The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts 9781474456630

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The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts

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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities Published The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts Edited by Maggie Humm The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English Edited by Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English Edited by David Johnson and Prem Poddar A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures – Continental Europe and its Empires Edited by Prem Poddar, Rajeev Patke and Lars Jensen The Edinburgh Companion to TwentiethCentury British and American War Literature Edited by Adam Piette and Mark Rowlinson The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts Edited by S. E. Gontarski The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts Edited by Stephen Prickett The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction Edited by David Brauner and Axel Stähler The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory Edited by Stuart Sim The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities Edited by Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton and Jennifer Richards The Edinburgh Companion to NineteenthCentury American Letters and Letter-Writing Edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman and Matthew Pethers The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts Edited by Frances Dickey and John D. Morgenstern The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature Edited by Clémentine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies Edited by Leslie Eckel and Clare Elliott The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts Edited by Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Isobel Baxter

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The Edinburgh Companion to Fin de Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts Edited by Josephine M. Guy The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies Edited by Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories Edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope Edited by Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton and Ortwin Graef The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English Edited by Paul Delaney and Adrian Hunter The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East Edited by Anna Ball and Karim Mattar The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts Edited by Roxana Preda The Edinburgh Companion to Elizabeth Bishop Edited by Jonathan Ellis The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts Edited by David Punter The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music Edited by Delia da Sousa Correa The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts Catherine Brown and Susan Reid Forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts Edited by Juliet John and Claire Wood The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature Edited by Jeanne Dubino, Catherine Hollis, Paulina Pajak, Celise Lypka and Vara Neverow The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense Anna Barton and James Williams The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism Maud Ellmann, Sian White and Vicki Mahaffey The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology Alex Goody and Ian Whittington The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecl

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The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts

Edited by Catherine Brown and Susan Reid

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© editorial matter and organisation Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, 2020 © the chapters their several authors, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5662 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5663 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5664 7 (epub) The right of Catherine Brown and Susan Reid to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction Catherine Brown and Susan Reid

viii xii xiii 1

Part I: Aesthetics 1. The Idea of the Aesthetic Michael Bell

11

2. Gesamtkunstwerk Susan Reid

23

3. Romanticism, Decadence, History Vincent Sherry

39

4. National and Racial Aesthetics Peter Childs

52

5. Traditional Aesthetics Julianne Newmark

65

6. Translation Stefania Michelucci

76

7. Biblical Aesthetics Shirley Bricout

90

8. Historiography and Life Writing Andrew Harrison

103

9. Queer Aesthetics Hugh Stevens

116

10. Politics and Art Howard J. Booth

129

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contents

11. Popular Culture Gemma Moss

145

12. Technology David Trotter

160

Part II: Aesthetic Forms Section 1: Verbal Arts 13. The Idea of the Novel Keith Cushman

191

14. Practitioner Criticism: Poetry Holly A. Laird

204

15. Revising and Rewriting Paul Eggert

219

Section 2: Performance Arts 16. Performance John Worthen

231

17. Drama and the Dramatic Jeremy Tambling

244

18. Music Susan Reid

257

19. Dance Susan Jones

274

Section 3: Visual Arts 20. Practitioner Criticism: Painting Jeff Wallace

305

21. Book Design Jonathan Long

320

22. Sculpture Jane Costin

338

23. Architecture Sarah Edwards

354

24. Clothing and Jewellery Judith Ruderman

371

Part III: Lawrence in Others’ Art 25. Lawrence in Biofiction Lee M. Jenkins

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contents

vii

26. Lawrence Set to Music Bethan Jones

398

27. Lawrence and Twenty-First-Century Film Louis K. Greiff

413

28. D. H. Lawrence: Icon Catherine Brown

426

Notes on Contributors Index

442 447

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Colour Plates Section 1 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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Watercolour copy by D. H. Lawrence of the painting An Idyll by Maurice Greiffenhagen (1911). University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections, La D 1/2. 173 Plates 2–10 are from The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, London: Mandrake Press, 1929. Plate 2: D. H. Lawrence, A Holy Family (1926). Oil on canvas. 75 x 65 cm. 174 D. H. Lawrence, Boccaccio Story (1926). Oil on canvas. 70 x 117.5 cm. 175 D. H. Lawrence, Fauns and Nymphs (1927). Oil on canvas. 95 x 80 cm. 176 D. H. Lawrence, Resurrection (1927). Oil on canvas. 95 x 95 cm. 177 D. H. Lawrence, Family on a Verandah (1928). Oil on canvas. 35 x 47.5 cm. 178 D. H. Lawrence, Dance-Sketch (1928). Oil on canvas. 37.5 x 42.5 cm. 179 D. H. Lawrence, Contadini (1928). Oil on canvas. 40 x 32.5 cm. 180 D. H. Lawrence, North Sea (1928). Oil on canvas. 40 x 32.5 cm. 181 D. H. Lawrence, Spring (1929). Watercolour. 30 x 22.5 cm. 182 Plates 11–20 show the illustrations by Anne Estelle Rice (1877–1959) for D. H. Lawrence’s Bay: A Book of Poems (1919), printed by Cyril Beaumont. Reproduced at close to original size. With kind permission of the estate of Anne Estelle Rice. Plate 11: ‘Guards !’. 183 ‘The Little Town at Evening’. 183 ‘Last Hours’ (printed upside down in the original). 183 ‘Town’. 184 ‘After the Opera’. 184 ‘Going Back’. 184 ‘Winter-Lull’. 185 ‘Obsequial Ode’. 185 ‘War-Baby’. 186 ‘Nostalgia’. 186

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list of illustrations 21. 22.

The first edition (cheap paper issue) of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), featuring the Lawrence phoenix on the front cover. D. H. Lawrence’s representation of a sun god designed as a frontispiece for the first unexpurgated edition of Sun (1928), published by The Black Sun Press.

ix

187

188

Section 2 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

Lincoln Cathedral. Photo: Artur Bogacki, Getty Images. Inside Lincoln Cathedral. Photo: Petrina Calabalic, Dreamstime. Sandro Botticelli (c.1445–1510), Mystic Nativity (1500). Oil on canvas. 108.6 x 74.9 cm. National Gallery, London. Raphael (1483–1520), The Madonna and Child (‘The Ansidei Altarpiece’) (1505). Oil on panel. 209.6 x 148.6 cm. National Gallery, London. Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879–80). Oil on canvas. 46.4 x 54.6 cm. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–84), Pauvre Fauvette (1881). Oil on canvas. 162.5 x 125.5 cm. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow. Vincent van Gogh (1853–90), Sunflowers (1888), fourth version, exhibited at the National Gallery, London. Oil on canvas. 95 x 73 cm. © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). Mark Gertler (1891–1939), The Creation of Eve (1914). Oil on canvas. 75 x 60 cm. Private Collection, reproduced by kind permission of the owner, image courtesy of Ben Uri Gallery and Museum. Mark Gertler (1891–1939), Merry-Go-Round (1916). Oil painting on canvas. 189.2 x 142.2 cm. © Tate, London. Edmond Xavier Kapp (1890–1978), D. H. Lawrence (1923). Chalk. 44.5 cm x 38.4 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London. Courtesy of Chris Beetles Gallery on behalf of the Edmond Xavier Kapp Estate. Dorothy Brett (1883–1977), Portrait of D. H. Lawrence with Halo (1925). Oil on canvas. 78 x 48.3 cm. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy of Christopher Esher of the estate of Dorothy Brett. Ernesto Guardia, D. H. Lawrence (blue tone) (1929). © National Portrait Gallery, London. Ernesto Guardia, D. H. Lawrence (sepia) (1929). © National Portrait Gallery, London. Dorothy Brett (1883–1977), Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ (1963). Reproduced in Keith Sagar, The Life of D. H. Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography (London: Chaucer Press, 2003). Courtesy of Christopher Esher of the estate of Dorothy Brett. Cover image of Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage (London: Abacus, 1997). With kind permission of Geoff Dyer and Little, Brown and Company. Title image of ‘D. H. Lawrence – Zombie Hunter’ in Dawn of the Unread, Hunt Emerson and Kevin Jackson (Nottingham: Spokesman, 2016). With kind permission of James Walker.

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289 290 291 292

293 294

295

296 297

298

299 300 301

302 303

304

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x

list of illustrations

Figures 2.1

2.2 2.3 21.1 21.2

21.3 21.4 21.5 21.6

21.7

21.8 21.9

21.10

21.11

21.12 21.13

22.1 22.2

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Unknown sculptor, Laocoön and his Sons (c.27 bc–ad 68, excavated in 1506 in Rome). Marble. 208 x 163 x 112 cm. Vatican Museums, Vatican City. Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), Composition VII (1913). Oil on canvas. 200 x 300 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Antonio Canova (1757–1822), The Three Graces (1815–17). Carved marble. 173 x 97.2 x 75 cm. © Victoria & Albert Museum. The front board of the first edition of The White Peacock (1911), published by Duffield & Company (New York), designer unknown. The front board of the first edition of Tortoises (1921), published by Thomas Seltzer, featuring an unknown artist’s copy of a print by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858). An unknown artist’s dust jacket design for Thomas Seltzer’s trade edition of Women in Love (1922). The dust jacket designed by Jan Juta (1895–1990) for the first edition of Sea and Sardinia (1921), published by Thomas Seltzer. The dust jacket designed by an unknown artist for the first edition of Aaron’s Rod (1922), published by Thomas Seltzer. The dust jacket designed by an unknown designer for the first English edition of Aaron’s Rod (1922), published by Martin Secker. The dust jacket designed by Knud Merrild (1894–1954) for the first American edition of The Captain’s Doll (1923), published by Thomas Seltzer. D. H. Lawrence’s dust jacket design for the first edition of Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), published by Thomas Seltzer. The dust jacket designed by Kai Gøtzsche (1886–1963) for the first edition of Mastro-don Gesualdo (1923), published by Thomas Seltzer. The dust jacket designed by Dorothy Brett (1883–1977) for the first American edition of The Boy in the Bush (1924), published by Thomas Seltzer. The dust jacket designed by Dorothy Brett (1883–1977) for the first American edition of The Plumed Serpent (1926), published by Alfred A. Knopf. D. H. Lawrence’s dust jacket design for the first edition of Mornings in Mexico (1927), published by Martin Secker. D. H. Lawrence’s design for the colophon in The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, published by P. R. (‘Inky’) Stephensen’s Mandrake Press (1929). Sir Hamo Thornycroft (1850–1925), The Mower (1888–90). Bronze. 58.5 x 33.0 x 18.5 cm. © Tate, London. Mark Gertler (1891–1939), Acrobats (1917). Bronze. 59.7 x 41.9 x 37.5 cm. © Tate, London.

27 27 29 321

325 326 327 328

329

330 330

331

332

333 333

335 339 344

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list of illustrations 22.3 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915), Birds Erect (1914). Limestone. 67.6 x 26.0 x 31.4 cm. Digital image © Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. 22.4 Copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover owned by Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975). Tate, London, loaned to The Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield. Photo: Jane Costin, with kind permission of Tate, London and The Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield. 23.1 The Crystal Palace, London, late nineteenth century. Photo: Getty Images. 23.2 University College Nottingham. Photo: Sarah Edwards.

xi

347

351 357 359

Musical Examples 18.1 Extract from D. H. Lawrence, ‘Lu-lu-a-li-lu-lu-lu!’. Song written for Scene 9 of David (Plays 591). 26.1 Extract from William Neil, ‘Southern Night’.

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270 406

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are extremely grateful to Jackie Jones and Ersev Ersoy for their invaluable support and assistance throughout this wonderful project, and to the Press’s anonymous readers for their enthusiasm. Our contributors have been exceptionally patient, resourceful and collaborative – with each other as well as with us – and we warmly thank them all. We are indebted to Jonathan Long for his assistance in obtaining many digital images, and to Jane Costin for dealing with the Ben Uri Gallery on our behalf. We are especially grateful for the generosity of copyright holders who allowed us to publish images for no charge: Christopher Esher for Dorothy Brett’s portraits of Lawrence with a halo (front cover), and as Pan and Christ; the estate of Anne Estelle Rice; the owner of Mark Gertler’s The Creation of Eve; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Our thanks also to Sarah MacDougall of the Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, London, for all her assistance with the work of Mark Gertler, particularly The Creation of Eve; to Geoff Dyer and his publisher Little, Brown and Company as regards the cover image of Out of Sheer Rage; and to James Walker, Hunt Emerson and Kevin Jackson for the image of ‘D. H. Lawrence – Zombie-Hunter’. 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.

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Note: Quotations from the Cambridge University Press edition of the letters and works of D. H. Lawrence follow that edition’s punctuation exactly.

Letters of D. H. Lawrence 1L 2L

3L

4L

5L

6L

7L

8L

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume I, September 1901–May 1913, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume II, June 1913–October 1916, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume III, October 1916–June 1921, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume IV, June 1921–March 1924, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume V, March 1924–March 1927, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 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 University Press, 1991). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume VII, November 1928–February 1930, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume VIII, Previously Uncollected Letters and General Index, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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xiv

list of abbreviations

Works of D. H. Lawrence A

Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). AR Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). BB The Boy in the Bush, with M. L. Skinner, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). EME England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). FLC The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Fox The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). FWL The First ‘Women in Love’, ed. John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). IR Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). K Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). LAH Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). LCL Lady Chatterley’s Lover and A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). LEA Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). LG The Lost Girl, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). MEH Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). MM Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). MN Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). PFU Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Plays The Plays, ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). PO The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 1Poems, 2 Poems D. H. Lawrence: The Poems, Volumes I and II, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 3Poems D. H. Lawrence: The Poems, Volume III: Uncollected Poems and Early Versions, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). PS The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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list of abbreviations

xv

R

The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). RDP Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). SCAL Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). SEP Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). SL Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). SM St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). SS Sea and Sardinia, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). STH Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). T The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). TI Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). VG The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). WL Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). WP The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). WWRA The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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Introduction Catherine Brown and Susan Reid

I

‘ t is Art which opens to us the silences, the primordial silences which hold the secret of things’ (STH 140). So Lawrence said in his first public statement on aesthetics, the paper ‘Art and the Individual’ delivered to the Eastwood ‘Debating Society’ in 1908. This assertion, which immediately follows an extract of poetry, places verbal art in the context of all art, the role of which is to escape the conscious and the verbal. Admittedly, most of his prodigious output, from a life cut short at the age of forty-four in 1930, was in written form: not just the long and short fiction for which he is best known, but poems, plays, travel writing, literary criticism, art criticism, social criticism, historiography, philosophy, physiological psychology and 6,000 extant letters. Yet the letters, like much of his prose, carry a sustained dialogue about the arts – often with other artists – that frequently interprets painting, sculpture, architecture, design, clothing, music, dance and cinema in relation to the verbal arts, history, philosophy and politics. Lawrence lived at a time of unprecedented experimentation across and between the arts, much of which he experienced through his growing artistic network, and in which he himself engaged. Before he embarked on a literary career, he painted, sang hymns that inspired his lifelong wonder of words and other worlds, and organised impromptu dramas and sing-songs – pursuits which came to fruition in his final years in his own paintings and his operatic play David, for which he composed music for ten songs. What it means to consider Lawrence as a practitioner of many and overlapping arts is one overarching aim of this Companion, which also revisits his perceived distrust of the idea of ‘art’, that has perpetuated his status as an outsider to literary modernism. The other main aim is 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. The reassessment starts by concentrating on aesthetic categories which transcend particular art forms. The fact that Part I, ‘Aesthetics’, constitutes nearly half of the volume fits with an artist who worked in such a wide range of intersecting forms and genres. ‘The Idea of the Aesthetic’, as Michael Bell puts it in the opening chapter, needs careful orientation in relation to a man whose ‘emphatic valuing of life over art has gained him the still lingering reputation of being anti-aesthetic’. All the contributors in this Part find that his aesthetic attitudes point, as Hugh Stevens argues, ‘in several directions’, and so demand re-evaluation of existing critical positions. Part II, ‘Aesthetic Forms’, concerns Lawrence’s practice of and reflections on a range of artistic forms, considered in three interrelated groups. The first section addresses the ‘Verbal Arts’ of the novel, poetry and his important practice of revising and rewriting, all of which resonate throughout this Companion. The second draws out the fundamental

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2

catherine brown and susan reid

import of the ‘Performance Arts’ in Lawrence’s oeuvre, John Worthen finding that his genius for performance was displaced into his fiction because ‘it was the only place he could thoroughly stage his imaginings’, a view reinforced by Jeremy Tambling’s rereading of the undervalued plays. This focus on performance arts also embraces Lawrence’s wide-ranging engagements with music and dance, and complements Part I’s discussions about the aesthetics of inter-arts modernism and the performance of gender. The third section’s consideration of the ‘Visual Arts’ opens with Lawrence’s ‘painterly criticism’, as Jeff Wallace describes it, and moves to a wider interest in design that he brought to the dust jackets of his books, before addressing his interests in other arts that have been relatively neglected by his critics: sculpture, architecture and clothing. These indicate rich seams for future exploration, as research areas, along with dance, that have yet to receive the book-length treatment they clearly merit. Artists have been abundantly responsive to Lawrence’s life and work in a range of media. Part III, ‘Lawrence in Others’ Art’, therefore responds to his works and image as reflected in the art of others up to the present day, in biofiction, film, music and portraiture, which can verge on iconisation (or, alternatively, iconoclasm). Beginning with Aldous Huxley, whose Introduction to the first edition of Lawrence’s letters in 1932 insisted that we approach him as an artist, Lee M. Jenkins traces the persistence of biofictional writings about Lawrence originating in ‘the inter-arts aesthetic of 1910s modernism’ through to a contemporary boom. Versions of ‘Lawrence’ survive in biofiction, she argues, ‘as a signifier of the inseparability of life and art’. Louis K. Greiff notes that ‘Seventy-one films devoted to a single author is, by any standard, a remarkable number’, which reflects the ability of his texts to ‘blossom into vivid and compelling scenes reminiscent of recent cinema at its very best’. Similarly, Bethan Jones explores examples drawn from more than fifty musical settings of texts by Lawrence that indicate how the soundscapes of selected poems make them especially suitable for setting by composers. Interdisciplinary approaches such as these, as throughout this Companion, draw on emerging areas of study to create a more composite understanding of Lawrence. Above all, the ‘new modernist studies’ are challenging what it means to be modernist, considering profound engagements with the conditions of modernity, and opening up the concept beyond the remit of superficial morphological innovation. Lawrence has long been perceived as only questionably a modernist. Sons and Lovers has proved one of his most popular works, while The Lost Girl was the only one of his works to win a literary prize in his lifetime (the James Tait Black Memorial). Both are for the most part realist. Holly A. Laird notes that ‘Lawrence is missing from Lawrence Rainey’s prominent Modernism: An Anthology (2015)’, and that he is ‘barely mentioned in the Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (2007)’, so that ‘Lawrence remains even today a maverick within the canon of modernist poetry’. Certainly, the respects in which he is modernist are less striking than are those of the mature James Joyce or Virginia Woolf. Novels such as The Rainbow and Women in Love can mislead the reader into perceiving a predominantly realist text and judging it (unfavourably) by both modernist and realist standards; in fact, as Keith Cushman observes, The Rainbow functions with the ‘allotropic states’ of a different type of ‘ego’ from any that had existed previously in British characterisation (2L 183). Vincent Sherry extends Lawrence’s analogy to observe that these two novels, originally a single book-project, seem to be ‘made out of each other’s imaginative antimatter’, encapsulating the numerous oppositions within his work and his ongoing experimentation with character and form.

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introduction

3

Recent understandings of the umbrella term ‘modernism’ have, as Sarah Edwards notes, broadened in such a way as to more comfortably cover Lawrence’s expansive oeuvre. Moreover, recent biographical research (Laird observes) has revealed the extent to which he was well-connected in modernist circles from the very beginning of his career, and increasingly critics are noticing how Lawrence’s aesthetic interests overlapped with those of his contemporaries. He has been called ‘arguably the most Biblical writer of the twentieth century’, but, Shirley Bricout points out, Joyce or Eliot would be close contenders. Lawrence’s engagement with Biblical aesthetics was ‘distinctively intimate’, she remarks, and while this description rings true of all his diverse engagements across the arts, this Companion also emphasises common ground with his modernist contemporaries. Like Joyce and Eliot, he wrote about music hall, combining putatively ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms in his novels The Lost Girl and Mr Noon, and was at least as interested in both music and dance as his literary contemporaries. The importance to Lawrence of the Ballets Russes, European Expressionist dance and ‘new physical health practices and martial arts’, as described by Susan Jones, overlaps more broadly with his interests in music and in combining the arts as Wagner and his Expressionist successors sought to do. The parallels that emerge with other practitioners across the visual arts of modernism are especially striking. Wallace reaffirms (Anne) ‘Fernihough’s argument that Lawrence had far more in common with the aesthetics of Clive Bell and Roger Fry, particularly through their shared endorsement of the significance of Cézanne, than has been assumed’, while Jonathan Long emphasises his collaborations with contemporary artists, such as Dorothy Brett, on his book jackets. Through Mark Gertler and Ezra Pound, Lawrence was indirectly connected with Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; his interest in their practice shows clearly in his writing about avant-garde sculpture, as Jane Costin argues. His attention to the built environment was such, Edwards comments, that he helped to shape ‘interdisciplinary debates in architecture, the arts and literature, and in the changing definitions of these terms in the twentieth century’. Bell asserts that Lawrence shared with those writers now most commonly considered as ‘high’ modernist ‘an ambitious conception of literature as a means of personal and social understanding’ that they inherited from European Romanticism, alongside a perception that Romanticism had ‘run to seed’ in escapist sentimentality ‘over the nineteenth century’. However, he diverged from some of his fellow modernists in equally distrusting the over-reaction against emotionality that characterised their neo-classicism and ‘emotional avoidance’: ‘He therefore kept faith with the Romantic tradition’ and disparaged ‘modernist irony’ as ‘a way of handling the emotions with self-protective tongs’. He also diverged from their conception of impersonality: ‘Eliot and Joyce emphasise the impersonality of the artist vis-à-vis the artistic material whereas Lawrence was concerned with impersonality as a quality of feeling as such.’ Sherry extends Bell’s discussion of Romanticism by presenting The Rainbow as embracing the ‘revolutionary possibilities’ of a Romanticism that, rather than being focused on formal political change, emphasises personal and erotic liberation at the level of the individual: thus Ursula in The Rainbow achieves a type of autonomy which her grandmother Lydia, when she was oppressed in her marriage to a Polish revolutionary, did not. However, the First World War’s assault on Lawrence’s belief in the revolutionary potential in English society rendered Women in Love overwhelmingly

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pessimistic and suffused with the Decadence into which a thwarted Romanticism degenerated: Hermione is ‘a figure out of Decadence central casting’ who holds Birkin back, and even in the Alps – transcendent refuge of the Romantic spirit – Loerke represents what David Trotter describes as ‘Lawrence’s best shot at a degenerate’. These Decadent and degenerate figures in Women in Love also contribute to a critique of Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which, Susan Reid argues, was a common modernist concern rooted in a decaying ‘Romantic ideal of unifying the arts as a means of restoring wholeness in society’. Lawrence’s strong engagements with the aesthetic debates and trends of his time are stressed in a number of chapters which treat Lawrence as a ‘practitioner critic’ – that is, an artist who writes criticism and a critic who produces art. The breadth of art to which he responded is reflected in the variety of his own output, as Laird perceives in relation to his poetry: ‘So dissimilar are the kinds of verse to which Lawrence responded that his general openness . . . helps account not only for this maverick status, but for the sheer variety of verse forms practised in his poetry.’ So diverse are these influences that some are yet to be fully explored, not least his shared modernist roots in Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent poetry. Cushman frames Lawrence’s ‘Idea of the Novel’ in the light of his 1925 essays on the novel, which crystallise his disagreement with those writers who elevate art above life (from Flaubert to Joyce, Proust and Richardson), and reinforce his own emphasis on ‘quickness’ of being. He was also a confident critic of paintings from an early age, Wallace comments, ‘such that, when he takes his own place in the world of art, a critical disposition is already well primed’. Moreover, he ‘could not have persevered with his technically maladroit painting without the theoretical conviction that the painterly effect of the vital could be achieved outside of formal technique and training’. He repeatedly used existing art as something to react away from, which is why his early enthusiasm for other artists was often eventually inverted, mirroring what Laird describes as ‘The well-known pattern of his personal relationships, of sympathy followed by judgement’. Bell puts it thus: ‘As a creative writer he was necessarily a creative reader always honing his own artistic commitments against the whetstone of other writers.’ Lawrence’s criticism is frequently inter-artistic: Cushman notes that ‘Lawrence begins “Art and Morality” with a discussion of a Cézanne still-life’ and Wallace that Study of Thomas Hardy is in part art-historical. The same is true of his art itself. In the field of historiography, Andrew Harrison relates Lawrence’s treatment of historical events and processes ‘to his interest in (and production of) other historiographical forms such as autobiography, biography, fictional biography, and the various hybrid historical fictions now discussed under the term “auto/biografiction”’. Reid explores Lawrence’s attraction to concepts of the Gesamtkunstwerk throughout his writings, including The Plumed Serpent, an operatic novel which combines ‘travelogue, fiction and gospel’ with poetry, music and dance; to this list Judith Ruderman adds that it also ‘offers perhaps the most vivid examples of fabric design and the clothing made from it as applied arts’. Lawrence’s presentations of non-verbal art forms such as dance and music – whether in those forms themselves, or through his writings – frequently point to the limitations of language. As Reid puts it in her chapter on ‘Music’, works such as ‘The White Peacock, The Rainbow, The Lost Girl, Mr Noon, Aaron’s Rod and David suggest textual experimentation beyond the sound of words to the nonrepresentational potential of music to evoke states of embodied being’.

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introduction

5

‘Embodied being’ is never fixed, because the body is constantly in flux. The idea therefore recurs through this Companion that Lawrence – contrary to his depiction by numerous of his detractors and admirers – is an artist whose individual works, and oeuvre, resist any attempt to pin them to a stable ideology. The result of his fluctuating engagements with the moments of life as they pass is what Laird calls a ‘dialectical or conflictual relationalism’: ‘As a person, a poet and a critic, he was inclined to shift perspectives, sometimes abruptly.’ Sherry notes that he was ‘protean’: ‘No sooner does he master a literary style than he leaves it behind.’ Bell observes that he was aware of this: in the flaming intensity of his life, which he always expected to be short, his intensities would just as quickly be burned out, which he also knew. Accordingly, his most subjective moods and dogmatisms were accompanied by self-deprecating humour; an irony . . . directed towards himself rather than the object. He knows that later ‘other moods’ would ‘supervene to relativise their emotional state which is retrospectively critiqued without losing its subjective authenticity’. Bell’s reading stresses the extent to which ‘Lawrence’s art arises from an exploratory struggle which is an integral part of its meaning’, in contrast to understandings of artworks as ‘gem-like’ (1Poems 645). Accordingly, for his readers, ‘fetishising the “work” as noun may frustrate its possibilities as verb’, since his works do ‘not just seek to contain, or record, but to be this process’ of exploration – hence the frequency of open endings to his narratives, and ‘his practice of writing successive versions of the same narrative’. This last phenomenon is described in detail by Paul Eggert, who enjoins us to understand Lawrence’s works not as finished, but as cut off in their development by the necessity to make money from publication: The surprisingly provisional nature of his usually forcefully expressed ideas comes into focus when we do this; and accepted practices of interpretation, based on the published forms of his writings taken as individual objects, as separate works, become problematic. An unfamiliar Lawrence emerges. Eggert argues that this pertains to Lawrence more than most writers, precisely for the reason that Bell describes: his works are exploratory. It follows, Eggert points out, that we should guard against thinking about Lawrence’s revisionary process as ‘benignly evolutionary, in a state of gradual perfecting whose end-point was always in view from the start’. To complicate the matter further, at any given moment he typically had multiple works in progress, which influenced each other: ‘Taking a break from one to write the other became habitual – and understandable given the extended period that, say, a novel might take to bring to completion. Each work became an element in the fertile soil from which the others sprang.’ It is in these contexts that Reid’s observation that Lawrence resisted the potentially totalising implications of the Gesamtkunstwerk should be understood. He resisted the integration of individual art forms, or people, into stable wholes, wishing to retain instead ‘the trembling instability of the balance’ between autonomous entities (STH 172). Characters such as Birkin and Ursula in Women in Love and Kate in The Plumed Serpent resist totalising ideologies, while Harrison comments that in his ‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus’, ‘Lawrence balances sympathy with critical awareness in a manner

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which . . . stresses the strangeness of experience and the provisional nature of our attempts to comprehend it’. In this light many commonplaces about Lawrence’s thought are revealed to be inadequate. Trotter’s chapter argues that in ‘his writing “life” can on occasion be seen to “flow” more freely under technology’s spell than it would otherwise have done’, and that critics have therefore been wrong to have ‘on the whole take[n] Lawrence at his word’ ‘where technology is concerned’. One formal outcome of Lawrence’s embrace of provisionality has been, as Reid argues, a progressive loosening of form from Women in Love to the ‘fragments’ of Pansies. Paradoxically, Lawrence’s provisionality is reflected in the one reasonably stable dogma in his writings – the denunciation of the absolute. Cushman identifies as a common theme in all five of his 1925 essays on the novel ‘the rejection of all absolutes’. For example, in ‘Morality and the Novel’ Lawrence describes the novel as ‘the highest complex of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside its own place, time, circumstance’ (STH 172); ‘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. Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance.’ The intrinsic ‘instability of the balance’ in Lawrence’s writings may be seen in the divergent interpretations that his individual works have produced, including in new artworks inspired by them. Greiff notes the multiple, strongly-differing film versions that exist of ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, while Bethan Jones describes various approaches to song settings of his overtly musical poem ‘Piano’. It is true to Lawrence’s protean nature that very various representations of him are found in the biofictions described by Jenkins. The provisionality of his positions and perceptions correlated with a striking openness to what was culturally foreign to him. Stefania Michelucci distinguishes his texts’ inclusions of foreign languages from the self-conscious, ‘elitist’ ‘intertextuality’ of his fellow modernists, reflecting ‘his need for a closer contact with and a deeper understanding of the peoples and cultures he encountered during his wanderings’. Several of the contributors describe Lawrence’s ‘Primitivism’ in terms not of the unthinking projection of imagined solutions to industrialised countries’ problems onto other countries’ peoples – but of a genuine desire to learn from those who (in Peter Childs’s words) he ‘perceived not to be caught in the civilisational snares with which he was familiar’. Julianne Newmark argues that Lawrence was ‘actively transformed by the aesthetic experience’ of ‘traditional’ aesthetic activities such as the Italian woman’s spinning (described in ‘The Spinner and the Monks’) and Native American dancing (described in ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’). In the same spirit Susan Jones perceives that in The Plumed Serpent ‘dance played a fundamental role in conveying how the West might need to surrender to a “new way” of life to survive’. Harrison finds that in Lawrence’s textbook Movements in European History his ‘most engaging imaginative passages . . . concern peoples who had typically been traduced or marginalised in earlier historical accounts – notably the ‘“Germanic races”’ (44); ‘The same desire is felt in the posthumously published Sketches of Etruscan Places, which Lawrence wrote in a spirit of opposition to the scholarly accounts of Etruscan civilisation provided by historians such as Theodor Mommsen’. Even in his reading of the Book of Revelation, Bricout notes, he excavates what he perceives as the suppressed voice of pagan inspiration buried under a strident Christianity.

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introduction

7

This openness of sympathy to marginalised groups is just one of several respects in which this Companion presents Lawrence as progressive. As noted above, Sherry stresses the revolutionary potential implied in The Rainbow; Howard J. Booth concurs in noting that Lawrence’s stress on ‘how change can begin at the level of the individual or with close relationships . . . is the major reason why the final version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover remains a political novel’. In his revisionary chapter on Lawrence’s ‘Politics and Art’, he argues that this subject ‘can be worked anew if we move away from discussions that redeploy conventional political labels, Rananim and leadership, and pursue instead his exploration of utopian longing’. Indeed, he identifies in Lawrence a strongly ‘utopian trajectory’, particularly in his writings of the 1920s, which owe much to the ‘late Victorian radicalism’ to which he was exposed by the Eastwood radical Willie Hopkin. Booth stresses that the so-called ‘leadership novels’, being exploratory, do not actually support strong leadership, and that Lawrence consistently opposed bullying, whether of the Left or the Right. He had an accurate sense of foreboding about sinister developments in Germany as early as 1924, as his ‘Letter from Germany’ demonstrates (MM 149–52). Booth further observes that, though many left-wing critics have accused Lawrence of class treachery, he re-engaged sympathetically with his native working class ‘immediately after the First World War and again during the 1926 miners’ strike’. If he critiqued many of the solutions proposed by the Left, he also ‘shared much of their critique’; in a similar spirit, Wallace stresses the deliberate claim that Lawrence laid, as a working-class boy, to sight and criticism of the world’s great art. Both Booth and Gemma Moss trace how Lawrence anticipated the thought of the Frankfurt School theorists. Like Adorno, according to Booth, he bemoaned people’s loss of ‘the capability to imagine the totality as something that could be completely different’. Like both Adorno and Benjamin, he critiqued ‘notions of progress and machine-like human activity that have become second nature’, and like Adorno he saw ‘popular culture’ as ‘forming and damaging mind, body and sexual life’. Moss explores further Lawrence’s ‘longstanding opposition to a broad, unspecified notion of popular culture’ – particularly in ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ – while arguing that ‘Lawrence moves closer to Frankfurt School theories about how to resist ideology in St. Mawr’. Similarly, Reid identifies an overlap between the differing responses to music described in Aaron’s Rod and Adorno’s sociological typology of listeners in his essay ‘Types of Musical Conduct’. Lawrence also, however, anticipated more recent movements than the Frankfurt School. What Stevens terms Lawrence’s ‘queer aesthetics’ are sharply relevant at a time when binary concepts of gender and sexuality are being questioned as never before. Stevens argues not only that Lawrence had a ‘persistent fascination with same-sex desire’, but that ‘Rather than dividing human beings into two discrete populations of “homosexuals” and “heterosexuals”, he “queers” the binary between homosexuality and heterosexuality by suggesting that individuals feel desire and love for both sexes’. Even though Lawrence ‘The metaphysician believes that men should not have sex with men’, ‘the aesthetician and the artist celebrates the spectacle of naked men touching . . . Lawrence’s queer aesthetics have their own truth, and express the beauty of what is prohibited.’ His representations of gender fluidity are also touched on by Ruderman, who argues that Lawrence’s interest in clothing and jewellery made him a ‘rare bird’ among ‘male modernist authors’, and men in general.

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Lawrence speaks still more loudly to modern ecological concerns. Booth rightly observes that Lawrence’s critique of industrialism made him ‘forward looking’, and not right-wing, as Terry Eagleton thought of ‘those who do not accept a modernising industrial world’ (an idea ‘that feels badly dated in our time of environmental crisis’). Bricout writes of ‘his belief in an aesthetic epiphany that enables man to re-establish harmonious relations with the cosmos’. Lawrence’s sense of life on earth as interconnected, and his holistic concern with ‘all’ that exists in the universe (sometimes punningly personified by him in the god ‘Pan’, Catherine Brown notes) not only fit with, but may guide, modern thought. Brown concludes by arguing that Lawrence’s iconisation as a life-guide, which has pertained to much of his reception history, persists in new forms still – and with good reason.

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Part I Aesthetics

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1 The Idea of the Aesthetic Michael Bell

Introduction

L

awrence had a strong conception of the importance of art in human life. Yet in his own day, and for long after his death, he was widely thought of as a writer of artless spontaneity whose potential artistry was further diminished by the persistent riding of hobby horses through his fiction. There are indeed many moments in his oeuvre which lend themselves to this impression; an impression reinforced by his apparently direct use of his own life experience and acquaintances in his fiction. To put it at a broader level of principle, his emphatic valuing of life over art has gained him the still-lingering reputation of being anti-aesthetic. The best way to appreciate his own artistry is by close reading of his work, for if his oeuvre were edited to remove all the unsuccessful moments it would remain a formidable achievement in a variety of genres: novels, novellas, short stories, poems, plays and literary criticism of the highest quality and unique in their kind. Yet such an exercise would not be as desirable as it might sound, since Lawrence’s art arises from an exploratory struggle which is an integral part of its meaning. The tidied-up, artistically respectable Lawrence would be a lesser thing. The brief of this chapter is to consider why this is so and, rather than offering a close reading of texts, it seeks to define in principle the nature of his artistic endeavour. Hence the specific emphasis on the idea of the aesthetic. Lawrence himself would readily speak of art but was suspicious of the word ‘aesthetic’, which has a long history of obfuscatory use. It is nonetheless a necessary term which Lawrence’s art, along with his reflective thought, especially helps to clarify. The nature of the aesthetic has been elusive and controversial ever since its emergence in the late eighteenth century. This is partly because the mind is not always adept at understanding its own most common processes and the widespread intuitive experience of the aesthetic has proved difficult to formulate in the abstract. A further difficulty is that it is frequently understood within some particular model, or myth, of human being. The notion of the aesthetic is usually embedded in a world-view. The modernist generation represents a distinct phase in this history, and I therefore first consider Lawrence in comparison with his major contemporaries to outline his conception of art. In the light of this, I then consider his significance within a broader history of thinking on the aesthetic.

Lawrence and Modernism Lawrence’s understanding of literary art is evident from his penetrating and influential commentary on other writers. His Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), for example, was one of the first attempts to identify a serious tradition of American

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writing and remains, with de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, one of the classic analytic critiques of America. He was also deeply read in British and continental European literature and here too he characteristically sought to identify, if not to expose, the underlying spirit of the writer and articulate it at a level of principle. His responses, therefore, to such authors as Hardy, Tolstoy, Verga, Balzac and Flaubert add up to a coherent conception of literary art; a conception which placed him in opposition to significant writers of his own generation. While sharing much of the ambition of his famous contemporaries, he was an internal critic of dominant conceptions within modernist writing. The generation of writers now thought of as modernist, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf and the later W. B. Yeats, shared, despite their great differences, an ambitious conception of literature as a means of personal and social understanding. This was largely inherited from European Romanticism of the early nineteenth century. The Romantic poet was accorded visionary and prophetic insight, most notably expressed by the claim in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry (1821, pub. 1840) that poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators’ of the world. Yet many of the modernist generation saw the Romantic tradition as having run to seed over the nineteenth century, leading at the worst to mawkish sentimentality and idealistic escapism, what Pound called ‘emotional slither’ (1960: 12). Nor was this just an arbitrary decline: its roots, by this account, were already evident in the Romantic impulse itself. And so a number of these writers turned to a conception of the Classical spirit as a mastering (the gendered term is used advisedly here) of the emotions; a turn most notably signalled in the title of Joyce’s Ulysses. In effect, these modernists inherited the ambitious claims of the Romantic period for literature as moral prophecy, but shifted the basis. Rather than the personal vision of the writer they emphasised the autonomous, impersonal quality of the work. A literary work is a labour of technique within a craft, such that the finished work is completely separated from its author. In the process, however, it draws possibilities from the writer and the material which were not necessarily intended, and which may remain unconscious. A work of literature, in other words, is likely to have a significance beyond the conscious intentions of the writer so that emphasis on the expression of personality is likely to limit understanding of it. This is perhaps the most radical modern revolution in the reading of literature, and Lawrence exemplified it in his Studies in Classic American Literature with his guiding principle ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale’ (14). But the opposition of ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic’ also had sociocultural overtones. As well as the gendered aspect already mentioned, the notion of Classical order against undisciplined Romantic emotion can reinforce the social myth of an educated governing class controlling a potentially subversive lower class. Lawrence, it is relevant to note, grew up in the emotional exposure of a miner’s home and some early reviewers assumed him to be a woman. Although very different from Lawrence, and more masculinist in outlook, similar social considerations help explain why Joyce’s aesthetic impersonality retains its authenticity: as a lower-middle-class Dubliner of Catholic upbringing during the period of British rule he cast an even-handedly cold eye on all idealisms. He analysed, rather than just suffered, the grip of such emotionally powerful formations as nation and religion, those ‘big words which make us so unhappy’ (Joyce 2000: 38). For him, even as he lived through an era of destructive tribalism

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across Europe, the aesthetic condition represented an inner or mental freedom from such compulsions. His commitment in this regard echoes the origins of aesthetic thinking in late eighteenth-century Europe. After the barbaric fanaticism into which the French Revolution had descended, Friedrich Schiller, in his Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795), made the first great claim for the aesthetic state as an essential condition of humane culture and mental freedom. In these respects, therefore, the anti-Romantic turn in modernism was crucial to its critique of contemporary culture, which Lawrence largely shared, as in his hostility to the militarism associated with the First World War. Yet the programmatic insistence on aesthetic impersonality and Classical emotional order could be a disturbing symptom. Every generation creates its own version of the Classical world and Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) had reversed the meaning of its ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’ as defined by the influential eighteenth-century German art historian J. J. Winckelmann in his Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755). Rather than seeing this vision of serene order as an expression of the ancient Greek character, Nietzsche saw it as the Apollonian dream the ancient Greeks felt obliged to impose on their true nature: the destructive emotional chaos of their Dionysian being. On a less grandly metaphysical scale, this remains a suggestive image for some of the modernists who turned to the ‘Classical’ spirit in a compensatory spirit that was as much personal as cultural. The insistence on Classical order and control could indicate a repressive fear of, or contempt for, emotionality as such. This seems to have been the case with Eliot, for example, for whom Lawrence initially represented a spirit of uneducated, and therefore uncontrolled, emotional subjectivity, although Eliot, to his credit, always acknowledged something of Lawrence’s genius and came to recognise in later life that his own emotional condition had coloured his earlier response.1 Lawrence shared with other modernist writers their principled distrust of indulgent, unthinking, ready-made emotionality. Sentimentality is not merely a harmless personal indulgence to be deprecated by fastidious literary reviewers but a condition from which great evils grow and by which they are veiled. The factitious patriotism, or jingoism, whipped up by sections of the press during the Great War was one of the notable examples in Lawrence’s early maturity. It also contaminates sexual desire: ‘The most evil things in the world, today, are to be found under the chiffon folds of sentimentalism. Sentimentality is the garment of our vice. It covers viciousness as inevitably as greenness covers a bog’ (RDP 285). Where Lawrence differed from other modernists, however, was in his equal distrust of the overreaction against it, in which he detected self-regarding disdain and emotional avoidance: ‘This classiosity is bunkum, but still more, cowardice’ (4L 500). He therefore kept faith with the Romantic tradition and his first important editor, Ford Madox Hueffer, was amazed at his knowledge of this literature (Worthen 1991: 121–2). Lawrence sought to understand the emotional life, one might say, from the inside. He seemed to give himself fully to an emotional moment whether in himself or in an imagined character. But in the flaming intensity of his life, which he always expected to be short, his intensities would just as quickly be burned out, which he also knew. Accordingly, his most subjective moods and dogmatisms were accompanied by self-deprecating humour; an irony, if that is what it is, directed towards himself rather than the object. He resisted any fetishising of the artistic ego.

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Indeed, Lawrence’s emotional immediacy is most notably reflected in his fiction as an absence of stylistic irony, an absence that some readers have mistaken for a lack of humour. The Rainbow, for example, is full of moments when characters experience intense emotions with no hint that their condition is not endorsed by the narrative. Only later will other moods supervene to relativise their emotional state, which is retrospectively critiqued without losing its subjective authenticity. This reflects the nature of emotional life in which some moments of love or loss are necessarily experienced as absolutes. We cannot see round them at the time for ‘truth’ of feeling is always relative and momentary. This mode of storytelling undercuts the implicit tug of narrative teleology by which every moment already anticipates the retrospective viewpoint. Lawrence tended to honour the moment narratively as well as philosophically. All this contrasts with the high value placed on irony by other notable modernists, for whom it was almost the hallmark of the aesthetic state as they understood it, the Flaubert of Madame Bovary being the tutelary genius of this conception. For Lawrence, by contrast, modernist irony was often a way of handling the emotions with self-protective tongs. It projects an authorial superiority which the reader is flatteringly invited to share. In his review of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice Lawrence objects to the imposition of authorial will which he sees in the Flaubertian tradition (IR 207–12). The willed formation of the work blocks the potential for emotional discovery: fetishising the ‘work’ as noun may frustrate its possibilities as verb. Irony in its self-protective and controlling aspect nurtures such a conception of art. It is worth recollecting at this point that modern attitudes to the emotions were formed in the eighteenth-century movements of sentiment and sensibility which were the precursors to European Romanticism. This was an optimistic Enlightenment belief in the positive value of the emotions to the extent of basing the moral life on benevolent impulse. The excesses of sensibility produced a sceptical reaction, and the debate continues to this day. At the time, the word ‘sentimental’ had a highly honorific, rather than its modern pejorative, meaning, but it also took on a further implication. While it referred, rather indiscriminately, to intense feeling in general, Friedrich Schiller (1981), in a famous essay at the end of the century, used the word to indicate a particular selfconsciousness of feeling that he saw as characteristically modern. Sentimentalism, for him, was not just feeling but an especially self-conscious way of experiencing feeling. For Schiller, this self-consciousness was highly ambivalent: while reflecting a moral and philosophical enrichment it also threatens the authenticity and spontaneity of feeling. Likewise, in his critique of modern sentimentality, now generally acknowledged as a vice, Lawrence picked up the damaging aspect of self-consciousness which he found, for example, in Dostoevsky. After an intensive reading of Russian writers who, he thought, might offer a new mode of being and an escape from what he saw as the impasse of European sensibility, he ultimately found them excessively self-conscious and turned instead to American writers whose special quality was that their repressive Puritan consciousness constantly allowed their true achievement, their responsiveness to the new continent, to come through unawares. Lawrence remained deeply distrustful of emotion driven or created by its own idea of itself. This found a well-known expression in Rupert Birkin’s objection to Hermione Roddice in Women in Love. Instead of sensuality she watches herself performing an idea of sensuality, a condition Lawrence elsewhere calls ‘sex in the head’.2 It is also part of Lawrence’s objection to Freud: that Freud’s ‘unconscious’ is itself too much a construction of consciousness. The same analysis underlies his critique of modernist irony: that it exercises a mental dominance over the emotions.

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These are, to be sure, delicate discriminations, very hard to define in the abstract. For human beings, all sex is in some sense in the head. And Lawrence was undoubtedly unfair to Dostoevsky, as he was to the stoic comedy of Joyce or Jane Austen. As a creative writer he was necessarily a creative reader always honing his own artistic commitments against the whetstone of other writers. Hence, while all his criticism is illuminating, much of it has to be read in this light. Yet undoubtedly he was on to something important in his emotional critique and, now that what he disliked or distrusted has been indicated, it remains to look more closely at his positive conception of art as emotional understanding. In effect, Lawrence shared the modernist concern with impersonality but with an opposite implication. Well-known statements in Eliot and Joyce emphasise the impersonality of the artist vis-à-vis the artistic material whereas Lawrence was concerned with impersonality as a quality of feeling as such: something that is experienced in the first instance by the character. This is especially evident in The Rainbow, the first of his novels to express his mature conception in this regard. The successful courtship and marriage of Tom and Lydia Brangwen depends on a trust in the unknown that each represents for the other. As conscious individuals they often feel confusion, dissatisfaction or inadequacy yet each acts for the other as a threshold to the larger life around them. Tom Brangwen ‘during the long February nights with the ewes in labour . . . knew he did not belong to himself’ (R 40). When he knocks on the vicarage door to propose to Lydia he is aware of himself as a nervous young provincial facing a sophisticated, travelled, older woman, yet she opens it to see a dark male figure emerging almost faceless from the windy night. What she experiences is quite different from his sense of himself. Except that when, as at other such moments of crisis, his immediate consciousness gives him little guidance or confidence, he follows his desire as an impersonal imperative and it is to this that she responds. The episode in which he feeds the cows and comforts the infant Anna while Lydia gives birth to their first child is an extended enactment of this emotional quality: The two sat very quiet. His mind, in a sort of trance, seemed to become more and more vague. He held the child close to him. A quivering little shudder, re-echoing from her sobbing, went down her limbs. He held her closer. Gradually she relaxed, the eyelids began to sink over her dark, watchful eyes. As she sank to sleep, his mind became blank. When he came to, as if from sleep, he seemed to be sitting in a timeless stillness. What was he listening for? He seemed to be listening for some sound a long way off, from beyond life. He remembered his wife. He must go back to her. (76) For both adult and child, the mind, unable to cope, goes into abeyance allowing the body to restore equilibrium within an impersonal order of time and space (Bell 1992: 71–2). As the reader comes to participate in this emotional condition, it also becomes evident how Lawrence’s preoccupation with impersonality of feeling in the characters inevitably requires artistic impersonality in the narrative presentation. He shared this with other modernists, but, once again, as an emotional quality not as an ironic technique. The emotional integrity, or otherwise, of moments such as this is at the centre of Lawrence’s art of fiction. It is perhaps impossible to discriminate in the abstract a trustful honouring of the emotional imperative from sentimental indulgence of a transient

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feeling. Yet this, after all, is what human beings are required to do throughout their lives and Lawrence’s fiction constantly rehearses such occasions whether, in the given instance, as a successful act of courage or as an emotional illusion. The question of illusion is vital here since authentic feeling in literature has commonly been sought through the discrimination of the false. This has been a primary preoccupation of the novel for several centuries, which is perhaps why Lawrence thought of himself primarily as a novelist. Eighteenth-century fiction had a typical focus on hypocrisy: conscious purveying of the false as in Richardson, Fielding or Laclos. Nineteenth-century fiction is more typically concerned with the unconscious falsity that arises from lack of self-knowledge, as in George Eliot. But whereas Eliot’s characters are held within an ethical frame, Lawrence sought to discriminate authenticity of feeling often in opposition to immediate ethical demands. Individuals imbibe from their surrounding culture naturalised models of feeling. Some of these are highly seductive, and even admirable, yet the ethical can in itself be an alibi, a peculiarly plausible alibi, for falsity of feeling. The story ‘Samson and Delilah’ turns on such a recognition as a long-abandoned wife comes to terms emotionally with her suddenlyreturned husband. Her initial response of moral indignation is in danger of blocking other possible aspects of her feeling although the expression of that indignation is a necessary part of the emotional process she undergoes. Lawrence’s fiction offers not so much a secure affirmation of authentic feeling as a constant attunement to the problems of it: If we can’t hear the cries far down in our own forests of dark veins, we can look in the real novels, and there listen in. Not listen to the didactic statements of the author, but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny. (STH 205) Lawrence’s sense of the need for constant attunement to the unknown, and the existential courage this requires, is reflected in the notable absence of resolution at the end of his fictions, long and short. His short stories often concern some intense episode in which the emotional situation is radically changed but the longer-term outcome is left uncertain. At the end of the ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’, for example, a couple have been brought together and have declared a mutual love. But the male character, Dr Fergusson, has been partly compelled by the desperation of the woman, Mabel Pervin, and when, at the end, she asks him yet again if he loves her, ‘“No, I want you, I want you,” was all he answered, blindly, with that terrible intonation which frightened her almost more than her horror lest he should not want her’ (EME 152). In the context of the story, the word ‘blindly’ is very resonant. It might be possible to read the story superficially as a sentimental magazine piece in which two characters find love and a presumably happy future. But the text is clear-headed about the radical uncertainty, and the existential courage, of their commitment. In this, as in other stories, the narrative casts an impersonal eye, neither sentimental nor cynical, on the action.

The Aesthetics of Temporality Lawrence’s focus on truth to the moment has consequences for his whole conception of art. His tendency to open endings; his way of progressing a thought through modified repetition; his practice of writing successive versions of the same narrative – all reflect

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his commitment to ongoing exploration. For him, art does not just seek to contain, or record, but to be this process. In his Preface to the American edition of New Poems, he declared his preference for a ‘poetry of the present’ as opposed to the ‘gem-like lyrics of Shelley and Keats’ and this defines in effect his whole disposition as a writer (1Poems 645). To live in the moment may seem like the banal advice of countless life manuals, but Lawrence, whose value often lies in rediscovering truth behind cliché, recognised its actual difficulty: ‘One great mystery of time is terra incognita to us: the instant. The most superb mystery we have hardly recognised: the immediate, instant self’ (649). All means of understanding or expressing life, including language and art, function through fixing and abstracting. This is in the nature of things and hardly a matter for complaint in itself, but it means that the ‘immediate, instant self’ is constantly transmuted, as he says, into ‘A figment. An abstraction. A static abstraction, abstracted from life’. Aesthetic form, even of the most complex and exquisite kind, tends to partake of this abstraction. Lawrence did not hope to reverse this radical condition, but he writes in such a way as to make the reader participate in his momentary responsiveness. Many writers speak of properly inhabiting the present – indeed ‘carpe diem’ is one of the great poetic commonplaces – but it is frequently expressed within poetic modes which freeze it into exquisite form, as in the eternal stasis of Keats’s Grecian urn. Lawrence, by contrast, sought in all his expressive genres to render quickness of being not just as a theme but as an experience (as Keith Cushman elaborates in his chapter on ‘The Idea of the Novel’). When he turned away from the exquisite poetics of Shelley and Keats, Lawrence was declaring an alternative aesthetic: an aesthetic of process rather than product. But, of course, there remains a need to possess the work as a whole and in a way the two aesthetic criteria are constantly in tension: seeking not so much a reconciliation as a joint modus vivendi. This may be why his most perfectly-formed fictions tend to be short forms: the isolated but open-ended episode which can be grasped as a single whole. By contrast, his novels increasingly took the form of exploratory quests. After his generally acknowledged masterpieces of The Rainbow and Women in Love, his longer fictions became psychological, and in many cases literal, journeys of the Lawrentian hero or heroine. Rather than merely thrusting his own personality into the fiction, these figures are a means of dramatically impersonalising his experience. Once again, however, the spirit of this is not so much that of modernist irony as of his poem ‘Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!’ in which the speaker, rather than controlling his experience, lays himself open to discovering its meaning. In sum, readers who say his most perfect artistry is in the shorter fiction are undoubtedly right, but without these relatively untidy novels the meaning of the oeuvre would be severely reduced. Lawrence seems not to have sought the deliberately new forms of other modern novelists but rather to have found the old form dissolving or transmogrifying under the pressure of his expressive needs. It is especially fitting that this aesthetic declaration comes from the American edition of his New Poems since it was in America that his artistic ambition and achievement found most fertile influence.3 He responded warmly to Whitman, despite his criticism of Whitman’s idealistic egoism, and, as Lee M. Jenkins has shown in The American Lawrence (2015), twentieth-century American poets, including Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, have found him an inspiring example. This is, indeed, a rather underground influence. Whereas Pound was the overt influence on many later American poets, Lawrence’s example lay less in specific technique than in his expressive ambition, his attempts to catch the felt dynamism of life itself.

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Aesthetics and Life If the central question for literary aesthetics is the relation of art to life, Lawrence’s distinctive voice is perhaps now especially timely. Joseph North (2017), in a recent magisterial study, has traced the development of the modern literary academy which originated in the modernist decades and under the influence of modernist aesthetic thought. North argues, surely correctly, that the present-day academy has no general conception of what it is doing in the study of literature. Many gifted and cultivated teachers unite sufficiently around the protocols of period coverage and examination practice to keep the institution functioning but without a shared philosophical basis. He observes that the first half of the twentieth century saw bitter wrangles between so-called ‘scholars’ and ‘critics’. Scholars, often formed in the study of Classical literatures, regarded literature as a body of texts open to historical understanding, and aesthetic appreciation, without requiring personal judgements of relative quality. Critics believed that, since literature is a cultural expression and not a natural phenomenon, every act of reading is an engagement with values, albeit much of the time unconsciously and inertly. North argues that over the second half of the century the scholars won largely by default while literary criticism was displaced by various forms of ideological critique. The outcome is that literature has been at once critically evacuated and ideologically overwhelmed despite the earlier influence of those modern writers who saw literature as both the means and the object of critique. Meanwhile, North notes, one of the generally acknowledged founders of modern criticism, I. A. Richards, initially sought to promote literary study as an examination of personal and social values, but this aspect of Richards’s work has been lost and North invokes his example to revive the critical value of the aesthetic as the basis for literary study. In truth, North traces in the history of modern academic criticism the re-enactment of a process constantly repeated in the longer history of the aesthetic. The idea of the aesthetic was devised as a means of critique, a way of engaging with human values, but it has repeatedly suffered an idealisation whereby its critical impact is lost. This has occurred partly because of its being associated with a certain moral outlook and partly because of confusions in its philosophical definition. I believe it is worth retracing this larger history to appreciate the enduring value of Lawrence’s example and the trenchant holism of his thought. Ever since it was articulated in the late eighteenth century, the idea of the aesthetic has been fraught with ambiguity and ambivalence. It arose partly as a response to the movement of sentiment and sensibility which placed, like Lawrence, a high value on feeling. The attempt to base the moral life on benevolent feeling was magisterially dismissed by Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788). A good act performed from benevolent emotion may merely have followed a satisfying impulse: a truly moral act is performed out of duty irrespective of inclination. Friedrich Schiller’s great treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795) sought to resolve these competing conceptions by combining rather than choosing between them. In effect he synthesised the thought of Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was deeply committed to the goodness of the natural emotions uncontaminated by social existence and, like many of his contemporaries, he had a highly literalistic understanding of the psychology of art. In his Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre (1757), for example, he was radically distrustful of the emotions aroused by theatrical fictions and allowed little credit to claims of their being experienced only in the imagination.

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He had a visceral horror of theatrical double consciousness as a disintegration of the self. In Schiller’s view, therefore, Rousseau, despite his poetic gifts, was the victim, rather than the master, of his passions and was unable to give them aesthetic transformation, to turn them into art (Schiller 1981: 49–50). On the other hand, Kant’s powerful mode of cerebration, Schiller thought, was not adapted to the recognition of emotional motivation and its significance for the moral life. For Schiller, Kant and Rousseau represented two inescapable and opposed human compulsions, or ‘drives’. Man cannot escape the compulsion of reason in acknowledging, for example, that two and two make four. Nor as embodied creatures can human beings escape the compulsions of appetite and desire. But Schiller saw this not as an irresolvable conflict so much as the basis of uniquely human freedom. Reason saves man from merely following instinct as we suppose other animals to do while emotion frees man from the compulsion of pure reason. This condition of conscious internal freedom Schiller called the aesthetic. It is the basis of human moral being and is not in the first instance confined to art. But art, as Kant had pointed out, is the uniquely privileged sphere in which values can be weighed and appreciated in momentary freedom from the otherwise inescapable interestedness of living beings. In his Critique of Judgement (1790) he affirmed the essential disinterestedness of the aesthetic as ‘purposiveness without purpose’ (Kant 1972: 62). Following Kant’s lead, Schiller described the aesthetic as a higher form of play; a purposeless activity in which both participants and spectators can nonetheless be highly skilled and committed. He emphasised the paradoxical doubleness of the aesthetic: its complete emptiness as utilitarian motivation or guidance to specific action and its plenitude as inward appreciation of evaluative possibilities. The aesthetic is a suspension, or bracketing, of values with a view to experiencing, and thereby understanding, them more fully. It is something most human beings do intuitively all the time but have found difficult to define in the abstract, while art is the realm in which this capacity can be exercised most fully and purely. Earlier eighteenth-century literary criticism had frequently agonised over the danger of presenting villains sympathetically since, within the pre-aesthetic literalistic understanding of literary response, readers and audiences would be infected by emotional identification. The new understanding of the aesthetic, however, explains the familiar, yet remarkable, experience that we may enter deeply into the inner life of a Macbeth without identifying with, or becoming like, him. And, of course, without truly entering that other life, experiencing its quality from the inside, there is no significant exploration of all the values. It was in this spirit that Lawrence declared ‘Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance’ (STH 172). In making essentially the same point, Schiller speaks of the aesthetic and Lawrence of morality: on this account the two orders are inseparable. While Lawrence’s trembling balance parallels Schiller’s weighing of values, it also suggests the instability of the aesthetic condition itself as a permanent balancing of detached understanding and passionate commitments. Indeed, Schiller himself, in his desire to emphasise the new element in his thought, the aesthetic disinterestedness, sometimes lost the balance. Seeking to define it in the abstract, he constantly emphasises the paradoxical nature of the aesthetic as plenitude of evaluative possibility and vacuity in respect of direct moral instruction. He says at one point, with an implication of regret, that anyone who comes from an artistic occasion with a specific motivation to action has not had a ‘purely aesthetic experience’ (Schiller 1967: 153). And indeed such purity, he says, is humanly impossible. Yet the larger logic of his analysis entails

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that a purely aesthetic experience is neither possible nor desirable. The aesthetic is not a content but a modality of experience in which the nature of the values involved is essential to the impact and gravitas of the work. If the aesthetic is a weighing of values in a trembling balance, then it must invoke values to be weighed. Schiller seems momentarily carried away by the intellectual excitement of his argument. Lawrence, by contrast, does not use a philosophical vocabulary but a homely image. Typically, too, Lawrence’s phrase does not emphasise the aesthetic state as such but the life values of which it treats, although art is the necessary condition. Likewise, F. R. Leavis, the British critic who largely established Lawrence as a modern classic and moral force, emphasised the values affirmed in Lawrence but always through his art. As Leavis put the point in principle: although we must read literature as literature, in other words in an aesthetic spirit, there are no ‘purely literary values’ (1967: 195). Even more than Leavis, Lawrence as critic typically went straight for the values of the work concerned and both of them were thought by careless readers to be eliding the aesthetic condition rather than engaging it as the most inward and complex arena of discrimination. Neither of them saw literature as a purely personal ‘matter of taste’. It is, if often unconsciously, the profoundest truth we have about ourselves. The phrase ‘purely aesthetic experience’ exemplifies Schiller’s tendency to idealise the aesthetic even against the grain of his own argument, and it was prophetic of a constant tendency in the subsequent history of the aesthetic. The one-sided notion of the aesthetic as purely a suspension of living demands, or even an escape from them, has recurred in various guises ever since. When Lawrence contrasted his ‘poetry of the present’ to the lyrics of Shelley and Keats he might have mentioned how, despite their urgent moral concerns, both poets already showed the tendency to create a special poetic realm. The later nineteenth century was to see the rise of Aestheticism understood as a full commitment to such a separatist conception of aesthetic autonomy. In many ways Aestheticism was a period myth, an impossible aspiration, comparable with the cult of moral sentiment in the preceding century. As Eliot was to observe, the aestheticist slogan ‘art for art’s sake’ is really a moral statement about life and its practical significance was as a resistance to the naive and literalistic moralism that bedevilled much public discussion of art (1961: 439). Principal figures of the modernist generation such as Yeats, Joyce, Pound and Eliot were deeply influenced by the spirit of Aestheticism while reversing its conventional implication. Art was for them a mode of critique and an intense form of responsibility, but their self-conscious assertions of aesthetic status were open to misappreciation. In a famous early study of this generation, Axel’s Castle (1931), Edmund Wilson argued that they were still essentially Aesthetes. There are memorable moments that might seem to justify this assessment. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, though not necessarily a spokesman for the mature Joyce, spoke of the author as an indifferent God ‘paring his fingernails’ while Eliot wrote unguardedly of poetry as an ‘escape from emotion’ (Joyce 1954: 219; Eliot 1961: 21). Wilson’s judgement is reductive but it reflects a pervasive tendency in these writers to idealise art and formal achievement as values per se, a tendency that left its mark on academic teaching. Lawrence was always suspicious of such a notion of form. When he was finally completing, after many draftings, what was to become Sons and Lovers he declared ‘It has got form, form’ (1L 476). In other words, his material had found its proper shape. But he reacted strongly against the phrase ‘Significant Form’ promoted by the

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Bloomsbury aesthetician Clive Bell, with its implication that form itself was significant (LEA 199–201). The notion of ‘significant form’ may have more purchase in an art-historical or musical, rather than a literary, context, but the essential outlook, at least for Lawrence, was apparent across artistic media, as witness the artist figure of Duncan Forbes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who is clearly an allusion to artists of the Bloomsbury Group. The longer history of the aesthetic shows an inveterate tendency to idealising whereby it is constantly reified as a putative value in itself rather than a crucial means of engaging life values. This in turn produces a response of rejecting the aesthetic as an assumed avoidance of substantive critique; a reaction which further entrenches this conception. The result, as North argues, is to abandon aesthetic or literary criticism as a humane critique of living values. If this is so, the topic is of more than historical interest; it has a permanently contemporary significance, and Lawrence’s trenchant affirmation of life not so much over as in art remains a vivid witness to the potential of literature as rounded, three-dimensional examination of human values. Against the history of its intellectual mystification from Schiller onwards, Lawrence’s image of the trembling balance typifies the holistic intelligence with which he catches the complexity of the art–life relation in a single confident grasp.

Conclusion: Art as Expression I have sought to define the conception of literature evident in Lawrence’s critical and creative writings, but there is a further important dimension to his example. For he is a notable reminder that the personal creative impulse from which art arises may be something more simple and spontaneous. Just as Schiller thought of art as a higher form of play, so in Lawrence it seems a developed form of joie de vivre. Carrie Rohman, in Choreographies of the Living (2018), has invoked Lawrence’s appreciation of birdsong and animal display to argue that these creatures are not merely following instinctual compulsion but expressing an aesthetic impulse, a delight in their own being. If we cannot know for sure that this is true, we equally cannot know it is false, and Lawrence clearly appreciated animals in some such spirit. Likewise, in his Study of Thomas Hardy he wrote at length of the notion of ‘excess’. What a utilitarian, calculative view would see as excess, a pointless expenditure of energy, Lawrence saw as the self-delighting overflow of life: There is always excess, a brimming over. At spring-time a bird brims over with blue and yellow, a glow worm brims over with a drop of green moonshine, a lark flies up like heady wine, with song, an errand boy whistles down the road, and scents brim over the measure of the flower. (STH 31) The flower is not just a means of producing the fruit but is a supreme value in itself. As is evident from other chapters in this Companion, Lawrence engaged in a variety of arts and his poetry, painting and music-making in particular seem to have been done in this spirit of personal expressiveness. In calling a collection of short poems Pansies he challenged Pascal’s Pensées with the unthinking beauty of a flower. His painting has not generally won the esteem of art critics but it evidently absorbed his own expressive

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impulse. In Lawrence’s case, however, it seems necessary to add that emotional expression is not just compatible with complex public significance: with him, the joie de vivre, the sheer intensity of conscious being, remains an important dimension of the work’s meaning. The vivid responsiveness to the world which he called the ‘fourth dimension’ is the true significance of his art (RDP 358–61). In an early talk entitled ‘Art and the Individual’ Lawrence affirmed the primary meaning of art as the expression of individual feeling, albeit with a recognition of its interpersonal significance. His mature work presents not subjective feeling so much as a world transfigured in the light of feeling. A familiar paradox in much modern literature and thought is that the subjective ego becomes a supreme value at the same time as it dissolves as an entity. Lawrence had his own contribution to this paradox as his personal responsiveness to the world became an impersonal insight into being. His conception of art is integral to this achievement. Indeed, it would be difficult to say which is the primary element: the life or the art. And after nearly another century of academic criticism, it is hard to improve on the remark of his early girlfriend, Jessie Chambers, who defined his art with deceptive simplicity as a ‘seemingly effortless translation of life’ (1980: 197).

Notes 1. Eliot’s most egregious critique of Lawrence occurred in After Strange Gods (1934), which he subsequently withdrew from publication. 2. Lawrence uses this phrase extensively in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). 3. The essay had been twice published elsewhere before being used as a Preface.

Works Cited Bell, Michael (1992), D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambers, Jessie [E. T.] (1980), D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eliot, T. S. (1961), Selected Essays, London: Faber. Joyce, James (1954), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London: Cape. Joyce, James (2000), Ulysses, London: Penguin. Kant, Emmanuel (1972), Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard, New York: Hafner. Leavis, F. R. (1967), Anna Karenina and Other Essays, London: Chatto & Windus. North, Joseph (2017), Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pound, Ezra (1960), The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, London: Faber. Schiller, Friedrich (1967), On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schiller, Friedrich (1981), On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, trans. Helen WatanabeO’Kelly, Manchester: Carcanet. Worthen, John (1991), D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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2 GESAMTKUNSTWERK Susan Reid

The term ‘total work of art’ translates the German Gesamtkunstwerk, coined by Wagner in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. If the total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated work, it is tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. (Roberts 2011: 1)

Introduction

L

awrence’s engagement with a remarkable range of arts is illustrated throughout this Companion, with several chapters in Part II focusing on how a specific art form influenced his writing. As early as 1908 he was aware of the limitations of language and of the differing representational possibilities of the various arts, each of which has its own inherent mode of expression: ‘All that is sayable, let it be said, and what isn’t, you may sing it, or paint it, or act it, or even put it in poetry’ (1L 101). On the one hand his repetition of ‘or’ rather than ‘and’ echoes manifestos for keeping the arts separate, such as those issued by Gotthold Lessing or Irving Babbitt (discussed below). Yet by bringing aspects of all these arts – music, painting, drama, poetry and more – into play within single works, to what extent did Lawrence also explore the interartistic scope of the Gesamtkunstwerk (usually translated as the ‘total work of art’) to engage all the senses and counter the fragmentary effects of industrial modernity? Lawrence’s writing, as I will argue, oscillated between two poles of resistance and attraction to a Romantic ideal of unifying the arts as a means of restoring wholeness in society, an ideal that descended from Schlegel’s vision for the novel through Wagnerian opera to German Expressionism. For Lawrence this was a dream of life (to invoke his late, utopian ‘[Autobiographical Fragment]’; LEA 49) that became for him at once more urgent and more remote as a result of the shattering events of the First World War. Despite its totalising potential, the Gesamtkunstwerk in practice was ‘a constellation of opposing demands’ (Daub 2013: 3), of separate media struggling for coherence or supremacy, of the arts aspiring to shape politics and society. It thus provides a useful context for reassessing the oft-discussed tensions and oppositions within Lawrence’s oeuvre – between art and life, self and society, the absolute and the relative – and how these are also enacted between artistic modes of representation. Considering his work in this frame also brings it into closer proximity with that of his contemporaries, who sought to define themselves, according to Daniel Albright’s pioneering study of interarts modernism, either by unifying or separating the arts (2000: 5–7). Comparisons that emerge in this chapter are often with composers, artists, dramatists and poets

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rather than with novelists, showing how much Lawrence brought to his fiction from across the arts. Women in Love is a seminal case. Patently concerned with a range of art forms and their sociocultural ramifications, Lawrence’s novel features in many chapters in this Companion that deal separately with his engagement in various of the arts and aesthetic categories. But Women in Love also comments on quintessentially modernist experiments in multimedialism, including Italian Futurism (74, 448) and the Ballets Russes (91). There are further parallels with Expressionism, as Jack Stewart suggests (1992: 73–93), and with Kandinsky’s influential 1913 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which embraced the possibilities of Richard Wagner’s model of ‘the arts encroaching one upon another’ and goes on to urge that ‘from a proper use of this encroachment will arise the art that is truly monumental’ (1977: 20). At least as important as the dialogue with the arts in Lawrence’s novel, though, is the fact that it embeds ‘the bitterness of the war’ in its characters (WL 485). It thus addresses a political ferment more cataclysmic than that which Wagner confronted in the wake of the failed European uprisings of 1848–9 (in which he participated, leading to a period of exile in Switzerland). Frieda’s proposed title for Women in Love was ‘Dies Irae’ [‘Day of wrath’] (2L 669), which resonates with Wagner’s Götterdämmerung [Twilight of the Gods] as Joyce Carol Oates observes (1992: 36). In Women in Love, the gods have been displaced by man’s worship of the ‘Godhead of the great productive machine’ (225), a ‘fall into sheer mechanical materialism’ (RDP 81) that Lawrence also lamented in his 1919 essay on ‘Democracy’ (written around the same time as his ‘Foreword to Women in Love’) – and it is this fallen state which must end, if necessary together with mankind itself. Thus Birkin tells Gerald near the beginning of the novel: Let mankind pass away—time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn’t embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. (WL 59) In a similar vein, Slavoj Žižek has mounted a defence of Wagner’s Ring and Parsifal against accusations of totalitarianism as, respectively, the destruction of a corrupt order and an ‘opening . . . to a new community’ (2009: xxvii). This trajectory, of opening to a new community through the arts, was pursued in Lawrence’s increasingly experimental novels of the 1920s, which though often perceived as troublingly authoritarian may be less totalising in both their politics and aesthetics than critics have allowed (see also Howard J. Booth’s chapter on ‘Politics and Art’). His growing awareness of humanity, and its ‘creative utterances’, as ‘a dead letter’ inspired his most interartistic works, The Plumed Serpent (considered below) and David (addressed in my chapter about ‘Music’), which are also the least integrated. This chapter begins, though, by situating the Gesamtkunstwerk within a long history of debates about the unification or separation of the arts, where Wagner features as a pivotal figure. Lawrence’s lifelong ambivalence towards Wagner – evident in a series of Wagner-influenced novels commencing with The Trespasser (1912) and culminating with his opera-like works of the mid-1920s – reaches back through early Romanticism and post-Romantic apprehensions that Wagner was a symptom of rather than the cure for the ills of industrial society that he purported to offer (as expounded

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in 1888 by Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner and reiterated in 1938 by Adorno’s In Search of Wagner). My reading of Women in Love that follows therefore considers how, even as Lawrence draws on the interartistic possibilities of the Gesamtkunstwerk, he critiques Wagner’s celebration of the deathliness of love epitomised by operas such as Tristan und Isolde, by juxtaposing an alternative vision of a more open and life-affirming art. Concluding with the paradoxically voluminous ‘fragments’ which make up his final poetry collection Pansies (1Poems 659), and which reprise numerous aspects of Women in Love, this chapter aims to explore how the conflicts inherent in the Gesamtkunstwerk illuminate our understandings of Lawrence’s oeuvre as a struggle between a totalising and non-totalising aesthetics.

Defining the Gesamtkunstwerk: Contexts and Conflicts Definitions of the Gesamtkunstwerk (as in the epigraph to this chapter) inevitably begin with the far-reaching influence of Wagner, whose monumental music dramas of the second half of the nineteenth century – Tristan und Isolde, the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal – cast a long shadow into the twentieth. Rebelling against the ‘absolute’ form in music that precluded extra-musical content and meaning (as recapitulated in Eduard Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful, first published in 1854), Wagner returned to older models that combined all the arts as a means of regenerating society. Rooted in ancient Greek drama, his concept as articulated in his 1849 essays Artwork of the Future and Art and Revolution, and again at book length in Opera and Drama (1851), was complementary to Nietzsche’s early study of The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (although they later broke decisively over the realities of Wagner’s Festspielhaus project at Bayreuth). Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk was also a late flowering of German Romanticism, which had already seen composers attaching ‘programmes’ to their symphonies (such as the ‘Pastoral’ to Beethoven’s Sixth) and even words (as in Beethoven’s Ninth). Indeed for Wagner, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1824), culminating in an inspirational declaration of brotherly freedom adapted from Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ (currently the anthem of the European Union), was the pinnacle of musical achievement that marked the limits of the purely musical symphony and the dawn of music drama. Wagner thus staked a claim for music drama that Friedrich Schlegel had previously proposed for the novel, in 1798, ‘as an omnigenre in which artistic, intellectual, ethical and social cultivation would be indivisible’ (quoted in Garratt 2010: 168). Lawrence, who was steeped in German aesthetic influences (Fernihough 1993), was inevitably drawn to explore Romanticism’s legacy of an aspirational reunion of the arts, circulating through and after Wagner, although he was also aware of opposing views. Long before Wagner’s formulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk in 1849, Lessing had discoursed against encroachment between the arts in his 1766 Laokoon, citing the example of the ancient Roman statue Laocoön and his Sons (Figure 2.1). For Lessing the statue of Laocoön, screaming in his death throes with an enormous snake, violated the artistic proprieties whereby the visual arts should observe the decorum of space while poetry was the proper domain for a narrative unfolding in time. Lawrence, who had a lifelong predilection for the controversial statue (mentioned in various letters: 1L 136, 2L 137, 3L 64, 5L 406, 611, 7L 369), was probably also aware of Lessing’s treatise (included in Richard Garnett’s International Library of Famous Literature

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owned by the Lawrence family). At the beginning of his literary career, the controversy was reignited by Irving Babbitt’s New Laokoon (1910), which explicitly targeted the growing dominance of music during the nineteenth century and the further erosion of formal integrity. This debate about the separation of the ever-encroaching arts continued while modernist art was being formed and theorised: Clement Greenberg’s influential ‘Towards a Newer Laocoön’ (1940) blamed the Romantics for a ‘confusion of the arts’ that effectively nullified the individual medium and subordinated the arts to powers of personality (2–3). Greenberg thus reinforced the line of overt antiRomanticism and aesthetics of impersonality espoused by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (who had studied under Babbitt). Both were influenced by Wagner, but they responded to his proposed synthesis of the arts, as Vincent Sherry observes, with ‘a compensatory attempt to isolate and radicalize the material and form specific to each art, which Ezra Pound dubbed “its primary pigment”’ (2017: 269). Kandinsky, on the other hand, used colour as a unifying component between the separable arts, for instance in abstract early paintings, such as his Composition VII of 1913 (Figure 2.2), that aimed to paint a symphony. Nonetheless, a tendency among modernist innovators to deconstruct the Gesamtkunstwerk is also evident in Kandinsky’s work, which, as Anke Finger asserts, pries open the Wagnerian idea of the total artwork and exposes it as, inevitably, a montage, consisting of several elements that may fall apart so that they can rejoin in some form or other after experiencing the essence of being in fragments. (2011: 120) Finger’s description invites comparison with Lawrence’s experiments with loosening form in the 1920s, culminating in the ‘fragments’ of Pansies (1Poems 659), and, accordingly, the rest of this chapter addresses the links between integration and disintegration in his work from Women in Love onwards, as he made his own negotiations with Wagnerian ideas. With twenty-first-century hindsight, then, the ‘total work of art’ was never as total as it once seemed. As Lutz Koepnick points out, alternative translations of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ may be more helpful: It has become commonplace to render Wagner’s ‘gesamt’ as ‘total’ in English, thereby situating the total work of art as a precursor of whatever one may want to identify as totalitarian about modern industrial culture and society . . . the idea of ‘gesamt’ could just as well be translated with words such as ‘aggregate’, ‘sum’, and ‘collected’, and thus describe a process of combination featuring traces of heterogeneity and difference, of amalgamation and construction. (2017: 273–4) Wagner himself was sparing in his use of the term, which he spelt with a double ‘m’ – Gesammtkunstwerk – as if ‘to underline the togetherness, the zusammen, of gesamt, totality’ (Sampson 2018: 168). His Artwork of the Future proposed a reunion of the Hellenic ‘sister arts’ of dance, music and poetry that would release each from its separate limitations and engage all the senses (Wagner 1993: 95–9), a cross-fertilisation that he described in terms of loving entwinement. However, there was a divergence between theory and practice where heterogeneity was difficult to maintain, and Wagner’s music tended to limit rather than liberate other media: a sea of orchestral music drowning

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Figure 2.1 Unknown sculptor, Laocoön and his Sons (c.27 bc–ad 68, excavated in 1506 in Rome). Marble. 208 x 163 x 112 cm. Vatican Museums, Vatican City.

Figure 2.2 Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), Composition VII (1913). Oil on canvas. 200 x 300 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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out both words and drama. As Lawrence warns in his characterisation of Siegmund in The Trespasser, Wagnerian concepts of music and love risk dissolving individual components and the individual: ‘You seem to have knit all things in a piece for me. Things are not separate: they are all in a symphony’ (98–9). Lawrence’s skirmish with Wagnerian style in The Trespasser was thus a rehearsal for a more sustained critique of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Women in Love – through its exploration of integration and its entwinement with disintegration and ‘dissolution’ (WL 172–3).

Wagner, the ‘sister arts’ and Women in Love By the beginning of the twentieth century, Wagner’s influence had pervaded the European arts: Baudelaire, Beardsley, D’Annunzio, Kandinsky, Mahler, Mann, Verlaine, Wells and Wilde had variously succumbed, and Lawrence was no exception. Wagner’s music had by then become part of the domestic piano repertoire, but his first experience of a full performance was probably Tannhäuser in Nottingham in 1909 (which he found strident: 1L 99), followed later that year by Tristan und Isolde (‘a bit hysterical’: 1L 140) and, in 1911, by Siegfried (the third opera in the Ring cycle), which he claimed ‘did not make any terrific impression’ (1L 327). Nonetheless he remained fascinated by Wagnerian opera. ‘Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death’ (1L 247), he wrote while working on The Trespasser – the first in a sequence of novels that Stoddard Martin has compared to Wagner’s Ring cycle (1982: 178). Martin, like Oates, has recognised Ring-like features in Women in Love – the characters named Gutrun/Gudrun and Loki/Loerke and a similar drive to the apocalyptic destruction of a corrupted order – and so, building from these comparisons, I will consider how Lawrence engages a broader critique of the cultural values which he perceived as underpinning the failure of war-torn Western society and which he related to the false ideals of artists, like Wagner, who were preoccupied with death. The first of two related scenes on which I will focus occurs in the ‘Breadalby’ chapter, when three women stage a Biblical scene from the Book of Ruth signalled as being ‘in the style of the Russian Ballet of Pavlova and Nijinsky’ (WL 91). Lawrence’s comparison is somewhat inaccurate (as Susan Jones also points out in her chapter on ‘Dance’), not least because the Ballets Russes, particularly in its early years, was widely believed to display ‘indifference to religious or political questions’ (Roberts 2011: 150). Since Lawrence’s novel is manifestly concerned with such questions and the role of the artist in society, the scene that unfolds can be read as a critique both of the Russian Ballet’s perceived concern with art for art’s sake and of its Wagnerian antecedent, its Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev having grasped the opportunity to do for ballet what Wagner had done for opera by integrating the elements of music, choreography and design. Two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and an Italian Contessa perform at the instigation of a patroness of the arts announced in the novel’s opening chapter as a ‘Kulturträger’ (WL 16). Implicitly acting in this later scene as an impresario like Diaghilev (and based on Lawrence’s aristocratic patron Lady Ottoline Morrell, a reallife enthusiast for the Ballets Russes), Hermione Roddice is also presented as a bearer of implicitly German and Decadent culture in the long shadow of Wagner. The performance by three women suggests a parallel to Wagner’s ‘sister arts’ of music, dance and

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poetry, lovingly entwined, as described in his Artwork of the Future (1993: 95–9) and based on the Greek muses and their traditional depictions in the arts (see e.g. Antonio Canova’s Three Graces in Figure 2.3). In Lawrence’s scene, however, the poetry is conspicuous by its absence: ‘It was all done in dumb show, the women danced their emotion in gesture and motion’ (WL 91). The emphasis on ‘gesture and motion’ is more akin to Wagner’s idea of ‘dance gesture’ than the renowned athleticism of the Ballets Russes, although in both cases these manifestations of the Gesamtkunstwerk shared the effects of displacing the representational value of words on to other media. Wagner elevated the expressive power of music, with the orchestra assuming the role played in Greek tragedy by the chorus, assisted by musical phrases (leitmotifs) that denoted specific meanings. The Ballets Russes were perceived by some as ‘a theatre of painters’, a who’s who of the avant-garde from Bakst to Picasso, for whom the stage was ‘a gigantic canvas, waiting to be brought to life through dance and music’ (Roberts 2011: 151). Lawrence’s novel also repeatedly challenges the value of words – through a thematic use of silence, the recurrent idea of humanity as a ‘dead letter’ (WL 59) and frequent invocations of other arts – but, at the same time, it also raises the spectre of purely Dionysian responses to art that manipulate the emotions and stimulate superficial excitement rather than balancing with Apollonian order. In this way, Lawrence echoes a discourse circulating since the 1880s that indicted Wagner’s legacy of Decadence in the arts, which, among other sources, he probably encountered in Nietzsche’s vitriolic The Case of Wagner (STH 255).

Figure 2.3 Antonio Canova (1757–1822), The Three Graces (1815–17). Carved marble. 173 x 97.2 x 75 cm. © Victoria & Albert Museum.

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Lawrence’s ballet scene provokes purely Dionysian exhilaration in its audience – ‘they all danced, seized by the spirit’ (WL 92) – akin to the ‘hysterical’ effects of Wagner’s art imputed by his critics, including Lawrence (1L 140) and Nietzsche (‘Wagner est une névrose’ [1911: 13]). Gerald Crich – depicted as a composite Wagnerian character: ‘at once a “Nibelung” (WL 47), a Siegfried-like human hero . . . and godlike’ (Reid 2019: 129) – is specifically excited by the ‘cleaving’ of Gudrun to Naomi (played by her sister Ursula). Their loving entwinement foreshadows his own fatal desire to ‘cleave’ to Gudrun in the disturbing scene in ‘Death and Love’: As he drew nearer to her, he plunged deeper into her enveloping soft warmth, a wonderful creative heat that penetrated his veins and gave him life again. He felt himself dissolving and sinking to rest . . . Like a child at the breast, he cleaved intensely to her, and she could not put him away . . . She seemed to lie hearing waves break on a hidden shore, long, slow, gloomy waves breaking with the rhythm of fate, so monotonously that it seemed eternal. (WL 344–5; emphasis added) For Wagner, the project of social regeneration through unifying the arts was also an erotic one in which ‘just as man can sink himself into the nature of woman through love . . . so each of the individual arts can find itself in the complete, and fully liberated work of art’ (The Artwork of the Future, quoted in Daub 2013: 17; emphasis added). Though Lawrence’s Wagnerian character Gerald feels himself ‘sinking’ and ‘dissolving’ in ‘love’, Birkin takes issue with a prevailing Western narrative of ‘The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love’ – or ‘cleaving’ as above – and posits instead a ‘singling away into purity and clear being, of things that were mixed’ (WL 200–1). In refusing to be ‘a broken half’ of a Platonic whole (199), Birkin defies Wagner’s tragic love plots and their ‘bellowings at Fate and death’, as Lawrence put it in his early letter (1L 247). Moreover, Birkin’s proposal of an anti-Platonic but ethical relationship of balanced stars (WL 148) is analogous to the ‘singling’ out of the arts in reaction to the Gesamtkunstwerk since, as Vincent Sherry explains, the intended synthesis of the arts prompted an opposite response of separation of each art into its essence, as expounded by Pound and Babbitt (2017: 269). Birkin’s desire for ‘pure’ relationship, ‘not meeting or mingling’ (WL 148), is represented as a cosmic model of love that draws implicitly on the Pythagorean idea of the music of the spheres – a pure form of music that Hanslick also invoked in the first edition of On the Musically Beautiful, his treatise on ‘absolute’ music (Bonds 2014: 184). It is no coincidence that stellar equilibrium with Birkin leads Ursula to think she can hear the music of the spheres in the Romanticallysublime setting of the Alps: ‘She imagined she could hear the stars. She imagined distinctly she could hear the celestial, musical motion of the stars, quite near at hand. She seemed like a bird flying amongst their harmonious motion’ (WL 408). At the other extreme from this novel’s imagery of constellation is the miniaturism associated with Gudrun. Early in the novel, Ursula remarks of her sister’s painted wood carvings: “Isn’t it queer that she [Gudrun] always likes little things?—she must always work small things, that one can put between one’s hands, birds, and tiny animals. She likes to look through the wrong end of the opera glasses, and see the world that way.—Why is it, do you think?” (WL 39)

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Opera glasses enable the spectator to zoom in on details of the panorama unfolding on the stage, so to ‘look through the wrong end’ is to miniaturise further. Wagner constructed prolonged soundworlds from a myriad of small musical phrases or chords – or leitmotifs – which Nietzsche criticised as building false ideals of wholeness: ‘The whole no longer lives at all: it is composed, reckoned up, artificial, a fictitious thing’ (1911: 20). Paradoxically, then, Nietzsche denounced Wagner as ‘our greatest musical miniaturist’ (21) – and a comparable paradox of scale seems to be at work in Women in Love. Lawrence’s 1913 ‘Review of German Books’ attacked Thomas Mann’s technique of Wagnerian ‘Leitmotiv’ in similar terms to Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner (where ‘case’ bears the meaning of disease), as a symptom of ‘physically ailing, no doubt. But his complaint is deeper: it is of the soul’ (IR 208; Reid 2019: 69–74). This rhetoric finds its fictional outlet in ‘Death and Love’ – the chapter’s very title suggesting a play on the Liebestod [Love-death] at the end of Tristan und Isolde, Wagner’s first and arguably most powerful working-through of his technique of leitmotif. A miniaturist herself, Gudrun hears ‘the rhythm of fate’ breaking in ‘long, slow, gloomy waves’, like a sea of Wagnerian music, ‘so monotonously that it seemed eternal’ (WL 345). She thus calls attention to what Martin rightly, if more generally, identifies as Lawrence’s ‘use of rhythms and patterns of repetition that were chromatic and building, like the music of Tristan’ (1982: 179). Yet Lawrence’s novel resists a Wagnerian conclusion. At the culmination of Tristan und Isolde, both protagonists succumb to a love-death that releases the long-withheld resolution of its opening chord, as described by Bryan Magee: The first chord of Tristan [und Isolde], known simply as ‘the Tristan chord’, remains the most famous single chord in the history of music. It contains within itself not one but two dissonances, thus creating within the listener a double desire, agonizing in its intensity, for resolution. The chord to which it then moves resolves one of these dissonances but not the other, thus providing resolution-but-not-resolution. (2001: 208) Women in Love makes no such effort at resolution. Gerald, though fated for death like Tristan, does not have a hero’s death – he is reduced to ‘a dead mass of maleness, repugnant’ (WL 480) – and Gudrun (his Isolde) survives to flee to Germany with another man, an artist, and in pursuit of her own art. The novel ends on an unresolved note of dissonance, with Birkin arguing with Ursula about his desire for ‘eternal union with a man too: another kind of love’ (481) – an open ending which suggests a different ‘double desire’ from Wagner’s ‘resolution-but-not-resolution’. Indeed, Wagner had taken musical dissonance to such a point that the German composers who followed him were faced with a choice between stretching consonance (harmony) to its limits or abandoning it altogether. While Mahler ‘maximalised’ the Romantic line pursued by Wagner by ‘Turning musical works into awe-inspiring mountains – by extending their length, amplifying their volume, and complicating their texture’, Schoenberg pursued the other line of intensifying or emancipating the dissonance between tonal relationships (Taruskin 2010: 5). Both strategies are evident in Women in Love. On the one hand this novel gestures to the capacity of the novel form to embrace all the arts, and posit other models of life and love, while on the other it demonstrates a tendency to disintegration and ‘dissolution’ (WL 172–3), symbolised finally by Ger-

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ald’s return to ‘cold, mute Matter’ (480). But Lawrence’s novel also repeatedly explores the gaps between words in ways that resemble Schoenberg’s ‘exploration of the gaps between the notes of the diatonic scale’ (Albright 2004: 7). As Albright remarks, ‘musical dissonance is an attractive metaphor for emotional dissonance’ (8). While this suggests a reason why so many modernist writers turned to music to explore inner states, in Lawrence’s case he also turned increasingly to a dissonance between the arts in his works of the 1920s. Around the same time, Schoenberg in his Theory of Harmony (1926) sought to ‘emancipate dissonance’ from the rule of consonance. As Thomas Harrison explains, ‘Consonance, a pleasing resolution of clashing tones, is like comfort. It avoids movement; it “does not take up the search”. Schoenberg’s compositions have more faith in disquiet than rest, uncertainty than knowledge, difficulty than ease’ (1996: 18). In some respects, the same might be said of Lawrence’s ‘difficult’ novels of the 1920s, which are marked by movement and quest, but also by a distinctly musical turn.

The Plumed Serpent: Brecht, Brotherhood, Blood Women in Love is often regarded as the apotheosis of Lawrence’s canon – novelistic or otherwise – while his subsequent works, though arguably more experimental, are viewed as less successful (see e.g. Keith Cushman’s discussion of ‘The Idea of the Novel’ in this Companion). His novels of the 1920s became more overtly intermedial, culminating in The Plumed Serpent (1926), which incorporates hymns and songs in the text, and his final play David (1926), for which he composed ten pieces of music (discussed in my chapter below on ‘Music’). In several respects, The Plumed Serpent resembles ‘grand opera’, as Lawrence’s friend Witter Bynner recognised (1953: 218), and David is similarly Wagnerian in scale and ambition (socially and artistically). On the one hand, these could be construed as his most sustained engagements with the Gesamtkunstwerk, yet they also challenge ideas of integration since the different media of words and music resist formal coherence. Lawrence’s near-contemporary, Bertolt Brecht, provides a useful point of reference because he described a comparable conflict between media in his 1930 opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny: The great struggle for supremacy between words, music and production—which always brings up the question ‘which is the pretext for what?’: is the music the pretext for the events on the stage, or are these the pretext for the music? Etc.—can simply be by-passed by radically separating the elements. So long as the expression ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (or ‘integrated work of art’) means that the integration is a muddle, so long as the arts are supposed to be ‘fused’ together, the various elements will all be equally degraded . . . Words, music and setting must become more independent of one another. (quoted in Albright 2004: 344–5) In this passage, Brecht claims to be working against the unifying ideology of the Gesamtkunstwerk, although at the same time he privileges the role of music to ‘communicate’, ‘take a position’ and ‘give the attitude’: in sum, ‘Music plays the chief part in our thesis’. But unlike for Wagner, for Brecht the music remains independent of the content because it has been liberated from the representational intent of leitmotif, a

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practice that Lawrence had also critiqued in Women in Love. Rather than being passively entertained, spectators must make up their own minds, launching a ‘change’, Brecht envisaged, ‘which goes far beyond formal matters and begins for the first time to affect the theatre’s function’ (346). In the mid-1920s, Lawrence’s experiences of Native American rituals sparked a similar awareness of the difference between going ‘to the theatre to be entertained’ and an ‘all-inclusive’ drama in which ‘There is no division between actor and audience. It is all one’ (MM 59, 67). This exceeded ‘even the earliest form of Greek drama’ that underpinned Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and inspired Lawrence to negotiate a new way of writing in the 1920s that aspires to heterogeneity within wholeness – a balance between self and society, words and other media (also discussed in the chapters by Julianne Newmark on ‘Traditional Aesthetics’ and Susan Jones on ‘Dance’). David, though operatic in scale with its cast of 58 actors, soloists, choruses, instrumentalists and dancers, is unintegrated in its elements and its rare performances have not included the music that Lawrence wrote (Plays 587–601). Edwin Muir set the tone for subsequent criticism of The Plumed Serpent when he complained that it ‘rarely succeeds in combining the three’ genres of travelogue, fiction and gospel (1926: 719). In some ways Lawrence’s most operatic works were thus his loosest and most un-Wagnerian in their non-totalising aesthetic, yet his return to religious themes has also invited comparison with Parsifal (Martin 1982: 178–80). The Plumed Serpent is arguably Lawrence’s most overtly political novel in proposing a new religious order that might redeem the world, but just as Parsifal was too dogmatic for Nietzsche (1911: 9), there is also a totalising political agenda in the case of The Plumed Serpent that remains implicated in Wagnerian conceptions of the Gesamtkunstwerk. The Men of Quetzalcoatl at the centre of The Plumed Serpent are a community of artists who bring together a range of arts, while importantly they also consecrate their art to a public religious programme of transformation. As Don Ramón tours his hacienda in the chapter ‘Lords of Day and Night’, his men are variously engaged: a smith crafts a metallic emblem of a ‘bird within the sun’, a sculptor carves a wooden head (or idol) of Ramón and a weaver makes the sashes and sarapes that constitute a sort of uniform (PS 171–3). Then he summons his seven men by beating a drum until a drummer takes over and ‘One by one the voices of the men joined in, till they were all singing in the strange, blind infallible rhythm of the ancient barbaric world’ (175). This artistic community has some resonance with Wagner’s vision, in The Artwork of the Future, of a brotherhood of artist-men [that] will mould its works of art in unison with, in complement and rounding-off of mother nature; accenting every quality and individual trait evoked by special need, in answer to the special call of nature’s individual features, but marching forward from the base of this particularity toward a common pact with common nature – as toward the utmost fullness of man’s being. (quoted in Wilson-Smith 2007: 9–10) Indeed, in some ways Ramón resembles Wagner himself. Mexico becomes his stage, on a larger scale even than Wagner’s programme of national revival at his purposebuilt festival playhouse at Bayreuth, where his ‘religious’ opera Parsifal was premiered

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in 1882. The entire religion is to be spread by the songs and hymns that Ramón has composed: Strange, the change that was taking place in the world. Always the air had a softer, more velvety silence, it seemed alive. And there were no hours . . . It was as if, from Ramón and Cipriano, from Jamiltepec and the lake region, a new world was unfolding, unrolling, as softly and subtly as twilight falling and removing the clutter of the day. (PS 359) The artistic proprieties of space and time are violated in ways that Lessing descried and that Wagner championed: the novel is supposed to be an art form that unfolds over time and in words, but ‘There are no hours’ and ‘a velvety silence’ reigns as a new world unrolls from the lake at its centre. The novel’s ‘fall’ into twilight resonates with Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods to the extent that Ramón sets fire to the idols of the Christian religion in the chapter titled ‘Auto-da-Fe’, but unlike Wagner’s culminating conflagration in the Ring this is not the end of Lawrence’s story, but the start of a conflict between the Men of Quetzalcoatl and the prevailing political and religious order. Lawrence’s Mexican brotherhood extends the idea of ‘Blutbrüderschaft’ in Women in Love (206) to incorporate his apprehension of blood consciousness and blood religion in Native American rituals: ‘the strange blind unanimity of the Indian men’s voices. The experience is one experience, tribal, of the blood-stream’ (MM 62). But the Men of Quetzalcoatl must become literal brothers in blood when Ramón is attacked and extracts vengeance. The shocking political violence of The Plumed Serpent foreshadows the totalitarianism of the twentieth century and has been critically condemned for it (in ways similar to those in which Wagner has been implicated in later events). My objective here is not to redeem the politics of this novel, but to point to its critique of Wagnerian aesthetics and the ways in which it resists totalising forms. If Ramón is a Wagnerian, Wotan-like character, Kate Burns offers a dissonant voice in a novel that does not finally affirm the Quetzalcoatl religion. She is no Kundry, the penitent seductress, who is silenced in the final act of Wagner’s Parsifal. Like the Walküre Brünnhilde in the Ring she intervenes to save her hero Ramón in combat, but she resists his godlike tendencies: He wanted her to acquiesce in the hymn, in the drum, in the whole mood. Like a child he wanted her to acquiesce. But if she were going to be hostile, he would be quick to be first in the hostility. Her hostile judgement would make a pure enemy of him. (PS 442) Also like Brünnhilde she chooses humanity over godhead for herself, but, akin to Ursula at the end of Women in Love, Kate ultimately questions her role in an eternal triangle with two men: ‘And I suppose a woman is really de trop, even there [in your Morning Star], when two men are together’ (423). Immediately before this unresolved parting scene Kate reflects that Ramón and Cipriano are ‘limited’: ‘But then one must be limited. If one tries to be unlimited, one becomes horrible’ (PS 439). Kate thus has the final words of warning in Lawrence’s fiction against the totalising potential of the Gesamtkunstwerk. The final Hymn in the novel also sounds a note of separateness:

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My way is not thy way, and thine is not mine. But come, before we part Let us separately go to the Morning Star, And meet there. (441) Together and apart, the ending of The Plumed Serpent underlines the contradictions inherent within the Gesamtkunstwerk, which had reached their limits as far as his fiction was concerned. His next and final novel signalled a retreat to more conventional form in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which also coincided with a turn to the medium of painting (outlined in Jeff Wallace’s chapter in this Companion). In both cases the content was shocking (and censored) even if the formal proprieties of these separate art forms were more closely observed. And yet in his final poetry collection, Pansies (1929), Lawrence grappled one last time with the contradictions of the Gesamtkunstwerk, suggesting a continuing fascination with the boundaries between the various arts and the potential for the arts to redeem a fallen culture.

Conclusion: Pansies and Parodoxes Lawrence presented Pansies as a ‘bunch of fragments . . . It is not offered as a collection of poems’; each of his ‘pansies’, he insisted, ‘shall be a whole plant’ (1Poems 657–8). Both voluminous and fragmentary, satirical and utopian, Pansies has a spiritual and performative intent that Christopher Pollnitz compares to ‘sacred dramas’ (2015: 16). At once a Gesamtkunstwerk and anti-Gesamtkunstwerk, Pansies is Lawrence’s most aphoristic work, with the same intent to shock as much of Nietzsche’s writing. Many of the themes of Women in Love are reprised here, including a bitter condemnation of industrial modernity announced in the opening poem ‘Our day is over’ and then accumulating through the collection in a relentless and seemingly irreconcilable clash between the organic and the mechanical, the personal and the cosmic. In ‘Nemesis’, a recurring threat of blood also connects with The Plumed Serpent: If we do not rapidly open all the doors of consciousness and freshen the putrid little space in which we are cribbed the sky-blue walls of our unventilated heaven will be bright red with blood. (1Poems 447) Frieda’s proposed title for Women in Love is recycled here for a poem, ‘Dies Irae’, which reiterates Birkin’s misgivings about words: ‘our Word is dead / and we know not how to live wordless’ (1Poems 443). Akin to his vision of ‘a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up’ (WL 127), there is a lizard who hearkens ‘to the sounding of the spheres’ (1Poems 455), an unheard music that also haunts Women in Love (408). The collection’s cosmic (and other) imagery similarly probes questions of scale: ‘The universe flows in infinite wild streams, related / in rhythms too big and too small for us to know’ (415). In some ways, these lines are also a metaphor for the collection, since as Holly A. Laird observes, ‘At one glance Pansies appears the most fragmented of his books, but is, in fact, deeply and pliably ordered’ (1988: 205). Ordered perhaps, but in Pansies the concept of togetherness (zusammen) that underpins the Gesamtkunstwerk is conspicuous by its absence. The poetic ‘I’ dominates here,

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repeatedly sounding dissonant notes, exhorting mankind to take action in ways that critics have found strident and didactic rather than lyrical. Yet musical references abound, such that if these poems aspire to be songs at all (and some do draw on hymns, songs and nursery rhymes), then they resemble protest songs, intended to provoke change like the Songs and Hymns of Quetzalcoatl. For instance, the four-line poem ‘Old song’ draws on similar imagery and rhythms: The day is ending, the night descending the heart is frozen, the spirit dead: but the moon is wending her way, attending to other things that are not yet said. Instead of Wagner we might think of the iconoclasm of an earlier Romantic visionary, Blake, whose Songs of Innocence and Experience – combining tiny, song-like poems with striking illustrations and a political intent designed to provoke rather than to please – might suggest a peculiarly British precursor of the Gesamtkunsterk. Pansies’ final poem ‘Trust’ reveals that the poet no longer trusts in mankind to find redemption. It opens with a weakly rhetorical ‘Oh we’ve got to trust / one another again / in some essentials’ and ends with an invitation to the other to entwine ‘with the sunshine in me / till we both of us / are more glorious / and more sunny’ (1Poems 493). It might as well end on a questioning note, like Women in Love, and so is consistent with the open endings of his novels. There is no sense of resolution – or of resolving the dissonance Wagnerian-style by restoring consonance. Pansies is a solo performance, so the gathering ‘we’ of its culminating stanza lacks resonance and the narrator seems detached from mankind intent on self-destruction. Cumulatively, this chapter illustrates a paradoxical relation of integration and disintegration between the arts and their political functions that responds to Wagner’s legacy and corresponds with various modernist experiments with (and against) the Gesamtkunstwerk. I will conclude by offering one example of how Lawrence has contributed to a continuing tradition of interartistic writing. His recurring insistence on the voice of the individual, though out of step in many ways with the impersonality insisted upon by some of his contemporaries, has found an echo in the work of Rachel Cusk, a twenty-first-century author who admires Lawrence. Cusk’s own Outline trilogy (2014–18) suggests a non-totalising but intermedial aesthetic, exemplified in the following reflections of her first-person narrator on the musical preferences of her host: Clelia favoured symphonies: in fact, she possessed the complete symphonic works of all the major composers. There was a marked prejudice against compositions that glorified the solo voice or instrument, very little piano music and virtually no opera . . . I wasn’t sure I would choose to sit through symphony after symphony any more than I would spend the afternoon reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and it occurred to me that in Clelia’s mind they perhaps represented the same thing, a sort of objectivity that arose when the focus became the sum of the human parts and the individual was blotted out. (2014: 53–4) Although Lawrence felt, in his darker moments, that the sum of mankind should be blotted out, his art constantly championed the individual against the mob. Cusk particularly commends the ‘brevity and the vastness’ of Lawrence’s vision (2019: 204),

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encapsulated in a letter that coincided with his drafting of Women in Love: ‘One is not only a little individual, living a little life. One is in oneself the whole of mankind, and one’s fate is the fate of the whole of mankind’ (2L 302). Such are the paradoxes of scale that Lawrence never ceased to explore in an artistic practice that fluctuated between the totalising and non-totalising poles inherent in the Gesamtkunstwerk.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Michael Bell for his comments on drafts of this chapter, Jane Costin for invigorating discussions of The Plumed Serpent and my co-editor Catherine Brown for challenging everything: this chapter is much improved as a result, though any shortcomings remain my own.

Works Cited Albright, Daniel (2000), Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Albright, Daniel (2004), Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Bonds, Mark Evan (2014), Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bynner, Witter (1953), Journey with Genius: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D. H. Lawrences, London: Peter Nevill. Cusk, Rachel (2014), Outline, London: Faber. Cusk, Rachel (2019), Coventry, London: Faber. Daub, Adrian (2013), Tristan’s Shadow: Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fernihough, Anne (1993), D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Finger, Anke (2011), ‘Idea/Imagination/Dialogue: The Total Artwork and Conceptual Art’, in The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork, ed. Danielle Follette and Anke Finger, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 108–28. Garratt, James (2010), Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Thomas (1996), 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Kandinsky, Wassily (1977), Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler, New York: Dover. Koepnick, Lutz (2017), ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, in The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. Vincent Sherry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 273–88. Laird, Holly A. (1988), Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Magee, Bryan (2001), Wagner and Philosophy, London: Allen Lane. Martin, Stoddard (1982), Wagner to ‘The Waste Land’: A Study of the Relationship of Wagner to English Literature, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Muir, Edwin (1926), ‘Review of The Plumed Serpent’, The Nation & The Athenaeum, 719. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1911), The Case of Wagner, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis. Oates, Joyce Carol (1992), ‘Lawrence’s Götterdämmerung: The Tragic Vision of Women in Love’, in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’: A Casebook, ed. David Ellis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 25–49.

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Pollnitz, Christopher (2015), ‘Using the Cambridge Poems and Auditing Lawrence’s Sacred Dramas’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 40:2, pp. 11–33. Reid, Susan (2019), D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Roberts, David (2011), The Total Work of Art in European Modernism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sampson, Fiona (2018), Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sherry, Vincent (2017), ‘Modernism in and out of Kind: Genres, Composite Genres, and New Genres’, in The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. Vincent Sherry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: pp. 269–72. Stewart, Jack (1992), The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Taruskin, Richard (2010), Music in the Early Twentieth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wagner, Richard (1993), The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works, trans. W. Ashton Ellis, Lincoln, NB and London: University of Nebraska Press. Wilson-Smith, Matthew (2007), The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace, London and New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj (2009), ‘Foreword: Why is Wagner Worth Saving?’, in Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London and New York: Verso, pp. viii–xxvii.

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3 Romanticism, Decadence, History Vincent Sherry

Introduction

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eaders aware of D. H. Lawrence’s literary biography will know that The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), his two major-length novels of the second half of the 1910s, began as a single book-length project, commenced in 1913 as ‘The Sisters’ (R xix). Those informed readers may still puzzle over – and newcomers to Lawrence may well be baffled by – an undeniable feeling that these two novels are made out of each other’s imaginative antimatter. The Rainbow tells a mythopoeic tale of the Brangwen family; it begins with an origin story of Biblical scale and moves into a generational saga whose perspectives are epic and whose destinations are rich with promise. Women in Love concentrates on a historical present that is limited in most significant respects; the two daughters of the most recent generation of the family are situated in careers and relationships that seem, variously, precarious and unpromising and, ultimately, unresolved or undone. There is a matching disparity in writing styles: the linguistic register of The Rainbow moves in its most characteristic and distinctive rhythms into the mythic and ritualistic, into a poetics of invocatory possibility, whereas, in Women in Love, the centre of linguistic energy shifts from narrative to dialogue, from a poetic summoning of future possibility to a prose that registers the difficulty of characters’ interactions, here the limits of human communicability (Bell 1992: 76–80, 97–101). And while the marriage plots of the later novel seem to have been in Lawrence’s plan from early on – he re-titled ‘The Sisters’ as ‘The Wedding Ring’ before he split the book up – the appearance of the members of the same family in the two novels only heightens our sense of contrast. In this chapter I want to take stock of the developmental difference of these two major novels. The motivating force of this story is of course the protean Lawrence. No sooner does he master a literary style than he leaves it behind, as, for most recent example, the virtuoso of realist or naturalist convention in Sons and Lovers has mastered – and then moved beyond – an identifiably modernist prosody of poetic prose. The import of this authorial development comprises but exceeds the resources of Lawrence’s individual gifts, however. Our critical trope for the author may shift accordingly from the god of changing shapes to the creature that changes its colours to match those of the ground on which it finds itself: to the chameleon. And the ground is historical. When, by late 1914, Lawrence had taken the decision to split ‘The Wedding Ring’ in two (Worthen 2005: 152), he was, in effect, drawing a line through time. On one side of the divide lay the mythic prehistory of the Brangwen sisters; on the other, these

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two women appear as figures in then-contemporary history, a history at once unspecified and specific. In this later novel, the First World War and its attendant horrors make for a presence as extensive and ramifying as it is unspoken – in effect, a present absence that bears its own silent witness to the feeling, growing through the war into the post-war, of this ‘unspeakable’ event. Most important: in turning his one novel into two, Lawrence was telling a double historical time; he was setting off a foretime of mythic futurity and an aftermath of foregone possibility. And if the history is unspecified in the final product, it is nonetheless the historical experience of the Great War that provides the decisive event, the reorienting force, in this development. Lawrence is telling his twofold story in a way that makes profound and revealing sense of literary history as well. This is the literary history of a long nineteenth century, a period which witnesses the generation of Romanticism and its downturn into Decadence, the two sensibilities we can see Lawrence appropriating and extending, successively, in the two novels. Thus, in The Rainbow, the origin story of the Brangwen sisters begins in the natural circumstances that are familiar as a primary locus of value in European and American Romanticism. These are also the establishing circumstances of power and promise in the struggles of political liberation, all in all, the staging area of a specifically revolutionary Romanticism. That is a legacy Lawrence is tapping into and orienting towards the resplendent finale for his story, where the title figure of the novel provides the future lives of the characters and the futurity of humankind with the tonic and resolving note of confident promise. Contrariwise, indeed in counterclockwise fashion, Women in Love tells the time of progressive development and individual liberation in reverse. And here, in keeping with the most indicative shift in the literary history of nineteenth-century Europe, the imaginative and poetic conventions of Decadence, or Décadence, replace those of an erstwhile Romanticism, most obviously, in shifting the imaginaries of temporal value from revolutionary futurities to declining times. What makes these literary conventions and sensibilities most apposite to Lawrence’s own fictional purposes is the political history underpinning the developments of that nineteenth-century literary history. This is a political history we can see Lawrence reliving in the interval of the two novels’ compositions and reconfiguring in the imaginative fashioning of each book. In our reading of political history in literary history, as I have proposed in Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (Sherry 2015), we can understand Decadence not just as the representation of a failed or decaying Romanticism in general but, in most acute particular, as the consequence of the long, ongoing, cumulative failure of European revolutions – 1789, 1815, 1830, 1848–52, 1871. By this later date, literary Decadence had codified and conventionalised the representation of those political disappointments. And while revolutionary Romanticism may have come to political term by the end of the nineteenth century, as witnessed in the multiple and successive failures of revolution, Lawrence’s imaginative engagement with this legacy lengthened into the twentieth, when, in 1914, the onset of an apocalyptically total war occasioned a totalising change in his own imaginative outlook. And here, in splitting his single great book into halves, and rewriting each from the start, it is their disparities that he will accentuate, enhancing each side of the divide with the rival identities of Romanticism and Decadence. Unlike Colin Clarke (1969), whose study of Romanticism in Lawrence’s work presents the imaginative project of Women and Love as essentially

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continuous with that of The Rainbow, and who offers no historically informed reading of these novels, I wish, with Lawrence, to accentuate their difference. For the difference intimates the rich, if bitter, significance of his fiction’s historicity. The double structure of the novel Lawrence reconstituted in 1914, reorganising imaginative time into a binary of Before and After, Promise and Disappointment, Futurity and Loss, is of course no mechanical plan. It is a living system, an imaginative understanding Lawrence realises by living it forward in the writing. And where his experience in history may be confirming it day by day, the fiction that results has the urgency of current circumstance as its force and authority. Not only in the aftermath despair of Women in Love. The representation of prospective foretimes in The Rainbow draws on the profounder longings of loss, of a twentieth-century retrospect on traditions of a future once possible but now foregone, where the compensatory energies of imaginative recovery give the truth of desire to lost possibilities and live out the power of a Romanticism otherwise long outlived.

The Rainbow The first paragraphs of The Rainbow lay out the main lines of thematic development in the novel; this overture augurs its generative tensions as well. Drawing us towards the long succession of Brangwens on the family farm, Lawrence begins by fitting this history into an expansive temporal dimension, widening into a backward time of mythic antiquity. As Michael Bell observes in his definitive study D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being, ‘The belief in an original continuity between the life of nature and life of man is a notable feature of European romanticism in several of its principal varieties’, where (it is Bell’s essential point about the opening of The Rainbow) ‘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’ (1992: 60, 66). Thus, as Lawrence centres attention on the ongoing resources of the land, he shapes the cadence of the prose to convey a feeling of rhythmic, ritualistic return in a quasi-sacred time of chthonic rite and custom. The men who farm this land are thus seen to turn for value and meaning to the inward continuities of deep time in local place. ‘The women’, however, ‘were different’ (R 10), Lawrence’s narrator remarks. The ‘women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farmlife, to the spoken world beyond . . . they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen.’ And so the imagination of the novel already poises between the separate directions and apparently contrary values of male and female awareness, where the women’s voyages outward instigate the developing stories of the novel and locate its motivating, complicating interest. In cumulative effect, these journeys will mark the extension of Romanticism into history, where the assignably natural values of Romanticism move from the sphere of the agrarian to the complications of a history specifically political. Beginning with the initial figure of specifically female interest in the novel, who comes to the Brangwen world from the far outside: this is the Polish refugee and widow, Lydia Lensky, who arrives with her one surviving child, Anna. The difference Lydia brings to the static world of Brangwen masculinity includes the foreignness of herself and her daughter, of course, but it features also and especially the personal memory and specific history of her Continental past. This story turns around

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her involvement in the Polish struggle for independence, where she worked as a nurse beside her husband, a Polish physician, who drew her first to the rebel cause. This story is told in two instalments: first, in her conversation with her new husband, Tom Brangwen, and second, following Tom’s death in a flood, in her confidences to her granddaughter, Ursula Brangwen. In her conversation with Tom, the diction resonates with the history of European revolution, and it comes, most indicatively, with French inflections: ‘a patriot and an émancipée’, who ‘learned nursing as a mark of her emancipation’ (R 49), Lydia provides a model for the cause and value of a revolutionary liberté that moves beyond the political or national and into the personal, the gendered. Here the woman’s individual emancipation figures as the indispensable condition of freedoms conferred by a political state. And here is the rub. Even if Lydia and her first husband were ‘very “European”’, and so, as historicised characters, bring the depth and drive of the continent’s history of revolution into their own historical present, their relationship gives the lie to the otherwise presumable truths of revolutionary liberation. This is revealed in her second telling, to Ursula. Thus, while her first husband was caught in the toils of an Enlightenment-driven revolutionary project, ‘prosecuting his ideas of nationalism, of liberty, of science’ (239), these emancipatory ideas are given the lie in his relationship to her as person: She had never quite recovered from her prostration of the first days, or nights, of marriage . . . passion came to her, and she became his slave, he was her lord, her lord. She was the girl-bride, the slave . . . For two years, she had gone on as his slave, crouching at his feet, embracing his knees. (238) An enslaving emancipator: that this monstrous paradox is revealed to Lydia’s granddaughter, on whom the historical and narrative futures most urgently turn, is no accident of tactic or strategy. Lydia’s dominance by Dr Lensky was pretty obviously erotic, and it is on this front that the most earnest work of Ursula’s liberation is to occur. This relocation of revolutionary ideals – from the external circumstance of political history to the internal dimensions of personal experience – is no aberration but a rich tradition within the history of European Romanticism. Percy Shelley, as John Worthen (2014) has persuasively demonstrated, is the Romantic poet with whom Lawrence had the closest relationship, first perhaps as a versifier, but ultimately and most consistently and closely as a reader. And Shelley lived the double rhythm of revolutionary Romanticism in a most intense and indicative way, turning from the external exertions of explicit political commitments to the internal work, the self-refashioning, in his later phase. In his earlier, proactive time, we hear the sounds of his angry entanglement with an apparently intractable political history, as amplified, say, in his bitterly eloquent verse diatribe, ‘Sonnet: England in 1819’: An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,— Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring,— Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling, Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,— A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—

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An army, which liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,— Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay . . . (Shelley 1960: 574) The accumulation of multiple paratactic phrases adds up an evidently endless litany of grievance, while the subordinate clauses, also multiple and sundry, find no main or independent clause as a subordinating force. The syntax suggests the unresolved anger of subordinates, a feeling intensified rather than resolved in the final couplet of this sonnet, where Shelley completes the rhetorical period of the sonnet’s one sentence but too late in the process for it to be sensible as closure. Political resolution is always already too late, we might infer. And so, on the other, later side of that tragically shortened career, indeed in the last poem Shelley wrote, there is ‘The Triumph of Life’. Here, in the alternate consciousness of a dream poem, his lyric speaker assumes an attitude of hard-won detachment from the sphere of political history. In his account of the dream-vision, in tercets recalling Dante’s own, he places many of the major actors of recent as well as ancient history as captives in the triumphal march of the poem’s title figure. The featured prisoner is the signal figure of European Romanticism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Shelley’s Rousseau relocates the meaning and value of the revolution he portended in the sphere of his own sentient, conscious, imaginative life, not necessarily to forgo the aims of revolution but to pursue these through the worthier, more earnest reality of individual experience. So Rousseau, just before the figure of Napoleon appears as captive in the triumphal march, speaks of those ‘who wore Mitres and helms and crowns, or wreaths of light, Signs of thought’s empire over thought – their lore ‘Taught them not this, to know themselves; their might Could not repress the mystery within . . .’ (Shelley 1960: 512) The ‘mystery within’: here was the resource, the motivating and directing power, of any external work. One needed to change as a person, in short, before one changes the world. As the Romantic poet to whom Lawrence was most intensely connected, Shelley stands censoriously over the tragic past of Lydia’s twice-told story. It is the radical, unflagging commitment to work in the external circumstance of history that blinds her first husband to her needs as an individual and so exhausts all the resources of their personal relationship. In the emotional and symbolic logic of their story, moreover, the exhaustion of all this work on externals also causes the deaths of their first two children, who serve as emblems of a revolutionary futurity also relinquished. What this hinterland of European history forces to a focus in the narrative foreground of Lawrence’s novel, then, is the necessarily double dream of revolutionary Romanticism: to blend and balance the demands of personal worth and collective effect, individual development and social progress. These shared ideals form the compound project of Ursula’s part of the novel, her own Bildungsroman. Her progress on this path is as difficult as it is significant, indeed as difficult as political history is resistant.

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Thus Ursula first encounters the evidence – and resistance field – of a then contemporary understanding of social history: the idea of Degeneration. A sort of Darwinism in reverse, Degeneration theory asserted the decline of humankind as the increasing stress of urban modernity revealed the inherent weaknesses in the unselected members of the species. As an idea, Degeneration blames and castigates the signs of the same decline that Decadence will embrace and stylise. This is a sensibility that is still being strenuously contested in The Rainbow, here in the struggle of Ursula’s first work as a teacher, which occurs in a school that sets up as a very laboratory of Degeneration sociology. One of her students, her special nemesis, gains the name of that theory like a character in a modern morality drama: ‘The one she hated most was . . . a sort of defective . . . he had a kind of sickness very repulsive to a sensitive girl, something cunning and etiolated and degenerate’ (R 368). Whether or not the ‘kind of sickness’ this ‘degenerate’ exhibits existed as a congenital trait, and whether or not Lawrence ever subscribed to these theories, his representation of Ursula’s reaction in terms of Degeneration theory confirms the historicity of her experience. And this pressure of contemporary history is realised most acutely in the moment of her most intense struggle at the school, where, she feels, she needs to apply physical discipline to the student. Here, in free indirect speech, Lawrence’s character sees her unruly subject in the figures of animal behaviours all too redolent of those to which Degeneration theory saw humankind reverting: The rat-like boy sat with his pale smile . . . She saw his face beneath her, white, with eyes like the eyes of a fish, stony, yet full of hate and horrible fear . . . she brought down the cane again and again, whilst he struggled making inarticulate noises . . . She let him go, and he rushed at her, his teeth and eyes glinting. There was a second of agonised terror in her heart: he was a beast thing. (370) So imaged and realised, the idea of Degeneration stands as an unvanquished antagonist, a foe unbeaten by Ursula and unimproved by institutions like state education. Ursula’s own journey will tack to the side of such institutions. Her Bildung, Lawrence firmly asserts, will occur in the internal sphere: ‘in her soul a change took place. Never more, and never more would she give herself as an individual to her class’ (367). Ursula’s reoriented course ‘as an individual’, however, is not without a social goal or collective value as its aspirational ideal. The fullness of this vision is claimed even – or especially – when Ursula decides to give up teaching: She carried away from the school a pride she could never lose. She had her place as comrade and sharer in the work of the school . . . And she was one of all workers, she had put in her tiny brick to the fabric man was building, she had qualified herself as co-builder. (R 394) Riddle or paradox or conceit, the building to be built is pretty clearly not going to be made out of real bricks. Concretely realised historical programmes, women’s suffrage most notably, will leave Ursula unmoved. Hers is a visionary and promissory ideal, one which enlists her ‘as an individual’ developing concurrently with this progressive vision of history. Thus, after a productive struggle in her first romantic and erotic relationship, a process that deepens and textures her sense of herself and her own worth,

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she recites in free indirect discourse an ode to a progress mythology whose potentials are as infinite and enthralling as her own, still unborn, possibilities: Out of the far, far space there drifted slowly in to her a passionate, unborn yearning. “There are so many dawns that have not yet risen.” It seemed as if, from over the edge of the sea, all the unrisen dawns were appealing to her, all her unborn soul was crying for the unrisen dawns. (401) The words Ursula recites to herself in the middle of this last passage come from a sacred Hindu text, Rigveda, which Lawrence may have found as the epigraph to Nietzsche’s Morgenröthe [The Dawn]. And it is Nietzsche’s ideas and values of radical futurity that Ursula is rechannelling and recasting in the rest of the passage in her own – Lawrence’s own – expansively poetic way. The highly affective quality of this passage leaves it echoing and resonating in memory as a prophecy to be fulfilled in the finale of the novel. Here Lawrence claims the full significance of his title figure, whose tonic and resolving quality encompasses all beneath it on the earth, all before it in the novel: And the rainbow stood on the earth. 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. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven. (458–9) Beginning with a co-ordinate conjunction, this last paragraph signals its continuation and resolution of the major work undertaken in the book. The cleansing, redemptive effect of the struggles Ursula has suffered extends through the weary record of contemporary ‘disintegration’, ‘corruption’, and, as it was earlier called, ‘degeneration’. More specifically, in recalling the cosmic dimensionality of Ursula’s Nietzschean dawn, Lawrence turns her personal dream of the future into a promissory morning for all. He fits the individual history of the protagonist character in this Bildungsroman into a collective destiny, spanning the expanse of ‘the earth’ with ‘the rainbow’ and sourcing the millennial splendour of ultimate ends in single lives, where reality begins. It is a promise of collective breadth, secured from its individualist premise.

Wartime Breathtaking as the finale to The Rainbow is, it is even more astounding to think of it being written in the midst of the Great War, which, in 1915, was as far from ending as its landscapes were remote from ‘the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven’. The power of contrast with the reality of those historical circumstances may have been part of the motivating power in Lawrence’s composition of the first part of his now composite, two-part project. The beauty Lawrence has rescued from that squalour is more stunning, indeed, than the moral irony of the prosecution and banning of this book for pornography or obscenity by a government now prosecuting the most sordid

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war in history (R xlv–li). The unresolved atrocity of that conflict, however, does not provide the mark of signifying difference in the second part, which, as indicated earlier, makes no explicit reference to those hostilities. The wrong in history that Women in Love records as its signifying difference from its predecessor is the lapse of faith in the public dimension of promissory futures; it is the failure of Mass Man – and Woman – in this modern, mass war. This is the specific point of critique in two pieces of fictional prose in which Lawrence refers overtly to the war. In ‘The Nightmare’ chapter of his novel Kangaroo (1923), Lawrence retells his own experience in wartime England from the retrospect of several years and from the vantage of outlying Australia, where he travelled in 1922. Writing as clear counterpart and double of its protagonist character, Richard Lovatt Somers, Lawrence presents the meaning of his experience in words which reverse perfectly the terms I provided to describe the conditions of significance in the promissory finale of The Rainbow. While Somers ‘had no conscientious objection to war’, Lawrence stipulates: It was the whole spirit of the war, the vast mob-spirit, which he could never acquiesce in. The terrible, unnatural war, made so indecent because in every country practically every man lost his head, and lost his own centrality, his own manly isolation in his own integrity, which alone keeps life real. Practically every man was caught away from himself, as in some horrible flood, and swept away with the ghastly masses of other men, disinclined to speak, or feel for himself . . . (K 213) From the same point in time, in 1922, Lawrence recasts an earlier (1915) short story, ‘England, My England’, and sets out the same critique. Egbert, his protagonist, challenges the mass nationalism its title implies from his one deepest pure-bred instinct. He recoiled inevitably from having his feelings dictated to him by the mass feeling. His feelings were his own, his understanding was his own, and he would never go back on either, willingly. Shall a man become inferior to his own true knowledge and self, just because the mob expects it of him? (EME 27–8) This is a rhetorical question, however, and if it expresses the low pathos of pointless resistance to a war that suborns Egbert (who dies in it) and just about everyone else in his England, it also locates the centre of negative energy and polemic in Lawrence’s own imaginative understanding of the war. The Great War represents to Lawrence a catastrophic failure of mass humanity. Most indicatively, it provides grim but convincing witness to the failure of the ideas, the premises as well as the promises, of revolutionary Romanticism. And, to understand the scale and intensity of disaffection in Lawrence’s imaginative experience and representation of the war, it is necessary to understand how, in the inaugural moments of this war, the enterprise of the war was being identified and confabulated with the traditions and histories of European revolution, which, in Lawrence’s own literary imagination, is the legacy of revolutionary Romanticism. There was indeed a widespread feeling of revolutionary liberation in the early days of the war. This is the emotional apprehension recorded again and again in the literary

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prose of the war, in the stories told in dozens of French and German (and Austrian) and British war novels and memoirs. To cite just a few of the best-known works: in Karl and Rosa, the third and final volume in Alfred Döblin’s trilogy November 1918: A German Revolution (the first volume is titled, indicatively, A People Betrayed), Rosa Luxemburg recasts the first moments of post-war revolution in 1919 Germany (the Spartacus movement of German socialism), already failing if failing for the right ideals, against the surge of pseudo-revolutionary movement in the inaugural war. Her remembrance of the outbreak of war in 1914 from 1919 finds a third point of reference, 1789, which sustains her play on Marx’s well-known adage about the ongoing failures of revolution in European history: the first time is tragedy (1789, for Marx), the second time (the demise of pan-European revolution in 1852, which Marx recorded in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) is farce. In this wise, 1789 and 1919 look like the tragedies enacted against the second-time farce of 1914. True or pseudo, this farce of history was the forcing energy of populist enthusiasm for the war. Thus, in Reflections of Non-Political Man, a collection of wartime journalism working earnestly to justify the war in line with the highest ideals of German Kultur, Thomas Mann had to work equally relentlessly to discount its popular justification as a new German Revolution. And Proust’s narrator, even in discounting the relation between his narrative and the reality of war in Le Temps Retrouvé, must observe how the union sacrée in the cultural coalition for war co-opted the feelings of longdeferred revolution to the much longer-ago mythology of l’ancienne France. Not a revolution coming out of war, as is the experience and understanding recorded in most of the Russian literature of the war, this is war coming out of the long-derailed passions of revolution. In this otherwise unrecorded story in the literary history of the war, we can read the record and representation and recognition of the lie lived out and, in post-war writing, outlived and recognised: the enthusiasm of these early days is a pseudo-revolutionary movement, it feels like freedom, it is the exhilaration of the feeling of liberation from a history of moments that have failed to be what this illusory moment will soon prove itself to be: one more illusory moment of revolutionary liberation. The long and lengthening story of failed revolutions in political history is borne forward in literary history, we have seen, in the turn from Romanticism to Decadence. The war calls up this whole history to Lawrence’s literary imagination, so that, following on the now lost promise at the end of The Rainbow, the sensibility of Decadence becomes the prevalent temper of Women in Love. Where the extent of this reversal in his second novel is complete, we may find a measure of the war’s staggering totality. Its impact may be told on scales little and large, in ways often invitingly subtle and sometimes bluntly, crushingly obvious. In sum, it affords a grimly convincing indication of the negative power a Romanticism in reverse may exert.

Women in Love The formative power of Decadence in Women in Love shows most notably perhaps in the development, or arrested development, of the relationships centring the romance plot of the novel: Ursula’s with Rupert Birkin (another obvious double for Lawrence), and her sister Gudrun’s with Gerald Crich, a wealthy industrialist. Of these Ursula and Birkin are clearly the favoured couple, and in them Lawrence invests what is

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most obviously in process and at stake in the story, as in his perception of the history informing it. Here Ursula remains largely true to the character she presents in The Rainbow, emerging on the changed landscape of this second novel as an idealist whose eyes are wide, whose vision seems somewhat naive. She retains a Romantic faith in natural processes as a resource for developments in an individual life as well as social history, but these values are challenged in her interactions with the older and more experienced – here, we might say, more historicised – character of Birkin, whose responses are keyed frequently to the themes of literary Decadence and its figures of decay, decline, death. The conflict of the pair is often hypostatised as erotic tension, and sublimated as sexual attraction, but what is at stake in their exchange is nothing less than the change of dominant consciousness between the two books – as in this dialogue, where Rupert responds to Ursula’s enunciation of faith, which, in his poetic negatives, reads all too clearly as a riposte to the visionary finale of The Rainbow: “We always consider the silver river of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on and on to heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea, a heaven of angels thronging.—But the other is our real reality—” “But what other? I don’t see any other,” said Ursula. “It is your reality, nevertheless,” he said; “the dark river of dissolution.—You see it rolls in us just as the other rolls—the black river of corruption. And our flowers are of this—our sea-born Aphrodite, all our white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection, all our reality, nowadays.” “You mean that Aphrodite is really deathly?” asked Ursula. “I mean she is the flowering mystery of the death-process, yes,” he replied . . . “And you and me—?” she asked. “Probably,” he replied. “In part, certainly. Whether we are that, in toto, I don’t yet know.” “You mean we are flowers of dissolution—fleurs du mal?—I don’t feel as if I were,” she protested. He was silent for a time. (WL 172–3) The reference to Fleurs du Mal invokes the poet laureate of French Décadence, Charles Baudelaire, whose favoured glow, the ‘phosphorescent’, appears here as a piece of insider literary knowledge that shows more tellingly the knowingness of this author, these characters, this text: it is as though Decadence were its encoded, embedded, inevitable message and destiny. And while Birkin admits to not knowing if the conditions of Decadence that he is poeticising may stand as expression of an existence ‘in toto’, the instance-in-miniature of this passage suggests nonetheless the depth to which its imagination possesses Lawrence’s text. This sensibility of Decadence takes possession of Ursula and Birkin’s relationship through the agency of a single, indicative figure in the novel: Hermione Roddice. This intensely disaffecting personage is modelled on Lady Ottoline Morrell, whom Lawrence knew from the gatherings of artists and intellectuals she convened in her salon on Bedford Square and at her country estate, Garsington Manor. While Lawrence’s connection with her did not amount to a close friendship, and he volubly (but dishonestly) denied that the scathing portrayal of Hermione had Ottoline as its model, this personal history turns, in the story, into a former relationship for Birkin. In the

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imaginative dynamic of his connection with Ursula, and especially in her perception, that former relationship holds him back from the completeness of his union with her. It threatens the resolution of the romantic comedy, which, ideally at least, combines its marriage conclusion with a social reconciliation. More specifically, in terms of the literary and political history being rewritten in this novel, Hermione stands to block the consummation of the revolutionary possibilities of Romanticism, which, as in the visionary finale to The Rainbow, encompasses individual fulfilment within a larger, social, egalitarian progress. And to perform that role she appears in this novel as a figure out of Decadence central casting. Fashionable cadaver, she dresses the deathliness of Decadence in a hue of extreme chic, offering the visage of emaciated glamour from an Aubrey Beardsley print, flaunting the colour of the Yellow Book as the emblematic shade of English as well as French Decadence. Thus she came along, with her head held up, balancing an enormous flat hat of pale yellow velvet, on which were streaks of ostrich feathers . . . She wore a dress of silky, frail velvet, of pale yellow colour . . . she drifted along with a peculiar fixity of the hips . . . She was impressive, in her lovely pale-yellow and brownish-rose, yet macabre, something repulsive . . . Her long, pale face, that she carried lifted up, somewhat in the Rossetti fashion, seemed almost drugged . . . (WL 15) The reference to ‘the Rossetti fashion’ of Hermione’s look provides the Decadence she demonstrates with the precedent memory of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, where the deathliness she images so vividly calls up one – or two – of that group’s more notorious stories. Everyone knew the anecdote of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s relationship in death with his muse and model Elizabeth Siddal, in whose grave he buried a volume of his poetry, exhuming it seven years later. The long-decaying, now decayed Romanticism that Decadence represents shows not only in tales like these but, most indicatively, in the literary history configured in the Rossetti reference and imaged in Hermione’s signature morbidity: ‘Hermione [appeared] . . . strange and sepulchral, her eyes heavy and full of sepulchral darkness’ (89). That is the cultural memory and literary history moving through Hermione, and Lawrence’s story draws the force – or forcelessness – of this legacy, like an inertial drag, into the relationship of Birkin and Ursula. We feel that gravitational drag most intensely when Birkin and Ursula attempt to leave Hermione behind; when Lawrence’s narrative turns her inertial force into a prompt for an attempted transcendence. Here the story turns the motivated interest of the romance plot away from the Decadence of contemporary Britain and towards an Alpine retreat which, in a composition of symbolic space, offers aloft a potential refuge from the lower turmoil of the otherwise unnamed Great War (the same composition of symbolic space appears in the the lowlands/mountain contrast and plot of Hemingway’s later war novel, A Farewell to Arms). In the counter-pressure Lawrence applies to this Romantic ascent quest, however, he registers the heavier pressure being exerted by the conditions and sensibility of Decadence. The upward path to the Alps is strewn with evidence of a Decadent poetics – not in the full flush (if that were possible) of a living or existing tradition but, in effect, in a shambolic parody. Here we can see Lawrence turning away from the exalted despair his double Birkin espoused in his recitation of Baudelaire and, in an effort to represent

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the reality of a poetics of lessening, of emptying and dereliction, debasing it. Thus he doubles down on the downward pressure the sensibility of Decadence exerts on the ascent quest. An obvious move in this direction is reversion, a turning of the poetics of Decadence into the zoology of Degeneration, and Lawrence goes this expected way as his characters begin to take their turn out of London. Here he populates the Pompadour Café that Gudrun and Gerald visit on their way with a ‘menagerie of apish degraded souls’ (WL 380), and, in this topos of Degeneration, the poetics of Decadence is performed at its reversionary worst. One of the habitués of this café thus recalls the duet on Baudelaire’s exemplary and ecstatic Decadence that Birkin and Ursula earlier performed and turns it now into a drunkenly stumbling aria: “‘We’re all flowers of mud.—Fleurs—hic!—du mal!—It’s perfectly wonderful, Birkin harrowing Hell—harrowing the Pompadour—Hic!’” (384). The indignity to which the poet laureate of Décadence is submitted here includes the antic excitement with which the French poet’s favoured glow is presented: “Do let me go on! Oh, this is a perfectly wonderful piece! But do listen to this. ‘And in the great retrogression, the reducing back of the created body of life, we get knowledge, and beyond knowledge, the phosphorescent ecstasy of acute sensation.’” (383; emphasis added) This ridicule of the conventions of Decadence is not serving the purpose of reinforcing the reverse, normative order of romantic love. While Lawrence’s own values should not be confused with those given place in his narrative, the romance plot of the novel continues to be confounded, now, in the Alps, by a figure who matches Hermione in fulfilling Decadent and Degenerate types. This is Herr Loerke, an Austrian Pole who brings with him all the association Mitteleuropa owns, in signal figures like Dracula, with the traditions of reversion and Degeneration. This Loerke is the figure whom David Trotter has accurately characterised as ‘Lawrence’s best shot at a degenerate’, one who fulfils ‘to an almost parodic degree the requirements of stereotype’ (1993: 126). The work Loerke performs in the story is to exert an appeal to Gudrun, who, disconnecting increasingly from Gerald, turns to Loerke – not in the furtherance of an alternative romance with this homosexual artist but as another, climactic moment of the counter-romance the novel constitutes. Left to himself, Gerald dies in a walk alone in the Alpine snow. And while the relationship of Gerald and Gudrun has always come second in the novel, it is, as a multiple of the first, an integral factor in a larger composite project of relationship, which, as it comes apart at the end, provides the sign of a larger unravelling. Whether or not Herr Loerke stands as a marker of the broader feeling against the designated enemies of Britain in 1916 – he was already one of Lawrence’s characters when The Rainbow and Women in Love were one book, that is, before the war (WL xxii) – his associations with Germany provide a historical point to his role in this second novel. He serves the purposes of its discursive work in reminding us of the ubiquitous presence in this novel of the otherwise unnamed war. These are the historical circumstances the plot of the novel intends to leave behind, not just for the sake of the fulfilment of the relationship of Ursula and Birkin but also, and no less important, for the necessary seconds of Gudrun and Gerald, who, in extending one couple into two, provide a broader social compass for this project. Decadence undoes it and, so,

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undoes them all: Gerald is dead, Gudrun is in an identifiably Degenerate relationship, while Rupert and Ursula’s future is at best insecure. This final configuration comes out of a profounder impasse between the intention of the romantic story, which lives forward the history of revolutionary Romanticism, and the conditions of a circumstantial history, which reveals those countervailing powers that the codes of literary and cultural Decadence represent most indicatively. In November 1915, just after The Rainbow suffered its censure from the War government, Lawrence expressed his vision of contemporary history in these terms: ‘I think there is no future for England: only a decline and fall. This is the dreadful and unbearable part of it: to have been born into a decadent era, a decline of life, a collapsing civilisation’ (2L 441). Where that ‘future’ still drove the revolutionary Romanticism of The Rainbow, its ‘decline and fall’ in a now ‘decadent era’ tells the affective as well as historical time of the follow-up novel, where the tempos and temporalities of literary Decadence set the measure. The composite project offers one of the profoundest accounts we have of the import of that war in the deep time of European cultural, political and literary history.

Works Cited Bell, Michael (1992), D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, Colin (1969), River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence & English Romanticism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1960), The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, London: Oxford University Press. Sherry, Vincent (2015), Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trotter, David (1993), The English Novel in History 1895–1920, London: Routledge. Worthen, John (2005), D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, London: Allen Lane. Worthen, John (2014), ‘Lawrence and Some Romantic Poets’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 3:3, pp. 11–32.

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4 National and Racial Aesthetics Peter Childs

Introduction: People and Place

H

OSTILES, Scott Cooper’s 2017 revisionist film about the Western ‘frontier narrative’, is a twenty-first-century take on nineteenth-century American mythology. It is set in 1892 and tells the brutal story of a soon-to-retire army captain ordered to take a dying Cheyenne chief and his family from New Mexico back to their home in Montana. On their travels, they pick up a traumatised woman whose husband and children have been summarily killed by Comanches. The subsequent journey across the desert wilderness of this assorted company, a microcosm of frontier America, is marked by hatred and forbearance, occasionally leavened by flashes of understanding, kindness or forgiveness as the travellers attempt to repel raiders and vicious fur-trappers. As a shorthand for its narrative standpoint, the film’s opening caption is taken from the writings of a twentieth-century English writer: ‘The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted’ (SCAL 65). This quotation from Lawrence’s 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature distills a nation into a few austere characteristics perceived to shape its mythology. The choice of a statement from Lawrence to open a mythic American narrative such as Hostiles is attributable, at least in part, to the fact that his view of national aesthetics connects directly to landscape. Which is to say that Lawrence understood the elements that shape the distinctive stories and foundational culture of a nation, race or people to be conditioned by the land. The choice of this epigraph for a film set the year before Fredrick Jackson Turner’s seminal essay describing ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ in terms of ‘the meeting point between savagery and civilization’ (1920: 3) may also be because Lawrence, alienated by civilisation, was drawn to North America precisely to experience the culture of those ‘savage’ peoples. In keeping with this, the focus of this chapter is on how the perception of national and racial alterity informs Lawrence’s writing, and his apprehension of aesthetic differences. In case we think that, searching for ‘essential’ features, Lawrence is unaware of other qualities in colonial Americans, it is worth noting that his brusque assessment follows on from a dismissive sentence that shows his desire to describe a core separated from its peripheral characteristics: ‘All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play’ (SCAL 65). What this reveals of the writer is his interest in articulating particularities conditioned by ‘The Spirit of Place’, as he names his seminal essay at the start of Studies in Classic American Literature:

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Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarised in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars . . . (17) This belief animates many of Lawrence’s perceptions of national and racial variances resting on a set of attributes he describes as playing a formative role in a people’s (whether nation or race) distinctive cultural artefacts and aesthetic expression. Through other examples, he further illustrates this perceived tie between the land and its inhabitants, which can be severed if the people move away: The Nile valley produced not only the corn, but the terrific religions of Egypt. China produces the Chinese, and will go on doing so. The Chinese in San Francisco will in time cease to be Chinese, for America is a great melting pot. (17) Lawrence’s standpoint here is also not limited to the argument in Studies in Classic American Literature, but shapes his more general stance on aesthetics: as he wrote at the start of ‘Morality and the Novel’ (1925), ‘The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment’ (STH 171). His views on Russian culture thus also reflected this conviction, perceiving its literature as having a core of sensuality overlaid with a disabling intellectual reflectiveness. Lawrence thought Russia’s late exposure to European culture to be both its underlying strength and current weakness, combining civilised and savage qualities, and his views resonated with those of the contemporary Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, whose essays Lawrence edited: ‘Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar. Culture is an age-long development, and sudden grafting of it upon a race rarely succeeds. To us in Russia, civilization came suddenly, whilst we were still savages’ (1920: 39).1 Lawrence wanted in particular to discover a pre-civilisational alternative to what he perceived as a repression of the senses, and to find the quiddity of others ‘before the mentality of Greece appeared in the world’ (SS 67). This led him on his ‘savage pilgrimage’ (4L 375), searching ever further from his East Midlands roots. His travels gave him, as Stefania Michelucci notes, ‘an opportunity to find glimpses of what he had been looking for and, at the same time, to express his bitter criticism of Western civilization’ (2011: 88). In terms of art, Lawrence sought a vitality he felt was missing in European aesthetics: a way to connect with art forms that were rooted in their ancient cultures and regional identities to an extent that could only be glimpsed in artefacts of the pre-industrialised West. Though he was an idiosyncratic thinker, Lawrence’s overarching world-views often also had an affinity with much nineteenthcentury ethnology and polygenist theories such as those, for example, of Robert Knox in The Races of Men (1850). Lawrence was intensely curious about others, particularly those he perceived not to be caught in the civilisational snares with which he was familiar, but his search was just as much for cultures that would unlock something in himself. He often found those he met impenetrable and frustrating, but also ennobling and liberating. His othering of the people he encountered enabled him to project on to them the characteristics he was searching for, and then, commonly, also to find where such characteristics were lacking.

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Europe At first, Lawrence’s intellectual search for alternative ways of living prompted him to look to parts of the Old World, including the England he saw linked to the land fictionalised by Thomas Hardy as Wessex and Egdon Heath, discussed in his 1914–15 Study of Thomas Hardy. In Lawrence’s fiction also, Englishness was a long-standing, bold and vivid national identity forged by place and nature. It was something modernity and imperial war-mongering were destroying but which could still be glimpsed in the countryside, as described in ‘England, My England’: The sunlight blazed down upon the earth, there was a vividness of flamy vegetation, of fierce seclusion amid the savage peace of the commons. Strange how the savage England lingers in patches: as here, amid these shaggy gorse commons, and marshy, snake-infested places near the foot of the south downs. The spirit of place lingering on primeval, as when the Saxons came, so long ago. (EME 5) To escape industrialisation in England and be with Frieda in continental Europe, Lawrence proceeded to explore the Mediterranean world (as discussed below, to progress his imaginative journey into cultural difference, his search would later take him to the more radical alterity of the New World, and in particular North America). Twilight in Italy was Lawrence’s first book of episodic travel writings. Although the text was published during the First World War in 1916, it recorded his pre-war visit and was based on revisions to sketches written between 1912 and 1913. Early in the book, he writes: ‘If only nations would realise that they have certain natural characteristics, if only they could understand and agree to each other’s particular nature, how much simpler it would all be’ (TI 91). Lawrence perceives a homogeneity of white Christian souls spanning most of the European nations, which may be differentiated by country but can also be collectively grouped when discussing alternative cultures. Thus, a few pages after the statement above, he concludes about Bavarian people that ‘they are convivial, they are almost the only race with the souls of artists’ (93). He decides that for the Bavarians, ‘Everything is of the blood, of the senses. There is no mind. The mind is a suffusion of physical heat.’ Of Italian people, he says ‘Their souls are dark and nocturnal’ (104) and this belief is clearly part of what appeals to him about the local people he observes. Lawrence believes their difference from the northern European nations speaks to him through a passion expressed in life and also in artistic performance. When he watches an Italian staging of Ibsen’s Ghosts, he decides this was really moving, a real crying in the night. One loved the Italian nation, and wanted to help it with all one’s soul. But when one sees the perfect Ibsen, how one hates the Norwegian and Swedish nations! They are detestable. (137) Lawrence valorises expressive gesture and Italian passion, which embody difference from an increasingly pervasive European hegemonic modernity. By contrast, England is one of ‘the industrial countries spreading like a blackness over all the world’, such that he sees ‘England, black and foul and dry, with her soul worn down, almost worn away’ (132).2 Switzerland is little better: ‘One gets this feeling always in Switzerland, except high up:

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this feeling of average, of utter soulless ordinariness, something intolerable . . . The place was soul-killing’ (193). Repeatedly, while talking little about its author, Twilight in Italy sets out aspects of Lawrence’s views on national and racial differences, which underpin his perception of aesthetic value rooted in the expressive soul that was often restrained in northern Europe. Part of this perceived restraint would also be attributed by Lawrence to the process of nation formation, often associated with the homogenisation of modernity. Thus, in Women in Love, Birkin denigrates Italy’s coming to ‘national consciousness’ because ‘it only means a sort of commercial-industrial consciousness. I hate Italy and her national rant’ (298). Lawrence’s second book about Italy, Sea and Sardinia, presents his travels as the temporal quest for an older culture and people who are free from civilisation and modern democracy. Thus, he decides to go to the island because Sardinia ‘has no history, no date, no race, no offering . . . It lies outside; outside the circuit of civilisation’ (SS 9). Such statements illustrate the animus behind Lawrence’s aesthetics: there is a strong desire to find freedom in difference, to escape to an older world from the constraints of a modern over-familiar culture, in terms of its attitudes to artistic expression but also time, religion, money, geography, sex and freedom. And as such, Lawrence is unusual in that his consideration of others is less concerned with physical appearance than with the ‘soul’, such that his desire is always to find expressions of inner, locally rooted alterity. ‘Humanity is, externally, too much alike. Internally there are insuperable differences’ (12). Lawrence does sometimes attend to the particularity of the individual, even if in Sea and Sardinia, unlike in Twilight in Italy, that individual is most often himself. For example, in terms of national differences, it is striking and somewhat ironic that he repeatedly protests at how he is undifferentiated from his nationality. Thus, he complains that he is seen as an English abstraction: try and get them to be human, try and get them to see that you are simply an individual if you can. After all, I am no more than a single human man wandering my lonely way across these years. But no – to an Italian I am a perfected abstraction, England – coal – exchange. (TI 51) His frustrated response is, in turn, to homogenise and dehumanise the Italians he meets because they do not respond to him as he wishes: ‘They are no longer human beings. They hate one’s Englishness, and leave out the individual’ (52). Towards the end of the book, returning home somewhat disillusioned, Lawrence finds that the Treaty of Versailles settlement after the war also determines the perception of nation for some; as one Italian on the return boat to Sicily declaims over dinner, ‘“What are the Allies for? To keep England up, and France half-way, and Germany and Italy down”’ (SS 181). The conversation comes to a head when an Italian asserts that the English come to Italy now for the sun, the charming people and the exchange rate. Lawrence replies sarcastically: It is very nice to be overcharged every time, and then insulted if you say a word . . . It’s very nice to have waiters and shop-people and railway porters sneering in a bad temper and being insulting in small, mean ways all the time. It’s very nice to feel what they all feel against you. (182–3)

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He later reflects that the Italians are not to blame for their spite against us. We, England, have taken upon ourselves for so long the rôle of leading nation . . . If you take upon yourself to lead, you must expect the mud to be thrown at you if you lead into a nasty morass. (SS 186) Lawrence returns to his own singularity in conclusion: ‘And still, for all that, I must insist that I am a single human being, an individual, not a mere national unit.’ Lawrence wanted both nations and individuals to be distinctive and to remain discrete, and thus he railed against ‘hateful homogenous world-oneness’: I shall be glad when men hate their common, world-alike clothes, when they tear them up and clothe themselves fiercely for distinction, savage distinction . . . when men fiercely react against looking all alike, and being all alike, and betake themselves into vivid clan or nation-distinctions. (SS 89) The islanders on Sardinia provide Lawrence with glimpses of an alternative to this widespread European similarity. Newly arrived, he says that at Cagliari ‘the people seemed warm and good-natured, like human beings. One has got so used to the non-human ancient-souled Sicilians, who are suave and so completely callous’ (SS 56). Sardinia is ‘within the net of this European civilisation, but it isn’t landed yet’ (9). By this he seems to mean that he is able to see Sardinia as special because of its history of resistance; and it is indeed the last place he looks in Europe for an alternative culture before venturing further afield, beyond the continent, seeking radical alterity in Ceylon, Australia and North America. Yet, Lawrence does not find himself outside the net in Sardinia; he is repeatedly caught up in comparisons with the rest of Europe and his consideration of Sardinians during his short visit is confined to observed superficialities; he makes very few actual connections, which remains the source of frustration that ultimately undermines his intent. Nonetheless, Lawrence thinks he sees flashes of pre-Hellenic humanity in the Sardinians: ‘before the soul became self-conscious: before the mentality of Greece appeared in the world . . . There is a creature, dark and potent’ (SS 67–8). This perception is in contrast to his dislike of modernity: a ‘universal grey mist that has come over men, the extinguishing of all bright individuality, the blotting out of all wild singleness. Oh democracy!’ (71). The ancient Sardinians ‘have no inkling of our crucifixion, our universal consciousness . . . One feels for the first time the real old medieval life, which is enclosed and has no interest in the world outside’ (88). Lawrence is drawn to his conception of ancient Sardinians but concludes that ‘the race of men is almost extinct in Europe . . . The last sparks are dying out in Sardinia and Spain. Nothing left but the . . . herd-equality mongrelism, and the wistful poisonous self-sacrificial cultured soul. How detestable’ (63). It is clear by this point that Lawrence feels his quest in Europe is over; he will need to search further afield for a race with an older, less cultured soul. This was in part an attempt to escape from the imperial nationalism in Europe that had culminated in the First World War. From Sicily, he wrote in March 1921 in a letter to Anton Kippenberg:

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Nationalism, as we have it, is established upon interest: material interest, commercial interest . . . For my part, I prefer to live abroad and escape as far as possible the stigma of national interest . . . At the bottom of all European hearts a rabid, jealous nationalism of hate-your-neighbour is the basic feeling . . . the old internationalism of human interest, the old philanthropic internationalism is dead or gone quite silly. (3L 679–80)

Beyond Europe After he left Italy in 1922, Lawrence’s vision of finding renewal in the ‘primitive’ waxed and waned as he sought to encounter aspects of cultures he had venerated in theory. But his fascination with otherness is already apparent in The Rainbow and Women in Love, as in Ursula’s response to Skrebensky’s stories of Africa: ‘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’ (R 413). This Africa thrills and seduces Ursula but is unapproachable; similarly, in Women in Love Africa and Africans strike Gerald as ‘tortured’ and ‘beyond the limits’, as ‘disturbing’ spectacle: there were several negro statues, wood-carvings from West Africa, strange and disturbing, the carved negroes looked almost like the foetus of a human being. One was a woman sitting naked in a strange posture, and looking tortured, her abdomen stuck out . . . conveying the suggestion of the extreme of physical sensation, beyond the limits of mental consciousness. (74)3 For Lawrence, the statues demonstrate art forms that both express an organic community, and in this sense are ‘primitive’, and also suggest the inauthenticity of most European art with its various veneers of formal decorum. In the novel, Birkin thus expresses the view that the statues convey a ‘compete truth’ and are aesthetically important, whereas Gerald denies their status as art completely (Birkin like Lawrence ‘justifying his assumptions by appealing to an evolutionary scheme of cultural development’ on which the ‘primitive’ is the end rather than the beginning; see Neilson 1997: 313). Contemporary aesthetics had also adapted to reflect industrialisation and the weaponry of mass warfare, whereas alternative art forms might point towards both a past culture that European civilisation has abandoned and a future way of breaking down the ill effects of modernity (variously considered as, for example, decadence, degeneracy or a drab ‘khaki democracy’). Lawrence’s perceptions of renewal through a search for the ‘primitive’ echoed Gauguin’s pursuit of aesthetic simplicity in Tahiti in the 1890s, an earlier flight from the artificial and conventional, and paralleled Henry Moore’s formal experiments in the 1920s, spurred by his researches into the holdings of ‘primitive’ art and sculpture in London’s museums. In European art, Lawrence saw only the paintings of Cézanne as pointing the way towards an exit from stale modern aesthetics, a chance to escape the dominant legacy of philosophy from Plato onwards. As he wrote in ‘Introduction to these Paintings’: The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit, the mental consciousness . . . Art, that handmaid, humbly and honestly served the vile deed, through three thousand years at least. (LEA 203)

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Lawrence thought the embodied human as represented in European aesthetics had become a ‘corpse with an abnormally active mind’ (LEA 203), losing its ‘blood consciousness’. It is therefore not surprising that what dominates in the description in Women in Love of the West African wood carvings is the emphasis on physicality beyond mental consciousness. Like Picasso, or Tristan Tzara in his 1917 ‘Note on Negro Art’, Lawrence saw in African art an antidote to conventional representation, hence Birkin’s reflections on one of the carvings when he recalls the ‘African fetishes’ later in the novel: she was one of his soul’s intimates . . . She had thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge behind her. It must have been thousands of years since her race had died, mystically: that is, since the relation between the senses and the outspoken mind had broken . . . Thousands of years ago, that which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these Africans. (WL 253) Birkin envisages a process of European northern dissolution that equals but contrasts with the African southern mystical death, and the novel portrays this apocalyptic trajectory in the arc of Gudrun, a Primitivist sculptor of figurines, detaching herself from the doomed Gerald and his ideology of nature-taming industry and cold domineering machinery to turn towards a personification of the ice-destructive, frozen Alpine world in Loerke, another sculptural artist (see Bullen 2003: 841; and also the chapter on ‘Sculpture’ in this Companion). With Africa too estranging, Lawrence pursued elsewhere his interest in alternative ways of being, and of representation. He decided to visit the Americas, following an invitation from Mabel Dodge Luhan to live in Taos, to ‘catch 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). His travels in North America led to a new set of understandings that informed his view of the ‘imagined communities’ he saw in other cultures.4 Consequently, Helen Carr notes how Lawrence in his writings about America chiefly venerates ‘imaginary others’: In Mornings in Mexico (1927) he creates his own intoxicated version of the Indian soul. He despises the Indians with whom he has contact, his servant and the local villagers, who live a mongrel half-European, half-Indian existence, but when he comes to describe their dances he insists that ‘so long as he is pure’ the Indian is in touch with the vital universe, unlike the modern European or American, trapped in their mechanical existence. (2002: 84) In Mexico, Lawrence deepened his view of an alternative aesthetic with qualities he saw as not linear and quantitative but qualitative and organic, based on a theory of mind rooted in feeling more than thought, valuing instinct and intuition, an observance of natural rather than clock time, and greater sensual awareness. This is perhaps in keeping with Lawrence’s earlier adoration of an idealised Italian aesthetic (as glimpsed in the production of Ghosts) that is largely separated from the people he encounters, who disappoint or even disgust him. In the pieces that make up the posthumously published Sketches of Etruscan Places, Lawrence is similarly frustrated, but this time because he cannot make contact with any real-life examples of his spiritual Italians:

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The garden of the Florence museum is vastly instructive, if you want object-lessons about the Etruscans. But who wants object-lessons about vanished races? What one wants is a contact. The Etruscans are not a theory or a thesis. If they are anything, they are an experience. (170–1) This is instructive about Lawrence’s broader frustrations: he is constantly wanting to make contact with vanished races but finds only their remains, as here, or the epigones of lost peoples (such as the Romans who overran the Etruscans of central Italy) that he valorised and wished to experience first-hand. As noted above, the spirit of place was central to Lawrence’s idea of national and racial aesthetics, and neither the entombment of museums nor vestiges of the spirit of place in the modern people he met could connect him to the vitality he believed to be exemplified in authentic local, regional, or even national art. Thus, his interpretation of the Mexican cultural focus on death was that it is attributable to ‘the fact that their religiosity and intimate interaction with the spirit of place is dying, suffocated by the encroachment of progress’ (Michelucci 2011: 90). In his foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence says that the ‘great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living terms’ had a ‘vast’ and ‘perhaps perfect science’ of life taught across all the world including Atlantis (PFU 63). Some retained their marvellous innate beauty and life-perfection, as the South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some, like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese, refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its half-forgotten, symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge: remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story. The cultures that bore traces of this world appealed to him, in Italy, Australia, Africa or Mexico. In terms of a national or racial aesthetic, we might say that Lawrence thus often approved of them in terms of a rejection of the values of bourgeois, Christian or industrial societies, which was evident in his desire to promote nature, intuition, emotion and an absence of inhibition or unnatural restraint. To his death, Lawrence remained appreciative of, more than immersed in, other cultures’ systems of thought, but he eventually despaired of finding an alternative spiritual consciousness available to European appropriation among ‘primitives’. In his Introduction to Apocalypse, Richard Aldington says: I think [Lawrence] grew dissatisfied with his savages, if only because (as he says somewhere) their consciousness is so different from ours that there is scarcely any possibility of communication. The white man can do nothing with the savage except to destroy or enslave, since it is too much to expect the elementary justice of leaving him alone. (1974: xvii) Lawrence wished to connect with an ideal cultural aesthetic, but came to see it as beyond the grasp of the corrosive civilisation into which he was born: It is almost impossible for white people to approach the Indian without either sentimentality or dislike. The common healthy vulgar white usually feels a certain

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peter childs native dislike of these drumming aboriginals. The highbrow invariably lapses into sentimentalism . . . You can detest the insidious devil for having an utterly different way from our own great way. Or you can perform the mental trick, and fool yourself and others into believing the befeathered and bedaubed darling is nearer to the true ideal gods, than we are. (MM 60–1)

For Lawrence, ‘consciousness’, the individual’s civilisation and culture, was always at odds with the ‘consciousness’ of other peoples. Individuals in Lawrence’s view are far from able to link, let alone have, two consciousnesses: The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness . . . There is no bridge, no canal of connexion . . . The consciousness of one branch of humanity is the annihilation of the consciousness of another branch . . . Because the same paradox exists between the consciousness of white men and Hindoos or Polynesians or Bantu. (61) Arguably, Lawrence’s pursuit of unity was undermined by his own reliance on dualisms in his conceptual thinking, which ultimately resulted in the perception of a profound unspannable bridge of alterity and alienation: ‘They stare at us as the coyotes stare at us: the gulf of mutual negation between us’ (90).5 Resolution of the binary could not occur other than by ‘the death of our consciousness’ (55), which might be the basis of any sympathetic reading of the three long and otherwise outwardly misogynistic stories inspired by his Mexican and New Mexican encounters: St. Mawr, ‘The Princess’ and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’. Neil Roberts speculates that Lawrence may have developed his ahistorical view of Native Americans from the influential English anthropologist E. B. Tylor’s 1871 book Primitive Culture (2004: 77), which he had read while finishing Women in Love and which expresses the common progressive belief that cultures developed from savage to civilised such that tribal societies on other continents represented the past of Europeans. Thus, while the narrator in The Plumed Serpent decides that ‘The dark races belong to a bygone cycle of humanity’ (PS 148), Lawrence also expresses the view in his essay ‘Indians and an Englishman’ that his encounter with Apaches brings ‘a pungent awakening to the lost past’ (MM 116).

Race and Nation As Judith Ruderman notes, ‘Lawrence’s travels reinforced and widened his inherent interest in otherness and identity, an interest often centred on race’ (2014: 2). She sees not only Lawrence’s respect for the ‘sacred mystery of otherness’ (SCAL 238) but also his ‘more than occasional frustration with and actual distaste for racial difference’ (Ruderman 2014: 4). This mixed response underlies Lawrence’s individual take on racial and national aesthetics, but it is also necessary to contextualise the above discussion. First, we should note that Lawrence is inconsistent, and so, for example, Ruderman observes that he calls Mexicans a ‘race’ in The Plumed Serpent but also says that Mexico is neither race nor nation, but people (PS 76; Ruderman 2014: 13). Again, in Women in Love Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich concur in the view that ‘race is the essential element in nationality’ (28) and in the early twentieth century differences

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between the terms ‘race’ and ‘nation’ were often vague. Second, in Lawrence’s time, racial differences were widely accepted to be facts, drawing on a history of Empire and European overseas expansion as well as such theories as social Darwinism and eugenics. As Simon Gikandi explains: the search for an idea of the aesthetic constructed on notions of universality, the moral sense, and human rights, was simultaneously accompanied by a racist ideology . . . Consider, for example, the idea of Reason, clearly one of the cornerstones of European identity and hegemony in the modern world. As is well known, rationality was one of the tropes around which the uniqueness of Europe was constructed; it was one of the enabling conditions of modernity and a modern identity. But the discourse of rationality, as numerous commentators have shown, was founded on the institution, or the imagination, of its opposite, the irrational savage or barbarian. (2001: 340) Gikandi’s comments can be illustrated by the examples of the extremely influential eighteenth-century philosophers Immanuel Kant and David Hume. In his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), Kant writes: If we cast a fleeting glance over the other parts of the world, we find the Arab the noblest man in the Orient, yet of a feeling that degenerates very much into the adventurous . . . The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents . . . So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour . . . Among all savages there is no nation that displays so sublime a mental character as those of North America . . . The Canadian savage, moreover, is truthful and honest. The friendship he establishes is just as adventurous and enthusiastic as anything of that kind reported from the most ancient and fabled times. (2003: 109–11)6 Lawrence was clearly immersed in, as well as desirous to escape from, what he saw as the cult of European reason after the Enlightenment, and we should note that he disliked the tyranny of rationalism and referred to ‘that beastly Kant’ in ‘The Future of the Novel’ (STH 154). In his writing, Lawrence seems to perceive the characteristics of different nations as rooted in a combination of their race and their particular location, though, as we saw above with the example of Chinese emigrants to America, this spirit of place can be lost: There was a tremendous polarity in Italy, in the city of Rome. And this seems to have died. For even places die. The Island of Great Britain had a wonderful terrestrial magnetism or polarity of its own, which made the British people. For the moment, this polarity seems to be breaking. Can England die? (SCAL 17) Lawrence posits a connection between place and people that can be eroded by proselytising religions and ideologies as cultures mix and local particularity gives way to a creeping European homogenisation: a phenomenon he felt in England, then perceived on the Continent, informing his choice to travel further afield to find cultures and aesthetics that were authentic to their older spirit of place.

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Here, it is again important to recall that Lawrence was a radical artist for his times and was avant-garde in his thinking; for example, the philosopher John Gray argues in his recent book Seven Types of Atheism (2018) that in paganism belief was irrelevant and that the coming of monotheism in human history was a disaster. Lawrence’s viewpoint is not dissimilar. Gray argues that Christianity begat the convictions that there are set doctrines that all must follow, that there is one true God, that the same moral laws apply to everyone, that history has meaning and that humanity can achieve perfection. Gray maintains, first, that all these beliefs are false, and second, that following them has been calamitous for the West. In keeping with this general argument, Lawrence’s ‘savage pilgrimage’ (4L 375) was an attempt to free himself from the influence of Christian morality and find a different social and cultural life in older, pre-monotheistic societies, access to which might still be possible through some contemporary peoples.7 Thus, in The Plumed Serpent, Mexicans evoke in Lawrence a feeling of ‘the old prehistoric humanity, the dark-eyed humanity of the days, perhaps, before the glacial period’ (414). Mexico appears to Lawrence to have given birth to a less cerebral civilisation, immersed in the rhythms of the land, and thus it represents a sensual, comparatively uninhibited way of life that is of a kind Lawrence finds more aesthetically and ideologically appealing. Hence his admiration for the intensity of the war dance, or the rhythms of the drums and the leaping men and women in the Spring Corn Dance, where there is no sign of the worship of a monotheistic God but only a pantheistic, animistic celebration of motion and creation. Lawrence sees in these dances the enactments of the only real theatre, that of the soul. Lawrence came to see the ‘primitive’ as both in touch with an essential way of being and at one with a communal nature that would swallow up individuality. He was much inspired in his views on myth and symbol by reading Frazer and the ritualists (e.g. PFU 62), which confirmed his belief in ‘blood-consciousness’ alongside mental consciousness. This was even though, by the time of The Plumed Serpent (1926) at least, Lawrence’s ‘primitive’ ‘was almost exclusively a projection of his own concerns’ (MacClancy 2003: 84), and thus, arguably, by the time of his death an antithetical case used to illustrate his own aesthetics. Accordingly, in Apocalypse Lawrence attacked what he saw as the impulse to assign a primal moment to European cultural aesthetics, an origin that consigns others to an ignorant prehistory: We accept the Greeks and Romans as the initiators of our intellectual and political civilisation, the Jews as the fathers of our moral-religious civilisation. So these are “our sort”. All the rest are mere nothing, almost idiots. All that can be attributed to the “barbarians” beyond the Greek pale: that is, to Minoans, Etruscans, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians, and Hindus, is . . . primal stupidity. (A 87) By contrast, Lawrence preferred to assert against this impudence that ‘we see a splendour, a beauty, and very often a joyous, sensitive intelligence which is certainly lost in our world of Neufrecheit [new impudence]’ (88). His attempts to experience a deeper, older and freer human soul through discovery of the epigones of ancient societies conditioned his view of nations and civilisations but also his racial and cultural aesthetics. Largely in vain, Lawrence spent his mature life trying to connect with a persisting spirit of place linking a Paradisal culture to the artistic practices of people alive in the

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twentieth century, allowing a contemporary connection with a radical aesthetic he felt had vanished in his industrialised, cultured, over-civilised and constrained homeland. On the one hand, he decided different ‘racial consciousnesses’ could not connect and knew his search was to be frustrated from his perception that ‘the great racial differences are insuperable . . . The spirit of place ultimately always triumphs’ (letter to Rolf Gardiner, 4 July 1924, 5L 67). On the other hand, he kept yearning for a Paradise that transcended humanity and never gave up longing for a place where there would be a similarly transcendent aesthetics beyond race and nation.

Notes 1. See the chapter ‘D. H. Lawrence: “Russia Will Certainly Inherit the Future”’ in Soboleva and Wrenn 2017: 186–236. 2. In terms of a contemporary take on English–Italian differences and attractions, Twilight in Italy, written pre-war, can be compared and contrasted with E. M. Forster’s Edwardian novels Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View. Each writer gave considerable credence to a north–south binary of different polarities of temperament in England and Italy. 3. Marianna Torgovnick glosses Lawrence’s conceptualisation of Primitivism in gender terms, noting that at the time he wrote Women in Love he typically aligned ‘the primitive’ with conventional ideas of the feminine, but by the time of The Plumed Serpent, after much travelling, he associated the primitive with conventional ideas of masculinity (1990: 159). 4. ‘Imagined communities’ is a term coined by Benedict Anderson in his 1983 book of that name to describe the ways in which nations are socially constructed. 5. According to Torgovnick, ‘The primitive both serves Lawrence’s needs and . . . inevitably disappoints him. He yearns for an idealized primitive state in which man, nature, and eternity are one’ (1990: 170). 6. Kant is referring to Hume’s ‘National Character’ (1741), in which he argues for a constructivist understanding of nations: that they are made up of moral causes rather than physical ones. 7. Gray mentions Lawrence in relation to his interest in the transcendent fideism of Shestov (2018: 155).

Works Cited Aldington, Richard (1974), ‘Introduction’ to Apocalypse [1931], Harmondsworth: Penguin. Anderson, Benedict (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Bullen, J. B. (2003), ‘D. H. Lawrence and Sculpture in Women in Love’, The Burlington Magazine, 145:1209, pp. 841–6. Carr, Helen (2002), ‘Modernism and Travel (1880–1940)’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 70–86. Gikandi, Simon (2001), ‘Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 40:2, pp. 318–50. Gray, John (2018), Seven Types of Atheism, London: Palgrave. Hostiles (2017), dir. Scott Cooper. Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures, USA. Kant, Immanuel (2003), Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. and ed. J. T. Goldthwait, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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MacClancy, Jeremy (2003), ‘Anthropology: “The latest form of evening entertainment”’, in A Concise Companion to Modernism, ed. David Bradshaw, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 75–94. Michelucci, Stefania (2011), ‘Forever in Transit: D. H. Lawrence’s Displacement’, in The Politics and Poetics of Displacement: Modernism off the Beaten Track, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo and Luisa Villa, Pasian di Prato: Campanotto Anglistica, pp. 87–98. Neilson, Brett (1997), ‘D. H. Lawrence’s “Dark Page”: Narrative Primitivism in Women in Love and The Plumed Serpent’, Twentieth Century Literature, 43:3, pp. 310–25. Roberts, Neil (2004), D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference, London: Palgrave. Ruderman, Judith (2014), Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shestov, Lev (1920), All Things Are Possible, trans. S. S. Koteliansky, London: Martin Secker. Soboleva, Olga and Angus Wrenn (2017), From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s, Berne: Peter Lang. Torgovnick, Marianna (1990), Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Frederick Jackson (1920), ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, The Frontier in American History, New York: Henry Holt and Company.

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5 Traditional Aesthetics Julianne Newmark

Introduction

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. H. Lawrence’s essays ‘The Spinner and the Monks’ of 1913 and ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ of 1924 offer evocative textual considerations of aesthetic mediation through acts of the body – one through an old woman spinning and the other through traditional, ceremonial dance. In these essays, readers can understand ‘traditional’ aesthetic acts to be those that are not contrivances of modernity; through such acts, history is invoked in the now, as if unchanged. The examples this chapter examines – the first from Lawrence’s earliest trip outside England (Italy) and the second from New Mexico (in the Southwestern United States) – show how Lawrence progressively experienced and then wrote about ‘traditional’ aesthetic acts as having a unique capacity to engage with community, history and truth. They thus have broad implications concerning Lawrence’s movement towards a refined articulation of aesthetic difference and viscerally mediated relationships. This chapter identifies Lawrence’s engagements with traditional aesthetics as unique experiences of the human sensorium. To make this point, I employ theorists who consider the connective capacity of ‘mediation’ to unite human and nonhuman actors and actants; with ‘actor’ meaning, in Bruno Latour’s sense, ‘something that acts’ (1990: 6) and ‘actants’ meaning, in Seth Lewis and Oscar Westlund’s explanation, ‘material objects that are notable for their association with human actors and the activities they undertake in conjunction with such objects’ (2014: 23). I expand this ‘material’ usage of ‘actant’ to include human aesthetic outputs: what is important is that Lawrence describes traditional aesthetic creation (say, the act of dancing or spinning wool) as an opportunity for the forming of relationships between actors, and between actors and actants. As new media theorist Richard Grusin explains, to think about the ‘immediate affective experience of mediation’ is to consider ‘that which is felt, embodied, near – not distant from us, and thus not illuminated or pictured, but experienced by us as living, embodied human and nonhuman creatures’ (2015: 132). What this means relative to Lawrence and traditional aesthetics is that the creative, bodily acts that he writes about are ‘not distant’ (in Grusin’s phrase) from him. He is so close, so eager to know, that he lives this change in his body through the mediative experience – and his writings suggest that this is a change he hopes others might be open to, too. The traditional aesthetic acts that Lawrence described in ‘The Spinner and the Monks’ and ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ (and elsewhere) are not ‘neutral’, to use Grusin’s word, but rather ‘reproduce meaning or information . . . by actively transforming human and nonhuman actants’ (130). Thus, ‘mediation’, though not a term or concept of Lawrence’s own, seems apt for our usage.

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‘Traditionalism’ is another concept central to this chapter’s discussion, though I urge us to use the term broad-mindedly, so as to be aware of the critical (and authorial) propensity to fetishise non-white and/or non-‘modern’ Others through its usage. Eve Tuck (a member of the Aleutian community) and K. Wayne Yang have discussed the historical pervasiveness of the authenticating practice of ‘playing Indian’ (a term reflected in the title of Native American theorist Philip Deloria’s 1998 book), a practice that comes in many forms. Citing Deloria (a Yankton Dakota tribal member), Tuck and Yang remind readers of the persistence, since the United States’ colonial period, of the fascination with and appropriation of Indigeneity (2012: 8). Lawrence has been accused of displaying a Primitivist fascination in essays such as ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’. Because of this, it is appropriate to ask here what is at stake for readers today of Lawrence’s considerations of traditional aesthetic creations, in his travel writing (such as the essays considered below) and fiction (such as Women in Love). Indeed, the traditional aesthetic acts and outputs that Lawrence writes of were often foreign and always outside of his ‘modern’ moment. Deloria helpfully posits that ‘Lawrence, with his reckless prose and layering of unresolvable dualisms seems (like his literary subjects) to be struggling to articulate something more. Indians, it is clear, are not simply useful symbols of the love–hate ambivalence of civilization and savagery’ (1998: 4). Similarly, the other communities whose aesthetic objects or performative outputs (actants) Lawrence considers do not merely serve in a symbolic capacity in his work; they reveal his working-through of something Deloria calls ‘the experience of liminal nonidentity’, a ‘never fully complete’ ‘ritual of becoming’ (1998: 36). Traditional aesthetic objects or performative outputs attracted Lawrence’s interest so powerfully because, for him, they mediated between past and future, and they changed him as an actor in what he knew was a global, relational network. His textual accounts reveal this change, however fraught and uncomfortable it was.

‘England, My England’ and Women in Love: Terminologies of Mediation Lawrence’s perspective on the capacity for traditional aesthetic outputs to convey truth and cultural ethos began to coalesce in the early 1910s and gained clarity throughout the decade. At this time, he was probing his own complicated relationship to his Englishness, as he would continue to do thereafter, in intricately woven writings about ‘foreign’ cultures. His intellectual curiosity and extensive reading on the subjects of ancient and primitive cultures intensified mid-decade (coincident with the First World War’s progression). Beginning locally, Lawrence was compelled to engage traditional English religious and social history, and he posited that vestiges of traditional English aesthetics of the body could be located in rural England and in traditional dance and song. As represented in ‘England, My England’ (1922) via Egbert (originally Evelyn, in the 1915 English Review version), Lawrence identified the ‘otherness’ of traditional aesthetics, which were historicised and persisted, often, only as traces of bodily (or in his term, blood) knowledge. Egbert’s affection is for ‘the past, the old music and dances and customs of old England’ (EME 10). His zeal for ‘folk-music’ and ‘folk-dances’, particularly ‘the Morris-dance and the old customs’ (7), marks him as incompatible with contemporary England and the machine age as optimised by the War. The primordiality of old England is Egbert’s passion, typified in sensibilities and customs not

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yet impaled by ‘The spear of modern invention’, persisting as ‘secret, primitive, savage’ (8). The ‘primeval’ nature of Crockham Cottage, the tale’s setting, allows Egbert and his wife Winifred to feel, for a time, ‘caught out of the world’ (5, 9). ‘England, My England’ displays Lawrence’s increasing interest in the transformative capacity of aesthetic acts in their sites of creation; such acts, he surmised, might mediate cultural truths, but this mediation is an ontological phenomenon he believed to have been largely ‘speared-through’ in his home country by ‘modern invention’ (8). In Women in Love an interest in the capacity of an aesthetic object or an artwork to be a cipher of cultural meaning can also be seen, yet, in this case, these objects are removed from their traditional or original context (the sweepingly continental ascription ‘Africa’) and can be viewed, held or touched outside of their local site of creation. For example, Birkin’s oft-discussed assessment of an African sculpture signals Lawrence’s investigation of material objects, aesthetic creations, as communicators of ‘truth’. The representational figurine is a cipher for a bodily, and thus (for Lawrence) authentically cultural, truth – and it qualifies as ‘art’ because of this capacity: ‘It is art’ because ‘It conveys a complete truth’ (WL 78–9). Birkin adds that the figure evokes ‘Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual’. But, because the African object has been decontextualised (a difference that is stark when compared to the aesthetic acts and outputs of Italy and New Mexico), it becomes vulnerable to possession, a concept with which Lawrence grappled throughout his oeuvre. The mediative capacity of the aesthetic object is compromised by de-localisation and possession. Grusin writes that in many ‘traditional philosophical accounts’, mediation ‘has been opposed to immediacy, functioning as what might be called an agent of correlation which filters, limits, constrains, or distorts an immediate perception of knowledge of the world or the real’ (2015: 128). He pushes against this understanding, invoking the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century insistence (such as that of Emerson, Thoreau and James, whose work was well-known to Lawrence) that this middle point – the site of mediation – is the crucial point to consider: Mediation should be understood not as standing between pre-formed subjects, objects, actants, or entities but as the process, action, or event that generates or provides the conditions for the emergence of subjects and objects, for the individuation of entities within the world. (129) This understanding of mediation illuminates Lawrence’s textual usage of traditional aesthetic objects, creations and outputs (be they ‘fetishes’, weavings, folk dances or choreographed religious rites), given his sense that these acts/objects themselves are ciphers for truths. But context seems important: mediation within an original context of creation – when the actant is not decontextualised – affords actors increased capacity to be changed. Whether an actor is open to being changed is another matter, and for Lawrence the traditional aesthetic objects attract his attention because they evoke both a cultural gap and a desire to bridge it, which may, in effect, be impossible. Such mediation is, then, the process of engagement, reliant on the desire or openness for connection between ‘entities within the world’ (129). As the two non-fictional case studies of this chapter reveal, the individual who experiences the aesthetic act or object (Lawrence) is actively transformed by the aesthetic experience. The intensity of these moments as recorded in emotive prose signals

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to us that we minimise Lawrence’s openness to such transformation when we silo him among Primitivists who project upon decontextualised tribal objects, as Jack Stewart writes, ‘dissident fantasies’ and ‘cultural alternatives’ (1999: 95). However, Judith Ruderman reminds us that while Lawrence was searching for a ‘better society’, his relationships with the ‘racialized other’ were ‘ambivalent’ (2014: 20). Indeed, I feel it necessary to complicate the readings I have offered above with a reminder that Lawrence’s ‘honest’ grappling came via usage of terms that we find offensive today. We cannot bracket out, as it were, such problematic terms – but we can, as Ruderman does, deepen our readings of Lawrence in a variety of ways, such as by understanding the ‘socio-cultural contexts’ of his writing. Inquiring into Lawrence’s considerations – whether celebratory, dismissive or confounded – of the aesthetic outputs/acts of seemingly traditional cultures in Europe and North America ‘can inform our contemporary discussions of race and ethnicity’ (20). By deepening our appreciation of Lawrence’s grappling, we can better perceive our own.

Twilight in Italy: ‘The Spinner and the Monks’ and ‘The Dance’ In Gargnano, on Lake Garda, in late 1912, Lawrence recorded his reflections on the qualities of the Italian peasantry. He saw these qualities most powerfully demonstrated in the physical artistry of villagers, such as an old woman engaged in the bodily act of spinning wool (described in ‘The Spinner and the Monks’) or peasant dancers (described in the essay ‘The Dance’). By establishing strong contrasts between his own Englishness and the Italy and Italians ‘of his imagination’, as Paul Eggert writes (TI xxxvii), Lawrence leveraged his experiences with the aesthetics of an internal European ‘other’ to a point where anti-modern, traditional artistry aligned with ‘warmth and blood and tissue’, and opposed the English ‘oldness and grubbiness and despair’ that he so lamented (1L 462, 459). In projecting vitalism onto the Italian villagers, Lawrence started to celebrate an artistry that he understood as communal not individual; communal art to him was the opposite of art associated with crude commercialism, recognition or fame. His experiences in Gargnano helped to crystallise his belief in bodily knowledge as religious and devotional: ‘the blood, the flesh . . . [are] wiser than the intellect’, as he wrote in late 1912 (503). Eggert writes that the Twilight in Italy essays mark a time of ‘intellectual urgency’ for Lawrence, when he discovered the ‘culturally revealing in the accidental, the universal in the local’ (lvii). In ‘The Spinner and the Monks’, Lawrence describes searching for the Church of San Tomasso, as he navigates through passageways and piazzas. The ambience is occluded, and he takes this as a suggestion about the local Italian people: The Italian people are called “Children of the Sun.” They might better be called “Children of the Shadow.” Their souls are dark and nocturnal. If they are to be easy, they must be able to hide, to be hidden in lairs and caves of darkness. (104) This perception of Italians informs his encounter with ‘a little grey woman whose fingers were busy’, who appears before him after he leaves the church on the ‘other side’ of a terrace (105). This woman ‘was spinning’; she was producing and her output is described, as she is described, largely in colour terms, as one might describe a painting’s chromatic elements independent of its design:

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She was grey, and her apron, and her dress, and her kerchief, and her hands and her face were all sun-bleached and sun-stained, greyey, bluey, browny, like stones and half-coloured leaves, sunny in their colourlessness. In my black coat, I felt myself wrong, false, an outsider. (106) It should be noted here that Lawrence’s experience of the spinner is ‘affective and experiential rather than strictly visual’ (Grusin 2015: 132). Though Lawrence conveys these experiences in the static media domain of printed type (which is for the reader a visual experience), he experiences with his body – through his eyes, his ears, his fingers and hands, his sense of smell. He feels with his body what he sees with his eyes; he describes what the woman feels as she works, what she touches between her ‘thumb and forefinger’, how she moves the shuttle ‘briskly’ and ‘rub[s]’ and twists the worsted wool (TI 106). He hears her speaking, but he could not understand ‘because of her dialect’ (108). Sight, touch, sound – Lawrence experiences the spinning woman’s aesthetic act throughout his sensorium. As she spun ‘the coarse, blackish worsted she was making’, the spinner does not pay attention to Lawrence, glancing ‘over’ him, a quality associated with her eyes having ‘no looking in them’ (TI 106). He says to the woman, “‘you are spinning’”, and she sees only, he conjectures, ‘a man’s figure, a stranger, standing near’. When Lawrence asks her whether her way of spinning is ‘an old way of spinning’ (actually a statement rather than a question), she answers in the affirmative and then continues to treat him as a ‘transient circumstance, a man, part of the surroundings’ (106, 107). In her universe, he writes, ‘I was a stranger, a foreign signore. That I had a world of my own, other than her own, was not conceived by her. She did not care’ (107). That Lawrence cared so much about the spinner, her action(s) and her body – the composite aesthetic effect of her – reveals the work he was endeavouring to do, hard work about what he can and cannot know. ‘There is something which is unknown to me’, he writes, ‘and which nevertheless exists’ (TI 107). Once he remarks on how much she has spun in such a short time (‘A day or two’), their conversation suddenly ends, as she makes her way across the terrace. ‘She had cut off her consciousness from me’, Lawrence writes, but nevertheless, at the end of his reflective essay, he has come to feel affectionately possessive of her (109). ‘My little old woman was gone’, and it is clear that he attempted to know her through their proximity and his observations of her body’s actions (112). To the little old woman Lawrence assigned cosmological import; indeed, she was so aesthetically powerful she transcended the local, the national and the global: ‘She was herself the core and centre to the world, the sun, and the single firmament’, even though she ‘did not know this’ (TI 107). Her capacity for production, that she is a ‘spinner’, is vital to the celestial/cosmological significance Lawrence ascribes to her, and he is able at once to connect to her (with the proprietary piety of ‘my little old woman’) and consider her ‘other’, timeless, generative, ‘eternal, unchangeable, whole even in her partiality’ (108). The aesthetic object she produces is worsted wool – a smoothed, twisted wool that is then used to produce other items. She transforms, through an act of her body, a rudimentary form (‘her wool strand’) into a smoother, transitional product (‘a length of worsted’), and she continues in this act of transformative creation even after ‘Her thread broke’, of which ‘She seemed to take no notice’ (108); she carries on transforming the unformed into the formed. Lawrence describes

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the spinner as symbolically central to ‘the world’ – meaning, she is a sun around which planets spin – because of the complete lack of contrivance or performance in her being. The creation of the worsted, in fact the worsted itself, represents the integrative capacity that the woman – according to Lawrence – embodies. F. B. Pinion argues that ‘The Spinner and the Monks’ ‘contains perhaps the most exquisite of [Lawrence’s] metaphorical scenes’, wherein he meditates on the search for ‘transcendental knowledge in our hearts uniting sun and darkness, day and night, spirit and senses. Why do we not know that the two in consummation are one?’ (1988: 35–6; TI 113). The worsted the spinner spins is produced of a bodily act (which Lawrence renders aesthetically, indeed sensorially), with this act being one of consummation, literally of unification and material transformation. There are other examples in Twilight in Italy of traditional aesthetic acts of the body that evoke intense sensorial power and that Lawrence highlights as significant because they are traditional. Specifically, ‘The Dance’ describes a peasant dance, to the tunes of mandolins and guitars, on the ‘soft bricks of the floor’ from which a ‘cloud of dust’ rose (TI 168). Eggert provides context for the essay: Lawrence’s visit to San Gaudenzio in March 1913 (xxxix). The essay is dense with sensual language and bodily description, tracing movements and meaning, such as that the dance ‘passe[s] into a possession’ when the men swing the women up from the earth, when everything becomes ‘interwoven’, ‘interrelated movement’ (168). At the apex of Lawrence’s description of this dance his focus is on one particular ‘wood-cutter from the mountain’, ‘quite a savage’ who ‘dances well’: ‘he never speaks. He is like some violent natural phenomenon’ (169). Lawrence adds that his movements, which rush ‘forth, liquid, perfect, transcendent’, present the woodcutter ‘like a god, a strange natural phenomenon, most intimate and compelling, wonderful. But he is not a human being’ (170). There are many ways to understand this Lawrentian dehumanisation (‘he is not a human being’), whether meaning ‘more than’, ‘less than’ or ‘other than’ human. This topic is especially relevant for this chapter’s next section, concerning ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’, where such language abounds – as it does throughout Lawrence’s New Mexican and Mexican period. In the context of a discussion of the body’s capacity to generate aesthetic outputs, particularly bodies that are at home in their own traditional communities, Lawrence’s description of the woodcutter seems laudatory, in that the combination throughout the body of sound, movement, sensuality, energy and interpersonal impact is transcendently beyond the typical and limited realm of the human. In this way, to Lawrence, being inhuman is being exceptional and transcendent, a celebration of what might be ‘beyond’ or other-than-human that recurs throughout his work. The experience of watching the dance unfold, of the bodies moving with and reliant on each other like stars in a constellation, impacts Lawrence as a decidedly unrehearsed aesthetic act. This aesthetic act – the dance – is not something standing between Lawrence and the peasant community; it is the community, insofar as Lawrence can understand it. This connective mediative act – the dance – thus envelops Lawrence within it, rather than figuring as an aesthetic performance that keeps him on the outside of it. The spinning woman and the dancing woodcutter engage Lawrence’s attention through their bodily acts – what they do in and as a process, rather than a finished material product or performance that connotes completion. The spinner’s body came to symbolise something cosmological and never quite perfect or complete. This is the

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contrastive scheme that marks many of Lawrence’s inquiries into whether a balance – to be understood as ‘the supreme ecstasy in mankind’ – can be achieved (TI 113). Having read William James’s Pragmatism and The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lawrence may have been familiar with his concept of mediation, specifically as related to pragmatism (see also Wallace 2005: 92). If we understand Lawrence’s experiences with traditional aesthetic acts/outputs near Gargnano as experiences of mediation in the sense Grusin uses it, then these experiences were generative for Lawrence and representative of what he came to understand to be a much wider range of possible relational configurations. His attitudes towards otherness, access, inclusion, exclusion and traditional lifeways can all be seen in mid-stream evolution in essays like ‘The Spinner and the Monks’ and ‘The Dance’. We can see Lawrence experiencing ‘liminal nonidentity’, which, to invoke Deloria’s description again, is a ‘never fully complete’ ‘ritual of becoming’ (1998: 36). Lawrence’s Italian essays reflect this flux and lack of completeness by revealing how the aesthetic acts of the body can serve as mediators and change-makers. This suggests how humans might retain connections to tradition even in a world rushing headlong into modernity.

Mornings in Mexico: ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ Further revealing Lawrence’s interest in the interplay between traditionalism and modernity as expressed by aesthetic acts of the body, ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ marks a moment of significant tension, as do his New Mexico essays more generally (he spent a total of eleven months near Taos, New Mexico, between 1922 and 1925). This essay was originally published in Theater Arts Monthly in 1924 and later in Mornings in Mexico in 1927. By moving from Lawrence’s reflections concerning an Italian community’s traditional aesthetic acts and outputs in 1912–13 to his later endeavours on a similar theme in New Mexico in 1924, I will show Lawrence’s evolving vantage, after extensive travel, on mediative acts. Ruderman explains that descriptions of the Snake Dance ‘serve as prime example[s] of the complex ways in which Lawrence and others have sought to apprehend culture in the American Southwest’ (2010: 45). She adds context concerning ‘Primitivism’, a theme that resonates throughout his travel writing: ‘Lawrence was like many ethnographers in attempting to grapple with the notion of “the primitive” and to put the Hopi Snake Dance and Native America in general in some relationship with American majority culture’ (2010: 46). I have written elsewhere about Lawrence’s considerations of Native American and Mexican indigenous lifeways as related to larger questions concerning national identity and assimilation (Newmark 2015). Here, however, I want to draw attention to how, in New Mexico, Lawrence crafts prose that attends to the change-making capacity of traditional aesthetic acts in a North American indigenous community. Notably, his assessment of Hopi aesthetics differs significantly from his portrayal of bodily aesthetics in his earlier Italian writing discussed above. The biggest difference is that the traditional aesthetic acts seem even more foreign to him and thus engender in him even sharper concerns about capacities for change and change-making. Lawrence begins ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ with geographic descriptors, signalling map-style strategies of orientation: ‘The Hopi country is in Arizona, next the Navajo country, and some seventy miles north of the Santa Fe railroad’ (MM 79). The proximity

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to the railroad is significant because it was railroad marketing campaigns, as Ruderman and many others have discussed, that brought waves of tourists to Hopi, Navajo and Pueblo communities in Arizona and New Mexico in the 1910s and 1920s. Lawrence travelled to Hotevilla, Arizona, in August 1924 with Mabel Dodge Luhan and her husband Tony, a Tiwa-speaking Taos Pueblo tribal member. Lawrence provides further facts about the dance, as he understands them, and its location on the year of his visit: The snake-dance (I am told) is held once a year, on each of three mesas in succession. This year of grace 1924, it was to be held in Hotevilla, the last village on the furthest western tip of the third mesa. (79) Lawrence continues the early phase of the essay with further description of logistics and a summary of the cultural significance of the dance, from his non-Native point of view. He avers: the Hopi snake dance is almost nothing . . . It has nothing of the impressive beauty of the Corn Dance at Santo Domingo . . . The big pueblos of Zuni, Santo Domingo, Taos have a cultured instinct which is not revealed in the Hopi snake-dance. (81) Certainly, Lawrence was more familiar with the Pueblo dances of Taos than he was with dances occurring among the Hopi in Arizona, if only as a result of his residential proximity to Taos Pueblo. While Taos Pueblo was ‘foreign’ to Lawrence, the Hopi community in Hotevilla was even more so. After several pages of reflection about ‘American Indian’ concepts of ‘Spirit and Matter, God and Not-God’, during which Lawrence approaches an articulation of non-hierarchical indigenous spirituality based on co-operation between what Kim Tallbear (2011) has labelled ‘interspecies communities’, Lawrence begins to describe the aesthetic acts of the dances he watches – the Antelope Dance and the Snake Dance (MM 82). Lawrence indicates that the Hopi, through their dancing, are attempting to reach far back, way back, deep down, to some crucial cultural knowledge and formative religion. Virginia Hyde notes that ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ was an essay that Lawrence himself understood as ‘philosophical’, and one that, as he wrote to John Middleton Murry, ‘defines somewhat my position’ (MM l; 5L 109). Hyde describes this essay, which was ‘special to Lawrence’, as ‘posit[ing] . . . [an] animistic mythology among the peoples of “all aboriginal America’” (MM li). In language that strikes a reader as much less reverent than the language used to describe the spinner, Lawrence writes of the attendance at the Snake Dance: ‘Three thousand people came to see the little snake-dance this year, over miles of desert and bumps’ (MM 80). He uses dismissive language when describing the white audience members, mostly as a means of poking fun at them, to whom he ascribes such remarks as ‘I never did see a rattlesnake, and I’m crazy to see one!’. He identifies other observers’ misunderstandings of Hopi ‘ceremonials’ and ‘animistic’ religiosity (81). When, after his lengthy preamble, he begins to describe the Antelope Dance, he wonders what he misunderstands about what he sees: There are no drums, no announcements. Suddenly into the plaza, with rude, intense movements, hurries a little file of men. They are smeared all with grey and black . . . The feet of the dancers are pure ash-grey. Their hair is long. The first is a heavy old man with heavy, long, wild grey hair. (85)

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He goes on to describe the dancers’ utterances: The deep concentration of the “priests” conquers, for a few seconds, our whitefaced flippancy, and we hear only the deep Háh-ha! Háh-ha! speaking to snakes and the earth’s inner core. This lasts for a minute or two. Then the antelope priests stand bowed and still, and the snake priests take up the swaying and the deep chant, that sometimes is so low, it is like a mutter underground, inaudible. The rhythm is crude, the swaying unison is all uneven. Culturally, there is nothing. If it were not for that mystic, dark-sacred concentration. (86) Lawrence writes that there is ‘nothing’, ‘Culturally’, but he immediately backs away, referring to something ‘mystic[al]’ that is connective, that ‘concentrates’ not just movement but meaning, as he sees it. At first, Lawrence seems to feel no connection to the Antelope Dance; his tone is very different from the reverent, vibrating aspect of his account of ‘The Dance’ in Twilight in Italy or his reflection on the old spinning woman who conveyed wholeness, evoked a kind of universal creation and signalled the potency of a cosmos encircling her. What is most different in his account of the Antelope and Snake Dances is how alarmed Lawrence is by the other spectators, whom he characterises as obtrusive and unable to understand the Hopi or engage with the community as anything but spectacle. Much of the account of these dances concerns optical spectacle, and Lawrence’s awareness of bodies in the audience as well as of his own body suggests that he struggled with an anxiety that Tuck and Yang describe thus: Numerous scholars have observed that Indigeneity prompts multiple forms of settler anxiety, even if only because the presence of Indigenous peoples – who make a priori claims to land and ways of being – is a constant reminder that the settler colonial project is incomplete. (2012: 9) Lawrence does try to distinguish himself from the audience of travellers and sightseers who are members of the settler state, and his anxiety reveals that he, perhaps, perceives the larger stakes. We can detect the potency of the community-sited aesthetic act in Lawrence’s description of the Snake Dance as engaging all sensory dimensions for the dancers. The Snake Dance, according to Lawrence’s description of it, transforms, or perhaps distorts, Western temporalities, chronologies and assumptions concerning the location of power in a human/non-human hierarchy. Lawrence writes chromatically: ‘Today, the eight antelope priests were very grey. Their feet were ashed pure grey, like suede [sic] soft boots: and their lower jaw was pure suède grey, while the rest of the face was blackish’ (MM 87). More grey and black descriptors are used, incessantly (indeed, the same tenebrous chromas appear in Lawrence’s initial descriptions of ‘his’ spinner in Italy). Lawrence describes the carrying of snakes in circles, ‘dangling’ from the mouth ‘of one young priest’ and ‘writhing and swaying slowly’ (90). At the end of the dance the snakes are collected, ‘snatched up’, and carried in the arms of ‘two young priests’ as they run out of the plaza. Lawrence describes these running young men as ‘such specks of gods’ who are responsible for delivering the snakes back to the earth; the snakes will ‘Carry the human prayer and will-power into the holes of the winds, down into the octopus heart of the rain-source . . . back to the terrific, dread and causeful

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dark sun which is at the earth’s core’ (91). Lawrence approaches his conclusion with another remark on transcendence and balance, which he had considered during his time in Italy: ‘To us, God was in the beginning, Paradise and the Golden Age have been lost . . . To the Hopi, God is not yet, and the Golden Age lies far ahead . . . Between the two visions lies the gulf of mutual negation’ (94). In his description of the Hopi dance, Lawrence in effect does less describing and more projecting of a cosmologically significant aesthetic experience, with all of its blacks and greys and darkness – but with the faintest glimmer of hope in the powerful emergence of something that is ‘far ahead’ and can be reached through constellations of dance, utterance and faith. His hope, then, is not for those who are non-Native, obtrusive observers, but for the Hopi, when they retain contact and are ‘involved at every moment’ in the aesthetic communal spirituality he sees in – or projects onto – their religious rites. Indeed, in his observational report on the Snake Dance, we see that Lawrence engages with the dance as religious artistry that is context-specific. As with his experiences in Italy, he came to the aesthetic experience; it did not come to him. The experience among the Hopi required of Lawrence greater ‘travel distance’, both geographically and psychologically. His discomfort correlates with this larger remove. The Hopi dance strikes Lawrence as a mediative truth, one that he feels himself to be physically ‘inescapably and unavoidably in the middle’ of (to borrow from Grusin 2015: 148). Lawrence comes to see the acts of spinning and dancing (as but two cases) as traditional aesthetic acts of assemblage – of spirit, matter, history and future – that require the human body to be at their centre.

Conclusion Lawrence’s accounts of Hopi dance and Italian handiwork reveal an openness to the viscerally-mediating capacity of aesthetic experience. Though concepts of ‘playing Indian’ and of settler-colonial cultural appropriation are very much components of our present-day critical vocabulary, I have argued, as has Deloria, that Lawrence did more than simply ‘use’ Native American dance or Italian handiwork or African sculpture as mere symbols – or as aesthetic acts/outputs onto which he could project an individual pathology of ‘liminal nonidentity’, in Deloria’s phrase. Our work with Lawrence as related to his incorporation of symbolic traditional aesthetics needs to be guided by caution, in accordance with Tuck and Yang’s remarks concerning the ways in which non-Native people struggle (today) to accept the ‘difficult reality’ of ‘directly and indirectly benefitting from the erasure and assimilation of Indigenous peoples’ (2012: 9). Lawrence discusses what he sees as cultural erasure among Native American people as well as among his fellow English people who no longer connect to their ‘folk’ traditions. He laments a circumstance he describes as ‘pueblo Indians . . . break[ing] in a kind of hopelessness under our cheerful, triumphant success. Which is what is rapidly happening. The young Indians who have been to school for many years are losing their religion’ (MM 94). Following Tuck and Yang’s theory, does Lawrence struggle to accept any complicity that his kind – white, European, colonial – have played in the ‘erasure and assimilation’ of people who live in traditional communities that have struggled against ‘a mechanical cosmos . . . [and] a mechanical triumph’ (MM 94)? Do his textual inclusions of traditional aesthetic artworks/acts reveal what Tuck and Yang

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call a ‘settler desire to be made innocent, to find some mercy or relief in face of the relentlessness of settler guilt and haunting’ (2012: 9)? It is on this subject that the question of mediation comes vitally into play. As a result of his multi-sensorial engagements, Lawrence experiences and textually records ‘traditional’ aesthetic performances or outputs as both meditating and transformational. In my view, the analyses above reveal that Lawrence resisted – as I hope his readers today will increasingly resist – what Tuck and Yang call the ‘settler desire to be innocent’. Indeed, Lawrence’s accounts of the mediative capacity of traditional aesthetics prove his openness to being changed.

Works Cited Bell, Michael (2018), Primitivism, New York: Routledge. Deloria, Philip J. (1998), Playing Indian, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Grusin, Richard (2015), ‘Radical Mediation’, Critical Inquiry, 42, pp. 124–48. Hyde, Virginia Crosswhite and Earl Ingersoll, eds (2010), Terra Incognita: D. H. Lawrence at the Frontiers, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 37–56. Latour, Bruno (1996), ‘On Actor-Network Theory. A Few Clarifications Plus More than a Few Complications’, Soziale Welt, 47, pp. 369–81. Lewis, Seth C. and Oscar Westlund (2015), ‘Actors, Actants, Audiences, and Activities in CrossMedia News Work: A Matrix and a Research Agenda’, Digital Journalism, 3:1, pp 19–37. Newmark, Julianne (2015), The Pluralist Imagination from East to West in American Literature, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Pinion, F. B. (1988), ‘Extension of Metaphor to Scene and Action, Chiefly in Lawrence’s Early Novels’, in The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Studies, ed. Gamini Salgado and G. K. Das, London: Macmillan, pp. 32–46. Ruderman, Judith (2014), Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stewart, Jack (1999), The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. TallBear, Kim (2011), ‘Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints’, Fieldsights, . Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang (2012), ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1:1, pp. 1–40. Wallace, Jeff (2005), D. H. Lawrence, Science, and the Posthuman, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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6 Translation Stefania Michelucci

Introduction: Lawrence’s Interactions with Foreign Languages

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polyglot like most of the literary modernists, Lawrence was interested in foreign languages for many different reasons. In the works of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, for example, the intermingling of different languages issues from a cosmopolitanism that leads them to try to transcend the limitations inherent in national cultures and arts – as for instance in Pound’s A Lume Spento (1908) or in Eliot’s overwhelmingly polyglot collage of erudite quotations from living and dead languages in The Waste Land (1922), of which the epigraph alone mixes Italian, Greek and Latin. In modernist writings, foreign words are often part of literary quotations, in line with the modernists’ intense use of intertextuality. By contrast, in Lawrence’s works foreign languages often reflect his need for a closer contact with and a deeper understanding of the peoples and cultures he encountered during his wanderings. His quotations in French, German and Italian, which became more and more frequent after he left England for the first time in 1912, are far from signalling a snobbish or elitist showing-off of learning: they are vitally connected to a yearning for fuller and deeper communication, with the aim of suggesting other differences – cultural, ethnic, psychological – which make him feel separated from, and attracted to, the foreign people he came into contact with. Foreign words become the vehicle of local colour and a way of suggesting the otherness of the reality observed; their meanings can be easily understood thanks to the context created by the author. In other words, the interaction between English and foreign languages is used by Lawrence, especially in his travel writing, to render a polarity, of the same kind as the one that must exist between man and woman, and aims to establish a kind of stellar equilibrium, involving a deep respect for the individuality and mystery of the other. After an overview of Lawrence’s interest in translations and a discussion of his project of creating a Lungarno Series of Renaissance Italian stories translated into English, this chapter introduces Lawrence’s rewriting from other languages, German and Russian, before moving, in the longer, second part, to a detailed analysis of his translations of the Italian writer Giovanni Verga. Apart from the full-length study by G. M. Hyde, D. H. Lawrence and the Art of Translation (1981), not much has been written on Lawrence’s activity as a translator from Russian, German and Italian until recent years. Then it has become the object of a new interest, witnessed by some recent essays by Nick Ceramella (1997, 2003, 2007), a book by Antonio Traficante (2007) and the ‘Translation’ section in an edited volume by Simonetta de Filippis (2016), to mention only a few.

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Lawrence’s activity as a translator can be traced back to the early years of his literary career and it also goes hand in hand with his travels and discoveries of other cultures. Suffice it to think of his letters to Louie Burrows in 1910, which include some poems he rewrote from a book in German (a written translation from oral Arabic songs), his concern with Russian culture as early as 1907 (Brown 2019: 110) and his later rewriting of S. S. Koteliansky’s translations from Russian texts. Particularly important was his interest in Verga in the 1920s, that led to his translation of two collections of stories and a novel (Little Novels of Sicily, Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories, Mastrodon Gesualdo), as well as the project of creating a Lungarno Series with the Florentine editor Pino Orioli in the last years of his life (De Zordo 1981: 33–46; 1992: 169–73). During his life and literary career, Lawrence was mainly interested in the text rather than its translator. There are very few exceptions, as for instance when he ruthlessly attacks R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s translation of Pedro de Valdivia, but Lawrence hardly mentions the name of a translator: Then we have Mr Graham as a translator. In the innumerable and sometimes quite fatuous and irritating foot-notes—they are sometimes interesting—our author [Graham] often gives the original Spanish for the phrase he has translated. And even here he is peculiarly glib and unsatisfactory. (IR 303) After quoting some examples, he writes: ‘These things are trifles, but they show the peculiar laziness or insensitiveness to language which is so great a vice in a translator.’ Lawrence was conscious of the transformation of a text inherent in its translation from one language into another, often via a third language. While celebrating the way the Italian writer Grazia Deledda renders the Sardinian soul, Lawrence underlines how much of the original gets lost in the English version: The book, of course, loses a good deal in translation, as is inevitable. In the mouths of the simple people, Italian is a purely instinctive language, with the rhythm of instinctive rather than mental processes . . . A language can be killed by over-precision, killed especially as an effective medium for the conveyance of instinctive passion and instinctive emotion. (IR 105–6) This concern about translation is also found in an ironic episode in Women in Love where the contessa discusses Turgenev. Here Lawrence seems to criticise Alexander Roddice’s mocking attitude, although the character’s showing off underlines the inevitable metamorphosis of a text, especially when it is translated not directly from the original but from another translation: “See!” said the contessa. “Bazarov came to the door and threw his eyes hurriedly down the street,” she read. Again there was a loud laugh, the most startling of which was the Baronet’s, which rattled out like a clatter of falling stones. “What is the book?” asked Alexander, promptly. “Fathers and Sons, by Turgenev,” said the little foreigner, pronouncing every syllable distinctly. She looked at the cover, to verify herself. “An old American edition,” said Birkin.

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stefania michelucci “Ha! of course—translated from the French,” said Alexander, with a fine declamatory voice. “Bazarov ouvra la porte et jeta les yeux dans la rue.” He looked brightly round the company. “I wonder what the ‘hurriedly’ was,” said Ursula. They all began to guess. (WL 86–7)

Finally, the Lungarno Series of 1928–9 (IR lxxxiii; 7L 526–7; De Zordo 1981: 33–46) was an ambitious, pioneering project involving a group of writers and friends including Aldous Huxley and Richard Aldington. They were to translate into English individual stories, with the aim of promoting and reviving interest in the Anglo-American world in mostly unknown texts of Italian culture of the Renaissance. Only The Story of Doctor Manente by A. F. Grazzini (Il Lasca) was translated into English by Lawrence (1928, published in 1929), and the whole ambitious project of the Lungarno Series as Lawrence and Orioli had conceived it ended with it. The Story of Doctor Manente is the Tenth Story of the Third Supper.1 Lawrence’s translation witnesses both his knowledge of rhetorical and stylistic features of Italian Renaissance prose and his effort to render in English the typical rhythm and sentence structure used in the original, difficult prose typical of sixteenth-century novellas, with their peculiar lexicon and syntactical constructions. For David Ellis (1998: 443) it is ‘the most technically adept of all Lawrence’s translations from Italian. He simulates well the toppling-over effect of the original Renaissance prose.’

Lawrence’s Rewritings from German and Russian The translations carried out by Lawrence in the early years of his literary career also include a group of songs in Arabic which he read in a German translation in a book (Schäfer 1903) he had received from his uncle Fritz Krenkow (‘the businessman and part-time Arabist’: 2Poems 697) in 1910. More than a real translation, these poems – some of which were included in letters to Louie Burrows in 1910 – are a rewriting into English of a German translation of Upper Egyptian and Palestinian songs in Arabic. Lawrence did try to translate from the German, which was based on a phonetic transcription of the original (oral) Arabic Fellaheen songs, but he admitted that his translations were not very good – ‘shocking’, in fact, he called them – and that he was not really translating, but writing them up for Louie (1L 196, 210, 230). He was creating a paraphrase which differed from the original partly as a result of his limited knowledge of German at that time. A few years later, in 1916, in the middle of the First World War, Lawrence rewrote the poems, shifting the focus from the private perspective to the expression of voices of men and women in times of war, as suggested by the title ‘All of Us’ (finally published in the Cambridge Edition of The Poems). In 1916 Lawrence was fluent enough in German: he had read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice in German and his German wife Frieda was with him. He could master the German version of the songs and rewrite the poems by keeping faithful to or distancing himself from the original text. He recommended these poems to his agent J. B. Pinker as war poems: ‘Give it to the people as the “war literature” they are looking for: they will find themselves in it’ (3L 51). These mourning love songs, originally described by Lawrence as ‘ingenious and touching’ (1L 293), were trying to give voice to real human feelings as opposed to the dehumanising mechanisation of the First World War. Most of the songs are touching laments of people living in difficult conditions (be it working at

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archaeological sites far away from home, or fighting in the war), yearning desperately for a lost or faraway lover and/or relative and expressing a deep sense of displacement and isolation. For instance, ‘Star Sentinel’ asserts: That is my spirit trembling high above You there as you turn your face up to the sky. Oh, as you stand and gaze, do you know it is I? Do I see your bayonet twinkle with answering love? (1Poems 139) David Cram and Christopher Pollnitz (2001) describe this transcultural experiment as an example of the mythical method, in line with Joyce’s and Eliot’s experimentations, that draws on oral folk traditions to critique the degeneration of the contemporary age. Their setting – an eastern, Muslim environment – enables Lawrence to achieve a cross-cultural experiment and create a work of art which, in the particularly tense time of the First World War, is devoid of any national belonging and involves a universal human situation. The yearning for a faraway lover who is likely not to return, or the pining of a young child for the absence of its older brother, for instance, express a human suffering with which both English and German soldiers, fighting on opposite fronts, can identify. Lawrence is therefore creating a literature which is beyond the conflicting parties and which denounces, via this transcultural experiment, the human suffering and desperation inherent in any war. In neither version does Lawrence mention the identity of the German translator. The restless search for new models and sources of inspiration at the border and beyond Europe is a leitmotif of European modernism. It is also connected with the popularity of literary works coming from other cultures, which, especially in the creative fervour of radical experimentation in the early years of the twentieth century, would quickly turn into a cultural fashion. This underpins the popularity of Russian culture in Britain, especially within the Bloomsbury Group. Lawrence’s interest in it goes back to his youth (Brown 2019: 110), as witnessed by Jessie Chambers’s memoirs (1935), and was subsequently nourished by his long-lasting friendship with Koteliansky, also known as the Russian Jew of Bloomsbury. He translated many Russian texts, which were published by the Hogarth Press of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Whereas Lawrence’s translations from the Italian are real translations, all his work on the promotion and transmission of Russian culture is a rewriting (in more idiomatic English) of Koteliansky’s literary translations, mainly Lev Shestov’s All Things are Possible, Ivan Bunin’s story ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’ and Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev by Maxim Gorky.2 Lawrence had started studying Russian after identifying Russia as a possible site for his ‘Rananim’ utopian project, once the idea of Florida had failed. His admiration for this country was mainly related to what was antiChristian and anti-Western European in its culture and traditions. But his knowledge of the Russian language was not good enough to enable him to translate directly from the original. Lawrence’s refusal to appear on the cover of the works translated by Koteliansky and rewritten by him is, in my view, the result of intellectual honesty, as he did not translate but polished, turning Koteliansky’s literary translation into a more idiomatic and readable text. Moreover, Lawrence owed Koteliansky money, borrowing from him after eloping to Italy with Frieda and incurring a debt that considerably embarrassed him. Helping his Russian friend to publish his translations was a way of repaying him and showing his gratitude.

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Lawrence’s Translations of Giovanni Verga After leaving England for the first time with Frieda in 1912, Lawrence travelled widely, intermingling famous destinations with unknown, remote places, ranging from Southern Europe to Australia and the Americas. But it was mostly in Italy that he chose to live. With its multiple cultural traditions as well as profoundly diversified dialects Italy was a patchwork of different regions until about half a century before his arrival. Lawrence’s first journey to Italy unfolds a gradual detachment from, and dismantling of, the Romantic cliché related to the traditional literary image of Italy, the image he inherited from a long literary tradition of travel writing: Byron, Shelley, Gissing, Ruskin and Goethe, who celebrated Italy as ‘Das Land wo die Zitronen blühen’ (the land where lemons flourish). In translating Italy, Lawrence is always completely aware that the language itself is not merely an aspect of the local colour, but an essential part of the culture of the foreign country, a key to understanding its difference from his native country. In his essay ‘The Theatre’ in Twilight in Italy, in relation to the Italian performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts, D’Annunzio’s La fiaccola sotto il moggio and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Lawrence discusses the different effects the plays have on him when he watches them in a foreign language and environment: their cultural heritage acquires a completely different significance outside its usual context (Michelucci 1997). Thus, Lawrence questions the concept of the universality of any work of art, the validity of which appears limited, to a certain extent, to the cultural environment in which, and for which, it was created. Transplanting any work of art from one culture to another can provoke a distortion of the original work as well as creating a disturbing effect on the audience. Comparing the sense of ‘sterile cold inertia’ of the audience after the performance of Ghosts and the warm enthusiasm, as if they had ‘drunk sweet wine’ (TI 138), after D’Annunzio’s La fiaccola sotto il moggio, Lawrence connects the different effects of the plays with the languages employed in them, which partly reflect, in turn, the nature of the peoples who use them. He underlines that whereas the English are more interested in the objective meaning of words, the Italians are instinctively attracted by rhetoric, ‘the physical effect of the language upon the blood’ (139). Lawrence read Verga as early as 1916: ‘We have read the Cavalleria Rusticana: a veritable blood-pudding of passion! It is not at all good, only, in some odd way, comical, as the portentous tragic Italian is always comical’ (3L 53). But it was above all during his stay in Sicily in the 1920s that Lawrence was attracted to Verga’s works: ‘his language is so fascinating’ (4L 106). He was especially drawn to his late masterpieces set in Sicily, Mastro-don Gesualdo, Novelle Rusticane and I Malavoglia, which, as he knew, had already been translated into English as The House by the Medlar Tree. He enquired about other existing translations, but there is no evidence that he came across them (Arnold 1965, 1968). Although aware of the difficulties inherent in Verga’s particular language (Motta 2007; Alfieri 2011), Lawrence translated Mastrodon Gesualdo (1923) while sailing to Ceylon, and later on some novelle which were published in two volumes, Little Novels of Sicily (1925) and Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories (1928).3 He also wrote some critical essays on Verga’s art, with a penetrating reflection on the transformation Sicily underwent at the end of the nineteenth century. In his ‘Introductory Note to Mastro-don Gesualdo’ (October 1923), ‘Note on Giovanni Verga’ (March 1925), ‘Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo’

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(March 1928), ‘Biographical Note to Mastro-don Gesualdo’ (March 1928) and ‘Translator’s Preface to Cavalleria Rusticana’ (February 1928), he underlines Verga’s modernity and his uniqueness on the European literary scene, involving also his difference from the French Naturalists (IR 137–74). In the 1920s Lawrence’s knowledge of Italian was good enough to enable him to read Verga in the original, but not to translate him without the mistakes and misinterpretations which occur in all Lawrence’s translations of Verga’s works. While Mastro-don Gesualdo shows little accuracy, due to Lawrence’s particular situation of haste (the boat journey to Ceylon), his later revised translation of Verga’s Novelle is more accomplished. It shows an unquestionable faithfulness in rendering the local colour, although the novelle might sound, to a certain extent, like his own creative texts, as if Verga’s works were the ground for the development of his own creativity. On the contrary, for Jeffrey Meyers (1982) Lawrence remains close to the original text, adding almost nothing of his own, and he does not use Italian words to give a foreign flavour. In the mid-1950s, when Lawrence’s reputation as a great writer was consecrated by F. R. Leavis, his translations from Verga drew negative criticism from Giovanni Cecchetti, a scholar who later embarked on the translation into English of Verga’s La Lupa e altre novelle (1973). He attacked Lawrence for his bad translation, mostly due, according to him, to haste and lack of accuracy (Cecchetti 1957). His criticism was, a few years later, refuted by Armin Arnold, for whom Lawrence’s translations are so far ‘the best we have’, much better than Cecchetti’s: ‘Cecchetti did, philologically, a painstaking job, but his language is pedestrian and uninspired. Lawrence’s translations, on the other hand, have all the fire, poetry, and vitality of his other writings’ (Arnold 1968: 389). To support his view Arnold quotes the positive reactions of eminent Italian scholars, writers and translators, such as Carlo Linati, Piero Nardi and Luigi Russo. Linati, who sensed the spark of Lawrence’s genius in them, wrote that his translations are accomplished with an exact knowledge of our language and of its local colour, showing the touch of a real artist (1968: 391). Whereas early criticism swung between unconditional appreciation (Arnold 1968 and Corsani 1966) and utter rejection because of misinterpretations and mistakes (Cecchetti 1957), recent studies seem, on the whole, to appreciate Lawrence’s translations, underlining above all their artistic quality (Chomel 1980; Consiglio 2013; Costin 2016) and their contribution to bringing Italian literature to the international forum (Ceramella 2007; Traficante 2007). In a letter to Edward Garnett, just before embarking on the task of translating Verga, Lawrence wrote: ‘He is extraordinarily good – peasant – quite modern – Homeric – and it would need somebody who could absolutely handle English in the dialect, to translate him. He would be most awfully difficult to translate’ (4L 115). This very rare comment by Lawrence about translation and translatability underlines his deep insight into and perception of Verga’s language. Lawrence did not refer to the use of a particular English dialect, but to ‘a new dialect’, conveying the orality of Verga’s language, yet free from any local specificity in the target language. The German translator Elizabeth Mayer reports her experience after spending an afternoon with Lawrence and asking him for suggestions before embarking on her translation of Verga. Lawrence suggested to her: ‘try to invent a new dialect, coined in German words, but free from any reference, from any flavour of a special region, yet preserving the flavour of some sort of relaxed, uncodified, untutored mode of speaking’ (Mayer, quoted in Moore 1959: 142).

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Verga does not write in Sicilian dialect, which would have been hard even for other Italian readers to understand in that epochal moment, when the unification of Italy in 1861, with all its different regional realities, had recently been achieved. One of Verga’s major achievements is the creation of an Italian language which is rooted in the Sicilian environment, of which it keeps the rhythm, structure of speech and a particular vocabulary, difficult to translate because of its colloquialism, syntactically approximative and full of Sicilian proverbs and sayings. To increase the effect of the oral language, where the narrator disappears behind the curtain, he uses free indirect speech and often adapts Sicilian sayings into Italian. Aware of its difficulty, Verga himself recommended to his French translator Édouard Rod to keep some particular words in the original (Longo 2004: 57, 103). It is a choral language spoken by the entire community, full of sentences in free indirect speech, with all characters strictly linked to one another as if they were the fingers of a hand. But, most importantly, this language is uttered first by the body and then by the mind, as a sort of strongly physical rendering of a verbal means of expression. And here, I believe, lies Lawrence’s original and deeply felt attraction to Verga as ‘The only Italian [writer] who does interest me’ (4L 110). The 1920s were the years when, following the collapse of Europe and of Western civilisation after the First World War, Lawrence was experimenting with a new artistic language rooted in the body, which, in the last years of his life, he would partly realise in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and in his paintings. In producing an English version of Verga’s Mastro-don Gesualdo and of his Novelle, Lawrence was trying to render a particular human situation and local environment with his own individual style, involving above all a language spoken by the senses, but implying also a distance from and a transformation of Verga’s style. Lawrence’s famous sentence ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale’ (SCAL 14) could be turned into ‘do not trust the translator’ (who is always a creative interpreter of the original text) but ‘trust the translation’, which always acquires a life of its own. Here is the beginning of Verga’s story ‘Don Licciu Papa’, followed by Lawrence’s translation: Le comari filavano al sole, e le galline razzolavano nel pattume, davanti agli usci, allorché successe un gridìo, un fuggi fuggi per tutta la stradicciuola, che si vide comparire da lontano lo zio Masi, l’acchiappaporci, col laccio in mano; e il pollame scappava schiamazzando come se lo conoscesse. (Verga 1979: 246) The goodwives were spinning in the sun, and the fowls were scratching among the rubbish in front of the doorsteps, when suddenly there arose a squealing and a scampering all down the little street, as Uncle Maso was seen approaching from the distance, Uncle Maso the pig-snatcher, with his noose in his hand; and all the fowls scuttled away squawking, as if they knew him. (Verga 1925: 32) In this passage Verga introduces primeval feelings and emotions, which acquire a mythical dimension. It is the fear of the enemy coming from the unknown, who, out of the blue, plunges into the life of the community as a kind of punishment from above. This fear overwhelms the whole environment, as if nature, human beings, animals were all

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part of the same order, of the same living body. This intimate, emotional dimension, with its mythical connotations (Uncle Masi arriving as a threat from the unknown, as a thunder from Mount Olympus, invincible) is one of the aspects of Verga’s art that exerted a great fascination on Lawrence. He turns the despised, threatening ‘zio Masi’ into a Titanic figure coming from the underworld, something huge, ruthlessly inhuman, by repeating the name. Lawrence’s ‘uncle’ is the literary translation of the Italian word ‘zio’, but in Verga’s story ‘zio’ is used as an appellation, not as the name of a relative. Interestingly, Lawrence does not keep ‘Masi’, the abbreviation of Tommaso or Tommasino, but changes it into ‘Maso’, which sounds more like a proper Italian masculine forename ending in -o, thus increasing the threatening individual masculine identity of the character. Masi ending in ‘i’, despite being the abbreviation of Tommaso or Tommasino, looks and sounds like a surname. Here and in many other cases throughout Verga’s Novelle Lawrence transforms Verga’s realistic/naturalistic style into his own impressionistic language. In Verga’s works there is a clear distinction between three speaking voices and their different ways of addressing the audience, mainly the ‘si’, ‘voi’ and ‘tu’ forms. The impersonal ‘si’ is the voice of the narrator that acquires a sort of polyphonic, impersonal connotation, which seems to disappear behind that of the community. In the beautiful, detailed descriptions of the natural environment, it seems as if Nature herself is speaking, as an independent living body talking to the audience. This also accounts for the particular title of Verga’s collection, Vita dei campi (literally ‘The Life of the Fields’), instead of Vita nei campi (‘Life on the Fields’), as if the fields themselves, embracing the community of human beings and all their passions and tragedies, set against a ruthless destiny which cannot be challenged, were the real protagonists. Here is the opening of Mastro-don Gesualdo and Lawrence’s translation: Suonava la messa dell’alba a San Giovanni; ma il paesetto dormiva ancora alla grossa, perché era piovuto da tre giorni, e nei seminati ci si affondava fino a mezza gamba. Tutt’a un tratto, nel silenzio, s’udì un rovinìo, la campanella squillante di Sant’Agata che chiamava aiuto, usci e finestre che sbattevano, la gente che scappava fuori in camicia. (Verga 1992: 5) They were ringing sunrise mass at San Giovanni; but the village still slept heavily, because for three days it had been raining, and on the plough-land you sank half up to your knees. All of a sudden, upon the silence, there was an uproar, the shrill bell of Sant’Agata ringing for help, doors and windows banged open, people running out in their shirts. (Verga 2000: 11) The polyphonic choral ‘si’ turns out to be one of the most difficult tasks for Lawrence in his translation of Verga, and he often fails in rendering the choral, objective voice of the community. In the opening of Mastro-don Gesualdo, for instance, Lawrence uses the generic ‘you’, which gives a sort of personal connotation to the impersonal objective language used by Verga. This happens also when, for ‘suonava’ in the third person (a bell ringing and heard by everybody, as if it would ring by itself as a voice of the community), Lawrence uses ‘They were ringing’. In doing so, he introduces a human agent where there is none in the original.

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In most dialogues Verga employs the ‘voi’ form4 common among members of the community. The Italian informal ‘tu’, which is normally used among friends and suggests familiar and intimate relationships, is rarely used in Verga’s works. It occurs when Mastro-don Gesualdo talks to Diodata – although she replies with the ‘voi’ form (‘salute a vossignoria’ – health to your lordship). On the one hand the ‘tu’ in Mastro-don Gesualdo’s speech to Diodata reflects the social hierarchy between them, he being the master and she the servant, but on the other, it reveals the real affection Gesualdo feels for her, as if she were his own creature. He really cares for her and sees her as a gift from God, as literally suggested by her name (Dio-data, given by God). For all three voices mentioned above, of which the distinctions are essential within Verga’s works, Lawrence uses the English ‘you’ (‘nei seminati ci si affondava fino a mezza gamba – on the ploughland you sank half up to your knees’; ‘Avete il fuoco in casa, capite?’ ‘Your house is on fire, do you know?’; ‘Devi aver fame anche tu. Mangia! mangia!’ ‘Aren’t you hungry? Eat something, eat –’), with the effect of flattening and simplifying Verga’s language, which is rich, lively and seductive also because of its polyphony (bold is used to emphasise the three forms used by Verga and translated with the ‘you’ form by Lawrence) (Verga 1992: 5, 109 ; Verga 2000, 11, 14, 71). Only occasionally in some parts of the dialogue between Gesualdo and Diodata, from which the last example above is taken, does Lawrence introduce the familiar and more archaic dialect-like forms ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, as in ‘Tu non mangi? Cos’hai?’, ‘You’re not eating? What’s amiss with thee?’ (Verga 2000: 71). This is similar to the language that Mellors uses with Lady Chatterley during their intimate conversations: ‘Eh! What is to touch thee!’ (LCL 125). When Lawrence introduces the ‘thou’ form, he turns colloquial speech into a language issuing from the senses, intimate and profound. ‘Thee’ is also used by Walter Morel at the beginning of Sons and Lovers, when he speaks to the newly-born Arthur, the baby who feels a genuine, spontaneous affection for and bond with him: hearing the miner’s footsteps, the baby would put up his arms and crow. And if Morel were in a good temper, he called back immediately, in his hearty, mellow voice: ‘What then, my beauty—I sh’ll come to thee, in a minute’ (SL 64). A language of intimacy and primeval affection seems to go beyond the verbal code. In his translation of Verga’s La lupa (The She-Wolf), Lawrence adopts the intimate ‘thou’ form to increase the intense crescendo of the wild, uncontrollable, primeval passion, by cleverly shifting from ‘you’ at the beginning to ‘thee’ at the end of the protagonist’s sentence. It is a shift in intensity and level of communication which Verga renders with the chiasm ‘Te voglio . . . Voglio te’: ‘Te voglio! Te che sei bello come il sole, e dolce come il miele. Voglio te!’ (Verga 1979: 198) ‘I want you! Thou’re handsome as the day, and sweet as honey to me. I want thee.’ (Verga 1987: 43) Lawrence’s attempt to re-create Verga’s language, to make it his own, sometimes creates distortions of meaning in the target language. A clear example of this is the recurrent use of the word ‘Neighbour’ attached to the proper name in the novelle, ‘Neighbour Carmine’ in ‘Malaria’, ‘Neighbour Neli’ in ‘Story of the Saint Joseph’s Ass’ and ‘Neighbour Lucia’ in ‘Liberty’, to mention just a few. Lawrence tries to convey the local colour of the original by keeping ‘Neighbour’ before the proper name – a

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word which sounds old-fashioned and rather countrified in English, evoking Shakespeares’s use of it, for instance, in Much Ado about Nothing: ‘Give them their charge, neighbour Dogberry . . . Come hither, neighbour Seacole’ (III, iii, 7) (in Sicily, not far from the place where Verga’s stories are set). But the word ‘Neighbour’ is neither a translation of ‘compare’, widely used by Verga, nor of ‘gna’, often attached by Verga to a female proper name. ‘Gna’ is an abbreviation of ‘donna’, often used for people of lower origins, like the poor fourteen-year-old gna Lucia in ‘Liberty’. ‘Compare’ is a typical word of southern Italian regions, where it keeps its original meaning of ‘godfather’ or ‘witness to a wedding’; in some areas, like Sicily, it means somebody you have an affinity with, but whom you might not necessarily like or be on good terms with (a friend, an enemy, a relative, a member of the same community). It is very different in meaning from the English word ‘neighbour’, conveying just the idea of somebody living nearby. Why does Lawrence use ‘neighbour’ for both ‘compare’ and ‘gna’, thus deleting the distinction between male and female, which was so clear-cut in Sicily and all over Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century? Was he not aware of the difference between the two words? This is quite unlikely, as they are rather frequent in Verga’s works. The use of ‘neighbour’ is almost a leitmotif in Lawrence’s rendering of ‘compare’, although occasionally he chooses ‘Master’, ‘chap’ or more specific, contextualised expressions such as ‘Old Mother Nunzia’ for ‘gna Nunzia’ at the beginning of ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’. In my opinion both ‘Master’ and ‘Old Mother’ betray Verga’s image and message, offering, on the other hand, Lawrence’s personal interpretation and re-creation of the novella. Although ‘Master’ (unlike ‘neighbour’) is used in English before a proper name, it suggests a sort of hierarchy which is absent in the Italian word ‘compare’. ‘Chap’, on the other hand, is colloquial, friendly and familiar, betraying the objective distance and impersonality of Verga’s text. ‘Old mother Nunzia’ for ‘gna Nunzia’ implies a sort of fragility and compassion, a Christian pathos that does not occur in the original and deprives the character of her identity as a free-standing woman (‘gna Nunzia’), and not simply as Turiddu’s mother. Lawrence could have left the words ‘compare’ and ‘gna’ in Italian, as he does in Mastro-don Gesualdo, when introducing Don Diego, Don Ferdinando and Donna Bianca, for instance. ‘Don’ and ‘Donna’ are not English words; neither are ‘compare’ and ‘gna’.5 ‘Don’ and ‘Donna’ are widely known to an Anglo-American audience, whereas ‘compare’ has the same spelling as an English verb and ‘gna’ is incomprehensible. Yet both ‘compare’ and ‘gna’ could easily be understood within the context of the story, as in the original text they are devoid of any specific semantic meaning; they are part of a proper name, of the way characters are commonly identified in Verga’s choral environment and language. From this point of view, Mastro-don Gesualdo could be defined as a better achievement than the Little Novels of Sicily, where Lawrence, aiming to find an English equivalent that does not exist, ends up with an odd effect in the English language. Yet, despite misunderstanding the real meaning of the word (‘compare’ may refer to a neighbour in the sense of someone living nearby, but can also mean someone living elsewhere within the same community), by faithfully using it Lawrence re-creates Verga’s speech in his own original way. His translations could be defined as a sort of symbiosis with the otherness of the original text, which inspires his own creative writing and his search for a language of the body. This is also underlined by the powerful and extremely modern essays he wrote on Verga.

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Conclusion In his Introduction to Grazia Deledda’s La madre, Lawrence discusses his idea of language as closely linked to the spirit of place and therefore irreversibly related to a particular Weltanschauung. The latter is hardly transmittable when the medium is different, an idea he had already hinted at as early as 1916 in the essay ‘The Theatre’, while commenting on the opposite effects on the audience of D’Annunzio’s La fiaccola sotto il moggio and Ibsen’s Ghosts (Michelucci 1997). In translating Verga, Lawrence was trying to dig deeper and deeper into that Weltanschauung and share his feelings and interpretation of it with an Anglo-American audience. Rather than lingering on one or more mistakes, awkward expressions and/or creative solutions according to a particular theory of literary translation, the best way to look at Lawrence’s translations would be to follow the path suggested by the Etruscologist Massimo Pallottino (1985) in his Introduction to the Italian edition of Sketches of Etruscan Places. For him, beyond the brilliant and paradoxical words, Lawrence’s writings show a deeper critical insight and a more stimulating interpretation than huge books published by famous archaeologists (Michelucci 2019). Lawrence’s translations are a genuine interpretation and appropriation of a work of art, which become creatively something different, yet ‘almost the same thing’, to quote Umberto Eco’s book on literary translation (2013). They become something different, embodying the fascination of the non-equivalent, as expressed by Bakhtin (1982) and Venuti (2000). Lawrence’s translations are in a certain sense similar to his travel writings. Eluding any fixed scheme and genre, they seem to get themselves into shape in accordance with the ‘otherness’ the writer is dealing with (Michelucci 2004). In their variety of styles, they are mainly the vehicle for the promotion of a particular culture and reality, by means of an artistic creation which should help the reader to look at that foreign reality as well as at himself from a different perspective, to question his own established, fixed point of view in a process of never-ending learning, experimentation and achievement involving artist and audience. A recurrent word among Verga scholars is ‘pessimism’. Yet in Lawrence’s brilliant essays on the Italian writer there is no mention of the word. For Lawrence, Verga’s greatest achievement was, like Cézanne’s great struggle against the cliché, the re-creation on the page of the naive core of human sensitivity, in its original state, ‘every manifestation of pure, spontaneous, passionate life, life kindled to vividness . . . non-moral and non-didactic’ (IR 287). That is what Lawrence aimed at in rendering and transmitting to an Anglo-American audience Verga’s works. In his brilliant, slightly ironic essays on Verga, Lawrence outlines a particularly complex portrait of the Italian writer, who turns out to be neither idyllic, nor compassionately Christian, nor a celebrator of the poor from a Marxist point of view. For Lawrence, Verga is an extremely modern writer, experimenting with new means of expressions, and able to convey ‘This activity of the mind [which] is strictly timeless, and against time . . . He is doing, as a great artist, what men like James Joyce do only out of contrariness and desire for a sensation’ (IR 173). Lawrence sees Verga as a modern, complex writer, thus anticipating some of the most innovative criticism of the author. Lawrence’s translations from Italian, as well as his rewritings from German and Russian, highlight the creativity of a great artist whose eagerness to go beyond the borders of his own country and culture issued in a cosmopolitanism not basically unlike that of other great modernists. Like several of these, he became a voluntary

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exile finding a new homeland in Italy, where, during his stay in Sicily, he discovered a writer who deeply impressed him – Giovanni Verga. In Lawrence’s translations from his narrative texts the reader finds a superb rendering not only of the local colour, but also of the semi-vernacular language the characters use in dialogues and, in general, of the complexity of Sicilian social texture. Lawrence’s translations unfold the creativity of an artist who was constantly open to new literary experiments which were rooted in a deep knowledge of other cultures, the transmission and sharing of which he always perceived as a never-ending enrichment of his own.

Notes 1. Lawrence also translated the First Story, intended for the Series, but it was never published in his lifetime. It was first published in 1981. 2. The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories by Ivan Bunin was translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (1922); Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev by Maxim Gorky was translated by Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky (1923). Lawrence collaborated on both translations. 3. Despite their intrinsic interest and value, Cambridge University Press decided to leave these translations out of the huge project of publishing The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence, which includes previously unpublished material or former versions of Lawrence’s works, on the basis that they were not his original work. Moreover, Little Novels of Sicily and Mastro-don Gesualdo exist only in the form of printed first editions. 4. Until the Second World War in Italy, ‘voi’ was the common way of addressing people in a respectful, polite way, and it is still widely used in the southern Italian regions. The ‘voi’ form was imposed by Mussolini during his Fascist regime; after the Second World War, it was abolished, replaced by the courtesy form ‘Lei’. ‘Voi’ still survives in rural areas in the south of Italy and in the language of Italian immigrants all over the world. 5. This is the choice of Hall (Verga 1989). J. G. Nichols (Verga 2003) leaves just the proper name, offering nothing for ‘compare’ and ‘gna’. In the latter case, although ‘compare’ is deprived of any semantic meaning, the local colour gets lost in the translation. The early translation by Strettel (Verga 1893) uses ‘Mistress’, which has a particular gender and role connotation, so different from the impersonal and detached ‘gna’ of Verga.

Works Cited Alfieri, Raffaella (2011), ‘Verga traduttore e interprete della parlata siciliana’, in Le nuove forme del dialetto, ed. Gianna Marcato, Padua: Unipress, pp. 291–302. Arnold, Armin (1965), ‘D. H. Lawrence, The Russians and Giovanni Verga’, Comparative Literature Studies, 2:3, pp. 249–57. Arnold, Armin (1968), ‘Genius with a Dictionary: Reevaluating D. H. Lawrence’s Translations’, Comparative Literature Studies, 5:4, pp. 389–401. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1982), The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson, Austin: University of Texas Press. Brown, Catherine (2014), ‘Anglo-German Relations and D. H. Lawrence’s “All of Us”’, On line D. H. Lawrence Birthday Lecture, . Brown, Catherine (2019), ‘“The Young Russian”: Lawrence, Libidnikov and London’s Russians in the First World War’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 5:2, pp. 103–24.

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Cecchetti, Giovanni (1957), ‘Verga and D. H. Lawrence’s Translations’, Comparative Literature, 9, pp. 333–44. Ceramella Nick (1997), ‘D. H. Lawrence Translator of Verga: Challenge and Fascination’, Englishes, 1:1, pp. 17–44. Ceramella, Nick (2003), ‘Getting to Grips with D. H. Lawrence’s Translation of G. Verga’s La roba’, Englishes, 18, pp. 33–60. Ceramella, Nick (2007), ‘Translation and Reception of Lawrence’s Works in Italy: The Story’, in The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Europe, ed. Christa Jansohn and Dieter Mehl, London: Continuum, pp. 92–106. Chambers, Jessie [E. T.] (1980), D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chomel, Luisetta (1980), ‘Verga: A Note on Lawrence’s Criticism’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 13, pp. 275–81. Consiglio, Maria Cristina (2013), ‘Art and the Spirit of Place: D. H. Lawrence Translates Giovanni Verga’, Études Lawrenciennes, 44, pp. 1–17. Corsani, Mary (1966), ‘D. H. Lawrence traduttore dall’italiano’, English Miscellany, 17, pp. 249–78. Costin, Jane (2016), ‘Found in Translation: Lawrence’s Fascination with Verga’s “Red-Headed Brat”’, in D. H. Lawrence: New Critical Perspectives and Cultural Translation, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 239–64. De Zordo, Ornella (1981), Una proposta anglofiorentina degli anni trenta. The Lungarno Series, Firenze: Olschki Editore. De Zordo, Ornella (1992), ‘Lawrence’s Translations of Lasca: A Forgotten Project’, in D. H. Lawrence Critical Assessments, vol. IV, ed. David Ellis and Ornella De Zordo, Mountfield: Helm Informations, pp. 169–78. Eco, Umberto (2013), Dire quasi la stessa cosa, Milan: Bompiani. Ellis, David (1998), D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hyde, G. M. (1981), D. H. Lawrence and the Art of Translation, Basingstoke: MacMillan. Leavis, F. R. (1955), D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, London: Chatto & Windus. Longo, Giorgio, ed. (2004), Lettere al suo traduttore di Giovanni Verga, Catania: Fondazione Verga. Mayer, Elizabeth, ‘An Afternoon with Lawrence’, in A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, ed. Harry T. Moore (1959), Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 141–3. Meyers, Jeffrey (1982), ‘Translations of Verga’, in D. H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 50–71. Michelucci, Stefania (1997), ‘Introduction’ to Twilight in Italy and Other Essays by D. H. Lawrence, ed. Paul Eggert, London: Penguin, pp. xv–xlix. Michelucci, Stefania (2004), ‘L’Espace Perdu: D. H. Lawrence’s Travel Writings’, Studies in Travel Writing, 8, pp. 35–49. Michelucci, Stefania (2019), ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Seduction’, Etruscan Studies, 22:1, pp. 1–14. Motta, Daria (2007), ‘Il tessuto linguistico di Vita dei campi tra grammatica e retorica’, Bollettino del Centro di studi linguistici e filologici siciliani, 21, pp. 409–90. Murry, John Middleton (1916), Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study, BiblioLife. Pallottino, Massimo (1985), ‘Scienza e poesia alla scoperta dell’Etruria’, in D. H. Lawrence, Paesi Etruschi, Siena: Nuova Immagine editrice, pp. 9–26. Pollnitz, Christopher and David Cram (2001), ‘D. H. Lawrence as Verse Translator’, Cambridge Quarterly, 30:2, pp. 133–50. Russo, Luigi (1995), Giovanni Verga, Bari: Laterza.

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Schäfer, Heinrich, trans. (1903), Die Lieder eines Ägyptischen Bauern, Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung. Traficante, Antonio (2007), D. H. Lawrence’s Italian Travel Literature and Translations of Verga: A Bakhtinian Reading, New York: Peter Lang. Venuti, Lawrence (2000), The Translation Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge. Verga, Giovanni (c.1890), The House by the Medlar Tree, trans. Mary A. Craig, introd. W. D. Howells, New York and London: Harper & Brothers. Verga, Giovanni (1893), Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Tales of Sicilian Peasant Life, trans. Alma Strettell, London: T. Fisher Unwin. Verga, Giovanni (1925), Little Novels of Sicily, trans. D. H. Lawrence, London: William Heinemann. Verga, Giovanni (1973), The She-Wolf and Other Stories, trans. Giovanni Cecchetti, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Verga, Giovanni (1979), Tutte le Novelle, ed. Carla Riccardi, Milan: Mondadori. Verga, Giovanni (1987), Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories, trans. D. H. Lawrence, London: Dedalus. Verga, Giovanni (1989), Italian Stories: A Dual-Language Book, trans. Robert A. Hall, New York: Dover. Verga, Giovanni (1992), Mastro-don Gesualdo, ed. Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Turin: Einaudi. Verga, Giovanni (2000), Mastro-don Gesualdo, trans. D. H. Lawrence, London: Dedalus. Verga, Giovanni (2003), Giovanni Verga: Life in the Country, trans. J. G. Nichols, London: Hesperus. Zytaruk, George (1970), The Quest for Rananim: D. H. Lawrence’s Letters to Koteliansky 1914–1930, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.

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7 Biblical Aesthetics Shirley Bricout

Introduction

I

n A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE AS LITERATURE, David Norton claims that D. H. Lawrence ‘is arguably the most Biblical major writer of the twentieth century’ (2000: 390). While other writers such as T. S. Eliot or James Joyce may qualify for this title, it is undeniable that, thanks to his religious upbringing and continual engagement with theological works, Lawrence’s extensive knowledge of the Bible pervades his entire oeuvre. He was born into a religious family, his maternal grandfather George Beardsall (1825–99) being a Wesleyan lay preacher (Sagar 2003: 12), and he received a thorough religious education in the Congregationalist church to which his mother had converted. Members of the church acquired Biblical fluency thanks to sermons which involved the Bible being read aloud to the congregation and also thanks to private readings of the Scriptures at home, as exemplified in Sons and Lovers, for instance, when Paul Morel reads Miriam a chapter from the Gospel According to St John (268). Lawrence comments on his religious upbringing in Apocalypse, written at the end of his life, when he remembers how ‘these “portions” of the Bible were douched over the mind and consciousness’ (A 59). In the novel The Boy in the Bush, which Lawrence co-authored with Mollie Skinner, the main character Jack Grant has a similar upbringing which leaves him fascinated with the ‘bible-language’ (8), the hyphen signalling the aesthetic specificity of the Biblical text. Lawrence’s own fascination is coupled with a resentment of what he called ‘the pompous snoring of the old Elizabethan language and the parson’s voice combined’ (A 153), which, in his view, obscured the Bible’s potential splendour. Indeed, Lawrence was mainly raised on the impressive work of translation into English known as the King James Version or the Authorized Version (1611), whose translators were urged on in their revision work by a desire to convey the literary qualities of the authoritative Hebrew and Greek texts they were using. While rendering the overall stately vigour of the verses, they made aesthetic choices to translate the parallelisms, the superlatives and Hebrew idiomatic expressions such as ‘Holy of Holies’ and ‘King of Kings’ (Norton 2000: 420–5). Lawrence was deeply aware of the specific cadence and phrasing of Biblical language, which, he said, ‘has a power of echoing and re-echoing in my unconscious mind’ (A 55). Lawrence’s own response to the Bible evolved at a time when new exegetical debates were taking place. These involved paying more attention to the ‘literary language of the Bible’, as argued by critic and professor Matthew Arnold in Literature and Dogma, which was first published in 1873 (1903: 36). Lawrence’s biographers

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agree that his personal beliefs were upset and shaped by the many publications available to him. In an oft-quoted letter to the Reverend Robert Reid in October 1907, Lawrence mentions that over the past year he has read Robert Blatchford’s God and My Neighbour (1904), Ernest Renan’s The Life of Jesus (1864) and the Congregationalist Reginald John Campbell’s The New Theology (1907), among others (1L 36–7). Besides shedding new light on the Christian dogma, these works also initiated a closer scrutiny of the base texts of Bible translations. Renan, whose book Paul and Miriam also read in Sons and Lovers (267), foregrounds the aesthetic value of the original texts when he writes of Jesus: But the true poetry of the Bible, which escaped the puerile exegetists of Jerusalem [the Pharisees], was fully revealed to his grand genius . . . the religious lyrics of the Psalms were in marvellous accordance with his poetic soul; they were, all his life, his food and sustenance. (1864: 57) Works such as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), Helena Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine (1888) and John Pryse’s The Apocalypse Unsealed (1910) gave Lawrence new insights into the sources and workings of Biblical symbols. And indeed, attention has been paid to how his extensive reading shaped his engagement with the Bible. James Cowan (1970) was a pioneer in pointing to Biblical resonances, focusing on The Plumed Serpent, while Virginia Hyde (1992) provides an extensive study of Biblical paradigms throughout Lawrence’s oeuvre, highlighting how imagery and symbols, as well as characters and places and their representation in religious art, are grafted onto his text. In D. H. Lawrence and the Bible (2000), Terry Wright also contributes an insightful analysis of what he calls Lawrence’s ‘struggle’ with the Bible, likewise stressing the symbolic development of typological characters such as Adam, Eve and Christ. While Lawrence’s works reflect both his Biblical fluency and his rejection of orthodox interpretations, they also bear witness to his distinctively intimate engagement with Biblical aesthetics. Taking a fresh approach to Lawrence’s attitude to the Bible, this chapter sets out to reassess his formal and thematic borrowings from the King James Version in the light of his own remarks on the substrata that underlie the Bible he grew up with. Lawrence weaves Biblical phrases so intricately into his texts that it is only possible to provide a brief overview here. This will begin with the influence of the Old Testament, which reveals Lawrence’s enthusiasm for the Hebrew forms of poetry that the diction and syntax of the King James Version convey. Then the discussion turns to parables as an aesthetic genre, which grants Lawrence’s characters a new outlook on the world. Finally, the chapter examines Lawrence’s conviction that the Book of Revelation grew out of older pagan texts depicting cosmic cycles.

The Old Testament Lawrence’s own remarks on Biblical aesthetics, recorded in a deleted ‘Fragment’ of his Apocalypse written in 1929, can be read against his appropriation of distinctive features of the Old Testament. First referring to the King James Version as a whole, Lawrence criticises the Elizabethan language for its ‘gorgeous noise’ (A 153), the oxymoron conveying his ambivalent response to the Bible he grew up with. He celebrates James Moffatt’s version, a single volume comprising both testaments published in

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1926, for divesting the Bible of its Elizabethan style and retrieving the original poetic vibrancy of the texts available to the translators. He says of one of the main prophetic books of the Old Testament that ‘The beauty of Isaiah is even greater, now it is more intelligible, the loss of that Elizabethan gilding gives it its own poetry’. Throughout his discussion of the aesthetic features of both versions, Lawrence clearly displays his knowledge of Jewish poetry and his sensitivity to the rhythmic flow of the Hebrew language. He had been introduced to Jewish poetry by his friend Samuel Koteliansky, a Russian Jew, who celebrated Christmas 1914 in Chesham with the Lawrences. As Frieda Lawrence recalls, ‘Koteliansky sang soulfully his Hebrew song: “Ranani Sadekim Badanoi”’ (1935: 81). The same deleted ‘Fragment’, called ‘Fragment 1’ in the Cambridge Edition of Apocalypse, expresses the interest Lawrence takes in the substratum of the translations. He explains that the original vibrancy of the Bible is clearly embedded in the beauty of Hebrew poetry based on repetitions with variations, a form of poetry called ‘parallelism’ that both versions of the Bible he is discussing attempt to translate. ‘Because the second line re-echoes the first in a parallel image, how curiously satisfying it can be, once one enters the image-rhythm of it’, he writes, stressing ‘the perpetual yet unexpected antiphony, like the strong heart-beat followed by the weak’ (A 153). Such parallelisms occur mainly in the Psalms but recur throughout the Old Testament (Alter 1987a: 611–2, 622–3). Ironically, though, after celebrating Moffatt’s translation, Lawrence gives an example of a syntactic parallelism taken from the King James Version. He insists on the musicality of the parallel structure in Psalm 127: 1: ‘Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ Moffatt’s version of the same psalm reads perhaps less felicitously because of the discordant wording in the final clause: ‘Unless the Eternal builds the house, workmen build in vain; unless the Eternal guards the town, sentries are on guard in vain.’1 The parallelisms to be found in Lawrence’s works disrupt the narrative flow at a moment of reflection, and either belong to a specific Biblical verse he is referring to or, in some instances, are Lawrence’s own. In Kangaroo, for instance, after a pause in a conversation, the eponymous character resumes the discussion by expressing an aphorism, ‘Man that is born of woman is sick of himself. Man that is born of woman is tired of his day after day’ (121), which echoes the verse from the Book of Job (14: 1): ‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble’. Lawrence’s use of Biblical parallelisms also conveys the poignancy of a situation or the force of an argument because of the solemn tone this aesthetic feature builds up. Kangaroo, lying on his deathbed, begs Somers to give in to his love, pleading, ‘Don’t harden your heart. Don’t stiffen your neck before your old Jewish Kangaroo’ (K 325). This semantic and syntactic parallelism resonates with the Biblical account of the rebellion of one of the kings of Judah: ‘but he stiffened his neck, and hardened his heart from turning unto the LORD God of Israel’ (2 Chr. 36: 13). Lawrence also capitalises on this rhythmic structure to build parallelisms of his own. In Kangaroo, when Somers, Lawrence’s alter ego, recalls his harrowing experience at the military conscription centres, his anger comes to a climactic pitch with a syntactic parallelism of Lawrence’s own making: ‘And because they had handled his private parts, and looked into them, their eyes should burst and their hands should wither and their hearts should rot’ (255). The use of the conjunction ‘and’ and the parallel constructions endow the curse with the

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typically Biblical rhythm, while the curse itself refers to the story of Noah punishing his son for making fun of his nakedness: ‘And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren’ (Gen. 9: 25). Similarly in The Plumed Serpent when Don Ramón burns Christian votive artefacts, Lawrence introduces a semantic and syntactic parallelism of his own to enhance the solemnity of the event: ‘Underneath, a pile of faggots ready; and at the side, a pile of faggots’ (285). Lawrence engages extensively with the poetry of the Old Testament in his play titled David, which Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen rightly perceive as his ‘most Bible-influenced work’ (Plays lxxi). Written in 1925 while he was travelling in New Mexico and Mexico between bouts of serious illness, his play follows the Biblical account of how the prophet Samuel was sent to identify David, a shepherd boy, as the successor to King Saul and how this choice affected David and Saul (1 Sam. 16–22). Many Psalms correspond with these events in David’s life, and Lawrence quotes from them freely for his own purposes, for instance when he borrows the rhythm and last clause from Psalm 20: 6, ‘he will hear him from his holy heaven with the saving strength of his right hand’, to write in his play that ‘We live our lives as men, by the strength of our right hand’ (Plays 444). Hebrew superlatives are also used, as in ‘prophet of prophets’ (437). Lawrence’s pastiche imitates the sonority and rhythm of the King James Version which echoed over and over in his mind; nonetheless, as far as content was concerned, he may have had to rely on the Revised Version (1881–5) and the American Standard Version (1901), both being more available on the American continent (Plays lxix).2 It should be noted, though, that, contrary to the Book of Samuel, where dialogue is a dramatic means for God to communicate with the prophet, in the play a monologue conjures up a more animist and cosmic divinity. This major formal shift, which so far has passed unnoticed, displays Lawrence’s endeavour ‘to get behind the Bible story’ (Plays lxxi) and to advocate a cosmic relationship with the divine. Scene 2 provides the most extensive example of this aesthetic choice. What was a sustained dialogue in which God gives orders and advice to Samuel (1 Sam. 16: 1–7) is turned into an intent prayer couched in a conflation of images and hyperboles borrowed from the Old Testament. For instance, in David, Samuel’s God is a mysterious force entreated to ‘Speak to me out of the whirlwind’ (Plays 442), a reference to Job 38: 1, which reads, ‘Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind’. God speaks from the ‘deep’ (Psalm 42: 7), he moves upon the ‘wings’ (Psalm 139: 9) and is ‘like waters’ (Plays 442), echoing ‘He is as swift as the waters’ (Job 24: 18). Such Biblical metaphors drawn from natural forces, in particular from the strength of the ocean, subtly combine with ‘elements of North American Indian animistic religion concerning the life of Fire, Water, Thunder, Light, Dark, etc.’ (Plays 658), with which Lawrence became fascinated after he attended Native American ceremonies. The pastiche incorporates the cyclical quality of Hebrew imagery at which Lawrence also marvels in the Book of Revelation as discussed below. However, contrary to Lawrence’s hopes, the reception of the play, which was staged in 1926, was disappointing. In his review of the play published in The Spectator, Martin Secker remarks on the presence of Old Testament imagery, arguing that it sometimes borders on the ridiculous (1926: 18). To illustrate his point, he quotes the line ‘my limbs swell like boughs that put forth buds’ (Plays 458), substituting ‘riot’ for ‘put’. The line could be inspired by ‘Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and

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bring forth boughs like a plant’ (Job 14: 9), but the association of limbs with boughs and swelling is Lawrence’s. A feature that also echoed over and over in Lawrence’s mind is the stately rhythm of the King James Version, built on a deliberately repeated use of the conjunction ‘and’ in addition to the characteristic repetitions with variations. In his contribution to The Literary Guide to the Bible, Gerald Hammond remarks that contrary to what had been done previously, in particular in the Vulgate, ‘The Authorized Version’s translators, rather than reducing the percentage of simple coordination, actually intensified it’ (1987: 659), as had the earlier translator William Tyndale, in order to follow the original’s ordering and disposition of clauses. Such cadences are also a distinct feature of Lawrence’s novel writing. The Rainbow, for instance, which critics concur in considering as Lawrence’s most Biblical novel, accommodates aesthetic features of Old Testament books such as Genesis and Exodus to depict the subtle shift from a unified agricultural society to individual modern experience. In The Making of the English Bible, Benson Bobrick quotes extensively from the first page of the novel in order to give the full scale of the impact of the translation commissioned by King James I (2001: 269–71). Indeed, the opening of The Rainbow brings to mind the sonority of the Book of Genesis as it sketches the relentless generations of Brangwens toiling the land. Phrases like ‘So the Brangwens came and went . . . But heaven and earth was teeming around them’ (R 9) echo the account of the Creation, and in particular the verse ‘Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them’ (Gen. 2: 1). The pronoun ‘They’, repeated at the beginning of nine sentences in the opening depiction of the Brangwen generations (R 9–10), further suggests the cycles of life and resonates with the Biblical account of the descendants of Noah settling on their land before the construction of the tower of Babel: ‘And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said to one another . . . And they said’ (Gen. 11: 2–4). As Virginia Hyde has skilfully shown, Genesis, which provides the novel’s eponymous symbol, is a recurrent typological source used to depict the Brangwens’ collective and individual strife in the face of modernity. The story of Noah and the flood, for instance, works both thematically and structurally in the plot, the patriarch Tom Brangwen’s death by drowning marking the end of the organic primitive world and the start of the modern one in which his granddaughters grow into emancipated women. The act of creation is deemed worthy of artistic representation in its own right when Will Brangwen finds in his carving an aesthetic means to convey his understanding of the creation of Eve narrated in Genesis 2: 22: ‘And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.’ In several passages couched in Biblical language, Will’s artistic production is depicted in paratactic sentences with variations recalling the poetry of psalmic parallel structures which urge the narrative flow forward, as details about Eve’s body pile up – for example, ‘he sent the chisel over her belly, her hard, unripe, small belly’ (R 112). Two angels frame the carving like the cherubs in the Old Testament who stand over God’s Ark of the Covenant (Ex. 37: 7–9). The angels are introduced with rhythmic variations, ‘At the sides, at the far sides, at either end’ (R 113), which resonate with the instructions given by God to his people to build the lid of the Ark of the Covenant called the mercy

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seat, ‘One cherub on the end on this side, and another cherub on the other end on that side’ (Ex. 37: 8). In fact, by modelling the body of Eve, Will attempts to master the tension between man and woman that he experiences with Anna, whom he courts and then marries. The mise en abyme becomes all the more significant as Will is carving the creation of woman while his own awareness of Anna matures. However, the carving scenes also disclose the specific compositional disparities of the Book of Genesis itself (Fokkelman 1987: 36), which contribute to its aesthetic features. Indeed, because of the heterogeneity of its source texts, multiple, and sometimes conflicting, voices can be heard in the Book of Genesis. Therefore, in The Rainbow, Anna’s criticism of the size of the figures, Eve being small compared to Adam ‘as big as God’ (162), introduces an antagonistic viewpoint in the narrative and can bring to mind the fact that another Biblical verse contradicts, or complements, the story of the creation of woman that Will is carving. The very size of the figures, which places man above woman, exemplifies the prominence given to the Biblical account where Eve is created after man, over a dissimilar, and probably older, version which ‘incorporates the fundamental equality of man and woman’ in Genesis 1:27 (Fokkelman 1987: 45). The latter verse reads ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them’. Similarly baulking at the inequality implied in Genesis 2:22, the American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton discusses the significance of Genesis 1:27 in The Woman’s Bible (1895), of which Lawrence may have known through his politically committed acquaintances Sallie Hopkin and Alice Dax: The first account dignifies woman as an important factor in the creation, equal in power and glory with man. The second makes her a mere afterthought. The world in good running order without her. The only reason for her advent being the solitude of man. (2010: 3) Thus, in The Rainbow, the discrepancy between the verses caused by the heterogeneous source texts of the Book of Genesis is evoked through an aesthetic rendition of the Creation of Eve. In fact, the disparities between the two accounts from the Book of Genesis have given rise to various interpretations including the legend of Lilith, Adam’s first wife according to Kabbalistic allegory and theosophical tradition, about which Lawrence also learned. Lawrence’s sustained appropriations of aesthetic features from the Old Testament not only refer the reader back to the Bible with which he grew up, they also point to the aesthetic choices of the authors of the base texts and of the translators seeking to express an outlook on the world. This is also true of parables, a literary genre to be found in both the Old and New Testaments.

The Parables The word ‘parable’ is a Greek term which translates the Hebrew ‘mashal’, meaning both enigma and proverb. Meaning is delayed since ‘the parables raise questions, unsettle the complacent and challenge the hearers to reflection and inquiry’ (Green et al. 2011: 577). Thanks to their aesthetic features founded on a simple plot, comparison, hyperbole, paradox and also parallelisms, parables acquire the potency to elicit

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a personal response to the ethical agenda they map out. David Gowler convincingly argues that parables can function similarly to works of visual art . . . especially to paintings that use chiaroscuro (dramatic variations of light and shade), because parables can illuminate some things as clear as day, whereas other elements – because of the nature of the parabolic word – remain (deliberately?) in the shadows. (2017: 255; original parentheses) Acknowledging their affiliation to oral traditions, today Bible scholars agree that parables ‘like other great works of art challenge our hearts, minds and imaginations’ (xii). In Women in Love, the story of Ruth from the Old Testament challenges Birkin and Gerald to change their outlook on Ursula and her sister Gudrun. Invited by Hermione to Breadalby, her family estate, the sisters and the Contessa dress up to enact the story of Ruth the Moabite who, on being widowed, refuses to leave her mother-in-law Naomi to go back to her people (WL 91–2). The Book of Ruth is celebrated for its beauty, and features prominently in James Frazer’s Passages of the Bible Chosen for their Literary Beauty and Interest (1895), that Lawrence may have known in addition to other works (2L 470). Frazer’s gloss on the aesthetic quality of passages from the Book of Ruth is the longest of his notes on his chosen pieces. One of his comments reads, ‘the author is an artist who takes manifest delight in the touching and graceful details of his picture, and is not simply guided by a design to impart historical information about David’s ancestors, or enforce some particular lesson’ (Frazer 1895: 431–2). Moreover, Bible scholar John Crossan argues that although the Book of Ruth may at first qualify as an ‘example parable’, since Ruth’s faithful devotion to her mother-in-law sets a model, it also qualifies as a ‘challenge parable’, because it introduces the subversive idea of exogamous marriages (2012: 73–4). In Women in Love, the beauty of this Biblical story is transferred onto the sisters as they enact devotion to one another. Echoing the Biblical phrasing ‘but Ruth clave unto her’ (Ruth 1: 14), the verbs ‘clung’ and ‘cleaving’ are repeated four times in Lawrence’s depiction (WL 91–2) and conjure up Naomi and Ruth’s inner strength generated by their mutual attachment in the face of sorrow, rather than a surrender to weakness and abandonment. The parable’s potency is clearly embedded in Lawrence’s text since Birkin and Gerald learn to read the sisters and experience their beauty, the paradox being that the sisters have donned veils to conjure up the world of the Old Testament. The rhetorical strength of the genre is put to full use elsewhere when Lawrence appropriates parables attributed to Jesus. Such appropriations mostly refer back to the orthodox interpretation of the parables, although their imagery may be demoted or, conversely, elevated through parody or pastiche. The Parable of the Ten Virgins is a case in point. The wise virgins who had made provision of oil ‘took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom’ (Matt. 25: 1), while the foolish virgins found they had no oil for their lamps when ‘at midnight there was a cry made, Behold the bridegroom cometh’ (25: 6). Consequently, the bridegroom denied the foolish virgins entry to his house. In Aaron’s Rod, the parable is derided in the course of a conversation at a Florentine restaurant when Aaron’s acquaintance makes fun of the need for enlightenment that they are debating, jeering at the parabolic metaphor, ‘Sit in the

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dark to save the lamp-oil! . . . When the bridegroom cometh—!’ (215). Conversely, in The Plumed Serpent, the paradigms of knocking and denying entry in the same parable provide images for a ceremonial song. ‘Hear a voice saying: I know you not!’ (195) paraphrases the bridegroom’s refusal to let the foolish virgins in: ‘Verily I say unto you, I know you not’ (Matt. 25: 12). Similarly, Kangaroo taps into parabolic metaphors and comparisons, when Somers and Kangaroo conflate the Parable of the Wheat and Tares with that of the House on the Rock, each protagonist borrowing in turn from the didactic imagery to make their point about the Australians they are discussing (131–2). The former parable (Matt. 13: 24–30) likens the sorting of those who may inherit God’s kingdom from those who cannot to the separate harvesting of wheat and tares or weed, and provides the imagery of ‘stalks of corn’, ‘robust stalks’ and ‘corn-stalks’ at the beginning of Somers and Kangaroo’s discussion. The parable’s imagery then blends in with the images of the Parable of the House on the Rock (Matt. 7: 24–7), when Somers asks, ‘Build a straw castle? . . . What do you expect to build on’ (K 131). In the parable, the wise man built his house on the rock whereas the foolish one built his on sand only to see it washed away by the floods. So, in the novel’s chapter aptly named ‘Battle of Tongues’, an aesthetic balance is achieved in the dialogue when Kangaroo and Somers in turn appropriate a parabolic metaphor and extend it to hold their ground. Paradoxically, the characteristic imagery of the parabolic genre can become the aesthetic means to actually write off Christian interpretations. In The Rainbow, Ursula’s struggling with the Parable of the Camel and the Eye of the Needle (Matt. 19: 23–6) provides conclusive evidence of how Lawrence’s characters seek to discard orthodox meanings in order to lay bare alternative ones (257–8). How to read the parable becomes the main issue for Ursula when its literal and figurative meanings compete with one another. In Christian thought, parables conceal the meaning to the unbelieving while the disciples are granted insight, a dichotomy accounted for by Jesus when he answered the question ‘Why speakest thou unto them in parables?’ (Matt. 13: 10). The confusion between the Greek term ‘kamēlon’ meaning ‘camel’ and ‘kamilon’ meaning ‘rope’ (Bailey 1983: 165–6) intensifies the paradox contained in the parabolic imagery of a camel passing through the eye of a needle, unless the ‘eye of a needle’ is understood as the name given to a small gateway for foot passengers, as Ursula has been taught. Discussing Lawrence’s religious schooling, Margaret Masson provides interesting insights into how the sermons delivered by the Reverend Reid at Eastwood Chapel conformed to Congregationalist rationalistic interpretations in their ‘assumption that everything must be expounded and explained and converted into what can be justified as morally valuable’ (1990: 67). In The Rainbow, while Ursula’s soliloquy foregrounds her knowledge of historicist modes of criticism mediated through the sermons, these are deliberately put aside in order to reflect on the splendour that Jesus’s audience experienced aesthetically on hearing the parables first hand, in the world of that day. The use of hyperbole conjures up what Ursula calls the ‘Eastern mind’ (R 258), with its own outlook on the world and aesthetic modes of expression. The oral mode of communication which enhances the rhythmic balance of the parabolic parallelism is foregrounded in the novel as Ursula remembers the preacher’s authoritative voice. Indeed, the phrase ‘Again she heard the Voice’ (257) precedes the parallel rhythmic wording of the enigma, which

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runs ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’ (Matt. 19: 24). While Ursula wonders about its literal and figurative interpretations, the parable acquires potency within Lawrence’s narrative, granting her a glimpse of the splendour of a world within the Biblical text, similar to Paul Ricoeur’s description of ‘a proposed world which I could inhabit and in which I could project . . . my ownmost possibilities’ (1981: 72). ‘It means the Absolute World, and can never be more than half interpreted in terms of the relative world’, Ursula concludes (R 258). The parabolic potency based on its aesthetic features is in line with that of the Book of Revelation. The tropes and extended imagery that Lawrence borrows from this Biblical book, also known as Apocalypse, endow his own writing with a similar potency, that redefines the very concept of God.

The Book of Revelation In Apocalypse, considerations of the aesthetics of the Book of Revelation contrast modern linear thought with the ‘old pagan process of rotary image-thought’ (95), which, Lawrence believes, underlies the strata of rewritings from which the book is composed. Interestingly, though, in an earlier draft of his study of the Book of Revelation, Lawrence expounds the same features when he perceives a circular or rotary movement in the Psalms (195). He resolutely identifies such images and the cyclical writing as the aesthetic means to convey a more ancient mode of thinking, from which modern man has become disconnected. Impressive imagery, parallelisms, cyclical sequences and paratactic sentences fashion the aesthetics of the Book of Revelation and its source text, the Book of Ezekiel. Both books belong to apocalyptic literature first identified as a discrete genre by Karl Nitzsch in 1822. The genre’s paradigms were to be evidenced by another German scholar, Friedrich Lücke, in 1832 (Barr 2006: 74). The Book of Revelation, like the Book of Ezekiel, gives a solemn account of a vision, the Greek term ‘apokalypsis’ meaning ‘revelation’, and the verb ‘apokalyptein’ ‘to reveal’, ‘to unveil’. Lawrence was well aware of how these books are deeply related, and in Apocalypse he gives further evidence of how Ezekiel’s vision is influenced by Chaldean astronomy (83). Lawrence’s hymns and poems illustrate how he taps into the aesthetic features of the genre. Indeed, the hymns inserted into his novel The Plumed Serpent provide examples of pastiche of Biblical rhythm and aesthetic balance. Verses from the Book of Revelation are embedded structurally and thematically, for instance, in the fourth hymn, ‘What Quetzalcoatl saw in Mexico’, which narrates the return of the Aztec god: Who are these strange faces in Mexico? ... Where do they come from, and why? Lord of the Two Ways, these are the foreigners. They come out of nowhere. (PS 256) In the corresponding Biblical text, the explanation of the vision that the apocalyptist is granted also comes in the form of a conversation, ‘What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he

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said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation’ (Rev. 7: 13–14). In The Plumed Serpent, the pastiche extends the dialogue, thereby creating an aesthetic balance between questions and answers, the divine presence speaking first. The sequences of questions (who? where?), and of answers with the forms of address ‘Sir’ or ‘Lord’ followed by information about the people’s origin, are strikingly similar. Moreover, in Lawrence’s hymn, the sequence precedes an enumeration of merchandise composed of gold, silver, oil, sugar, maize, coffee and rubber akin to that of another Biblical verse, ‘The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones . . . and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep’ (Rev. 18: 12–13). Lawrence’s pastiche conflates the verses structurally and thematically to announce the return of a pagan god. In more complex ways, Lawrence engages with Biblical imagery and sonority in his poems, and particularly in his Last Poems, which work to reveal the pagan thought processes hidden under the rewritings of the Book of Revelation. Bethan Jones aptly states that ‘it is difficult to consider, analyse and explore Lawrence’s Last Poems without reference to his major prose work, Apocalypse’ (2010: 143), where he devotes a chapter to each apocalyptic symbol, to numbers, to colours, to the dragon and to the woman clothed with the sun. In his poems, Lawrence strives to free such symbols from Christian meanings and to endow them with their original cosmic potency. His sustained reading of Pryse and Carter gave him manifold insights into alternative readings which enabled him to grasp how the Book of Revelation sets to work ‘meaning against meaning’, as he puts it in his ‘Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse by Frederick Carter’ (A 48). In Apocalypse, Lawrence insists on the absence of abstract thought, on the concreteness of everything which enables the artist to find God in plants, in beasts and also in objects. Thus, as a poet, Lawrence aspires to depict a religious experience. Accordingly, his poem ‘Red Geranium and Godly Mignonette’ ponders the potency of thought in the act of creation. A ‘yearning . . . for some other beauty’ (1Poems 604) is the urge that leads to creation, not the thought of the flower itself. So creation is first and foremost an aesthetic act that the poet can achieve thanks to a cosmic vision. That is why, throughout the poems about the gods in Pansies, Nettles and ‘The “Nettles” Notebook’, the motif of vision as revelation remains pervasive, signalling an aesthetic continuity that advertises the cyclical exploratory movement of writing. ‘Invocation to the Moon’ provides significant evidence of the influence of the Book of Revelation (1Poems 609). In this poem, the moon is personified as a woman whose attributes are akin to those of the Biblical ‘woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’ (Rev. 12: 1). The attributes are also those of another Biblical female protagonist called the ‘MOTHER OF HARLOTS’ ‘decked with gold and precious stones’ (Rev. 17: 4–5). In Apocalypse, Lawrence identifies the former woman as the ‘cosmic Mother robed and splendid’ (120) ‘crowned with all the signs of the zodiac’ (A 121), the Magna Mater of pagan tradition. He conflates the two Biblical women, the one clothed with the sun and the great whore (Rev. 12: 1 and 17: 5), and ends the chapter devoted to them by railing against the writing over that, he claims, the original pagan text went through: ‘They can’t bear even to let the sun and the moon exist, these horrible salvationists’ (A 122). In ‘Invocation to the Moon’, Lawrence aestheticises his quest for a cosmic reading of the Book of Revelation. The moon is restored to its rightful place in the cosmos thanks

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to the poet’s aesthetic engagement with the vocabulary and sonority of the Biblical book. As Elise Brault-Dreux has shown, the adjunction of the suffix ‘less’, expressing loss, removes the woman’s adornments so that she is left ‘crownless’, ‘jewelless’ and ‘garmentless’, a reversal of the Biblical depictions. Thanks to this aesthetic choice, the moon can regain its potency, since the poet ‘strips’ (‘déshabille’, Brault-Dreux 2014: 208) the language of the Biblical verses devoted to the descriptions of the women (Rev. 12: 1 and 17: 4) in order to lay bare original pagan image-thought. In this way, the poem turns into a pagan celebration of cosmic forces. Bringing the first-person narrator of this poem more prominently into focus, I would argue moreover that he is depicted as being on the threshold of a new religious experience of becoming ‘a healed, whole man’ (1Poems 609). The transformations the terms from the Apocalypse have undergone pertain to the process leading up to the epiphany, but the apostrophe ‘you’ and the narrator’s begging are traces of the moon’s remoteness; the poet can only yearn to approach the cosmic body, just as he yearns to reveal the pagan origin of the symbols through his aesthetic engagement with Biblical language. The poet, standing at the gate, pleads again and again for admittance, the constant repetitions with variations recalling psalmic parallel structures, ‘Now I am at your gate . . . / Now I must enter your mansion’ (1Poems 609). These repetitions with variations endow Lawrence’s writing with a cyclical quality recalling the concept of rotary image-thought that he praises. The cyclical movement is akin to the Hebrew poetic form known as the ‘envelope structure’, ‘a structure popular in many Biblical genres in which significant terms introduced at the beginning are brought back prominently at the end’ (Alter 1987b: 255). In this way, cycles are indeed structurally and thematically embedded in Lawrence’s poem, since the envelope structure launches a cycle, with the repetition of ‘glistening’ to be found in the first and last lines: ‘You beauty, O you beauty / you glistening garmentless beauty . . . and watched for your glistening feet down the garden path!’ (1Poems 609). Within this larger cycle, other loops of images develop thanks to repetitions with variations, and in particular that of ‘your silvery house’, ‘lady of the last house’. The latter cycle comprising the repetition of ‘house’ aestheticises the succession of the astrological houses that the poet associates with the moon. These cyclical repetitions embedded in the poem recall how, in Apocalypse, Lawrence links the cycles of the houses of the zodiac to the circularity of the writing in the Book of Revelation, which, according to him, bears traces of the pagan concept of time (97). In ‘Invocation to the Moon’, this pulsing rhythmic quest conveyed in the cyclical movement of writing akin to the Bible’s positions the poet on the threshold of the epiphany he yearns to achieve. The religious experience itself is said to be cyclical since it grants rebirth and since other men, alluded to, for instance, in the poems ‘The Argonauts’ and ‘For the heroes are dipped in Scarlet’ (1Poems 601–2), yearned for and achieved the pagan epiphany in ancient times, long before the poet did.

Conclusion Lawrence’s appropriation of the aesthetic features of the Book of Revelation breaks down the Jewish and Christian rewritings to conjure up a cosmic vision by restoring the original rotary image-thought process both structurally and thematically throughout his Last Poems. He endeavours to create what he called ‘chaos in poetry’, that is,

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poetry that ‘may be apprehended by sense-consciousness rather than a more limited cerebral response’ (Jones 2010: 145). The phrase ‘chaos in poetry’ became the title of Lawrence’s introduction to Chariot of the Sun by Harry Crosby (IR 109), in which he details his belief in an aesthetic epiphany that enables man to re-establish harmonious relations with the cosmos. Thus, his creative enterprise can be said to stem from an epistemological stance that redefines the very idea of God. As discussed above, this also applies to his prose. Lawrence commented on his own repetitive style in his ‘Foreword to Women in Love’ (1919), explaining that it seemed very natural to him to induce this ‘pulsing’ rhythm in his prose (WL 486). While this ‘pulsing’ rhythm may well stem from the influence of the King James Version, manifestly Lawrence’s extended knowledge of the Bible set him free from the hold of its orthodox theological claims and spurred his artistic creativity. Lawrence aestheticised his own understanding of Biblical thought to advocate a turn from religion as creed to religion as epiphanic experience. His engagement with Biblical aesthetics assuredly conveys his personal sense of the religious experience through art.

Notes 1. All further quotations from the Bible in this chapter are from the King James Version. 2. The differences between these versions, both revisions of the King James Version, lie in word-order and paragraph divisions, and also in more accessible lexical choices and contemporary grammar (see also Bielby 2014: 88–96). Moreover, Moffatt introduced different typefaces in his Bible, mentioned above, according to which author he identified as having written a specific portion. This was of particular interest to Lawrence, since in Moffatt’s Book of Revelation italics signal the Book of Ezekiel as the source of many of its phrases and images.

Works Cited Alter, Robert (1987a), ‘The Characteristics of Ancient Hebrew Poetry’, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, Cambridge: Belknap Press, pp. 611–24. Alter, Robert (1987b), ‘Psalms’, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, Cambridge: Belknap Press, pp. 244–62. Arnold, Matthew (1903), Literature and Dogma, New York: Macmillan. Bailey, Kenneth (1983), Poet & Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Barr, David, ed. (2006), The Reality of Apocalypse: Rhetoric and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Houston: Society of Biblical Literature. The Bible: King James Authorized Version (1997), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bielby, Nicholas (2014), ‘A Babel of Bibles’: Aesthetics, Translation and Interpretation since 1885, in The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts, ed. Stephen Prickett, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 88–103. Bobrick, Benson (2001), The Making of the English Bible, New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Brault-Dreux, Elise (2014), Le ‘je’ et ses masques dans la poésie de D. H. Lawrence, Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Cowan, James (1970), D. H. Lawrence’s American Journey: A Study in Literature and Myth, Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University. Crossan, John Dominic (2012), The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus, New York: HarperOne.

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Fokkelman, Jan Peter (1987), ‘Genesis’, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, Cambridge: Belknap Press, pp. 36–55. Frazer, James (1895), Passages of the Bible Chosen for their Literary Beauty and Interest, London: A & C Black. Gowler, David (2017), The Parables after Jesus: Their Imaginative Receptions across Two Millennia, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Green, Joel B., Jacqueline E. Lapsley, Rebekah Miles and Allen Verhey, eds (2011), The Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Hammond, Gerald (1987), ‘English Translations of the Bible’, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, Cambridge: Belknap Press, pp. 647–66. Hyde, Virginia Crosswhite (1992), The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology, Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Jones, Bethan (2010), The Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence: Shaping a Late Style, Farnham: Ashgate. Lawrence, Frieda (1935), Not I, But the Wind . . ., London: Heinemann. Masson, Margaret Jane (1990), ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Congregational Inheritance’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 22, pp. 53–68. Moffatt, James (1994), The Bible: James Moffatt Translation, Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Classics. Norton, David (2000), A History of the English Bible as Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Renan, Ernest (1864), The Life of Jesus, London: Trübner & Co. Ricoeur, Paul (1981), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sagar, Keith (2003), The Life of D. H. Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography, London: Chaucer. Secker, Martin (1926), ‘David. A Play by D. H. Lawrence’, The Spectator, 28 August, p. 18. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (2010), The Woman’s Bible, Seattle, WA: Pacific Publishing Studio. Wright, Terry R. (2000), D. H. Lawrence and the Bible, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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8 Historiography and Life Writing Andrew Harrison

Introduction

S

urprisingly little attention has been paid to D. H. Lawrence’s engagement with historiography; that is, with the writing of history and the study of history as an academic discipline. Available discussions of Lawrence and history have tended to focus in a rather narrow manner either on Movements in European History (1921), the school history textbook which Lawrence wrote for Oxford University Press, or on his treatment of historical events or historical processes in his fiction. There has been no attempt to take a broader view of these distinct aspects of his historiographical practice or to relate them to his interest in (and production of) other historiographical forms such as autobiography, biography, fictional biography, and the various hybrid historical fictions now discussed under the term ‘auto/biografiction’. In this chapter I will situate Lawrence’s historiographical writing in its early twentieth-century context, focusing on key debates in the period, firstly about the nature of history as an academic discipline and mode of writing, and secondly – and relatedly – about life writing.

Historiography: ‘The old bad history is abolished’ One of the most prominent theoretical debates in historiography at the turn of the twentieth century addressed the question of whether history is an art or a science. On 26 January 1903, J. B. Bury delivered his inaugural address as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. His title was ‘The Science of History’. Bury described the ‘transformation and expansion of history’ by late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century German historians such as Friedrich August Wolf, Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Leopold von Ranke; he stated that these historians had given succeeding generations ‘the idea of a systematic and minute method of analysing their sources, which soon developed into the microscopic criticism, now recognised as indispensable’, and he noted that for his own generation the ‘idea of a scrupulously exact conformity to facts’ had been ‘fixed, refined, and canonised’ (1930: 4, 6). He told his audience that ‘history is not a branch of literature’ and ‘literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars’ (9). In fact, the association of history with literature had (in his view) tended to obscure its status as a science. He asserted: History has really been enthroned and ensphered among the sciences; but the particular nature of her influence, her time-honoured association with literature . . . [has] acted as a sort of vague cloud, half concealing from men’s eyes her new position in the heavens. (5)

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For Bury, the danger of viewing history as an art was that, in that case, ‘the sanctions of truth and accuracy could not be severe’ (6). Bury made it quite clear that the responsibility of the science of history was to document, in an objective and selfless way, with minimal reference to ‘one’s own time and place’, the ‘material and spiritual development, of the culture and the works, of man in society, from the stone age upwards’ (16, 19). ‘The Science of History’ received a rebellious reply from the twenty-four-year-old G. M. Trevelyan, who would succeed Bury in his Cambridge post in 1927. In an essay entitled ‘The Latest View of History’, published in the Independent Review for 1903–4, and later reprinted under the title ‘Clio, a Muse’ (1913), Trevelyan made a plea that history should be recognised as an art as well as a science. As Todd Avery comments, Trevelyan seems to have been bothered by ‘the ascendancy of “scientific” historiography’ primarily because, ‘as a symptom of the growing scientization of British culture, it was . . . contributing to the burgeoning scientism of education and a rising distrust of literature as a valid way of knowing’ (2010: 851). Trevelyan was a committed educationalist and he was troubled by history being considered a soft science rather than a discipline which required ‘the accumulation and interpretation of facts’ alongside ‘the whole art of book composition and prose style’ (1913: 34). He argued pragmatically for the importance of art and science to history on the grounds first that as an academic discipline it required both detached analysis of fact and a sympathetic understanding of contextual factors, and second that without art history could have only a niche readership. Trevelyan’s argument for viewing history as both a science and an art seems tame by modern standards. The powerful post-structuralist turn in the 1960s towards a view of history as a constructed narrative form indistinguishable from fiction makes these early twentieth-century debates appear decidedly dated, but in the first three decades of the twentieth century they were very much alive. Lawrence met G. M. Trevelyan in summer 1914, through Trevelyan’s older brother, the poet R. C. (‘Bob’) Trevelyan, and he did not respond well to the former’s committed academic outlook: ‘I met Bob Trevelyan’s elder brother . . . and rather hated him. He’s so God almighty serious. I reckon it’s conceit to be quite so serious: as if he was the schoolmaster and all the world his scholars, poor dear’ (2L 211). However, in the matter of history as a science or an art, Lawrence took a similar line to Trevelyan, arguing for a balanced view that foregrounds the educative value and appeal of history. In July 1918 Lawrence was invited by Oxford University Press to write ‘a school-book, of European History’ (3L 261). Lawrence’s contact at the Press, Vere Collins, had been ‘struck by the knowledge he showed of history’ and suggested that he might write ‘an elementary text-book for junior forms in grammar, or upper forms in primary, schools’ (i.e. for children between approximately ten and thirteen years of age), focusing on Europe because the Ministry of Education was at that time ‘urging schools to do more in teaching European history’ (Nehls 1957: 471). Lawrence was ideally suited to write for a young adolescent readership because of his experience of teaching at Davidson Road Elementary School in Croydon between October 1908 and November 1911. Elementary schools were divided into Standards I to VII, with pupils ranging in ages from five to fourteen; Lawrence was given Standard IV (with an average age on the national scale of around ten to eleven) when he arrived at the school (1L 80). His own training for teaching history while studying for the King’s Scholarship Examination had required him to read textbooks on English history by Cyril

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Ransome (father of Arthur Ransome) and Samuel Rawson Gardiner (Lawrence 1905: 283), so he had a fairly recent appreciation of how history was taught in schools, and an understanding of the textbooks which teachers had at their disposal. The challenge of producing a history textbook for a young readership which must be at once wide-ranging and informative but also accessible and stimulating forced Lawrence to confront the different contemporary approaches to history as an academic discipline. In the foreword to Movements in European History – the ‘Introduction for the Teacher’ – Lawrence notes: At the present moment, history in school must either be graphic or scientific. The old bad history is abolished. The old bad history consisted of a register of facts. It drew up a chart of human events, as one might draw up a chart of the currants in a plum-pudding, merely because they happen promiscuously to be there. No more of this. (7) Lawrence describes ‘graphic’ history as consisting of ‘stories about men and women who appear in the old records, stories as vivid and as personal as may be’. ‘Scientific’ history, on the other hand, is ‘all head’: Having picked out all the currants and raisins of events for our little children, we go to the university and proceed to masticate the dough. We must analyse the mixture and determine the ingredients. Each fact must be established, and put into relation with every other fact. This is the basis of scientific history: the forging of a great chain of logically sequential events, cause and effect demonstrated down the whole range of time. (8) The ‘Introduction’ critiques both the graphic and the scientific approaches to history, noting how the former is liable to make the study of historical figures over into our own understanding, leaving out ‘the impersonal, terrific element, the sense of the unknown’, ‘the strange, vast, terrifying reality of the past’ (7), while the latter is all very well, if we will remember that we are not discovering any sequence of events, we are only abstracting. The logical sequence does not exist until we have made it, and then it exists as a new piece of furniture of the human mind. (8) Lawrence was aware that the intended readers of his textbook demanded a compromise, since they would ‘have had almost enough of stories and anecdotes and personalities’, but ‘not yet reached the stage of intellectual pride in abstraction’ (8). The graphic approach to history requires fact in order to inject into a historical narrative the necessary degree of strangeness and impersonality, while the scientific approach needs imagination to discover logical sequences – or, in Lawrence’s terms, ‘threads’ or ‘movements’ – in recorded data and events. Lawrence’s interest in the history textbook project clearly resided more in the telling of vivid stories and the process of abstracting sequences than it did in the setting down of factual information. At a late stage of his work on the textbook, he declared his dislike of ‘the broken pots of historical facts’ and said that he felt happier when he could discern ‘the thread of the developing significance’ (3L 322). Yet he worked intensively,

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if not always accurately, to establish the factual basis of his account. Philip Crumpton has shown how closely Lawrence relied upon certain historical sources, including ‘Gibbon, Suetonius, Plutarch’s Lives, the translation of The Annals of Tacitus by A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb (1906) and A. J. Grant’s A History of Europe (1913)’, plus Tacitus’s Germania, G. W. Kitchin’s A History of France (1881), Kenneth Bell’s Medieval Europe (1911), R. B. Mowat’s The Later Middle Ages (1917) and Emmeline M. Tanner’s The Renaissance and the Reformation (1908) (MEH xix, xx, xxii, xxiii). He also referred to more imaginative sources such as Thomas Bulfinch’s Legends of Charlemagne (1862) and Joseph Victor von Scheffel’s Ekkehard: A Tale of the Tenth Century (1867) (3L 304, 315). In places the narrative consists of a simple listing of facts and details, as when Lawrence sketches in the early history of Rome: Gradually Rome extended her dominion. In 252 B.C. she took Sicily, her first overseas possession. Then she defeated Carthage in North Africa; then Macedonia, in the Balkan peninsula; then Greece, then Spain, and so on, till the lands of the Mediterranean were under her power. In the year 62 B.C. Pompey the Great returned from the east. He had been as far as the Euphrates, had defeated the Persian Mithridates, who fled to the Crimea, and Syria was added to Rome. In the year 58 B.C. Julius Caesar marched north to Gaul, and across from Gaul he came to Britain. By Gaul we mean the land now occupied by France, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Rhine. (MEH 11–12) Crumpton notes that in a marked-up copy of the first edition somebody at Oxford University Press questioned the date of the taking of Sicily: ‘I suppose this might stand? But 241 B.C. wd. be more accurate’ (287 n.12:1). The historian C. R. L. Fletcher, Fellow of All Souls and a Delegate of Oxford University Press, read the original manuscript of Movements in European History and approved it subject to the correction of ‘some small details of dates and names’ (xxv), and the author and editor V. F. Boyson made further, unauthorised changes to names and dates when the Press was preparing the 1925 illustrated edition. The initial commission was to write not ‘a formal, connected, text book, but a series of vivid sketches of movements and people’ (Nehls 1957: 471). The strength of the book lies precisely in the vividness of its descriptive passages. Very little evidence has survived of Lawrence’s teaching practice, but in a letter of 4 November 1908 he told Blanche Jennings that when he gave Standard IV ‘a history lesson’ they were ‘pretending to shoot arrows at me, drawing back the bow with vigour, and looking at me with brown bright eyes’ (1L 89). We know that in one lesson he got his class to act out the Battle of Agincourt by the division of the classroom into two halves (Healey and Cushman 1985: 132). Lawrence clearly saw the educative value for young minds of connecting with historical events through empathy and imaginative re-enactment. It is in the graphic descriptions of historical experience that Lawrence’s skills as a fictionalist are felt, as when he invokes the trepidation of Roman soldiers as they advanced through deep forests in southern Germany: This Hercynian forest created the greatest impression on the Roman imagination. No one knew how far it stretched. German natives who had travelled through it had gone on for sixty days, without coming to the end of it. In the illimitable

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shadow the pine-trunks rose up bare, the ground was brown with pine-needles, there was no undergrowth. A great silence pervaded everywhere, not broken by the dense whisper of the wind above. Between these shadowy trunks flitted deer, reindeer with branching horns ran in groups, or the great elk, with his massive antlers, stood darkly alone and pawed the ground, before he trotted away into the deepening shadow of trunks. (MEH 45) This kind of immersive historical writing comes close to the style and content of the popular historical romances which Lawrence had greatly cherished in his youth. The extent of Lawrence’s early reading of historical romance is made clear in Chapter IV of Jessie Chambers’s D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, ‘Literary Formation’, in which she lists the texts which fired the young writer’s imagination, from Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth: A Tale of the Middle Ages (1861) and Frederic (‘Dean’) Farrar’s Darkness and Dawn. Or, Scenes in the Days of Nero. An Historic Tale (1891) to R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor (1869). These were read alongside adventure tales by R. L. Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper and Anthony Hope, and stirring poems with historical settings like ‘Hiawatha’ and ‘Evangeline’ by Longfellow, and ‘Morte d’Arthur’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’ by Tennyson, which we know he read and enjoyed (Chambers 1935: 92–6). Jessie records how Lawrence would not only discuss these texts with her, but sometimes actually involve her in enactments of scenes from them. Lawrence’s ability to inhabit and reproduce the form of these historical romance writings and popular adventure narratives underscores his appeal to his young readership in Movements in European History. Lawrence’s most engaging imaginative passages in the book concern peoples who had typically been traduced or marginalised in earlier historical accounts. The same desire is felt in the posthumously-published Sketches of Etruscan Places, which Lawrence wrote in a spirit of opposition to the scholarly accounts of Etruscan civilisation provided by historians such as Theodor Mommsen, George Dennis, Fritz Weege, Pericle Ducati and R. A. L. Fell. Gaps in the historical record were particularly appealing to Lawrence; in February 1916 he asked Lady Ottoline Morrell to send him a history book which was ‘not too big, because I like to fill it in myself, and the contentions of learned men are so irritating’ (2L 529). His descriptions of the ‘Germanic races’ (MEH 44) and the Huns in Movements in European History give details of the family structures and cultures of these groups which seem intended to balance sympathy with a critical awareness of their difference from the reputedly more civilised Romans; he avoids sentimentalising the barbarian warriors, calling them ‘lazy and violent’ (48) and ‘avaricious as demons’ (67), but he stops short of dismissing them or explaining them away in relation to Roman accounts or contemporary norms. In ‘The Science of History’, Bury had argued that the best preparation for truly understanding the past and ‘for investigating its movements, for deducing its practical lessons, is to be brought up in a school where its place is estimated in scales in which the weight of contemporary interest is not thrown’ (1930: 16). Lawrence was aware that ‘each age proceeds to interpret every other age in terms of the current personality’, so that ‘Shakespeare’s Caesar is an Elizabethan, and Bernard Shaw’s is a Victorian, and neither of them is Caesar’; his response was to focus not on ‘our sentiments and our personal feelings’, on ‘cosiness and familiar circumstance’, but on the impersonal ‘surging movements which rose in the hearts of men in Europe, sweeping human beings

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together into one great concerted action, or sweeping them apart for ever on the tides of opposition’ (MEH 7, 8). This epochal understanding of history rests on belief in an underlying mass psychology to elucidate significant historical phenomena. For example, Lawrence explained the catastrophe of the First World War as a mass reaction against the stymied state of safety and self-preservation created in the West by ‘Laws, and all State machinery’: No wonder there is a war. No wonder there is a great waste and squandering of life. Anything, anything to prove that we are not altogether sealed in our own self-preservation as dying chrysalides. Better the light be blown out, wilfully, recklessly, in the wildest wind, than remain secure under the bushel, saved from every draught. (STH 15–16) Such an account reads history in terms of psychological needs rather than politics and personalities. Great men and exceptional individuals interested Lawrence in his writing of history and fiction only in so far as they enabled him to ‘discover whither the general run of mankind, the great unconscious mass, was tending’ (Carswell 1932: 38). The emphasis is not on a Whig version of history which stresses progress and linear historical development, or on a straightforward narrative of evolution and/or degeneration, but on a cyclical view of changing human impulses and ‘Worlds successively created and destroyed’ (MM 14). Unlike H. G. Wells, who argued in The Outline of History (1920) that an inclusive ‘sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind is as necessary for peace within as it is for peace between the nations’ (1920: vi), Lawrence saw conflict and war as necessary and unavoidable features of human life, and the role of history as being to help us grasp their meaning and significance rather than to ameliorate conflicts and prevent further wars. Lawrence’s focus on epochs in history helps to explain the significance of the word ‘Movements’ in his title, Movements in European History. ‘Surging movements’ or tides are recurring and allow one to identify with the human needs and desires which have shaped historical events without losing the recognition of the fundamental strangeness of the past. Lawrence certainly valued historical accounts for the light they shed on contemporary events, but he believed that their educative value in this respect lay solely in our responsiveness to collective experience: Rupert Birkin’s reading of a ‘thick volume of Thucydides’ in Women in Love (105), in the scene in which Hermione Roddice hits him on the head with a lapis lazuli paperweight, indicates the implicit connection Lawrence sensed between the violent collapse of Western civilisation in the First World War and the fall of ancient Greece. In this tragi-comic scene the domestic offers a window onto impersonal historical processes. Lawrence’s views of history do not make themselves felt in his fiction only through such isolated allusions, however, since his interest in the impersonal tides of history can be said to shape the very structure of his works. In his frequently-quoted letter of 5 June 1914 to Edward Garnett, Lawrence expressed his interest in exploring character in his fiction at this same impersonal level: he wanted to move beyond the ‘old stable ego of the character’ in order to discover the ‘inhuman will’, and to address what the characters are instead of what they feel (2L 183). He was aware that this committed him to adopting a new approach to literary form:

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don’t look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters: the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form, like when one draws a fiddle-bow across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown. (184) Mark Kinkead-Weekes has described The Rainbow as ‘an historical novel’ with a ‘double focus’ on how the individual is shaped both by ‘historical development and social change’ and ‘a timeless nature, outside history’ (1989: 121–2). While the novel traces developments in the opportunities and range of experiences available to women between 1840 and the early twentieth century, the religious and mythical aspects of the narrative reveal continuities between the emotional and intellectual natures of Lydia Lensky, Anna Brangwen and Ursula Brangwen down the generations. Specific historical contexts are absent from Women in Love, so the emphasis is placed entirely on the states of violence, self-destruction and emotional collapse to which the characters are subject; Lawrence deliberately wished for the historical setting of the novel ‘to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters’ (485). The realist drive to account for the development of characters’ lives in terms of their personal psychologies and social experiences – which Lawrence externalised in his letter to Edward Garnett of 19 November 1912 (1L 476–9) concerning the form of Sons and Lovers – gives way in the post-war novels to an incorporation of form-breaking and unresolved impulses to escape such structures and to realise deeplyfelt but unarticulated needs. Alvina Houghton, Gilbert Noon, Aaron Sisson, Richard Lovatt Somers and Kate Leslie each act on their irreducible and unresolved desires in ways which challenge the formal and thematic features of the Bildungsroman.

Life Writing: Lawrence and ‘The New Biography’ The historiographical issues confronted and negotiated in Lawrence’s writing of history are implicitly worked through in his prose fiction, then, but they also inform his multi-layered engagement with life writing. The key figure in contemporary debates around biography was Lytton Strachey. Strachey was studying history at Trinity College, Cambridge over the period of the debate between Bury and Trevelyan. In an unpublished essay entitled ‘The Historian of the Future’, written for a Cambridge reading group in 1903 (and now in the Strachey papers in the British Library), he made his own contribution to the issues at stake. The essay is a rejoinder to Bury: in it, Strachey argues that the greatest historians were invariably artists. Avery notes that Strachey – like Trevelyan, a Cambridge Apostle – uses the methods of analytical philosophy of G. E. Moore to unpick Bury’s arguments, suggesting that he (Bury) was ‘conflating the definitional and pragmatic questions, What is history? and, What good does history do?’ (2010: 853). Strachey contends that by spending most of his energies arguing about the good that history does, Bury ignores (in Avery’s words) ‘the intrinsic goodness of History as a type of art’ (854) and its capacity to have a positive effect on the future. For Strachey, ‘history, made interesting by judicious selection, and made beautiful by art, is one of the most valuable things we know’ (855). ‘The Historian of the Future’ articulates views that would be more succinctly expressed in the preface to Eminent Victorians (1918), one of the key texts of what has come to be known – after Virginia Woolf’s 1927 essay – as ‘The New Biography’. By setting out a vigorously aestheticist notion of history as an intrinsic force for good

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Strachey paved the way for his own irreverent experiments in biography (undoing Victorian mythography) and the kinds of experimental biographical narratives written by modernist authors who shared his desire to critique the accepted wisdom of imperialism while linking this to a broader assault on the unitary and coherent subject. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928) and Flush: A Biography (1933) – focusing on Vita Sackville-West and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel respectively – are often viewed as landmark texts for ‘The New Biography’. In her essay of that title, Woolf argued that biographers should leave behind naive notions of reality and focus more closely on language and design, combining truth and imagination, ‘granite-like solidity’ and ‘rainbow-like intangibility’ (1967: 229). Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was a celebrated biographer and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and Woolf’s parodic and mocking interrogation of the conventions of life writing can be viewed (in Max Saunders’s formulation) as ‘a complex reaction against the kind of Victorian “official” biographic tradition that the DNB represented: conventional, patriarchal, impersonal, censorious, and censored’ (2010: 438–9). Lawrence’s approaches to life writing across his career respond to what Saunders calls the turn-of-the-century awareness that the conventions of biography (like history) are beginning to seem absurd: that as soon as they begin to become visible as conventions, they can no longer do their work of transparently creating the impression of authority and objectivity. (2010: 450) Saunders groups Lawrence with Joyce, Eliot and Pound as authors who ‘did not write their memoirs’ and did not ‘write biographies of others (with the possible exception of Pound’s Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916), which is more manifesto for Vorticism than conventional life-narrative)’ (2010: 293). This statement simplifies the extent of Lawrence’s involvement with experimental autobiographical writing and biography. Saunders focuses almost exclusively on Lawrence’s autobiographical fiction, only registering in a footnote the autobiographical nature of some of his poetry (256). He does not pay any attention to Lawrence’s most experimental autobiographical poem, the unfinished ‘A Life History in Harmonies and Discords’. He also overlooks two examples of Lawrence’s biographical writing: the ‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus’ and the short satirical ‘squib’ entitled The Life of J. Middleton Murry By J. C. . Lastly, he does not consider two unfinished works by Lawrence – the fragments now known as the ‘Burns Novel’ and ‘The Wilful Woman’ – which variously combine fiction with biography and autobiography. In the remainder of this chapter I will discuss the historiographical implications of Lawrence’s approach to life writing by focusing on autobiography, biography and auto/biografiction. Lawrence had a lifelong aversion to producing the kinds of short autobiography required by publishers, partly due to his impatience with the business aspects of publishing and his resistance to being marketed as a working-class writer, but also because he realised how little they tell one about an author’s actual identity. His instinct was always to send people to his more autobiographical fiction if they wanted to learn about his early life. In July 1928, for example, he grudgingly provided some autobiographical notes in response to a request from the French publisher Kra, but told Jean Watson, the manager of his literary agent Curtis Brown’s Foreign Department: ‘Let the

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Kra – Kra – Kraaa! read Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow and he’s got all he wants – and be damned to him’ (6L 465). In his fictional autobiographies Lawrence explores selected aspects of his life in a fully self-critical way, seeking to discover general insights through the personal experience he is drawing on. The self-aggrandisement implicit in the autobiographical note is here replaced by detached self-analysis and an acknowledgement that a life cannot be viewed in isolation from the biological, social and historical forces that went to create it (and of which it is a part): autobiographical writing must give due emphasis to the impersonal shaping forces of heredity and social history, and of human nature. The most obvious example here is Sons and Lovers; in this most autobiographical novel Lawrence offers a comprehensive account of the historical and family forces which shape the lives of the Morels, and at a late stage of his work on it he claimed to ‘loathe Paul Morel’ (1L 427) and later still called the excessive mother-love and consequent psychic split in Paul ‘the tragedy of thousands of young men in England’ (477). Lawrence’s late autobiographical essays – including ‘[Return to Bestwood]’, ‘Getting On’, ‘Which Class I Belong To’ and ‘Myself Revealed (Autobiographical Sketch)’ – are very carefully crafted constructions of his life which address (and, to some degree, re-imagine) his past by discussing wider issues of social change and class structure. The nine poems which make up ‘A Life History in Harmonies and Discords’ were written around November 1909. Lawrence clearly thought of the sequence as an experimental autobiography, since the character Ernest Lambert, in his contemporaneous play A Collier’s Friday Night, refers to it as ‘full of significance’ and notes that ‘The profs. would make a great long essay out of the idea’ (Plays 29). Lawrence draws on a scientific language he had gleaned from Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (1900) to describe reproductive growth and the origins and development of the individual through antinomies of ‘joy with death, and black anger with Love for mate’ (3Poems 1425). The poems are complex, and they are made more difficult to decipher because of the fact that the only available state of the text (transcribed in the Cambridge Edition of The Poems) is that written in pencil in the second University College Nottingham notebook (Roberts E320.1), and parts of the poems are heavily deleted and almost illegible. The sequence is formally innovative, since it is structured musically, in terms of alternating ‘harmonies’ and ‘discords’: its central theme seems to be the necessity of contraries for human life and the violence that ensues from them, but it also confronts the difficulty one faces in clearly tracing the shape of one’s own life, as this entails disentangling it from the intertwined lives of one’s parents: ‘With pain did I carefully overline / What part of my graph was plainly plotted / Where the curves were knotted I must define / Pains that were clotted over mine’ (3Poems 1429). As John Worthen has suggested, the sequence is best considered in the context of Lawrence’s early reflections on his mother’s life and his preparation for writing Sons and Lovers, because the third poem presents the reflections of a mother ‘who is so clearly using her child to help her escape her own unhappiness’, and the final, unfinished poem ‘is an author’s instruction to himself about what his job should be when he deals with material such as the story of his mother’ (1991: 275, 276). Its heavily revised and unfinished state strongly suggests that its author was aware of his inability to resolve the issues involved in creating clear autobiographical understanding from a consideration of biological factors and psychological determinants that stress the inevitable overlapping of subjectivities and the reverberation of experiences through the generations.

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‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus’ is Lawrence’s only extended piece of biographical writing. It was written between November 1921 and January 1922 as an introduction to Magnus’s autobiography Dregs, which details his experiences in the French Foreign Legion. Catherine Carswell records that Lawrence thought it ‘the best single piece of writing, as writing, that he had ever done’ (1932: 117). The contexts of its composition and publication – recounted at length in the Cambridge Edition of Introductions and Reviews (IR xl–l) – highlight the complexities involved in producing a truthful account of another person’s life when one’s own is so closely interwoven with it. Lawrence first met Magnus in the company of Norman Douglas in Florence in November 1919. He was at once interested and impressed by Magnus’s past experiences and courage, and appalled by his spendthrift tendencies and reliance on others to get by. Magnus solicited money from Lawrence on several occasions. In Taormina, Sicily, at the end of April 1920, Lawrence grudgingly offered Magnus some financial support but refused to accommodate him or to fetch his possessions from the monastery at Montecassino (where he had been living, and to where he had been followed by police who were pursuing him for paying for a hotel stay in Anzio with a cheque which bounced). Magnus subsequently travelled from Sicily to Malta in May 1920 on the same boat as Lawrence, Frieda and their friend Mary Cannan. Magnus stayed on Malta, and at the start of November 1920 he committed suicide by drinking hydrocyanic acid, having been intercepted on the street by policemen intent on extraditing him to Italy on the charge of fraud. Lawrence heard about Magnus’s suicide in late November, via a letter he received from one of Magnus’s friends on Malta, Walter Salomone. He wrote his ‘Memoir’ with a view to publishing it together with Dregs in order to make enough money to pay off the debts that Magnus owed to himself and another friend, Michael Borg. Lawrence sought and received the permission of Norman Douglas (Magnus’s literary executor) to publish Magnus’s book. However, when the volume – re-titled Memoirs of the Foreign Legion – was published by Martin Secker on 1 October 1924 Douglas took exception to Lawrence’s ‘Memoir’. He issued a pamphlet entitled D. H. Lawrence and Maurice Magnus: A Plea for Better Manners, in which he contested the presentation of himself in Lawrence’s account and ascribed what he saw as Lawrence’s unfair attack on Magnus to his (Lawrence’s) mean-spirited resentment on account of the money Magnus owed him. The experimental form of Lawrence’s ‘Memoir’ reveals (pace Douglas) his attempt to confront and foreground the problems involved in making sense of Magnus, and in understanding his own feeling of being implicated in the suicide. As Howard Mills notes, the ‘Memoir’ is a ‘generically hybrid work’, combining aspects of ‘memoir, autobiography and fiction’ (1988: 121). Lawrence may have begun writing it with the words ‘Yesterday arrived the manuscript of the Legion, from Malta’ (IR 63), which occur close to the end of the published text (xlii). This would be consistent with Lawrence’s original intention to produce a short introduction to Magnus’s book. In the event, the introduction became an extended account of Lawrence’s encounters with, impressions of and reflections on Magnus. Lawrence accentuates the subjective nature of his understanding of Magnus by providing a vivid account of his sensitivity to Magnus’s response to him alongside his own response to Magnus. If Lawrence thought Magnus a ‘little scamp’, ‘shrewd and rather impertinent’, full of ‘niceties and little pomposities’ (71, 12, 15), then he was also aware of how he might appear to Magnus with his ‘beard bushy and raggy’ because of his ‘horror of entering a strange barber’s

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shop’ and his strict exercise of economy: ‘Magnus rather despised me because I did not spend money’ (11–12, 15). As in his historical writing, in the ‘Memoir’ Lawrence balances sympathy with critical awareness in a manner which impedes reductive reasoning and stresses the strangeness of experience and the provisional nature of our attempts to comprehend it. Mills shows how Lawrence dramatises ‘the struggle to summarise’; in his analysis of Magnus’s behaviour Lawrence makes regular use of ‘generous qualification’, employing ‘frequent “turns” of but and yet’ (1988: 125, 123). Instances of such qualifications abound: He had a queer delicacy of his own, varying with a bounce and a commonness. He was a common little bounder. And then he had this curious delicacy and tenderness and wistfulness. (IR 20) Magnus was very familiar and friendly, chattering in his quaint Italian, which was more wrong than any Italian I have ever heard spoken; very familiar and friendly, and a tiny bit deferential to the monks, and yet, and yet—rather patronising. (28) Magnus was never indecent, and one could never dismiss him just as a scoundrel. He was not. He was one of these modern parasites who just assume their right to live and live well, leaving the payment to anybody who can, will, or must pay. The end is inevitably swindling— (51) When faced by Douglas’s criticism that he had misunderstood and slandered Magnus, Lawrence stated that his ‘Memoir’ contained ‘nothing but the exact truth: as far as any human being can write the exact truth’ (5L 255). The qualification here is crucial because it makes clear that all a memoirist or biographer can deliver is an honest account of the impression made by an individual, since objective truth is outside his scope. In his preface to Eminent Victorians, Strachey asserted that the two rules which a biographer must follow are to ‘preserve . . . a becoming brevity’ and to ‘maintain . . . freedom of spirit’. It was not, he said, the ‘business’ of a biographer to ‘be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them’ (Strachey 1986: 10). As Lawrence famously wrote in his conclusion to the ‘Memoir’, ‘Even the dead ask only for justice: not for praise or exoneration. Who dares humiliate the dead with excuses for their living?’ (IR 70). The stance on life writing revealed in the ‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus’ is consistent with Lawrence’s later reflections on biography and biographical criticism. Members of his inner circle were very much engaged in writing biographies – or producing biographical writing – during the period of ‘The New Biography’, and he took part with characteristic vigour in the debates raised by their approaches. In May 1927 he took Richard Aldington to task for being too apologetic and skittish in a 7,000-word pamphlet he published about Lawrence entitled D. H. Lawrence: An Indiscretion. He asked Aldington, ‘Why do you write on the one hand as if you were my grandmother . . . And on the other . . . as if you were on hot bricks?’ (6L 64–5). In December of the same year, when Catherine Carswell told Lawrence that she was working on a life of Robert Burns, Lawrence made it clear that she must avoid condescending to Burns and making him a safe historical figure for a bourgeois readership (as he felt J. G. Lockhart had done in his 1828 biography); he instructed her not to be ‘mealy mouthed

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like them’ (232), but to take Burns seriously as a rebel working-class poet and to use his life and work to send out a much-needed challenge to her modern-day readers. In 1929 Lawrence responded to John Middleton Murry’s The Life of Jesus (1926) with a ‘squib’ intended to satirise what he felt was Murry’s complacent attitude to, and identification with, Christ. Lawrence imagined a reversal of author and subject. The Life of J. Middleton Murry By J. C. is the shortest of Lawrence’s published prose works: ‘John Middleton was born in the year of the Lord 1891? It happened also to be the most lying year of the most lying century since time began, but what is that to an innocent babe!’ (Roberts and Poplawski 2001: 183). Lawrence also expressed forthright views on fictional biography and made two abortive attempts to write his own fictional biographies. His negative response to Gilbert Cannan’s fictional biography of Mark Gertler, Mendel: A Story of Youth (also discussed by Lee M. Jenkins in her chapter ‘Lawrence in Biofiction’), published in October 1916, reveals his awareness of the porous boundaries between the roman à clef, which draws selectively on a life – or lives – in order to explore and/or to critique a society or culture, and sensational journalism, which merely recounts the more salacious and sensational aspects of an individual’s life to arouse interest and attract readers. Lawrence believed that all historiographical forms should entail a struggle to make sense of past experience with a view to understanding and critiquing contemporary life. He dismissed Mendel as ‘journalism: statement, without creation’ (3L 35). Lawrence would have had in mind a comparison here between Mendel and the transformation of life into art which he was himself effecting at this very date in his own roman à clef, Women in Love. His failure to complete his own fictional biographies perhaps reveals his sense of the insurmountable difficulties involved in balancing truthfulness to another person’s life events with the analytical detachment and clarity required by art. In December 1912, having just completed Sons and Lovers, Lawrence attempted to write a fictional ‘life of Robert Burns’. It was to have been an autobiografiction: he researched the details of Burns’s life and told a friend that he would ‘make him [Burns] live near home, as a Derbyshire man’ and ‘do him almost like an autobiography’ (1L 487). The project stalled at an early stage; Lawrence admitted that his work on it was ‘more clever than good’ (491). Almost a decade later, in September 1922, he began writing a biografiction based on the life of his New Mexican host, Mabel Dodge Luhan (SM 199–203), but this project too was soon abandoned, this time because of the tensions between Lawrence, Frieda and the overbearing subject of the fiction.

Conclusion Gamini Salgado suggests that ‘it would be absurd to claim for Lawrence, on the basis of Movements [in European History], the status of an original historiographer’ (1988: 236), but taking a wider view of his historiographical writing reveals just how attuned he was to contemporary debates in historiography, and how responsive and opinionated. Lawrence deliberately combined the graphic and scientific approaches to history in Movements in European History, articulating a distinctive epochal interpretation of history based on a model of mass psychology; he sought to rehabilitate the reputations of peoples whose cultures had been denigrated or marginalised by academic historians; and he made formal innovations in his fiction to express his awareness of the ways in which the individual is shaped by both historical processes and timeless features such

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as heredity and human nature. Like his modernist contemporaries, Lawrence sought to ‘imagine alternative forms for . . . experience’, working both with and ‘against the prevailing modes of representation’ (Saunders 2010: 444). He approached autobiography and biography in a sceptical and questioning way as modes of writing whose conventions were being challenged in response to the latest thinking about selfhood, subjectivity and relativity. His innovations and experiments in life writing were informed by the full range of his historiographical insights, and they carry an implicitly moral implication in their insistence on understanding the individual in relation to wider social, historical and psychological forces, and in the consistent emphasis they place on the partial and contingent nature of our knowledge of ourselves and others.

Works Cited Avery, Todd (2010), ‘“The Historian of the Future”: Lytton Strachey and Modernist Historiography between the Two Cultures’, ELH, 77:4, pp. 841–66. Bury, J. B. (1930), ‘The Science of History – Inaugural (1903)’, in Selected Essays of J. B. Bury, ed. Harold Temperley, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–22. Carswell, Catherine (1932), The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence, London: Chatto & Windus. Chambers, Jessie (1935), D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, London: Jonathan Cape. Healey, Claire and Keith Cushman, eds (1985), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence and Amy Lowell, 1914–1925, Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark (1989), ‘The Sense of History in The Rainbow’, in D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World, ed. Peter Preston and Peter Hoare, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 121–38. Lawrence, D. H. (1905), Letter Concerning His King’s Scholarship Examination Success, The Teacher, 25 March, p. 283. Mills, Howard (1988), ‘“My Best Single Piece of Writing”: “Introduction to Memoirs of the Foreign Legion by M. M.”’, in D. H. Lawrence’s Non-Fiction: Art, Thought and Genre, ed. David Ellis and Howard Mills, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 120–45. Nehls, Edward, ed. (1957), D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Volume One, 1885–1919, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957. Roberts, Warren and Paul Poplawski (2001), A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salgado, Gamini (1988), ‘Lawrence as Historian’, in The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Studies, ed. Gamini Salgado and G. K. Das, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 234–47. Saunders, Max (2010), Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strachey, Lytton (1986), Eminent Victorians [1918], ed. Michael Holroyd, London: Penguin. Trevelyan, G. M. (1913), Clio, a Muse and Other Essays Literary and Pedestrian, London: Longmans, Green & Co. Wells, H. G. (1920), The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, rev. and corrected edn, London: Cassell & Co. Woolf, Virginia (1967), ‘The New Biography’, in Collected Essays, Volume 4, London: The Hogarth Press, pp. 229–35. Worthen, John (1991), D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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9 Queer Aesthetics Hugh Stevens

Introduction

T

his chapter considers recurrent tensions in Lawrence’s writing between a desire to affirm the supremacy of sexual relationships between men and women and his persistent fascination with same-sex desire, with men desiring and loving men, with women desiring and loving women. It begins by situating Lawrence’s heterosexual metaphysics, as expressed in his 1929 essay ‘A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”’, in relation to the conceptualisation of sexual identities in his lifetime. Rather than dividing human beings into two discrete populations of ‘homosexuals’ and ‘heterosexuals’, Lawrence ‘queers’ the binary between homosexuality and heterosexuality by suggesting that individuals feel desire and love for both sexes. It follows that heterosexual identity in much of Lawrence’s fiction is not simply an expression of sexual desire for the other sex; it also depends on a repudiation of same-sex desires. Yet Lawrence’s fiction often describes same-sex desire alluringly, even as his writing champions ‘phallic marriage’. These discrepancies are considered using Lawrence’s own theorisations of the difference between the achievement of the work of art and the artist’s conscious intention. Lawrence’s 1923 short novel The Fox contains a tender portrayal of love between women, thus questioning rather than celebrating ‘phallic marriage’. The chapter closes with a discussion of a range of works in which Lawrence aestheticises love between men, while respecting the taboo against homosexual acts.

Heterosexual Metaphysics and Queer Desires Man’s blood and woman’s blood ‘are two eternally different streams’, flowing separately, but ‘in sex the two rivers touch and renew one another’, Lawrence tells us in ‘A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”’ (LCL 324). This ‘warm blood-sex’, sex ‘that establishes the living and re-vitalising connection between man and woman’, is the basis of ‘true phallic marriage’ – and ‘marriage is no marriage that is not basically and permanently phallic’ (327, 324). Lawrence figures phallic marriage as an absolute ideal, metaphysical and transhistorical: the place where human beings find themselves and establish a ‘vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe’ (329). But when he tells us in the same essay that ‘homosexual contacts are secondary, even if not merely exasperated reaction from the utterly unsatisfactory nervous sex between men and women’ (327–8), we recognise how this ideal is formed by late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century discourses of sexual identity.

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‘Homosexuality’ was invented in 1870, Michel Foucault provocatively and persuasively claimed in 1976. In the late nineteenth century, same-sex desire and sexual encounters between men and between women began to be associated with a particular type of individual: the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized – Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on “contrary sexual sensations” can stand as its date of birth . . . The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (Foucault 1978: 43) A range of other ‘minor perverts’ – ‘zoophiles’, ‘auto-monosexualists’ and ‘mixoscopophiles’ – are identified in literature of the period, but, unlike homosexuals, do not become a species. Another species came into being at the same time as the homosexual: the heterosexual. ‘Heterosexuality’, as a kind of ‘sexual identity’, a ‘psychological, psychiatric, medical category’, was born at the same time as its abnormal twin. As Jonathan Ned Katz argues, our ‘discourse on “heterosexuality”’ is a ‘modern fabrication’, first appearing in medical literature in the 1890s (1995: 12). In the late nineteenth century, the terms ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ came to identify ‘two sex-differentiated eroticisms, one normal and good, one abnormal and bad, a division which would come to dominate our twentieth-century vision of the sexual universe’ (28). The heterosexual was that which was not homosexual, the being whose sexual sensations were normal, not contrary, in harmony with rather than against nature. Individual beings were thought to belong to one or the other species, and so, in order to demonstrate one’s heterosexuality, one also needed to demonstrate one’s freedom from homosexual tendencies. This need can be discerned in medical literature of the 1890s. Sexologists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing claimed that individuals could be cured of homosexual impulses by hypnotherapy (Katz 1995: 24–7). The influence of this thinking is registered in E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice, written in 1913–14 but only published in 1971, after Forster’s death. When Clive writes to Maurice to announce that he has miraculously become cured of homosexuality, he uses the word ‘normal’: ‘Against my will I have become normal. I cannot help it’ (Forster 1971: 106). Maurice, on the other hand, cannot find a cure. He visits Mr Lasker Jones, a hypnotist who tells him that the ‘name’ of his ‘trouble’ is ‘Congenital homosexuality’ and boasts that he cures ‘fifty per cent’ of his patients of the condition (167). But Maurice, an ‘unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’, remains immune to all suggestion (145). His ‘body would not be convinced’, because ‘Chance had mated it too perfectly’ to Alec, his friend Clive’s gamekeeper (191). It is likely that one of the ‘scientific’ experts who influenced the characterisation of Mr Lasker Jones was Doktor Albert Freiherr von Schrenk-Notzing, hypnotist, psychical researcher with an interest in ectoplasm, and psychotherapist, who wrote a study boasting of the ability to cure homosexuality ‘by psychical treatment in the hypnotic state’ (1895: v). Schrenk-Notzing advised the physician to consider ‘the following important diagnostic points’ in order to identify ‘sexual inversion’ in a patient: ‘(a) the episodical occurrence of homo-sexual impulses in individuals of hetero-sexuality; (b) psycho-sexual hermaphroditism; (c) the content of sexual dreams; (d) the complete

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absence of hetero-sexuality as a pathological phenomenon’ (194). In this model of human sexuality, homosexuality and heterosexuality exist together as a binary. For the most part, homosexuals have homosexual impulses, and heterosexuals have heterosexual impulses. The ‘complete absence of hetero-sexuality’ is a ‘pathological phenomenon’, and if individuals of heterosexuality do have occasional homosexual impulses, they should keep them in check. Schrenk-Notzing notes approvingly that ‘Very many individuals of contrary sexuality are well able to control their impulses’, and says that the individual who ‘has committed a criminal act as a result of organic necessity, as if forced to it’, lacking ‘the necessary inhibitory (or restraining) ideas’, can be deemed to be ‘devoid of free will’ (195). Heterosexuals should inhibit their homosexual impulses; homosexuals, even those with a ‘complete absence of hetero-sexuality’, should likewise attempt to be ruled by inhibition and restraint. Unfortunately, some lack the will to overcome their impulses, and, as a result, commit criminal acts. Lawrence appears to have become aware of this modern regime of homosexual and heterosexual identities at around the same time that Forster was writing Maurice. A range of texts from 1913 onwards portray characters stifling and inhibiting their queer desires, or yielding to them only to regret their actions subsequently. On the other hand, Cyril Beardsall, the narrator and protagonist of his first novel, The White Peacock (1911), shows no awareness of the need to assert his own heterosexual identity. In a much-quoted scene, Cyril describes swimming naked with his friend George Saxton. After the swim, he is thrilled when George rubs him dry: 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) In a 1915 letter to his friend Edward Dent, Forster singles out this chapter for praise, and suggests that Lawrence did not really know what he was doing when creating this beautiful homoerotic scene: Have you read The White Peacock by D. H. Lawrence? If not, do not, for you cannot, but read one chapter in it called A poem of friendship, which is most beautiful. The whole book is the queerest product of subconsciousness that I have yet struck – he has not a glimmering from first to last of what he’s up to. (Lago 1983: 222) Forster’s suggestion that the homoeroticism of the scene is ‘subconscious’ helps explain the freedom and boldness with which Cyril describes his ‘love’. The chapter is a poem of friendship, not a poem of homosexuality. This does not mean that the scene is not homoerotic; rather, that the scene should not be read as Cyril affirming a ‘homosexual identity’. His and George’s love might be perfect, but he does not consider it in any way perverse.

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Never such innocence again in Lawrence’s fiction. The carefree bliss of ‘A Poem of Friendship’ contrasts with the knowing eroticism in the chapter entitled ‘Shame’, in The Rainbow (1915), in which Ursula Brangwen and her teacher Winifred Inger, like Cyril and George, enjoy a naked swim together. But whereas Cyril and George enjoy an innocent friendship, Ursula and Winfred go on to have an affair. The chapter titles indicate the move from a world of poetic innocence and friendship to a world of shameful experience and sex, as does the word ‘queer’ in the sentence that first links the two women: ‘Suddenly Ursula found a queer awareness existed between herself and her class-mistress, Miss Inger’ (R 311). Here Lawrence can use the word ‘queer’ precisely because of its ambiguity: if he had used the word ‘lesbian’, the novel would never have been published. From the 1890s onwards, writers like Henry James began to use the word ‘queer’ to hint at homosexuality, while avoiding the open identifications that would make literature vulnerable to censorship (Stevens 1998: 11–13). Although Lawrence’s descriptions of the two women taking pleasure in their ‘flushed, hot limbs, startling, delicious’ (R 316) might seem tame enough to today’s readers, contemporary responses to the novel complained that it dealt with ‘the subject of Diderot’s La Réligieuse [sic]’ (a novel in which Suzanne Simonin has to resist the advances of a lesbian Mother Superior), and suggested that the publishers could not have read the novel before publishing it, ‘unless they hold the view that Lesbianism is a fit subject for family fiction’ (Draper 1970: 92, 96). Two months after its publication, the novel was classified as obscene and banned. Lawrence rhapsodically describes Ursula’s obsession with her mistress’s body. Realising that she will see ‘Miss Inger in her bathing dress’ at school, Ursula ‘trembled and was dazed with passion’ (R 313). Miss Inger doesn’t disappoint when she appears in her ‘rust-red tunic like a Greek girl’s . . . How lovely she looked. Her knees were so white and strong and proud, she was firm-bodied as Diana.’ The schoolmistress as Greek goddess echoes what Yopie Prins calls ‘a Hellenizing discourse of lesbianism’ in Victorian England (1999: 78). Naked Winifred embraces and kisses naked Ursula, and carries her into the River Soar: Ursula rests ‘her forehead against the beloved, maddening breast’ and ‘twined her body about her mistress’ (R 316). After spending an evening with ‘her mistress’ Ursula wants to forget her. But the next morning ‘the love was there again, burning, burning . . . All separation from her mistress was a restriction from living.’ She writes Winifred ‘a burning, passionate love-letter: she could not help it’. Eventually, however, Ursula puts an end to the affair. It is merely an episode in her life, and after parting with Winifred she shows no further sexual interest in women. At the end of Women in Love, the sequel to The Rainbow, Ursula insists to her husband, Rupert Birkin, that his desire for ‘eternal union with a man’ is ‘a perversity’, something that is ‘false, impossible’ (481). Does this mean that Ursula has what might be called a coherent ‘heterosexual’ identity? The Rainbow does not attempt to give a clear answer to this question, but it might make more sense to think that Lawrence’s fiction demonstrates the complexities and contradictions of our identities. We are not made to believe that we can know Ursula’s true nature as a stable and unchanging entity. ‘You mustn’t look in my novel [The Rainbow] for the old stable ego of the character’, Lawrence advised Edward Garnett in one of his most famous letters (2L 183). Ursula rejects Winifred as ‘perverted’, suggesting that she does not want to acknowledge that she also might feel perverse desires: ‘The fine, unquenchable flame of the younger girl

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would consent no more to mingle with the perverted life of the elder woman’ (R 319). Ursula decides that the elder woman, like herself, should also renounce perversion: she decides that Winifred should ‘marry her uncle Tom’. The plan enables three individuals to control what Schrenk-Notzing would call their ‘homo-sexual impulses’. After Tom and Winifred marry, Ursula decides to ‘leave them both for ever, leave for ever their strange, soft, half corrupt element’ (326). That Tom, too, might be a creature given to homosexual impulses is hinted at in the chapter called ‘The Marsh and the Flood’, in which we are told that Tom was ‘the favourite pupil of an engineer’, that he has ‘a sort of post as assistant to his chief’, until there is ‘some breach between him and his chief which was never explained’ (R 223, 225). After this mysterious separation, Tom is ‘somehow outside of everything’, and ‘a deep misery’ is visible in his eyes (225). He is ‘undefinably an outsider’; he ‘belonged to nowhere, to no society’ (226). ‘There was something of a woman in all this’ (223), the narrator tells us, a not-too-oblique hint at Tom’s ‘sexual inversion’. Tom and Winifred meet in a chiasmic crossing, the masculine woman and the feminine man. Miss Inger is hard and Tom is soft; whereas Miss Inger has ‘strong shoulders’ and ‘wonderful firm limbs’ (313), Tom has ‘long black eyelashes and soft, dark, possessed eyes’ (223). Between Tom and his young brother Fred ‘existed an almost passionate love’, and ‘Tom watched over Fred with a woman’s poignant attention and self-less care’ (224). The hints about Tom build to a crescendo when he and Winifred meet: Tom ‘looked at the athletic, seemingly fearless girl, and he detected in her a kinship with his own dark corruption. Immediately, he knew they were akin’ (322). Ursula feels that she wishes ‘to be rid of them both’, for ‘Their marshy, bitter-sweet corruption came sick and unwholesome in her nostrils’ (326). Tom regards his engagement with Winifred as ‘an assurance of his validity’; besides, he ‘wanted children’ (327). Winifred is ‘of the same sort as himself’. Here marriage is not a realisation of heterosexuality, but an escape from homosexuality, a respectable form, and an institution in which a couple can start a family. Winifred only consents to marry Tom after asking Ursula what to do. ‘“I’ll marry him, my dear—it will be best. Now say you love me”’ (326). Another startling portrayal of an individual struggling with contrary sexuality is found in the ‘Prologue’ that Lawrence wrote in 1916 for an early draft of Women in Love but did not include in the published novel. Rupert Birkin spends his life lusting after men and sleeping with women, and in this way remains, in deed and in the flesh, on the right side of the homo–hetero divide, even if he strays in thought and in fantasy. It is men who ‘roused him by their flesh and their manly, vigorous movement . . . whilst he studied the women as sisters’ (WL 502). Birkin’s ‘reserve, which was as strong as a chain of iron in him, kept him from any demonstration’. He hopes that he will experience ‘the day when the beauty of men should not be so acutely attractive to him, when the beauty of woman should move him instead’, but ‘that day came no nearer, rather it went further away’ (504). And so his life is ‘one long torture of struggle against his own innate desire, his own innate being’. Here Lawrence distinguishes between innate desires and external actions. Birkin’s desire for men is ‘the one and only secret he kept to himself . . . He never accepted the desire, and received it as part of himself’ (505). Moreover, Birkin ‘kept this secret even from himself’. Birkin’s wrestling with his own desires recalls the protagonist of ‘The Prussian Officer’, a story Lawrence wrote in 1913. Herr Hauptmann is less able than Birkin to control his desires, but he too avoids sex with men. The homoeroticism binding

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Hauptmann with his young orderly is striking. Not only (of course) does the captain, ‘a tall man of about forty’, possess ‘a handsome, finely-knit figure’, he also has great muscles; the orderly, when rubbing him down, ‘admired the amazing riding-muscles of his loins’ (PO 2). For those who like the domineering military type of man, there is something erotic about the captain’s ‘reddish-brown, stiff hair’, worn ‘short upon his skull’, and his moustache ‘cut short and bristly over a full, brutal mouth’. But the orderly is even more beautiful, as his name, Schöner (schön is German for beautiful), makes clear: twenty-two, well-built, with ‘strong, heavy limbs . . . swarthy, with a soft, black, young moustache’. Also, delectably, he has ‘strong young shoulders’, ‘young, brown, shapely peasants’ hands’, and his lovely young body, with its ‘blind, instinctive sureness of movement’ drives the Prussian crazy (3). Hauptmann tries to divert his desire by spending time with a woman, but he ‘simply did not want the woman’ (6). He cannot refrain from violently abusing the object of his desire. This abuse is terrifying. He flings ‘a heavy military glove’ into Schöner’s face; he beats Schöner’s face with ‘the end of a belt’, making his mouth bleed; the violence culminates in a vicious assault, when Hauptmann repeatedly kicks Schöner, leaving him bruised and aching, and sick at the ‘thought of the threats of more kicking’ (5, 6, 9). Hauptmann ‘refused remembrance’ of ‘his passion . . . and was successful in his denial’ (9). Often in Lawrence’s writings, possibilities of same-sex desire are rejected in the formation of a ‘heterosexual’ identity, yet this formation is tenuous, far from complete and stable. For the Birkin of ‘Prologue’ and the Prussian officer, desires for men are true, positive, essential, primary. But they avoid sexual contact with the objects of their desires. Their contacts with women are ‘secondary’, ‘substitutes’ for the sex with men they refuse themselves.

The Fox: Lawrence’s Ambiguous Phallus In ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, Lawrence expressed scepticism towards the idea that we can know ourselves. As a consequence we should not expect to know ‘whether the author or artist intended to arouse sexual feelings’ (LEA 239). The work of art might express a range of meanings not consciously intended by the artist: why a man should be held guilty of his conscious intentions, and innocent of his unconscious intentions, I don’t know, since every man is more made up of unconscious intentions than of conscious ones. I am what I am, not merely what I think I am. These comments help account for the discrepancies between Lawrence’s heterosexual metaphysics and his queer aesthetics. His representations of same-sex desire are exciting and challenging in part because they militate against his own over-insistent championing of heterosexuality. Rather than dividing the world into two species, heterosexuals and homosexuals, Lawrence describes a world in which individual human beings are complex creatures capable of a range of blessed and stigmatised desires. Instead of depicting people with unified and coherent normal or queer identities, he ‘queers’ the very concept of a coherent sexual identity, even as he keeps his metaphysics warm with the phallus, that ‘column of blood, that fills the valley of blood of a woman’ (LCL 324).

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Although Lawrence’s championing of ‘true phallic marriage’ seems to make everything about his person and his work antithetical to contemporary queer theory, his questioning of the coherence of sexual identities makes him a queer theorist avant la lettre. One of queer theory’s most eloquent attacks on the concept of a coherent sexual identity is found in Judith Butler’s essay ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in which she claims that ‘identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression’ (1991: 13–14). Lawrence’s writing breaks down the binary opposition between championing and resisting ‘normalizing categories’, and shows individuals shaped as much by queer desires as by normal desires. We might borrow a formulation from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and characterise his writing as ‘kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic’ (1993: 15), or kinda damned, kinda blessed, kinda kinky, kinda vanilla, kinda queer, kinda normal. Queer theory is fascinated with the incompleteness of sexual identities, the ways in which our identities do not conform to the rigid structures of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Identity, in so far as it exists, is not just something that comes from within, essential to the self; it is formed in response to external pressures. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler suggests that ‘heterosexualized genders form themselves through the renunciation of the possibility of homosexuality’ (1993: 235). The gendered being formed in this way can suffer from heterosexual melancholy, the melancholy by which a masculine gender is formed by the refusal to grieve the masculine as a possibility of love; a feminine gender is formed . . . through the incorporative fantasy by which the feminine is excluded as a possible object of love. Yet art might provide spaces to recover what is excluded. If Lawrence the metaphysician excludes the possibility of homosexual acts, Lawrence the artist repeatedly glamorises and aestheticises the possibilities excluded by the formation of heterosexualised masculinity and femininity. ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale’ (SCAL 14). Lawrence’s famous advice is crucial to an appreciation of his queer aesthetics. ‘The artist usually sets out—or used to—to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tail, however, points the other way, as a rule.’ Lawrence’s tales often contain tails pointing in several directions. Which tail should we trust? The tale pointing in the direction of ‘phallic marriage’? Or the tail pointing in other directions? One of the most extraordinary tails in Lawrence’s writing is the brush or tail of the fox in his tale The Fox. Nellie March and Jill Banford are running Bailey Farm together, but they are disturbed by ‘One evil . . . greater than any other’, a fox who carries off their hens (Fox 9). The fox seems to take over Nellie’s consciousness. Nellie’s and the fox’s eyes meet: ‘And he knew her. She was spell-bound. She knew he knew her’ (10). As the fox runs away, ‘She saw his brush held smooth like a feather, she saw his white buttocks twinkle’. This is a fateful vision, comparable to Connie Chatterley’s vision of Mellors the gamekeeper washing himself in the woods, ‘naked to the hips, his velveteen breeches slipping down over his slender loins’ (LCL 66). Lawrence’s fiction is aware of the power of slender loins and twinkling buttocks.

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Soon Nellie is dreaming of the brush. In one dream the fox ‘whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed his brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain’ (20). This brush with the brush is painful rather than pleasurable: ‘She awoke with the pain of it, and lay trembling as if she were really seared.’ Henry Grenfel wants to marry Nellie March, but there is an obstacle in his way, Jill Banford. Henry takes up his heterosexual entitlement by killing Banford: he chops down a tree so that it falls on her and crushes her. ‘In his heart he had decided her death’ (64–5). He has already killed the fox: after he kills it he shows it to March, ‘holding it by the brush’ (40). March ‘passed her hand down’ the fox’s ‘wonderful black-glinted brush . . . full and frictional, wonderful . . . and quivered . . . Wonderful sharp thick splendour of a tail!’ (41). Is this Henry’s tail? Or is it March’s own tail? Who possesses the phallus? The repetition of ‘wonderful’, the kind of repetition that many critics of Lawrence’s style object to, serves to bring us into March’s mind: she is not a writer thinking of verbal variety in order to please a reader, she is a person wondering at a full and frictional brush. ‘It was wonder which made her attend’, the narrator tells us, when March feels ‘the deep, heavy, powerful stroke’ of Grenfel’s heart (52). Before Grenfel kills Banford, Nellie has already dreamed of Banford’s death. ‘The two girls were usually known by their sur-names’, we are told at the beginning of the tale, but they consistently call each other ‘Nellie’ and ‘Jill’, and the phrase ‘her darling Jill’ is particularly tender when Nellie dreams she had to put the dead ‘Banford into her coffin’ (7, 40). Nellie has to find something to line the box with, to make it soft, ‘something to cover up her poor dead darling’, but all she can find, ‘in her dreamdespair’, is ‘a fox skin . . . And so she folded the brush of the fox, and laid her darling Jill’s head on this, and she brought round the skin of the fox and laid it on the top of the body’ (40–1). She cries in her dream, and ‘woke to find the tears streaming down her face’ (41). Note the ambiguity of the brush. Is the brush the phallus the ‘girls’ do not possess, or is it rather the sexuality they do possess but deny themselves, unless in a dream? It may be that my mind is obscene – although, as Lawrence himself points out, nobody knows what the word ‘obscene’ means, and ‘What is obscene to Tom is not obscene to Lucy or Joe’ (LEA 236) – but I cannot help but connect the burning brush of March’s first dream with the burning bush seen by Moses: ‘And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed’ (Ex. 3:2). According to Freud, the dream is the fulfilment of a wish: the wish-content of Nellie’s dream, of lying with Jill in Jill’s box, with Jill’s head resting in Nellie’s b(r)ush, is legible, whatever Nellie’s (or Lawrence’s) conscious (or unconscious) intentions.1 The brush of course has many meanings: think of how Grenfel ‘kissed [March] on the mouth, with a quick brushing kiss. It seemed to burn through her every fibre’ (Fox 33). Here the brush seems to be heterosexual. But when Nellie lays ‘her darling Jill’s head’ on the fox’s brush, the brush must surely be a lesbian brush, or, to borrow a term from Judith Butler, a ‘lesbian phallus’ (1993: 63). Butler suggests that while ‘any reference to a lesbian phallus appears to be a spectral representation of a masculine original’, we should ‘question the spectral production of the putative “originality” of the masculine’. Lawrence’s tale allegorises the grief of Nellie’s loss of Jill, so that Nellie’s marriage to Grenfel is a tragedy rather than a triumph. ‘Prohibitions, which

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include the prohibition on homosexuality, work through the pain of guilt’, Butler suggests. As a result of ‘a prohibition on love accompanied by threats of imagined death, there is a great temptation to refuse to love, and so to be taken in by that prohibition and contract neurotic illness’ (63–4). The only way to remove the threat of imagined death is, of course, to die, and in March’s dream, with Jill dead, March feels herself safe from that threat, safe to love her darling Jill, to enter Jill’s box with her foxy brush. The story has a folkloric quality. Grenfel is the fox – ‘to March he was the fox . . . she could not see him otherwise’ (Fox 14). The fox, the big bad wolf, is also the beast, and it is as if Beauty has to kiss the Beast in order to realise the Beast’s beauty. But could not Beauty have kissed another beautiful woman instead of the beast, and realised the beast in beauty, rather than beauty in the beast? Might that have made her more happy? On the farm that Banford and March manage together – a farm that seems only to have hens and ducks on it, a farm that conspicuously lacks cocks and drakes – March is the ‘man about the place’ (7). March is ‘responsible . . . for her dear Jill’s health and happiness and well-being’ (68). Does she form her ‘feminine gender’ through an ‘incorporative fantasy by which the feminine is excluded as a possible object of love’ (Butler 1993: 235)? The tale, if it can be trusted, suggests that the formation of femininity through March’s appreciation of the fox’s and Grenfel’s brush is far from complete. March might marry Grenfel, but Jill is Nellie’s darling. Nellie dreams of erotic union with her dead darling. Nellie’s dreams are open to a range of interpretations, full of tails and brushes pointing in several directions. Having enacted the prohibition on homosexuality by murdering Jill Banford, Grenfel feels that ‘He had won’: he and March marry (Fox 66). He has brought about a marriage and forced on March a heterosexual femininity by excluding the feminine as an object of love. But the renunciation of queer desires is not, Grenfel finds, the same as the formation of normal desires. When he speaks to his wife, ‘she would turn to him with a faint new smile, the strange, quivering little smile of a woman who has died in the old way of love, and can’t quite rise to the new way’ (67).

Aestheticising Love between Men Complex patterns of repudiation and affirmation of queerness are found throughout Lawrence’s writing. Mellors the gamekeeper, preacher and practitioner of Lawrentian ideals, unfurls an astonishingly violent tirade against lesbians, who are, it appears, even worse than homosexual men. Women might be consciously lesbian; they might also be unconsciously lesbian: “It’s astonishing how Lesbian women are, consciously or unconsciously. Seems to me they’re nearly all Lesbian—” “And do you mind?” asked Connie. “I could kill them. When I’m with a woman who’s really Lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.” ... “But do you think Lesbian women any worse than homosexual men?” “I do! Because I’ve suffered more from them.” (LCL 203)

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One of the reasons Mellors might be more tolerant of homosexual men than of lesbians is that he himself has had a same-sex relationship of sorts. Clifford tells Connie that ‘some Indian colonel took a fancy to [Mellors], and made him a lieutenant’ (92). Mellors remembers ‘the colonel who had loved him and whom he had loved’ (141), until the colonel died from pneumonia; he tells Connie that he and the Colonel loved each other, that the colonel was ‘“a passionate man”’, and that he ‘“lived under his spell, while I was with him”’ (216). Was this a sexual relationship? The novel doesn’t tell us that it was, but it also doesn’t tell us that it wasn’t. After the colonel dies, Mellors ‘knew another part of me was finished.—But then I’d always known it would end in death.’ Here Lawrence seems content to present a same-sex relationship in wholly positive terms, but only because he draws a veil over the intimate details of that relationship. What was Lawrence’s conscious intention? What was his unconscious intention? We cannot know. But what we do know is that the novel facilitates the queer reading that the statement that ‘Homosexual contacts are secondary’ would seem to rule out: same-sex desire and same-sex love bring Mellors together with his colonel, regardless of whether or not they have sex. Here, as often in Lawrence’s writing, queer aesthetics are found in the silences, in what is not said, in what is kept secret, in the secret the narrator and novelist keeps to himself, perhaps even from himself. In a much-cited 1913 letter, Lawrence wrote that ‘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’ (2L 115). If we think it possible that Lawrence was thinking of himself as one of these men approaching greatness, then his further remarks are interesting. Such a man ‘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’. Importantly, one does not get satisfaction from a man, because ‘one is kept by all tradition and instinct from loving men, or a man – for it means just extinction of all the purposive influences’. The letter suggests that Lawrence was aware of himself as someone who ‘tended to homosexuality’, but who kept himself from reaching that goal because he believed that sex between men was unnatural – against instinct – and uncivilised – against a tradition that he respected. Just as Butler suggests that prohibition might work through ‘threats of imagined death’, Lawrence imagines that homosexuality might bring about extinction. Yet Lawrence’s refusal to admit the possibility of men loving men is contradicted by the recurrent suggestion in his fiction that love between men might be more satisfying than love between men and women. In Women in Love, Birkin proposes that he and Gerald should ‘“swear a Blutbrüderschaft”’, in the manner of ‘“old German knights”’, and ‘“swear to stand by each other—be true to each other—ultimately—infallibly—given to each other, organically—without possibility of taking back”’ (WL 206–7). The Brüderschaft bond is realised not through a literal exchange of blood, but in a naked wrestling match, during which Birkin’s ‘fine, sublimated energy entered into the flesh of the fuller man’ (270). (This penetration of Birkin’s energy into his fuller friend’s flesh beautifully exemplifies Lawrence’s suggestion that a text might represent a writer’s unconscious intentions as much as his conscious ones.) After wrestling, Gerald tells Birkin over shared whisky and sodas: ‘“I don’t believe I’ve ever felt as much love for a woman, as I have for you—not love”’ (275). In The Plumed Serpent, the heroine Kate Leslie thinks to herself that ‘the highest thing [Mexico] might produce would be some powerful

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relationship of man to man’, in contrast with which ‘Marriage itself would always be a casual thing’ (152). This powerful relationship is realised in a wordless initiation ceremony, in which Don Ramón binds Don Cipriano’s eyes ‘with a strip of black fur’ and rubs his naked breast, his navel, the small of his back, his loins and his ‘secret places’, as Cipriano stands ‘in profound darkness, erect and silent’ (367–8). Ramón ties Cipriano’s arms to his breast, binds his knees, and then lays him ‘on the skin of a big mountain lion’, then lies down ‘at his feet, holding Cipriano’s feet to his own abdomen’ (369). At the conclusion of this curious ritual, ‘both men passed into perfect unconsciousness, Cipriano within the womb of undisturbed creation, Ramón in the death sleep’. These ‘contacts’ can scarcely be considered ‘secondary’ to the blood-contact of man and woman. In 1977 Jeffrey Meyers described these scenes, the bathing scene in The White Peacock, and a further scene in Aaron’s Rod, during which Rawdon Lilly rubs ‘every speck of [Aaron Sisson’s] lower body—the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs and knees, down to the feet’ (96), as ‘four overt homosexual scenes’ (1977: 131). It is, however, more correct to think of these scenes as ways of allowing naked men to touch each other’s bodies without having sex, but which nevertheless are charged with eroticism. Cipriano might be naked, ‘erect and silent’, but the novel does not tell us whether his body or his penis is erect. The narrative avoids mention of his penis, or his ‘phallos’, as Mellors’s member is called in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Connie admires Mellors’s ‘erect phallos rising darkish and hot-looking from the little cloud of vivid gold-red hair’ (LCL 209), a description which has an anatomical specificity contrasting with the ‘whole physical intelligence’ and ‘energy’ with which Birkin enters in Gerald’s ‘flesh’ and ‘physical being’ (WL 270). In one telling exchange in Women in Love Rupert tells Gerald that he believes ‘“in a permanent union between a man and a woman”’, but that union ‘“isn’t the last word”’ (WL 352). Birkin believes ‘“in the additional perfect relationship between man and man—additional to marriage”’. Gerald demurs, saying ‘“there can never be anything as strong between man and man as sex love is between man and woman. Nature doesn’t provide the basis.”’ Birkin comes back: ‘“Well, of course, I think she does . . . you’ve got to admit the unadmitted love of man for man”’. This exchange might be taken as articulating a difference between a heterosexual identity (Gerald’s) and a bisexual identity (Birkin’s), but Birkin is not quite embracing a bisexual identity, because it is not suggested he is willing to have a sexual relationship with Gerald. The love that Rupert offers is ‘a bond of pure trust and love with the other man’ (353). It does not seem to involve that activity men in sexual relations enjoy with each other, namely, sex – sex involving the hands, the mouth, the genitals, the anus. The taboo against sex that might (in Lawrence’s words) bring about just extinction of all the purposive influences is respected, and Gerald and Birkin leave the meaning of their shared penetrations, interfusings and interpenetrations ‘unfinished’, outside of their ‘normal consciousness’: The normal consciousness however was returning, ebbing back . . . “One ought to wrestle and strive and be physically close. It makes one sane.” “You do think so?” “I do. Don’t you?” “Yes,” said Gerald, “it’s life for me—” There were long spaces of silence between their words. The wrestling had some deep meaning to them – an unfinished meaning. (272)

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Here Lawrence’s queer aesthetics are found in the silences, in naked male bodies brought together without words. The deep unfinished meaning recalls the vague and undecipherable yearning of Cyril Beardsall’s soul. If we read these scenes in terms of plot, they all must be regarded as variants of the ‘perpetual blood-brother theme’ that Lawrence finds in the Leatherstocking novels of Fenimore Cooper (SCAL 56). Women in Love closes with Rupert telling Ursula that he ‘wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love’ (WL 481). But the homoeroticism of such scenes defies any easy categorisation. Why do the blood-brothers need to take their clothes off and touch each other’s bodies? Men are apprehended ‘sensuously’ by each other, even if they do not have sex with each other. Lawrence’s heterosexual metaphysics are not merely a realisation of sexual desire between men and women; they depend on Lawrence’s own insistence that same-sex desire is a potent force that should be resisted. The metaphysician believes that men should not have sex with men, while the aesthetician and the artist celebrate the spectacle of naked men touching and embracing each other’s bodies, feeling all of the parts with which they are supposedly not having sex. Men are not allowed to have sex with each other, but they can love and touch one another, and Lawrence feels free to celebrate this loving and touching, to celebrate what he calls, in his writing on Walt Whitman, ‘the mystery of manly love, the love of comrades’ (SCAL 153). Writing is different from having sex, but not altogether different: writing about human bodies, like having sex with human bodies, can be inspired by our appreciation of those bodies. In 1929 Lawrence wrote a short essay called ‘Making Pictures’, in which he claims that ‘many people have in their consciousness living images that would give them the greatest joy to bring out’ (LEA 231–2). Pictures of the human body should not be directly painted from human models: ‘a model only spoils the picture’ (231). Rather, the picture must ‘come out of the artist’s inside awareness of forms and figures’; this is ‘more than memory’; ‘It is the image as it lives in the consciousness, alive like a vision, but unknown’. One of Lawrence’s late paintings is Spring, painted in January and February of 1929. It began as a painting of youths wearing trousers while playing football, but on 7 February Lawrence noted that he ‘took off the blue trousers (of course) they were too stuffy’ (7L 169), and so the painting shows six naked young men (Colour Plate 10). It is just one of many of Lawrence’s paintings of naked men that appear to have given him the greatest joy as he brought them out of his consciousness. (In a letter to Aldous and Maria Huxley, he joked that he was working on ‘a small thing in oil, called The Rape of the Sabine Women or a Study in Arses’ [6L 353].) One man in the background plays with a ball, while another stretches languorously. In the foreground two couples have taken their eyes off the ball. One man embraces his friend from behind, his right arm around his friend’s neck, which he kisses, his body pressing into his friend’s buttocks. The other couple embrace each other as they come together to kiss: one arches his back, pushes out his bottom, stretches his arms and rests his head on his friend’s chest, the curves of his body expressive of longing and love. Lawrence claims that no artist ‘ever painted a picture without the curious delight in image-making’ (LEA 232). Spring shares with Lawrence’s word-pictures of naked men together a ‘space of silence’, ‘an ‘unfinished meaning’ (WL 272); it leaves open the many questions we might ask of what embracing men do together. Lawrence is merely enjoying an image as it lives in his consciousness, alive but unknown. The sexual meaning of Spring might

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be ambiguous, but the emotional content of the painting does not feel unknown to the viewer: the painting calls to mind one of Whitman’s best-known Calamus poems, the short lyric that begins ‘We two boys together clinging / One the other never leaving’, an innocent fantasy of homoerotic yearning (1975: 162). What is the truth of D. H. Lawrence? Do we find it in the words, or in the deeds, or in the images that live in his consciousness? We should not expect this truth to be delivered up in uncontradictory form across his writing and art in different genres. We should also question our ability to tell truth from lies, fact from fiction, when it comes to questions of sexual identity. Lawrence claimed that ‘art speech . . . prevaricates so terribly . . . tells such lies . . . because we always all the time tell ourselves lies’ (SCAL 14). Lawrence the great liberator is also Lawrence the great represser, but Lawrence’s queer aesthetics have their own truth, and express the beauty of what is prohibited, the beauty of naked women swimming together, women enjoying their burning brushes in boxes, and naked men, like the boys in Whitman’s poem, together clinging, touching, embracing, kissing, statutes mocking, fulfilling their foray.

Note 1. For an example of ‘bush’ in reference to pubic hair in connection with the marriage in 1840 of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert, see Pearsall 1969: 29. The connection between ‘bush’ and ‘brush’ is suggested by the fact that both words can refer to the bushy tail of the fox (Oxford English Dictionary).

Works Cited Butler, Judith (1991), ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss, New York: Routledge, pp. 13–31. Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge. Draper, R. P., ed. (1970), D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge. Forster, E. M. (1971), Maurice, London: Edward Arnold. Foucault, Michel (1978), The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon. Katz, Jonathan Ned (1995), The Invention of Heterosexuality, New York: Dutton. Lago, Mary and P. N. Furbank, eds (1983), Selected Letters of E. M. Forster: Volume One, 1879–1920, London: Collins. Meyers, Jeffrey (1977), Homosexuality and Literature 1890–1930, London: Athlone. Pearsall, Ronald (1969), The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Prins, Yopie (1999), Victorian Sappho, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schrenk-Notzing, A. von (1895), Therapeutic Suggestion in Psychopathia Sexualis (Pathological Manifestations of the Sexual Sense), With Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock, London: F. J. Rebman. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1993), ‘Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel, GLQ, 1, 1–16. Stevens, Hugh (1998), Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitman, Walt (1975), The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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10 Politics and Art Howard J. Booth

Introduction

L

awrence cannot readily be placed on the usual political spectrum, or aligned with a particular party, group or creed. That he wanted total change means that politics has to be broadly defined, and cannot be limited to individuals and parties seeking power in a nation state, or to the distribution of wealth. Further, Lawrence realised that as he had only experienced the prevailing order, he was unable to fully imagine a transformed society and thus to say precisely how change could come about. The genres and resources of language available to him as a writer were, he also perceived, rooted in the current world. In this chapter I see Lawrence as responding to these challenges by adopting open forms and styles that create the conditions, through the process of writing itself, for an emergent utopian trajectory; many of his texts, especially from the 1920s, make ‘a shot at a new mode’, as Rawdon Lilly puts it in Aaron’s Rod (291). Past writing on Lawrence and politics was usually predicated upon his having a consistent position and message, delivered using conventional literary forms and writing styles, which is simply not how critics read Lawrence today.

Labelling Lawrence Lawrence undertook little in the way of direct political campaigning, perhaps because his anti-war magazine The Signature had failed so badly in 1915 (Kinkead-Weekes 1996: 212, 812–13). Shorthand accounts of Lawrence and politics have often been deployed long after they have been shown to be untenable, presumably because they help impose order on a large and diverse corpus. A well-worn example, which, as John Turner and John Worthen have pointed out, is ‘found everywhere’ (1999: 136), is that Lawrence wanted to establish a small ideal community that he called Rananim. It was first mentioned in a letter of 3 January 1915 (2L 252–3) as a result of a group of friends trying to imagine a better future at a wartime evening party (Worthen 2005: 157). Turner and Worthen’s thorough investigation finds that mentions of Rananim refer back to the discussions of Christmas and New Year 1914–15. Schemes Lawrence had at other times were different, involved other people and were given alternative names. These all need to be seen in terms of the wider interest in the utopian (Turner and Worthen 1999: 167–9). Lawrence was well aware of the history of ideal communities and the difficulties they ran into. For example, he excoriated what he saw as the idealisation of labour at Brook Farm in Massachusetts in the 1840s when writing about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance – the novel drew on Hawthorne’s

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time at Brook Farm (SCAL 398; Robertson 2018: 27–34). There were anyway long periods when Lawrence was not particularly interested in group living but rather in changing whole nations and communities – or indeed times when he wanted to live apart from others, including on occasion his wife. Another shorthand way of thinking about Lawrence and politics is that he was a supporter of strong leadership, which is shown by his novels written in the first half of the 1920s, Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent. However, Worthen has drawn attention to the ‘so-called (and very misleadingly called) leadership novels’ (1991: 56). This focus on novels relies on an old hierarchy of genres; much of Lawrence’s other writing from the post-war years, whether poetry, non-fiction or shorter fiction, addresses other themes – as indeed these three novels often do too. The ‘leadership novels’ thesis became commonplace soon after the Second World War, but the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence’s works established that there is other long fiction from this period that does not fit the model. The second part of Mr Noon – first written between November 1919 and early January 1920 – was published in 1984, and in 1990 it was revealed that Lawrence wrote every word of the last version of The Boy in the Bush between September 1923 and January 1924, though the novel was published with Mollie Skinner’s name as co-author. However, reference to ‘leadership novels’ is still made some thirty years after Worthen brought it into question, in part because it was stretched to include dominance and ‘leadership’ in heterosexual relationships by such books as Cornelia Nixon’s Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women (1986). There is also often a slippage between saying that texts consider leadership and assuming that they evince unstinting support for the leaders depicted. Such advocacy is found in neither Kangaroo nor The Plumed Serpent – and as we will see Aaron’s Rod hardly fits the bill either. In his major study Political Fictions, Michael Wilding sees Kangaroo as ‘an important political novel from its very obliqueness, its non-partisan, sceptical, questioning stance’ (1980: 150). The end of The Plumed Serpent sees Don Ramón and Cipriano still dominant, but even in the final version of the novel the main character, Kate, equivocates. Anyway, a theme of leadership can only be said to be in play for part of Lawrence’s career. In March 1928, he replied to Witter Bynner’s questioning of the interest in leaders in The Plumed Serpent saying, ‘On the whole, I think you’re right. The hero is obsolete, and the leader of men is a back number’ (6L 321). Not long before, Lawrence had written to Rolf Gardiner in similar terms: ‘I’m afraid the whole business of leaders and followers is somehow wrong, now . . . you are struggling to enforce an obsolete form of leadership’ (307).1

Lawrence: A Right-Wing Writer? A perceived commitment to strong leadership is part of what has led some to see Lawrence as a fascist. Other arguments adduced – though these are of course all related – are an interest in the male soldier and violence; forms of authoritarian personality; thinking from the body rather than using mental reasoning (‘blood consciousness’); and a strong stress on nature and the natural (Mensch 1991; Al-Dabbagh 2011). The claims here often rely on invoking what happened after Lawrence’s death. The Second World War altered political co-ordinates in ways that very often make quick conclusions about earlier formations unsustainable; in the first part of the twentieth century, for example,

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those on both the Left and the Right proselytised for eugenics.2 Bertrand Russell famously linked Lawrence and the Far Right after the Second World War, writing in Portraits from Memory – repeated verbatim in his later Autobiography – that Lawrence on ‘blood consciousness’ struck him as ‘frankly rubbish, and I rejected it vehemently, though I did not then know that it led straight to Auschwitz’ (1956: 107; 1968: 22). A further issue with Russell’s comment is that he had fallen out badly with Lawrence and there was perhaps a personal animus. As Laura Frost has noted in a chapter on Lawrence in her study of the erotics of fascism in the modernist novel, the key period is immediately after the First World War rather than that of fascism’s development and spread later in the 1920s and 1930s. Lawrence was suspicious of mass democracy and socialist movements when living in Italy in this period; thus his post-war texts emerge from the same terrain as Italian Fascism (Frost 2002: 38–40). A particular motivation for Lawrence, though, was a popular press that stoked outrage and provoked a response. (In the British context he felt a deep animosity towards Horatio Bottomley and his paper John Bull.) Frost also argues that depictions of strong authoritarian responses to the post-war world in Lawrence’s novels often culminate in a rejection of that approach (42); a potential solution was found wanting when tested through imaginative fiction. In the (unused) Epilogue Lawrence wrote for the second edition of Movements in European History during the summer of 1924, he saw Fascist, socialist and Communist movements as all, in the final analysis, forms of ‘bullying’: ‘A certain group of men in Italy intend to force their will on all other men. Earlier, socialists tried to force their will. In Russia, the communists succeed in forcing their will’ (263). Lawrence had been sceptical about Italian Fascism from the start; an example is his depiction of soldiers returning from the end of the D’Annunzio-led occupation of Fiume of 1919–20 in Sea and Sardinia (173) – he referred to events in Fiume in a letter of January 1920 as ‘my-eye’ (3L 462). He had a sense of foreboding about German politics, though he did not live to see the Nazis come to power. The ‘Letter from Germany’ of February 1924 sees the country as turning away from European values as a result of its economic collapse and treatment by other powers at the end of the First World War (MM 149–52). The piece was unpublished in Lawrence’s lifetime, and David Ellis has noted that it ‘must have seemed prophetic’ when it first appeared in the left-leaning New Statesman in 1934 (1998: 160, 644). For Terry Eagleton, it is Lawrence’s indebtedness to Romanticism, vitalism and nature that makes him, finally, a right-wing writer. In The English Novel, Eagleton sees Lawrence as ‘breathtakingly radical’, though this is ‘a radicalism of the political right and not the left’ (2005: 258). Lawrence is an individualist rather than someone who works collectively to make life in modern industrialised nations better. In Eagleton’s more recent Materialism, he sees similarities between Lawrence and the ‘cosmic vitalism’ of Gilles Deleuze, with both operating in a tradition of ‘Romantic-libertarian philosophy’ (2016: 15, 16); he compares Lawrence’s stress on intense lived experience to Nietzsche’s (111, 118). Eagleton has always been suspicious of those who do not accept a modernising industrial world, and that feels badly dated in our time of environmental crisis; for Eagleton it is the interest in nature and physicality that aligns Lawrence with the Right. As the essays in the collection Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green make clear, an interest in nature could equally well be used to connect writers like Lawrence with the nascent ecological movement

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in Britain (Rignall et al. 2012). Also, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, though fascism held up the aestheticised surface world of an ‘idealistically perceived nature’, a fuller conception of natural processes challenges fascism (1979: 127, 128). Today, Lawrence’s opposition to the environmental damage wrought by modernity can be seen as anticipating a progressive green politics. It can be expected that in the future, environmental degradation and the climate crisis will become central to how he is discussed – something already seen, for example, when Fiona Becket (2009) turns to eco-feminist philosophy to discuss Lawrence, or when Carol Siegel (2014) explores how her working-class background led her to use him to question consumerism, damage to the environment and sex-negative forms of second-wave feminism. As these examples demonstrate, a turn to an environment-centred conception of politics will also transform what is at present a male-dominated discourse on Lawrence and the political.

Lawrence from the Left As the account I have just given of Eagleton’s post-2000 views on Lawrence suggests, the consideration of Lawrence and politics from writers on the Left goes beyond assessments of where he lies on the political spectrum. Though he is the first major canonical British writer to hail from the industrial working class, Lawrence left his home region and those with whom he shared a background; he cannot be seen in terms of unstinting class solidarity and an active socialist politics. However, after the Second World War many on the Left were interested in, and often identified with, Lawrence. His narrative of leaving while also remaining deeply attached to his home community resonated with those who shared a similar life story. Further, until the early 1960s at least, he was seen as a part of a long-term radical tradition. The self-taught and prolific Christopher Caudwell established the main contours of the Marxist critique of Lawrence. In his Studies in a Dying Culture, published the year after his death in 1937 fighting in the Spanish Civil War, Caudwell saw Lawrence as failing to address solutions through social relations, instead aligning himself with bourgeois individualism through his return to earlier civilisations and the ‘mother’ in a form of Primitivism. In Caudwell’s binary view, Lawrence’s ‘solution was ultimately Fascist and not Communist’; he fails to recognise the proletarian renaissance (1971: 56). Literary Primitivism is now being re-evaluated for its complexities and ambivalences, although unfortunately the chapter on Lawrence in Ben Etherington’s major recent study outmodedly reads Lawrence as someone who builds a fixed position in his writing (2017: 107–33). Lawrence’s essay on Typee and Omoo in the final version of Studies in Classic American Literature repeats the prevalent view of his time about some races being more advanced than others, while also talking about transformative forms of engagement: ‘We can’t go back. We can’t go back to the savages: not a stride. We can be in sympathy with them. We can take a great curve in their direction, onwards’ (127). For all his criticisms, Caudwell’s Romance and Realism shows that he regarded Lawrence as ‘artistically considerable’, with his questioning of modern capitalist societies anticipating in some ways the writers – Soviet writers, as well as ‘Gide, Dos Passos, André Malreux and Barbusse in Europe’ (1970: 118) – that Caudwell admired. Romance and Realism also shows Caudwell’s alertness to matters of form; he compares Lawrence to novelists who approached their subject matter from the margins, utilising narrators who are to some degree outsiders, because they came to Britain from elsewhere (98–9).

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Raymond Williams, the most influential writer on culture from the British Left after the Second World War, had a shifting and complex relationship with Lawrence’s work. The broad contours can be discerned from the series of interviews he gave to the New Left Review, which were collected together in book form in 1979. At the end of the 1960s he was still warmly welcoming Lawrence’s colliery plays, noting that their neglect meant that an opportunity had been missed to establish a tradition of drama that engaged with the lived experience of ordinary people: ‘these plays show us that we have lost half a century’ (Williams 1969: 14). However, in the interviews he acknowledges that ‘I got much harder about Lawrence over the years’ (Williams 2015: 125). There are perhaps three main reasons – two of them are stated directly in the interviews, and the other can be inferred. By the time he wrote The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970) Williams was seeking to differentiate his position from that of F. R. Leavis’s ‘great tradition’ narrative, which included much praise for Lawrence. The second was an increased knowledge of, and commitment to, Marxist theory that led him to see Lawrence as positing a sense of selfhood that pre-dates social and cultural mediation. Williams is very clear, however, that it is wrong to align Lawrence’s writing with fascism (2015: 126). Williams’s third response is perhaps the richest, and results from what Geoff Dyer has called the element of ‘vicarious autobiography’ in his writings on Lawrence (2015: xiii). Williams’s interest in reconnecting his adult life with his early experiences can be seen in his novel Border Country (1960). There, as Williams noted in a joint interview with Edward Said from 1986, he deliberately broke with the ‘pre-formed’ narrative of ‘childhood, adolescence, going away’; Williams noted that the ‘classic of this is still, after all, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers’ (2007: 186). Williams saw Lawrence as moving towards abstraction after Sons and Lovers, something seen in the isolated and alienated main characters in Women in Love. However, as Jeff Wallace has shown in a supple and thoughtful article, Williams was very aware that there was no fully external theoretical position from which to view Lawrence. There was, as Wallace puts it, a ‘close entanglement of [Lawrence’s] conditions with the conditions of Williams’s own life and writing’ as he negotiated the connections between an intellectual language and that which arose from shared lived experience (1993: 107). Wallace points out that in an essay such as ‘Democracy’ Lawrence is negotiating the relationships between idealisation and abstraction, and nature and everyday experience, that also engaged Williams in his somewhat different period and context (117–26). Williams questioned criticism that saw Lawrence as tragic because he never got to ‘come home’, and also pointed out that his story is ‘common enough in its incidence to exempt him from the impertinence of personal blame’ (1967: 213). For others, such as Graham Holderness, Lawrence’s development after Sons and Lovers is all too clearly problematic. He regrets the move away from the social realism of Sons and Lovers towards more formally innovative, modernist modes. Following the Hungarian theorist Georg Lukács, Holderness thinks modernist writing should demonstrate modified forms of realism that could analyse a society and think about change, rather than welcoming modernist forms that celebrate fragmentation (1982: 19). Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology (1976) takes the opposite view to Holderness. He questions the ‘nostalgic organicism’ Lukács finds in realist texts, preferring ‘multiple forms which bear in their torsions the very imprint of the contradictions they lay bare’ (Eagleton 2006: 161). In the brief section on Lawrence, Eagleton sees Sons and Lovers as a realist text, though one with ‘“symptomatic” repressions and absences’,

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with Lawrence advancing from there rather than regressing as Holderness maintains. For Eagleton, The Rainbow ‘“explodes” realism in its letter’ even as its generational structure asserts the organic. Women in Love is a ‘unique moment’ that registers a sense of loss and absence whilst attaining a modernist ‘“progressive” discontinuity’ (160–1).

Lawrence and the First New Left: Utopia and the ‘education of desire’ Seeing Lawrence as part of a radical tradition developing a utopian trajectory – rather than an exceptional, unique figure – is best approached through the wider discussions within the British Left around the year 1960. It was a time which saw the English radical tradition both being explored and also starting to come under sustained attack. These debates on English radicalism are useful in thinking about Lawrence, art and politics because he is himself an important figure in that tradition; it is of course one that goes back centuries, with political and religious dissent interlinked. Through the 1950s a number of major British critics explored and critiqued nineteenth-century utilitarianism and, implicitly or explicitly, its ongoing legacies; they included Raymond Williams in Culture and Society and E. P. Thompson in William Morris. This critique was not confined to the Left; it can also be seen in F. R. Leavis’s 1962 lecture Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow, in which he attacks Snow for seeing progress in technological and material terms. Leavis uses Lawrence as ‘the greatest writer of our century’, and specifically the character of Sir Joshua Mattheson in Women in Love (based on Russell, but Leavis also makes a connection to H. G. Wells), to contend instead that ‘only in living individuals is life there’ (2013: 65). Against models that saw individuals as quantifiable elements in a system that could be retooled to raise wealth, Williams, Thompson and Leavis stressed the human and ‘life’, appealing to Lawrence as they did so. Not only could this critique be ascribed to modern capitalist societies with their increasing attempts to monitor individuals and thus to circumscribe liberty, it also applied to state-led projects for change on the Left, from Fabianism to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Even the 1930s critic Alick West, who remained loyal to the Communist Party, argued for what Lawrence offered in these very terms. In a piece on Lawrence from late in his life – West died in 1972 – he argued that ‘in the revolutionary movement there is insufficient consciousness of life, and hence an inadequate sense of what is to be achieved through revolution’ (1975: 259; Booth 2009). The problem, though, for all these writers is in articulating just what is meant by ‘life’ or ‘humanity’. Introducing Leavis’s lecture on Snow, Stefan Collini quotes John Ruskin on political economy in Unto This Last (1862), ‘There is no wealth but life’, and continues: Leavis and Ruskin (and others) come up against one of the recurring aporias of cultural criticism: quantitative or instrumental descriptions of the goals of life need to be shown up as inadequate and reductive, yet the character of the alternative ends up being merely gestured to by unsatisfactory phrases about ‘life’. (Collini 2013: 18–19) Lawrence’s development of a utopian trajectory in his writing can be seen as an effort to go beyond mere gesture.

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Thinking about the utopian tradition, and thus seeing Lawrence as a part of it, became harder as the 1960s progressed. Many had left the British Communist Party after the Soviet Union suppressed the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, exploring forms of democratic socialism outside of a party structure. The New Left that initially emerged was initially very interested in utilising the English radical tradition. However, in 1963 the so-called first (or old) New Left was displaced from the board of the New Left Review by younger thinkers from Oxford and Cambridge, led by Perry Anderson, who argued that there was no true indigenous Marxist tradition in Britain and who looked to theoretical models from the Continent instead, accusing their opponents of English exceptionalism. That second (or new) New Left has remained at the centre of later debates not only through the ongoing publication of the New Left Review, but also due to its offshoot New Left Books, which is now called Verso. The major figure of the first New Left who contested this shift was E. P. Thompson, and in one of the meetings where control of the New Left Review was at issue he produced a long discussion paper, ‘Where Are We Now?’ (Hamilton 2011: 93–132). First published in 2014, it includes a section that invokes Lawrence, as Thompson argues for the importance of culture and ideas that communicate a wider sense of life over theories of revolutionary violence (specifically Sartre’s championing of Fanon): ‘in important ways, Lawrence’s novels or de Beauvoir’s Second Sex are also about the attainment of humanity’ (2014: 241). Thompson’s view of social change emerging from the bottom up through increasingly educated and resourceful debate often turned to the past – his classic The Making of the English Working Class was also published in 1963 – and drew on the nineteenthcentury utopian tradition. Trying to go beyond political discussions bounded by the world we already know led Thompson to argue, in his ‘Commitment in Politics’, for ‘the value of utopianism’, which is to be found, not in raising banners in the wilderness, but in confronting living people with an image of their own potential life, in summoning up their aspirations so that they challenge the old forms of life, and in influencing such social choices as there are in the direction that is to be desired. (2014: 115) That this helps describe Lawrence’s effort to imagine change in his fiction is of course not pure serendipity; Lawrence grew up with the very Victorian utopian thinking that Thompson was exploring after the Second World War. Though Thompson is still widely read and discussed today, Lawrence’s relationship with Victorian radicalism is something that the wider intellectual culture created by the second New Left has long served to obscure. Thompson places Lawrence alongside Thomas Carlyle and Ruskin in his review of Williams’s The Long Revolution (1961) as examples of when the radical tradition takes on forms of discourse that are at times angry and indignant rather than operating within the terms of thoughtful communication and debate extolled by Williams (2014: 188). Lawrence used his post-First World War writing to posit and evaluate paths to a better future. He believed that something very different was possible, and his formation among the discourses of late Victorian radicalism meant that even if his texts did not describe a utopia, they were characterised by utopian yearning, and developed concomitant uses of form and language. The challenge lay in articulating an alternative to the

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everyday conditions that were all people knew and could imagine in their daily struggle. As well as the popularity of writing utopias in the late nineteenth century (Beaumont 2005), the effort to gesture towards something radically different and better resulted in the ‘religion of socialism’ that was developed, for example, in Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England (1893) and his Clarion newspaper (Bevir 2011). Though not proselytising for Christianity, Blatchford knew that his readers were steeped in the Christian story, so he reworked ideas of a third age of a transformed life on earth found in both Protestant and Catholic traditions (Yeo 1977). Perhaps the fullest exposition of what is at stake in utopian political thinking in this English tradition comes in writing on William Morris, and especially his utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890). In the long Postscript Thompson wrote for the 1977 second edition of his book on Morris he now felt able to fully free himself from what he saw as the chilling effect of Engels’s scepticism, in his 1880 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, regarding Romantic and ‘sentimental’ utopias. In the Postscript, Thompson thinks that John Goode, in his work on News from Nowhere, was ‘like myself in 1955 . . . running away from the acceptance of Utopianism as a valid imaginative form, because of the fright given to us by Engels in 1880’ (1977: 797; Goode 1971). Thompson wants a space for utopian yearning, and to bring about ‘a process of self-criticism and re-ordering within Marxism itself’ (1977: 802). What had helped Thompson make this step was reading the doctoral dissertation of Miguel Abensour. (Abensour has since gone on to be a major theorist of utopia.) Thompson quotes Abensour on Morris with approval in his Postscript: In fact, in William Morris’s case, the recourse to utopian writing signifies exactly the desire to make a breakthrough, to risk an adventure, or an experience, in the fullest sense of the word, which allows one to glimpse, to see or even to think what a theoretical text could never, by its very nature, allow us to think, enclosed as it is within the limits of a clear and observable meaning. (Abensour, quoted in Thompson 1977: 791; Thompson’s translation) Thompson distils from Abensour the idea that in Morris’s News from Nowhere ‘we enter into Utopia’s proper and new-found space: the education of desire’. And just as predetermined conclusions are abjured, so the form is open; the development of the desire occurs in the creative process and in the reading. As Thompson puts it: ‘what distinguishes this enterprise is, exactly, its open, speculative, quality, and its detachment of the imagination from the demands of conceptual precision’ (1977: 790). Abensour (1999) later published an article on News from Nowhere that places Morris’s text alongside Umberto Eco’s The Open Work; he observes that Morris creates spaces from which new possibilities might emerge, however rough-hewn. Abensour’s exploration of Morris’s utopian novel, like Thompson on Morris, helps provide us with the language and terms with which to describe Lawrence’s texts from a generation after Morris. Though attacked by Perry Anderson in his Arguments Within English Marxism (1980: 157–75), Thompson’s Postscript spurred further insights. Raymond Williams, in an essay on utopia and science fiction, said of ‘the education of desire’ that what people believe they ‘desire’ is itself dependent on the prevailing class relations (1978: 208). Lawrence often engages – The Rainbow and Women in Love are examples – with what his characters carry forward from their earlier lives, and with how hard it is to

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comprehend and overcome that legacy. More broadly, Lawrence’s texts acknowledge that the possibility for transformation is narrowing. This led him to question News from Nowhere for what he saw as its naivety. In 1927 Lawrence wrote that he had never felt News from Nowhere created a ‘valid’ world (IR 402). It does, though, seem to have been in Lawrence’s mind when he wrote his own unfinished utopia that same year, ‘A Dream of Life’, published in the Cambridge Edition as ‘[Autobiographical Fragment]’) (LEA 50–68; Booth 1999, 2011). Lawrence did not despair or write dystopias like other modernists (Linehan 2012). However, he saw that the intensification of change brought by modernity in the new century made it ever harder to imagine any alternative. In Lawrence ‘the education of desire’ takes place in deeply inimical conditions, and it is not seen as the pursuit of a known goal, such as the Rananim of older Lawrence criticism.

Lawrence, the Radical Tradition and Eastwood Lawrence’s political formation in the radical tradition had a particular context, namely Eastwood and his home region. It was one that continued to inform Lawrence’s writing. One of his longest friendships was with Willie Hopkin, a local Eastwood socialist radical and shopkeeper. It was perhaps through the older man that Lawrence first heard about Edward Carpenter; he knew Hopkin and visited Eastwood. We know that Lawrence read Carpenter, and though his indebtedness to Carpenter may not be as considerable as Émile Delavenay attested, there are striking similarities (1970). As Sheila Rowbotham notes in her biography of Carpenter, however, that may have been because of shared roots in a longer-term radical tradition, rather than simply a matter of direct transmission (2008: 275). Both writers show an interest in how change can begin at the level of the individual or with close relationships, rather than only coming from above in the form of large organisations or the state; this is the major reason why the final version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a political novel. Though Hopkin did serve as a local councillor, Roger Moore (1995) has argued that Hopkin’s politics were not widely shared in the area. The Nottinghamshire coalfield was not known for socialism and a combative union, and that meant that in large measure Lawrence heard about radical ideas rather than seeing a movement in action. There was a history of co-operation between workers and mine owners in the region, bolstered by the butty system that operated there; the butties were closer to the owners than the day men. (A butty was allocated a small stretch of the seam, or stall, to work; after the output from his stall was weighed, he then paid the rest of those who helped him to work it.) Another of those elected as a councillor in Eastwood before the First World War was the butty Joseph Birkin. He was to go on to help persuade George Spencer, the regional head of the union, to break away during the 1926 miners’ strike that continued on from the General Strike of May of that year. The accommodation Spencer reached with the owners delivered the national strike a fatal blow (Moore 1995: 53–4). (It was also in Nottinghamshire that a breakaway union was to emerge during the 1984–5 miners’ strike.) However, Hopkin did have influence through the newspaper column he wrote for many years for the Kimberley and Eastwood Advertiser (he also regularly contributed nature poetry). Moore discusses a number of sample periods – Hopkin’s contributions have still not been researched in full – saying that ‘much of

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what he wrote would not have looked out of place in an Independent Labour Party (ILP) or Social Democratic Federation (SDF) Tract’ (49–50). In making a claim for the ongoing importance of Lawrence’s upbringing through his life, I differ from those who see him as forgoing sympathy with the working class of the region from early in his career (Macdonald Daly’s example is his response to the 1912 miners’ strike [1994: 145]), noting his re-engagement with these issues immediately after the First World War and again during the 1926 miners’ strike that continued on after the General Strike ended. In the years just after the First World War, Lawrence questioned organised labour and socialist politics for their focus on ownership. He shared much of their critique if not their solution. The ambivalences here are caught in the various versions of his poem ‘Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers’, later included in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. They condemn socialists for wanting to rearrange present-day society in their favour without enacting sufficiently radical change; the flowers they wear, on the other hand, suggest that more thoroughgoing transformation (1Poems 266–71; 3Poems 1,544–50). Lawrence’s most positive statements about socialism are in texts that were not published in his lifetime. In the Epilogue to Movements in European History he wrote that ‘Myself, personally, I believe that a good form of socialism, if it could be brought about, would be the best form of government’ (262), and he set out a radical, if idiosyncratic, agenda in the essay ‘[Return to Bestwood]’ (LEA 22–4). That essay was written in response to the conditions he had seen when visiting Eastwood and its environs in September 1926; class war seemed imminent as the miners’ strike crumbled. In the chapter on Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Writing the 1926 General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics, Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill rightly note the importance of politics to all three versions of the novel, in opposition to the old consensus that politics fades from view in the later versions. However, they seem baffled as to why Lawrence talks in ‘[Return to Bestwood]’ about both nationalisation and the role of ‘beauty’ in life (2015: 92); the two are inextricably linked for Lawrence and the tradition of which he was part. The play Touch and Go, written in late 1918, addresses what Lawrence saw as the pressing issues for his home region at the end of the First World War, a response that continued to develop in such fiction as Aaron’s Rod. I have argued elsewhere that The Rainbow was a modernist recasting of late Victorian utopias, emphasising its ending and Ursula’s vision of the rainbow (Booth 2015), but post-war he developed different strategies. Lawrence wrote Touch and Go after becoming interested in engaging with politics and meeting the leadership of the Independent Labour Party (3L 284–5). He based a character – Willie Houghton – on Hopkin, as he was also to do in Mr Noon. The play provides an excellent close-up example of Lawrence’s take on industrial disputes, the relations between masters and men, sexual relationships and change at an individual level. It sees him addressing why he did not remain on the terrain of arguments around the distribution of material assets. Touch and Go reworks a number of characters and situations from Women in Love, then mainly finished but awaiting publication, though there are marked differences. Touch and Go imagines a Gudrun character, here called Anabel, who has left Gerald and had a further relationship before returning to the Midlands and restoring contact with him in the context of the industrial unrest that followed the war. Related to whether Anabel and Gerald can establish a relationship that moves them both forward – there is scepticism that their

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frictional relationship will work – the play is interested in whether relations between the classes can change for the better. After Gerald has physically attacked the Eastwood miners’ leader, Job Arthur Freer, based on Joseph Birkin (Plays 646),3 the play builds towards a scene where the crowds capture Gerald, Willie Houghton, Anabel and Gerald’s friend Oliver. The violence delivers a major shock to the idealistic Houghton; like Oliver he regards both sides as engaged in bullying. Gerald is allowed to leave at the end of the play, and he promises that there will be no recriminations. Oliver articulates a compromise position: OLIVER: [W]hy can’t we have the decency to agree simply about money, just agree to dispose of it so that all men could live their own lives. JOB ARTHUR: That’s what we want to do. But the others, such as Gerald Barlow, they keep the money—and the power— OLIVER: You see, if you wanted to arrange things so that money flowed more naturally, so that it flowed naturally to every man, according to his needs, I think we could all soon agree. But you don’t. What you want is to take it away from one set and give it another or—or keep it yourselves. JOB ARTHUR: We want every man to have his proper share. OLIVER: I’m sure I do. I want every man to be able to live and be free. But we shall never manage it by fighting over the money.—If you want what is natural and good, I’m sure the owners would soon agree with you. (Plays 430) While this shows that Lawrence looked beyond material ownership and power towards fulfilment for all, seen in terms of ‘what is natural and good’, it does not really suggest how that change might occur (we surely find the claims about the owners’ ready acquiescence deeply unconvincing). The phrase ‘according to his needs’ brings to mind Marx’s ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ from the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ of 1875. Lawrence addresses in his own terms what Marxist theory explores by asking if those living under capitalism know which needs are truly natural, given the category of ‘false needs’, and whether what appears natural is not itself made and constructed, having become ‘second nature’. After Touch and Go there was to be a renewed focus on utopian exploration in Lawrence’s fiction. As Aaron’s Rod shows, that had implications for the forms and styles adopted.

Aaron’s Rod Attending to the utopian trajectory of Aaron’s Rod – its search for a new mode of living, without fully knowing what that future will look like – also means responding to its tone and form. It is deeply inadequate to see the novel as a straightforwardly written search for a leader that everywhere manifests barely repressed homoeroticism and misogynistic depictions of women who suffocate men. The openness of the novel, with its peripatetic, picaresque form, sees Aaron knowing he has to leave his old life with only a general sense of what it is he is going towards. Chapter IV opens with ‘Our story will not yet see daylight’ (AR 39), suggesting that a hoped-for dawn has not arrived. Aaron’s decision to leave his wife, children and community is reminiscent of the opening of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, but here

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Aaron has no religious faith to draw upon. The tone of Aaron’s Rod is often ironic, questioning, and indeed darkly playful – for example in the overblown rejection of Christmas shopping near the novel’s start, or the different meanings of the rod of the title. However, Aaron is also on a deeply serious quest, and his brief return to his hometown after his experiences in London confirms that he cannot go back to his old life. Aaron’s stay with Sir William Franks after travelling to Italy only serves to show that a change of location provides no easy answer to the problems of the post-war world. The two versions of the suppression of the workers’ demonstration in Milan in the ‘XX Settembre’ chapter demonstrate that the state of conflict found in the strikes back in England is also present in the new country, but now in an even more violent form (AR 182–6, 303–7). Florence is very different, but not simply, as Aaron first feels, because he ‘felt a new self, a new life-urge rising inside himself’ (212). He is robbed in the street and, despite the tumescent language deployed in his initial response to the city, he recoils from his sexual relationship with the Marchesa. As well as the feeling that the novel is being improvised, there is also evidence of a shaping authorial hand. It is deployed to show elements of Aaron’s older way of life falling away. From the first chapter, although Aaron’s flute playing appeals to others, it gives rise to ‘maddened exasperation within him’ (13); the Apollonian is not fulfilling. The eventual destruction of his instrument in the anarchist bomb erupts into the novel with a ‘C R A S H !’ (282), showing that the Dionysian brings death as well as newness. The tension that is never fully resolved in Aaron’s Rod is between the importance Aaron discovers in being alone and not being reliant on others, and, on the other hand, whether being directed by another might offer him a way forward. The character of Rawdon Lilly in Aaron’s Rod is a Lawrence-figure who might offer an answer, but he is also ironised and called into doubt. Lilly is used to question Lawrence’s own urge to tell people how they should live. So exasperating are the personal comments Lilly makes to Jim Bricknell that he responds by punching Lilly in the stomach. Lilly’s wife Tanny entirely understands Bricknell’s motivation: ‘Now you’ll know how you make people feel’, she tells her husband (AR 83). As the following example from near the novel’s close shows, the tone and style probe Aaron’s feelings: As he lay pondering this over, escaping from the cul de sac in which he had been running for so long, by yielding to one of his pursuers: yielding to the peculiar mastery of one man’s nature rather than to the quicksands of woman or the stinking bog of society: yielding, since yield he must, in some direction or other: yielding in a new direction now, to one strange and incalculable little individual; as Aaron lay so relaxing, finding a peculiar delight in giving his soul to his mind’s hero, the self-same hero tapped and entered. “I wondered,” [Rawdon Lilly] said, “if you’d like to walk into the country with me: it is such a nice day. I thought you might have gone out already. But here you are in bed like a woman who’s had a baby.—You’re all right, are you?” “Yes,” said Aaron. “I’m all right.” “Miserable about your flute?—Ah, well, there are more flutes. Get up then.” And Lilly went to the window, and stood looking out at the river. “We’re going away on Thursday,” he said. (AR 290)

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We might well ask here whether Aaron is really being pursued by Lilly when if anything it is Aaron who feels that Lilly might have answers. Meanings shift as sentences develop. Though it is said of Aaron that ‘he must’ yield – erotic language is playfully deployed – this is then undercut and made very open when we learn that it will be ‘in some direction or other’. Aaron is both serious about his quest and left daydreaming about ‘his mind’s hero’ while ‘relaxing’. Bathetically that ‘hero’, who just then ‘tapped and entered’, proceeds both to misread Aaron’s state of mind and announce that he is soon to leave with Tanny.

Conclusion: Further Directions – Lawrence and the Frankfurt School In addition to Lawrence’s adaptation of nineteenth-century English radical and socialist thought for the harsher conditions of the modernist period, he also points forward in time. In his study of writers associated with the Frankfurt School, Stuart Jeffries discusses parallels between them and Lawrence’s analysis of modern life and culture (2016: 114–16, 176–7). However, Lawrence’s critics have rarely made this comparison. A notable exception is Gemma Moss’s consideration of Lawrence and ‘Popular Culture’ in this Companion, utilising Theodor W. Adorno on jazz, film, mimesis and propaganda. Both Lawrence and Adorno see modern popular culture as forming and damaging mind, body and sexual life rather than simply offering forms of pleasure that are chosen by wholly autonomous subjects in their free time. As Moss notes in her chapter, a crux issue is the possibility of change in an increasingly totalising modernity. Another possible area for comparison is Walter Benjamin’s and Adorno’s explorations of notions of progress and machine-like human activity that have become second nature, with the processes of natural history – the inevitability of the irregular, of fragmentation, and of decay and loss – becoming ever more unthinkable. It is a topic explored with economy, wit and force in Lawrence’s poem ‘Peach’ (1Poems 232). Comparing Lawrence and the Frankfurt School also helps us think about Lawrence’s formal choices. From the early 1920s not only do we have characters who search for new and better ways of living but also more open and exploratory forms and styles of writing. Though initially Lawrence’s texts seem very different from the high modernist writing that Adorno praised in his writing on literature, the way they include and evaluate diverse forms of art and culture can be compared with Adorno’s interest in music that reworks older, often popular, forms of art in order to hold up the possibility of a different future. Major examples include Adorno’s review of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and his book on Mahler (1989–90, 1992). Lawrence’s writing can also be placed alongside Adorno’s consideration of the ‘constellation’, roughly speaking the bringing together of different elements in order to spark something new (Jeffries 2016: 327–8). Perhaps the major possible area of comparison between Lawrence and the Frankfurt School, though, is their shared interest in utopia, in a transformed future that cannot yet be fully thought. The major Frankfurt School theorist here is Ernst Bloch, with his The Spirit of Utopia and multi-volume The Principle of Hope (2000 and 1986). Adorno, more sceptical regarding utopian longing than Herbert Marcuse, often

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questioned dreams somehow held to reside outside of the language and thought existing in modern conditions (Jeffries 2016: 329). However, Adorno’s philosophical writing builds towards extended considerations of how different forms of living might be reached by ‘negative dialectics’, the absences and gaps that can be used to imply an alternative to what presently pertains. Adorno summarised his position on utopia in a discussion with Bloch in 1964 that gets to the heart of the issues that Lawrence had explored creatively in the first decades of the twentieth century: It seems to me that what people have lost subjectively in regard to consciousness is very simply the capability to imagine the totality as something that could be completely different. That people are sworn to this world as it is and have this blocked consciousness vis-à-vis possibility, all this has a very deep cause, indeed, a cause I would think is very much connected exactly to the proximity of utopia, with which you [Bloch] are concerned. My thesis about this would be that all humans deep down, whether they admit this or not, know that it would be possible or it could be different. Not only could they live without hunger and probably without anxiety, but they could also live as free human beings. At the same time, the social apparatus has hardened itself against people, and thus, whatever appears before their eyes all over the world as attainable possibility, as the evident possibility of fulfillment, presents itself to them as radically impossible. (Bloch and Adorno 1988: 3–4) As these comparisons suggest, the topic of Lawrence and politics can be worked anew if we move away from discussions that redeploy conventional political labels, Rananim and leadership, and pursue instead his exploration of utopian longing.

Notes 1. For a discussion of these letters see Ellis 1998: 402–3. See also Lawrence’s comments on ‘men of action’ in his review, from late 1926, of Pedro de Valdivia: Conqueror of Chile by R. B. Cunninghame Graham (IR 302–3). 2. Lawrence’s interest in eugenics never became the preoccupation it was for some other modernists. John Carey’s claims regarding Lawrence’s support for eugenics extrapolate from a few quotations (1992: 10-12). 3. The same character also appears briefly in Aaron’s Rod (8).

Works Cited Abensour, Miguel (1999), ‘William Morris and the Politics of Romance’, in Revolutionary Romanticism, ed. Max Blechman, San Francisco: City Lights Books, pp. 125–61. Adorno, Theodor W. (1989–90), ‘Mahagonny’, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, Discourse, 12:1, pp. 70–7. Adorno, Theodor W. (1992), Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Al-Dabbagh, Abdulla (2011), D. H. Lawrence: A Study of Literary Fascism, New York: Peter Lang. Anderson, Perry (1980), Arguments Within English Marxism, London: NLB and Verso. Beaumont, Matthew (2005), Utopia, Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900, Leiden: Brill.

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Becket, Fiona (2009), ‘D. H. Lawrence, Language and Green Cultural Critique’, in New D. H. Lawrence, ed. Howard J. Booth, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 148–68. Benjamin, Walter (1979), ‘Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior, ed. Ernst Jünger’, trans. Jerolf Wikoff, New German Critique, 17, pp. 120–8. Bevir, Mark (2011), The Making of British Socialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bloch, Ernst and Theodor W. Adorno (1988), ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing’, in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, Cambridge, MA: MIT, pp. 1–18. Booth, Howard J. (1999), ‘“A Dream of Life”: D. H. Lawrence, Utopia and Death’, English Studies, 80:5, pp. 462–78. Booth, Howard J. (2009), ‘The Rainbow, British Marxist Criticism of the 1930s and Colonialism’, in New D. H. Lawrence, ed. Howard J. Booth, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 34–58. Booth, Howard J. (2011), ‘Dreaming Better Dreams: D. H. Lawrence, the Wilkinsons, and William Morris’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 36:2, pp. 27–42. Booth, Howard J. (2015), ‘“At Last to Newness”: D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and the Dream of a Better World’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 4:1, pp. 19–44. Carey, John (1992), Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, London: Faber & Faber. Caudwell, Christopher (1970), Romance and Realism: A Study in English Bourgeois Literature, ed. Samuel Hynes, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Caudwell, Christopher (1971), Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, New York: Monthly Review Press. Collini, Stefan (2013), Introduction to F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow, ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–49. Daly, Macdonald (1994), ‘D. H. Lawrence and the 1912 Miners’ Strike’, English Studies, 75:2, pp. 133–45. Delavenay, Émile (1970), D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition, London: Heinemann. Dyer, Geoff (2015), Introduction to Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London: Verso. Eagleton, Terry (2005), The English Novel, Oxford: Blackwell. Eagleton, Terry (2006), Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory, London: Verso. Eagleton, Terry (2016), Materialism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ellis, David (1998), D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Etherington, Ben (2017), Literary Primitivism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ferrall, Charles and Dougal McNeill (2015), Writing the 1926 General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frost, Laura (2002), ‘The Libidinal Politics of D. H. Lawrence’s “Leadership Novels”’, Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 38–58. Goode, John (1971), ‘William Morris and the Dream of Revolution’, in Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Lucas, London: Methuen, pp. 221–80. Hamilton, Scott (2011), The Crisis of Theory: E. P. Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Holderness, Graham (1982), D. H. Lawrence: History, Ideology, and Fiction, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. Jeffries, Stuart (2016), Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, London: Verso.

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Kinkead-Weekes, Mark (1996), D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leavis, F. R. (2013), Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow, ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Linehan, Thomas (2012), Modernism and British Socialism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mensch, Barbara (1991), D. H. Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Moore, Roger (1995), Community and Conflict in Eastwood: A Study from the Nottinghamshire Coalfield Before 1914, Nottingham: Department of Adult Education, University of Nottingham. Rignall, John, H. Gustav Klaus and Valentine Cunningham, eds (2012), Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green, London: Routledge. Robertson, Michael (2018), The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rowbotham, Sheila (2008), Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, London: Verso. Russell, Bertrand (1956), Portraits from Memory, London: Allen & Unwin. Russell, Bertrand (1968), The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914–1944 (Volume II), London: Allen & Unwin. Siegel, Carol (2014), ‘D. H. Lawrence, Mentor’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 39:1, pp. 11–25. Thompson, E. P. (1977), William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, London: Merlin. Thompson, E. P. (2014), E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics, ed. Cal Winslow, New York: Monthly Review Press. Turner, John and John Worthen (1999), ‘Ideas of Community: Lawrence and “Rananim”’, D. H. Lawrence Studies, 8, pp. 135–71. Wallace, Jeff (1993), ‘Language, Nature and the Politics of Materialism: Raymond Williams and D. H. Lawrence’, in Raymond Williams: Politics, Education, Letters, ed. W. John Morgan and Peter Preston, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 105–28. West, Alick (1975), ‘D. H. Lawrence’, Crisis and Criticism and Other Essays, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 259–82. Wilding, Michael (1980), Political Fictions, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Williams, Raymond (1967), Culture and Society, 1780–1950, London: Chatto & Windus. Williams, Raymond (1969), Introduction to D. H. Lawrence, Three Plays, London: Penguin, pp. 7–14. Williams, Raymond (1970), The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Raymond (1978), ‘Utopia and Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies, 5:3, pp. 203–14. Williams, Raymond (2007), Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, London: Verso. Williams, Raymond (2015), Politics and Letters: Interview with New Left Review, London: Verso. Worthen, John (1991), D. H. Lawrence, London: Edward Arnold. Worthen, John (2005), D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, London: Allen Lane. Yeo, Stephen (1977), ‘A New Life: the Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896’, History Workshop Journal, 4, pp. 5–56.

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11 Popular Culture Gemma Moss

Introduction

I

n 1913, Lawrence claimed that he was going to write a ‘pot-boiler’ (1L 536) – a work designed to make money by appealing to popular taste. He set aside the story that would become The Lost Girl and began what developed into The Rainbow and Women in Love – but did not produce his pot-boiler. In 1915 The Rainbow’s publisher was prosecuted, the book was banned under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and the remaining copies were destroyed (R xlv). After that, Lawrence struggled to find a UK publisher for Women in Love, writing that, ‘I have done a novel, which nobody will print, after the Rainbow experience’ (3L 100).1 Lawrence wanted his fiction to be popular in the sense that he wanted it to be in print and widely read. When he finally completed The Lost Girl in 1920 he felt it necessary to reassure his publisher about the commercial viability of his writing, claiming that it would be ‘the perfect selling novel’ and a story that ‘might be quite popular’ (3L 439, 503). Lawrence also had a cheap edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, described as the ‘Popular Edition’ on its title page, published privately in 1929 by Edward Titus in Paris (LCL lvii). At other times, Lawrence used the word ‘popular’ negatively, to denote culture that is widely consumed but lacks the moral, spiritual and intellectual value that he strove for in his own writing. In 1915, he maintained that his novels could make money without stooping to the status of the ‘popular’: ‘Does he expect me to be popular? I shan’t be that. But I am a safe speculation for a publisher’ (2L 370). Fourteen years later, Lawrence’s harsh critique of the ‘the mass of our popular literature, the bulk of our popular amusements’ (LEA 244) in ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ (1929) demonstrates his long-standing opposition to a broad, unspecified notion of popular culture. Hostility to a generalised conceptualisation of popular culture was common among modernist writers. As Andreas Huyssen has shown, many modernists anxiously sought to separate their writing from ‘the culture of everyday life’ – especially during the inter-war years (1986: vii). The First World War contributed to the self-conscious eschewal of the popular among modernist writers by prompting their urgent consideration of political, moral and philosophical issues, as Vincent Sherry (2003), Trudi Tate (1998) and Carl Krockel (2011) have identified. In 1914, Lawrence wrote to the literary agent J. B. Pinker of his hope that the First World War would change literature for the better: that it would ‘kick the pasteboard bottom in the usual “good” popular novel’ by making people feel ‘much more deeply and strongly’ (2L 240), and thus more receptive to serious and valuable writing. After the War, Lawrence was

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disillusioned. The more serious writing he hoped for had not materialised, and his attitude to popular culture and the mass market became more negative. In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) Lawrence denied seeking mass appeal for his writing. He declared that his books were not intended ‘for the generality of readers’ and claimed it was ‘a misfortune that serious books are exposed in the public market’ (PFU 62). Although Lawrence was deeply affected by the First World War, he considered it a symptom of deeper social problems, rather than the cause. In ‘Education of the People’ (1920) Lawrence wrote of ‘the real war, the real fight’ as separate from ‘our last war’ (RDP 159). In Fantasia of the Unconscious he went further, claiming that the ‘real war’ to come would be about securing freedom from ‘machines’: ‘There are wars in the future, great wars, which not machines will finally decide, but the free, indomitable life spirit’ (PFU 119). Popular culture, for Lawrence, was intricately bound up with the negative pressures machine technologies were exerting on social life, which had intensified during the First World War. Lawrence thought that people were becoming increasingly like machines: automatic and unthinking. In Lawrence’s writing, machines function as a metaphor for the rigid and stifling aspects of modern life, for which he wanted his writing to be an antidote. Lawrence claimed that limited forms of education and culture – ‘books and newspapers’ that dulled people’s ‘original spontaneity’ – were partially to blame for people acting like ‘machine-units’ (PFU 141, 119). Lawrence’s fiction published in the 1920s became increasingly critical of popular culture as his ideas about it became intertwined with other key areas of his thought, especially technology, sex and urban life. His critique of cinema’s mechanical production and dissemination in The Lost Girl, however, shows that he was not simply ‘in opposition to technology’, as Krockel claims (2011: 138; see also David Trotter’s chapter ‘Technology’ in this Companion), but specifically in opposition to the negative impact that he argued living in an increasingly mechanised and automatic world was having on peoples’ capacities to exercise independent thought. In contrast to the generalisations Lawrence makes about the popular in his essays, letters and articles quoted so far, in his fiction he often examines specific popular cultural forms and genres. This chapter will consider Lawrence’s exploration of cinema in The Lost Girl and popular music and painting in St. Mawr. Lawrence was critical of the content of popular culture as well as the forms it took. In ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ (1929), he claimed that popular culture transmits repressive and immoral ideas about sex and relationships to the public. These criticisms are influenced by his experience of censorship, as well his views on sex and education: ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ was written in direct response to the censorship of Pansies and Lady Chatterley’s Lover earlier the same year. Issues that are bubbling under the surface in The Lost Girl and St. Mawr are directly articulated in ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, which is Lawrence’s most direct attack on popular culture. This chapter will therefore finish by considering how ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ elucidates the connections between sex, ideology and popular culture that Lawrence was working through in his fiction of the 1920s. ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ also demonstrates some of Lawrence’s strategies for resisting the damaging ideologies that he argues are disseminated through the forms of culture that go uncensored, allowing them to be consumed by the masses.

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The Lost Girl At the time Lawrence was writing The Lost Girl, which he began in 1912 and published in 1920, Huyssen identifies that ‘vernacular and popular culture’ was being ‘transformed into modern commercial mass culture’ (1986: ix).2 Lawrence explores this shift in The Lost Girl by differentiating between waning forms of popular entertainment, like music hall and theatre, and newer forms of mass culture like cinema that were mechanically disseminated and far more widely consumed. Although ‘mass culture’ was not a term widely used when Lawrence was writing, The Lost Girl does offer a critique of mass culture, since it explores the effects of the mechanical technologies that facilitate cinema’s mass consumption. Madame Rochard, the leader of the Natcha-Kee-Tawara performance troupe, summarises the difference between theatre and cinema as follows: “The pictures are cheap, and they are easy, and they cost the audience nothing, no feeling of the heart, no appreciation of the spirit, cost them nothing of these. And so they like them, and they don’t like us, because they must feel the things we do, from the heart, and appreciate them from the spirit . . . They want it all through the eye . . .” (LG 148–9) For Madame, film is a visual medium that predominantly appeals to the eyes and the mind, working on surfaces, while the theatre has depth: it works on the whole sensory organism, appealing to the spirit and a deeper mode of feeling. For Sam Solecki, in The Lost Girl and for Lawrence more broadly, ‘film – a primarily visual medium – makes an appeal only to the viewer’s mental consciousness and in no way involves or relates to his vital, sensual, unconscious self’ (1973: 12). Theatre necessitates a form of engagement between audience and performer, with the potential to achieve vital, spiritual connections. For Madame, film offers no such opportunity: the mechanical technologies of filmmaking and projection allow a great number of people to consume the films, but those technologies also act as obstacles to interpersonal interactions. In The Lost Girl, cinema is represented as participating in a troubling shift towards the passive consumption of culture that requires limited interactions with machines, and no active engagement with other people. Lawrence saw technologies of mass production and consumption as significant forces shaping people’s thought and actions. His novels and essays anticipate arguments made by Frankfurt School theorists about the problems of an increasingly mechanised, capitalist society in which the culture industry plays a significant role. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1992) argue that advanced industrial society and modern subjectivity is built upon the domination of nature and people. In the search for increasingly efficient modes of domination, they argue, mechanical efficiency has become fetishised, and one result is the mass production of standardised forms of culture that generate automated consumer responses. Adorno often returns to the problems of popular culture, especially music. In ‘Perennial Fashion: Jazz’ he argues that the repetitive forms and structures of popular music require only passive consumption, so that people’s capacities for independent thought are gradually worn down (Adorno 1982: 119–32). For Adorno, popular music – which he also calls ‘consumer art’ – comprises ‘basic formulas’ that ‘recur constantly’ with

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only small variations (123). Such ‘standardization’ creates a public who become used to a limited range of music: they have ‘conditioned reflexes’ and want ‘only that to which they have become accustomed’ (123, 126). For Adorno, popular culture plays a crucial role in robbing people of their capacities for critical thinking and their desire for change, without which positive social transformation is impossible. Comparable comments about the problems of passivity, easiness, and mechanical thoughts and actions become common in Lawrence’s late essays and articles. In ‘Why I don’t like living in London’ (1928) Lawrence describes an increasingly mechanistic, money-driven society that is over-reliant on technologies that make everything so ‘easy and nice’, they are like ‘anaesthetic’, turning life into a ‘nightmare’ (LEA 121). Easiness – whether referring to simple ideas, or the way difficulty is removed from life by machines – has extremely negative connotations in Lawrence’s writing, as he fears that people’s abilities to experience conflict and difficulty, and also to think independently and thus work towards a better society, are being eroded. In another 1928 essay, ‘Introduction to Pictures’, Lawrence claims that in ‘modern civilisation’ people have become ‘a clock-work. A mechanism, and hence incapable of experience’ (170). Lawrence worries that people are being prevented from living rich, rewarding lives full of variety, conflict and intimacy by an increasingly mechanised society, where machines and mechanisms connote the repetitive, emotionless and homogeneous. For Lawrence, popular culture can contribute to creating a passive society through its form – such as the easiness of the consumption of film that Madame Rochard describes in The Lost Girl – or through the limited ideas it contains. In ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ (1929), Lawrence describes popular culture as providing ‘secondhand’ ideas that limit the potential of the ‘individual self’ (LEA 238). The ideas are ‘second-hand’ for Lawrence in the sense that they are acquired from mass culture instead of via direct engagement with other people and the world around them. In Lawrence’s view, homogeneous and homogenising mass culture, with its increasing reliance on mechanical technologies, was contributing to what he called society’s ‘fall into automatism, mechanism, and nullity’ (PFU 152). Lawrence’s relegation of popular culture to an inferior realm while claiming for his own writing the valuable ability to access truth and real experiences could be considered elitist. Adorno, with whom Lawrence shares so much, has been accused of elitism by Bruce Baugh (1990), while Huyssen acknowledges Adorno’s disregard for genres such as realism (1985: 25). Lawrence critiques realism in The Lost Girl, as well as developing his connections between popular culture, education and attitudes to sex. Miss Pinnegar, an economically efficient woman who is concerned about social status and propriety, enjoys the simplicity and clarity she finds in films. She is unable to see why Alvina values the Natcha-Kee-Tawara troupe and becomes anxious that association with them will damage Alvina’s prospects of marrying someone wealthy. In Miss Pinnegar’s character an approval of cinematic realism is combined with prudish and moralising attitudes to sex and marriage. Miss Pinnegar tells Alvina: “I can’t understand, myself, how people can go on liking shows. Nothing happens. It’s not like the cinema, where you see it all and take it all in at once; you know everything at a glance . . . I like to go the cinema once a week. It’s instructive, you take it all in at a glance, all you need to know, and it lasts you for a week. You can get to know everything about people’s actual lives, from the cinema. I don’t see why you want people dressing up and showing off.” (LG 142–3)

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In The Lost Girl, cinema is associated with knowing, while theatre is associated with feeling. Lawrence’s belief in the superiority of bodily knowledge over mental knowledge is explained in more detail in Fantasia of the Unconscious, where he writes that ‘the true goal of education for a child’ has been ‘to force each individual to a maximum of mental control, and mental consciousness’ (PFU 105). According to Lawrence, forms of education that prioritise intellectual over spiritual development have ‘almost poisoned the mass of humanity to death with understanding’ (141). Popular novels and films contribute to a restrictive education by disseminating inadequate ideas about life and relationships. As Lawrence writes in his review of C. W. Stork’s A Second Contemporary Verse Anthology, in which he finds crude, sentimental notions of love, ‘The girl who is going to fall in love knows all about it beforehand from books and the movies. She knows what she wants and she wants what she knows’ (IR 234). In ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, Lawrence claims that the ‘public’ are unable to distinguish between their ‘own original feelings and feelings which are diddled into existence by the exploiter’, where ‘the exploiter’ is the culture industry (LEA 238). For Lawrence, people become unable to think beyond the so-called knowledge they acquire from popular culture, which shapes their expectations and desires. Miss Pinnegar’s response to the cinema is exemplary of this effect. She believes she is gaining useful information about ‘people’s actual lives’ from films and finds them ‘instructive’, as though they offer a model for how to live. She is unable to see that that she is falsely equating the narrow cinematic world with reality. Miss Pinnegar’s assumption that a film offers a true representation of ‘actual’ life, combined with the easiness of being able to ‘take it all in at a glance’, suggests that cinematic realism facilitates passive consumption. Here, Lawrence reaches towards something comparable to Adorno’s critique of the mimetic impulse in realist art. For Adorno, realist art attempts a reconciliation between people and the natural world, from which people have become alienated through their subjugation of it. Realist art attempts to accurately represent the world, and cinema – which often draws on realist conventions – appears to have a privileged relationship with the world, since it records and transmits images and sounds. Summarising one of Adorno’s claims in ‘Transparencies on Film’, David Jeneman writes that cinema ‘offers illusory plenitude and wholeness’ by appearing to provide a direct and complete copy of the world (2007: 116). Lawrence makes a similar observation in The Lost Girl: since cinema claims to accurately represent life, its consumers accept what they see on the screen. This uncritical acceptance then limits their abilities to imagine or desire alternatives. Such inability is harshly criticised in the opening of The Lost Girl, where James Houghton’s business fails because his unusual clothes do not cater for the tastes of the masses, who can cope only with ‘mediocrity’. Money can only be made in Woodhouse, we are told, by providing things that are ‘vulgar, machine-made, and appropriate to the herd’ (LG 5), so that commercial success is equated with low-quality produce. Lawrence sees a herd-like mentality produced by realist forms of mass culture such as cinema: when a public are indoctrinated with ideas through mechanically standardised products and forms of art they blindly follow and copy each other, becoming unable to cope with newness and difference. Despite its critique of cinematic realism and popular culture, The Lost Girl is one of Lawrence’s most realist novels. It was also one of his most successful novels during his lifetime, winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. John Worthen tells us that the novel was ‘produced as part of Lawrence’s campaign to get The Rainbow

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into print, and to make some money’ (LG xlv). Since then The Lost Girl has been comparatively neglected by critics, which Ann Ardis attributes to the prioritisation of ‘high modernist’ texts by a generation of critics who equated aesthetic value with abstraction, formal complexity and a lack of commercial success at the time of a text’s original publication (2000: 123–4). Ardis points out that since The Lost Girl contains elements of realism and had some commercial success, it was once not considered a complex novel. Huyssen and David Chinitz have questioned claims about the aesthetic autonomy of ‘high’ modernist texts by revealing their fraught relationships with ‘low’ or popular culture, and Ardis draws on these ideas to argue that The Lost Girl is interesting precisely because of its complicated relationship with, and potential status as, popular culture. Nevertheless, for Ardis the main goal of the novel is to prioritise the literary: ‘Lawrence arrives at a defence of the “literary” through his criticisms of two popular, and primarily visual, forms’ (130). Ardis’s closing argument risks simplifying Lawrence’s relationship with non-literary and popular cultural forms like cinema. Linda Ruth Williams has written that ‘D. H. Lawrence had little to say about cinema’ and that ‘what he did write was negative’, yet her book identifies Lawrence’s use of cinematic techniques in his writing (1993: 1). Lawrence also praises the use of cinematic techniques in his review of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. It ‘is like a movie-picture’, Lawrence writes, ‘of disconnected scenes and scraps, a breathless confusion of isolated moments in a group of lives’ (IR 310). Lawrence values Dos Passos’s fragmented literary technique that provides a variety of snapshot moments without a connecting narrative – in other words, his rejection of a realist, linear narrative. That the foundational media theorist Marshall McLuhan has since written about Dos Passos’s novel attests to its extra-literary significance (1969). For Lawrence, the gaps between the stories and images resist the falsifying claims to unity, truth and wholeness that characterise realist narratives. If Lawrence shares Adorno’s distrust of realist art forms, another point of continuity between them is in their openness to the radical potential of cinematic technique, despite their broad resistance to it. David Jeneman has explored at length Adorno’s varied engagement with film during his time in the USA (2007: 105–47). Similarly to Lawrence’s claims about the value of disconnection and fragmentation, Adorno writes that ‘It is in the discontinuity of that movement that the images of the interior monologue most resemble the phenomenon of writing: the latter similarly moving before our eyes while fixed in discrete signs’ (1991b: 156). Cinema is comparable to writing, for Adorno, and can contain similarly radical potential: by featuring gaps and breaks in its narrative, an art form can eschew wholeness and unity, avoiding simple attempts at mimesis and registering the discontinuity between art and the object it seeks to represent. Lawrence’s texts place value on experiences that unsettle and disrupt commonlyheld notions of life. Cinema has this potential, but for Lawrence it is not realised. There are two reasons for this, and the first is its commitment to realism: a genre which passes off as true a limited range of ideas about the world. Second, it is part of a problematic shift in the kinds of behaviour encouraged by mechanical mass culture: away from human interaction and towards an increasing reliance on technology. Theatre has the potential – even though it is not always successful – to bring a person into closer contact with vital emotions and new experiences.3 This is the function of the Natcha-Kee-Tawara and other entertainers in The Lost Girl. The travelling artists are ‘Odd, eccentric people’ (LG 119) who perform remarkable physical and theatrical

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feats. Their performances are extraordinary because in an increasingly standardised, mechanised world they demand awareness of the non-quotidian and beseech intimate consideration of bodies and emotions by requiring an audience to acknowledge their unusual physical capabilities, or the extremes of human experience. The theatre manager, Mr May, prefers the ‘turns’ (the short stage performances by live entertainers) that precede the films and cannot understand the success of the Empire theatre, which has ‘only pictures’ and no live performers (115). Alvina offers Mr May an explanation for the public’s preference for film over the ‘turns’ that prefigures Lawrence’s claims about cinema in ‘Pornography and Obscenity’. She denies that the public have more discriminating taste than Mr May, as he fears, but says the public are “more modern.—You like things which aren’t yourself. But they don’t. They hate to admire anything that they can’t take to themselves. They hate anything that isn’t themselves. And that’s why they like pictures. It’s all themselves to them, all the time.” (116) Mr May and Alvina enjoy experiencing ‘the living personality’ of the artist, but the modern audience is ‘jealous’ of the ‘flesh-and-blood’ people on the stage. In The Lost Girl, being ‘modern’ is synonymous with inward-looking individualism and being unwilling to engage with otherness. In what will develop into Lawrence’s critique of the masturbatory impulse of modern films and literature in ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, the cinema is a solitary, selfish pleasure in The Lost Girl, devoid of human interaction. Lawrence develops his critique of cinema and connected attitudes to sex in ‘Tickets Please’, a short story published in 1922. John is represented as a vulgar man who lacks depth and uses outings to the cinema as conveniently impersonal preludes to one-off sexual encounters that function similarly to masturbation, offering only momentary and empty sexual satisfaction. John, who is uninterested in achieving any meaningful human connections and has a ‘flock’ of ‘old flames’, abruptly ends his relationship with Annie after realising she takes ‘an intelligent interest in him and his life and his character’ (EME 40, 39). In ‘Tickets Please’, the cinema is the preferred pastime of a person who has no interest in developing close relationships, and the format of the entertainment – a dark room in which you must be quiet, and not converse with your neighbour – is particularly suitable for facilitating impersonality and detachment.

St. Mawr In St. Mawr Lawrence takes his ideas about the damage popular culture does to people’s relationships further, describing the effects of conforming to a fashionable lifestyle on bodily health and sexual relationships. The problems of popular culture are represented differently in St. Mawr from in The Lost Girl: instead of specific pieces of mass-produced culture, it is Rico’s desire to be fashionable that is critiqued, which means he strives to conform to the standardised, ‘second-hand’ ideas about how to live that Lawrence describes in ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ (LEA 238). Lou and Rico both try hard to become ‘fashionable’, with their ‘little house in Westminster, the portraits, the dinners, the friends, and the visits’ carefully selected to help them ‘fit in’ (SM 23). The strain of crafting their fashionable lifestyle damages the couple’s sexual

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relationship: they have a ‘curious exhausting effect’ on one another and are perpetually on the brink of illness, which makes sex ‘shattering and exhausting’ (24). Rico is ‘an artist—a popular artist’ (117), closely associated with popular culture, and thus particularly associated with the problems of modern life, as Paul Poplawski has identified (2001: 94). Rico imagines his life in the same terms as his ‘fashionable’ paintings, so that he seems to have acquired his ideas about how to live from popular culture: And that was Rico. He daren’t quite bite. Not that he was really afraid of the others. He was afraid of himself, once he let himself go. He might rip up in an eruption of life-long anger all this pretty-pretty picture of a charming young wife and a delightful little home and a fascinating success as a painter of fashionable, and at the same time “great” portraits: with colour, wonderful colour, and at the same time form, marvellous form. He had composed this little tableau vivant with great effort. He didn’t want to erupt like some suddenly wicked horse . . . (27) Rico’s ‘life-long’ struggle to construct a life like a fashionable ‘pretty-pretty picture’ takes such ‘great effort’ that he feels in danger of erupting with the energy and desires he has repressed. Rico demonstrates the attitude that Lawrence wrote about several years later in his review of Trigant Burrow’s The Social Basis of Consciousness: he is ‘dominated’ by ‘a picture or an idea’ of ‘a normal humanity’ (IR 336). The effort of conforming to popular notions of what life ought to be like affects his health and reduces his masculinity – he is ‘forever quivering’ and ‘won’t need emasculating’ (SM 31, 97). In St. Mawr, foreshadowing issues that he explores more directly in ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, Lawrence challenges ideas that had become widespread during the nineteenth century about the benefits of abstinence from sex, by exploring the problems of too little sex. For Herbert Sussman, during the nineteenth century it was common to think of ‘sexual manliness as sexual thrift’, while the poorly-behaved man used up his ‘vital energy in wasteful sexual activity’, reducing his masculinity and virility (1995: 96). The health of the physical body acts as an indicator of the health of the soul, signalling social actions as variously beneficial, harmful or immoral. Such connections have a much longer history. French ideologues had long looked to the body to confirm the morality of social actions, with Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis noted for his writing on the ‘influence of the physical on the moral’, as François Azouvi has noted. For Cabanis, Azouvi writes, ‘every event in physical man is capable of “influencing” moral man’ because the intellect and thoughts are considered physical processes (2000: 277). Lawrence reshapes these ideas to respond to contemporary issues. Through Rico, Lawrence suggests the body can sanction a lifestyle by maintaining its health, or dissent by becoming ill. Rico’s marriage to Lou is ‘without sex’ (SM 24), which is emasculating and drains his energy. Rico’s languor is connected to his continual effort to win social acceptance by being ‘self-controlled’, which makes him fearful and ‘uneasy’, so that Lou finds him weak and unattractive: ‘the anxious powerlessness of the man drove her mad’ (31). Rico is ‘deadly afraid’ of being left with other women because of the danger of succumbing to repressed sexual desires and ruining his carefully curated lifestyle (117). In St. Mawr, Lawrence challenges discourses that associated masculinity, health and morality with ‘sexual thrift’. In another sense, though, Lawrence is

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still working within the parameters of discussions about nineteenth-century masculinity: although Lawrence has different ideas about what constitutes the ‘correct’ sexual behaviour, he still connects ‘correct’ sexual behaviour with health, claiming that welldirected sexual activity is good for the individual and, by extension, society as a whole. In St. Mawr, Rico’s physical ailments are the evidence that for Lawrence, the effort required to win social acceptance is immoral and unhealthy.

‘Pornography and Obscenity’ In ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, Lawrence directly articulates connections – between popular culture, repressive attitudes to sex and censorship – that he had been exploring in The Lost Girl and St. Mawr. The pamphlet was written in response to the confiscation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Pansies by the police in January 1929, and the resultant parliamentary debate on censorship and obscenity on 28 February the same year. Lawrence’s fiction – especially The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover – was targeted by religious organisations and legislators who considered parts of his novels sexually explicit and obscene, as Rachel Potter has shown (2013: 110). In the pamphlet, Lawrence challenges the definitions of ‘pornography’ and ‘obscenity’ that have been used to censor his texts, and argues that popular culture is in fact obscene because it degrades sex. For Lawrence, the ‘cheap and popular modern love-novel and love-film’ transmits repressive codes of behaviour, demonstrating ‘contempt of sex’ by treating it as something to be ashamed of (LEA 244, 243). The ‘mass of our popular literature, the bulk of our popular amusements’, he writes, ‘just exist to provoke masturbation’ in which ‘there is nothing but loss’ (244). Masturbation becomes a metaphor for solitary, energydraining behaviours that replace human interaction. In ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, Lawrence refers to the ‘popular’ as anything that transmits what he considers oldfashioned attitudes to sex. Lawrence sees power as concentrated at the top of a social hierarchy, and he accuses an anachronistic elite – ‘The grey ones left over from the Nineteenth Century’ (251) – of promoting unhealthy, repressive ideas about sex to the public through popular culture. Lawrence makes sweeping claims that ‘all nineteenthcentury literature’ (which had been popular in its own time) that avoids discussion of sex is pornographic (243). Lawrence declares contemporary obscenity laws morally bankrupt because they sanction novels and films that provoke unhealthy masturbation while suppressing art that could improve social well-being by celebrating sex. We should view with caution Lawrence’s assertions about his complete separation from popular and contemporary views on sex. His claims about the harmful effects of masturbation owe much to nineteenth-century discourses about the need to carefully control how and where sexual energy is spent. Thomas W. Lacquer has discussed the development of ideas about appropriate social and sexual behaviour during the nineteenth century, when bourgeois subjects were expected to be economically and reproductively efficient by focusing their energies into work and family life (2003: 277–8). Herbert Sussman describes the nineteenth-century ‘view of male ejaculation as a depletion of male energy’, with masturbation considered the ‘greatest’ waste (1995: 96–7). For Alison Pease, Lawrence often uses ‘the enabling discourse of sexology’ to make arguments about which aspects of sexual behaviour and culture are unhealthy

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(2000: xiv). As Howard J. Booth has noted, Lawrence was shaped by ‘the forces that structured minds and sex at the time, even while trying to imagine and bring about something better and different’ (2018: 205). ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ does, though, offer a view of sexuality and sexual behaviour as constructed, and constructed in part by ideas disseminated through popular culture: ‘in the press, in literature, everywhere’ (LEA 251). In his arguments about the effects of popular culture, Lawrence draws on ideas about mass psychology that he encountered in Burrow’s The Social Basis of Consciousness. As Burrow contemplates how it comes about that people share certain ideas, he argues that consciousness is not merely something with which the world is approached, but a mode of thinking that is imposed on people as they respond to ideas they encounter in the social world. These ideas create powerful images that people attempt to live by: ‘unconscious images which the repressed psyche uses as a substitute for life’ (IR 332). In ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, Lawrence claims that novels and films play a role in imposing ideas upon people, specifically by promoting associations between an absence of sexual desire and morality: films that characterise sex as profane by giving only ‘the villain or villainess’ sexual desire create expectations among the public, who come to ‘insist that a film-heroine shall be a neuter, a sexless thing of washed-out purity’ (LEA 242). For Potter, in ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ Lawrence argues that ‘Freudian understandings of the unconscious drives which structure psychic life complicate the idea of intention’ (2013: 52). Lawrence’s claims share much with ideas about the repressive effects of mass culture that Adorno derived from Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and which he wrote about in his essay ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’ (1991a: 135–57). For Adorno, ‘society extends repressively into all psychology in the form of censorship and superego’ (1968: 79). In other words, the removal of certain ideas from public discourse via censorship affects what people consider appropriate. Rather than responding to public opinion, censorship works to limit the ideas available to the public and constructs self-regulating subjects. Adorno goes further by explaining why individuals become convinced by ideas they derive from mass culture – to the point of defending them when challenged. Adorno describes how the ‘pseudo-cultured person counts himself among the saved; among the damned is everything which might call his reign – and everything connected with it – into question’ (1993: 53). As Deborah Cook explains this, Adorno finds that individuals ‘derive from the culture industry the sense of being part of an elect group’ (1996: 15). The shared experience offered by the culture industry gives lonely, alienated individuals a sense of belonging, which they become invested in protecting. For Lawrence and Adorno, popular culture’s powers of mass suggestion have serious and far-reaching consequences. For both writers, media technologies shape ideas and behaviours to produce, at worst, subjects capable of rationalising and engaging in warfare. In Aaron’s Rod, Lilly says the First World War was ‘humanly quite false’: that a person would never undertake mass warfare or use poison gases if he was ‘awake and in possession of himself’ (119). The war is described as having taken place ‘in the automatic sphere’ (118) – it was mechanical, thoughtless behaviour of the kind promoted by popular culture and technologies that require only passive consumption and automatic reactions. Jeff Wallace calls this ‘a state of mass-suggestion commensurate

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with the later potential of media technologies’ (2005: 222). Lawrence and Adorno share a belief that popular culture is diminishing the agency of the subject.

Strategies of Resistance Lawrence does not use the word ‘ideology’, but his argument that novels and films influence people’s actions, thoughts and morals comes close to an analysis of popular culture’s ideological content. In Women in Love, Birkin voices ideas about the harmful effects of school education that Lawrence writes about in Fantasia of the Unconscious, claiming that children are ‘Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts’ (WL 41). Birkin simplifies ideology into lies, but Lawrence’s account of writing The Lost Girl includes more nuanced observations of the variety of forces that shape desires and values: I think, do you know, I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people, not just what they fancy they want . . . this novel is perhaps not such good art, but it is what they want, need, more or less. (1L 511) Lawrence can claim that people only ‘fancy they want’ something because he thinks of people’s wishes as shaped by what they know. In other words, for Lawrence, desire is ideologically moulded rather than innate. In this formulation, ideology is not purely restrictive but also works constructively to form people’s subjectivities. People’s wants, expectations and beliefs are formed from the thoughts that are available to them, which are influenced by education, traditions and popular culture. This is positive, because it means the novelist can have a social impact. It also means that the novelist’s task is more complex than disabusing people of false notions – it means the novelist must reshape desires. Lawrence is interested in who can resist popular culture and how they might do so. Between The Lost Girl and St. Mawr there is a significant shift in where Lawrence attributes the agency for resistance. In The Lost Girl, only unique individuals like Alvina seem able to resist cinema – and with it, commonly held ideas about life, money and relationships. Alvina, though, is not an ordinary girl: ‘we protest’, the narrator tells us, ‘that Alvina is not ordinary. Ordinary people, ordinary fates. But extraordinary people, extraordinary fates’ (LG 83). Something better is destined for Alvina because she is different. However, her difference is innate, and if only a minority of unusual individuals can resist the ideas handed down to them by ‘the grey ones left over from the Nineteenth Century’ (LEA 251), Lawrence leaves little hope for most people, and by extension little hope for significant and widespread social change. In The Lost Girl, Lawrence’s ideas about the possibilities for resistance are different from Frankfurt School theorists’. For Adorno, everyone, theoretically, has the capacity to resist the ideologies of modernity, either with the effort of dialectical thought or by experiencing art that has ‘truth-content’ (1997: 169): that which formally registers, through techniques like fragmentation and dissonance, the alienated condition of the subject in modernity. Lawrence moves closer to Frankfurt School theories about how to resist ideology in St. Mawr. Lou is not special, but she is

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shocked into a realisation about the ‘rottenness’ of a bourgeois lifestyle by encountering St. Mawr, who is so different he seems to ‘look at her out of another world’ (SM 80, 30). In Lawrence’s fiction, experiencing otherness – people, places or animals that are strikingly different from that to which an individual has become accustomed – can cause a shock, prompting rebellion against the standardised behaviour and thought promoted by popular culture. In St. Mawr, as I have written in detail elsewhere, Lawrence uses an unusual narrative form to transmit Lou’s shock to the reader (Moss 2015). In a climactic central event, St. Mawr rears and throws Rico off near the Devil’s Chair – an ancient and spiritual location on the Welsh border. Significantly, St. Mawr rears exactly at the moment when popular culture – specifically, popular music, in the form of ‘a new dance tune’ (SM 75) – intrudes into an environment ordinarily untouched by modern culture. At the sight of St. Mawr writhing on top of Rico, sensing the creature’s rebellion against their intrusion into an ancient place, Lou has an apocalyptic vision. Modern life is revealed to her as rotten, evil and destructive. The vision changes her; she abandons Rico and retreats from ‘what other people call life’, which is closely connected to popular entertainment and poor forms of physical intimacy: ‘Wriggling half-naked at a public show, and going off in a taxi with some half-drunken fool who thinks he’s a man’ (153). Unlike The Lost Girl, where Ciccio and Alvina achieve some happiness until his conscription, in St. Mawr there are no beneficial human relationships. Lou rejects human intimacy, moving to an isolated Mexican ranch. Yet in one significant way, St. Mawr is more optimistic than The Lost Girl, because the capacity to think differently and resist modern life is not limited to unique individuals, but can be produced by engaging with otherness, or with formally unusual art. By the time of writing ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, Lawrence was carefully attending to the form of his writing and using literary techniques to challenge the ideas he claimed were transmitted by uncensored culture. ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ does more than argue that novels and films affect how people think: it also demonstrates how writing can do so. The pamphlet aims to reverse what Lawrence claims are the commonly held ideas about obscenity that had been used to censor his texts. To do this, Lawrence unfolds a detailed argument in stages, beginning with a typically modernist concern: the problems of language and meaning. He identifies that the meanings of the terms ‘pornography’ and ‘obscenity’ are not concrete: they are constructed in changing social contexts, and different individuals will ascribe to the terms a variety of connotations. As a result, Lawrence argues, broad definitions – or popular opinions, what he calls ‘the mob-meaning, decided by majority’ (LEA 236) – are always bound to be simplifications with insufficient nuance and specificity. After having laid this foundation, it is not a big leap for Lawrence to claim that the current consensus about what is obscene is an unhelpful generalisation. The opening of the pamphlet observes the impossibility of accessing conceptual essences and criticises popular opinion, but Lawrence pre-empts charges of elitism by avoiding convoluted word-choice and illustrating complex arguments with quotidian examples, such as the varieties of bread that are obscured by the catch-all term. After an opening that invites a critical approach to language, Lawrence attempts to remould his reader’s ideas by transferring the associations of ‘pornography’ and ‘obscenity’ away from his texts, onto popular culture. Lawrence repeatedly uses the phrase ‘dirty little secret’ to mean ‘repressive attitudes to sex’, re-framing so-called

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‘pure’ or ‘moral’ attitudes to sex as unhealthy and clandestine. He bombards the reader with images of the ‘secret’ being masturbated – ‘rubbing’ and ‘tickling the dirty little secret under the delicate underclothing’ (LEA 251) – and makes the descriptions unpleasant through their association with illness and infection, with scratching, rubbing, dirt, and by describing the ‘secret’ as a sore that becomes ‘inflamed’ (243). Associations are encouraged between these unpleasant images and popular culture, which Lawrence accuses of encouraging masturbatory behaviour. The pamphlet works on the intellect and sensations simultaneously, combining a series of developing philosophical arguments about language, meaning and morality with the affective potential of language and association to redirect ideas about indecency and feelings of disgust towards popular culture and censors. The censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover belatedly turned it into a piece of popular culture. When Penguin republished the novel in 1960 and invited prosecution, it won the right to publish the novel unexpurgated. Sales of the text were enormous, and the novel has since been adapted for film, stage, radio and television. Issues of morality dominated public discussions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Its suppression in 1929, and the 1960 Penguin trial, both hinged on claims about its obscenity: that it would damage the nation by transmitting immoral, unhealthy ideas about sex. Lawrence thought the opposite: he believed that the novel would benefit people because it represented sexual relationships frankly. Responding to the censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ invites its readers to question popular notions of what is right, moral and true: could the texts people are told will harm them in fact benefit them? By the end of his career and life, Lawrence was asking his readers to engage in dialectical thinking – which would become the core tool of Frankfurt School critical theorists – to resist popular culture, ideology and industrial modernity. Could things that are sanctioned and approved – such as popular culture, war and the pursuit of money – in fact be harmful? In The Rainbow, when Will contemplates the modern world, he thinks of the ‘ponderous, massive, ugly superstructure of a world of man upon a world of nature’ and wants to ‘Sweep away the whole monstrous superstructure of the world of today, cities and industries and civilisation’ (R 179). For Lawrence, popular and mass culture is responsible for the perpetuation of some of the worst aspects of modernity: it is one of the works of man, and ‘The works of man were more terrible than man himself, almost monstrous’.

Notes 1. For the fluctuations in Lawrence’s relationships with publishers and the extent of his commercial success, see Wexler 2018. 2. Lawrence drafted ‘Elsa Culverwell’ in 1912, rewrote the story as ‘The Insurrection of Miss Houghton’ in 1913, and finally wrote The Lost Girl in 1920 (Poplawski and Worthen 1996: 210). 3. Lawrence’s reviews of theatre performances are varied. He describes a performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts in Italy positively because he felt that the performances, which were full of emotion, brought him into closer contact and empathy with characters by showing ‘people frightened, obstinate, foolish, passionate, and dead’. A second play on the same evening is described as ‘childish and foolish’ (TI 71, 73).

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Works Cited Adorno, T. W. (1968), ‘Sociology and Psychology (Part 2)’, New Left Review, 1:47, pp. 79–97. Adorno, T. W. (1982), ‘Perennial Fashion: Jazz’, in Prisms, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 119–32. Adorno, T. W. (1991a), ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, in The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein, London: Routledge, pp. 132–57. Adorno, T. W. (1991b), ‘Transparencies on Film’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein, London: Routledge, pp. 154–61. Adorno, T. W. (1993), ‘Theory of Pseudo Culture’, trans. Deborah Cook, Telos, 95, pp. 15–38. Adorno, T. W. (1997), Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Teidemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Adorno, T. W. and Max Horkheimer (1992), Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, London: Verso. Ardis, Ann (2000), ‘Delimiting Modernism and the Literary Field: D. H. Lawrence and The Lost Girl’, in Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–30, ed. Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 123–42. Azouvi, François (2000), ‘Physique and Moral’, in Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind–Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment, ed. John P. Wright and Paul Potter, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 267–80. Baugh, Bruce (1990), ‘Left-Wing Elitism: Adorno on Popular Culture’, Philosophy and Literature, 14:1, pp. 65–78. Cook, Deborah (1996), The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Huyssen, Andreas (1986), After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Jeneman, David (2007), Adorno in America, London and Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Krockel, Carl (2011), War Trauma and English Modernism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lacquer, Thomas W. (2003), Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, New York: Zone Books. Lawrence, D. H. (1929), Lady Chatterley’s Lover, including Mr Skirmish with Jolly Roger, Paris: Edward Titus. McLuhan, Marshall (1969), ‘John Dos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility’, in The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, 1943–1962, ed. Eugene McNamara, Toronto: McGraw-Hill, pp. 49–62. Moss, Gemma (2015), ‘“A Beginning Rather Than an End”: Popular Culture and Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 4:1, pp. 119–39. Pease, Alison (2000), Modernism, Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Obscenity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poplawski, Paul (2001), ‘St. Mawr and the Ironic Art of Realization’, in Writing the Body in D. H. Lawrence: Essays on Language, Representation, and Sexuality, ed. Paul Poplawski, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 93–104. Poplawski, Paul and John Worthen (1996), D. H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion, Westport, CT and London: Greenwood. Potter, Rachel (2013), Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment 1900–1940, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sherry, Vincent (2003), The Great War and the Language of Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solecki, Sam (1973), ‘D. H. Lawrence’s View of Film’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 1:1., pp. 12–16.

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Sussman, Herbert (1995), Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tate, Trudi (1998), Modernism, History and the First World War, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wallace, Jeff (2005), D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wexler, Joyce (2018), ‘Book Publishers’, in D. H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 37–46. Williams, Linda Ruth (1993), Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence, London: Routledge.

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12 Technology David Trotter

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o question but that technology would have been a dirty word for Lawrence, had he ever used it. As it is, the ‘machine’ – sometimes bulked up into the ‘great machine’ Tom Brangwen worships, in The Rainbow (325) – took the brunt of his long, increasingly bitter campaign against industrial capitalism. An obvious point of reference would be ‘What is a man to do?’, from ‘The “Nettles” Notebook’, the contents of which he composed over six months in 1929, while travelling through France, Spain, Italy and Germany: Oh, when the world is so hopeless what is a man to do? When the vast masses of men have been caught by the machine into the industrial dance of the living death, the jigging of wage-paid work, and fed on condition they dance this dance of corpses driven by steam. When year by year, year in, year out, in millions, in increasing millions they dance, dance, dance this dry industrial jig of the corpses entangled in iron and there’s no escape, for the iron goes through their genitals, brains, and souls— then what is a single man to do? (1Poems 545) Here, and in many other poems, the machine is for Lawrence more than an enemy. It is history, or fate. There are ‘Masses and Classes’, as he put it in the poem of that title, ‘but the machine it is that has invented them both’ (553). Lawrence, then, was no stranger to technological determinism. He may on occasion have been prepared to maintain that, despite the damage it has already done, the machine ‘will never triumph’ over a stubborn residual reverence for what still remains of the natural world (537). But he more often concluded, as he does in ‘What is a man to do?’, that there is only one alternative to submission to it: Or must he try to amputate himself from the iron-entangled body of mankind and risk bleeding to death, but perhaps escape into some unpopular place and leave the fearful Laocöon of his fellow-man entangled in iron to its fearful fate? (545)

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For Lawrence, in some moods, the ‘unpopular place’ was all that remained outside the entangling military-industrial complex: freedom’s only resource. We might note that the machine controlling capitalism’s dance of the corpses is a nineteenth-century machine: built of iron, it runs on steam. Of course, there are technological innovators, in the fiction, like Gerald Crich in Women in Love, or Sir Clifford Chatterley in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But the innovations they introduce do little more than accelerate the prevailing logic of capital accumulation. ‘The dark, satanic mills of Blake / how much darker and more satanic they are now!’ (1Poems 543). The mass media which had since the turn of the century reconfigured popular culture could be seen as an extension of industrialism’s dance of death from work into leisure, a kind of Satanic Mills 2.0. Jazz, film and wireless, he announced in ‘Departure’, ‘are all evil abstractions from life’ (629). ‘Let us be men—’, from Pansies (1929), is even less forgiving: For God’s sake, let us be men not monkeys minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone. (390) Radio, film, gramophone: each is a cog in the ‘machine’. As Amit Chaudhuri has pointed out, the ‘generality’ of the term indicates reference to an idea rather than to an object or device. Lawrence deployed it in polemics both against industrial capitalism and against whatever else is ‘anti-life and anti-man’ (2003: 43). When it came to actual machines, he could be distinctly offhand. James Houghton, for example, in The Lost Girl, upgrades his garment factory by installing ‘another plant of machinery—acetylene or some such contrivance—which was intended to drive all the little machines from one big belt’ (10). It is hard to see how acetylene, a gas then used in welding, and for illumination, might generate the sort of energy necessary to drive a ‘big belt’, or anything else, for that matter. Where technology is concerned, criticism has, on the whole, taken Lawrence at his word. F. R. Leavis set the tone by celebrating him as a hero of the resistance to ‘technologico-Benthamite civilization’, and as one who, unlike T. S. Eliot, felt able to draw with confidence on a ‘wholeness of being, or free flow of life’ (1969: 125, 139). Raymond Williams, establishing Lawrence as heir to the Carlylean critique of industrialism, provided some historical context: Lawrence takes over the major criticism of industrialism from the nineteenth-century tradition, on point after point, but in tone he remains more like Carlyle than any other writer in that tradition, then or since. There is in each a mixture of argument, satire, name-calling, and sudden wild bitterness. The case is reasoned and yet breaks again and again into a blind passion of rejection, of which the tenor is not merely negative but annihilating . . . The impact of each man on the generation which succeeded him is remarkably similar in quality: an impact not so much of doctrines as of an inclusive, compelling, general revelation. (1990: 200) Williams has certainly caught the ‘annihilating’ tone of those desperate last poems, which weaponise language itself in response to the technologico-Benthamite onslaught. There is indeed something Carlylean about their inveighing against entanglement in iron.

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There have, of course, been productive critical variations on the theme of Lawrence’s rage against the machine. In the 1990s, Heidegger, for whom technology was above all ontological, a modern metaphysic arising out of our distinctive way of being, was introduced into the argument. Michael Bell has drawn attention to the striking similarities between Heidegger’s brief discussion of coal mining in ‘The Question concerning Technology’ (1954) and Lawrence’s extensive account of the activities of Gerald Crich in Women in Love (1992: 8). According to Heidegger, modern technology is in essence extractive: it lays the world open as a resource rather than as an environment, putting to ‘nature’ the ‘unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such’ (1977: 14). The area of land ‘challenged’ to provide coal thereby becomes a mining district, its soil now no more than a mineral deposit. The coal extracted must then be brought to market by means of further technological systems of one kind or another: ‘the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew’ (16). Lawrence did not pursue the ramification of technological process quite that far, but he certainly shared Heidegger’s concern with the violent demands it has so damagingly made on the world. Heideggerian readings of his work continue to flourish (Männiste 2016). Indeed, that emphasis on sensitivity to ecological damage remains central to our view of his achievement as a writer. Many, if not most, of the essays in a recent collection of essays on the topic, D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, enlarge upon the theme of rage against the machine (Männiste 2019). Pretty much all these approaches, from Leavis and Williams onwards, deal in the relatively longue durée. We have come to value Lawrence as a witness to the Anthropocene. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that Lawrence was by no means always as offhand in his treatment of machines and devices as his reference to ‘acetylene or some such contrivance’ might suggest. Leavis praised Lawrence’s ability to draw with confidence on, and to represent, the ‘free flow of life’. I want to argue that in his writing ‘life’ can on occasion be seen to ‘flow’ more freely under technology’s spell than it would otherwise have done. The critical focus on a Carlylean antipathy to the ‘great machine’ has hitherto precluded close attention to the actual devices he did choose to represent and reflect on in his poems, novels and short stories. It is worth adding that, despite their abundant interest, and the eccentricity with which they are sometimes described, these devices have for the most part attracted as little attention from editors as they have from critics. I do not intend in this chapter simply to scan the poems, novels and short stories for quotable technological awareness. My aim, instead, is to throw some light on two of Lawrence’s qualities as a writer, in particular: his feeling for sound, and subtle understanding of its effects on mind and body; and his skilful organisation of narrative matter. It is surely of significance that, to judge by his writing, Lawrence tended to listen to machines rather than to inspect them visually. The recent attention to sound in literary modernism seems thus far to have ignored him (Murphet et al. 2017). A valuable exception is Susan Reid’s study of his lifelong engagement with music and song. Reid shows how a steadily increasing preoccupation with rhythm led to an ‘assault’ on harmonics comparable to that undertaken at the time by modernist composers determined to push tonal relationships to the limit (2019: 13). Mechanical noises

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‘erupt’ into the foreground of Women in Love, Reid argues, as a ‘virtuosic performance’ to rival the Futurist compositions of Luigi Russolo, or Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Furthermore, it is not hard to hear in these cacophonies the ‘discordant soundscape of machine warfare’ (126). That soundscape was to continue to haunt Lawrence, as Reid establishes, long after the end of the war which had brought it to a macabre climax (147–72). ‘Terrible the noise of iron all the while, breaks my head,’ he reported from San Francisco in 1922: ‘and the black, glossy streets with steel rails in ribbons like the path of death itself’ (4L 290). The terrible noise had become the great machine’s most damaging emanation, an iron cacophony. There can be no doubt that particular devices also make a noise, sometimes terrible, sometimes not, in Lawrence’s writing. What remains to be examined are the occasions on which the noise they make is not in fact the noise ‘of’ anything at all: when there is no shape to it, and therefore no meaning; when, in effect, it no longer counts as sound. Because such noise-making constitutes an event, rather than an expression – a deed, not a symbol – I will pay particular attention to the timing of its occurrence: its place in narrative. My second main emphasis is therefore on when technology happens. In a number of key scenes or episodes in Lawrence’s fiction, mechanical noise precedes – and could even be said to pre-empt – the meanings subsequently articulated either as speech in dialogue form or as narrative commentary. Timing matters less where the poems are concerned. In order to illustrate the breadth of mechanical noise-making in both the poetry and the fiction, I have chosen examples from three of the several genres in which he excelled: the short story, the novel and the lyric. I will begin at the beginning of his career and work my way forward. The variations in his treatment of the relationship between human beings, technology and the natural world suggest, as Jeff Wallace has pointed out, a ‘constant process of reappraisal’ (2005: 34).

The Free Flow of Technology A branch of technology pretty much assured of a prominent role in the work of earlytwentieth-century writers was transport. Journeys by ship, train, car and airplane feature in, and in some cases structure, a wide range of novels and stories. Lawrence was no exception, as Andrew Humphries’s comprehensive study of the topic has demonstrated. Modes of transport seem to several of his protagonists a ‘symbol’ of the ‘changing modern world they have inherited and must negotiate’ (2017: 2). One in particular, the tram, could be accounted doubly modern: at once a mass transit system and a convert to electricity. Electric trams brought about a ‘small social revolution in urban travel’ between 1895 and 1914 (Bagwell and Lyth 2002: 113–15). Croydon, for example, had acquired its own electricity generator by the turn of the century. When Davidson Road School was built in 1907, it came complete with electric lighting. Lawrence started teaching there in 1908 (Harrison 2003: 142). One of Lawrence’s earliest stories, ‘The Witch à la Mode’, written in 1911 and subsequently revised, includes a wonderful description of the electrical spark generated by a tram. Bernard Coutts, having got as far as East Croydon on his return from a nine-month stay on the continent, suddenly decides to visit his old landlady, Mrs Braithwaite, in Purley, an adjoining suburb, rather than travel directly through the centre of London to the ‘Vicarage in the north’ where his fiancée Constance awaits his

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arrival. He does so in the hope that he might once again run into his ex-lover Winifred Varley, a mutual friend. As the tram carries him from Croydon to Purley, on a mild March evening, he feels immediately at home: ‘I know it so well,’ he thought—‘And love it,’ he confessed, secretly, in his heart. The car ran on familiarly. The young man listened for the swish, watched for the striking of the blue splash overhead, at the bracket. The sudden fervour of the spark, splashed out of the mere wire, pleased him. ‘Where does it come from?’ he asked himself, and a spark struck bright again. He smiled a little, roused. (LAH 54) Bachelor habit clearly exercises an emotional and erotic command over Coutts that the idea (and ideal) of marriage cannot yet hope to match. It still constitutes an important source of the ‘free flow of life’ inherent in him. What reopens that source is his apprehension of a comparable ‘flow’ in the technological process or system by means of which he is returning to familiar territory. It all begins with the noise made as the tram’s pole passes a bracket supporting the overhead line along which electrical power is transmitted to the vehicle. Coutts hears that noise as a ‘swish’. A swish is the sound of an object moving through air, or in contact with water. In the early poem ‘A Youth Mowing’, it is the ‘swish’ of scythe-strokes that Lawrence hears (1Poems 178). In Chapter IV of The Rainbow, Will and Anna Brangwen stack corn amid ‘a swish and hiss of mingling oats’ (114), the rhythm of their work ‘marked only by the splash of sheaves, and silence, and a splash of sheaves’ (115). In ‘The Witch à la Mode’, the sound made by a thoroughly up-to-date technology has been rendered uncanny through its association with a traditional form of human labour. Alliteration, a sound effect, then generates an image, equally naturalistic, and thus equally uncanny: that of the ‘blue splash’ struck from ‘mere wire’. The uncanniness matters. It is only because Coutts does not know where the spark has ‘come from’ that he is able to acknowledge in himself a comparable ‘fervour’: a ‘life’ which would cease to flow if he were ever to admit its origin. ‘He smiled a little, roused.’ As Lawrence surely knew, the term ‘fervour’ has meant intense heat or a glowing condition for as long as it has meant passion or vehemence. The passage I have quoted occurs on the story’s first page, before we have learnt anything very much at all about Coutts. The glow he experiences under technology’s spell thus defines him for us. It turns out that he will not again experience anything quite as intense. For the remainder of the story, told throughout from his point of view, consists in large part of verbal sparring with the witch-like Winifred Varley, through what he describes as a ‘foggy weather of symbolism’, as they make their way slowly back from Purley to her rooms in Croydon (LAH 62). Winifred fascinates him. ‘He and she really played with fire’ (64). The problem is that the flirtation they have resumed produces a self-consciousness as predictable and as deadening as the prospect of marriage to the woman in the northern rectory. They play at passion by playing with the symbols for it, as Winifred points out when Coutts compares her to Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott. ‘“You talk to me,” she said, dashing his fervour, “of my fog of symbols”’ (67). The only possible outcome of these skirmishes is bathos. Coutts literally plays with fire when he clumsily knocks over a lamp which in shattering sets Winifred’s dress ablaze. He extinguishes the blaze and runs out of the house and down

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the street, ‘with burning red hands held out blindly’ (70). The problem, we realise, is that both protagonists know only too well where each show of passion has come from. That initial fervour struck from mere wire did not so much anticipate as pre-empt the renewal of their relationship. Technology is the better witch.

Anna’s Sewing Machine Michael Bell has argued persuasively that there is almost invariably in Lawrence’s novels ‘a significant interaction between the narrative language of the given book and the way language is thematised within it’ (1992: 4). Throughout his career, the ‘thematised struggle with language’ continued to provide a ‘significant focus’ for his ‘representation of being in the world’ (10). Bell pays particular attention to The Rainbow as the novel in which that thematised struggle ‘arises’ for the first time as ‘an effect of the whole’. For the evolution of ‘Brangwen consciousness’ across three generations ‘passes at several points through crises of meaning which bear equally upon the nature of meaningfulness in the narrative itself’. During those crises, the protagonists fail to express, and the narrative fails to express on their behalf, the meaning of an existence ‘guided by intense intuition of an emotional or an ontological kind’ (55). As we have seen, much the same could be said of ‘The Witch à la Mode’. Might we then expect to find in The Rainbow a comparable pre-emption of language by technology? The most likely candidate is an event which occurs in Chapter VI, ‘Anna Victrix’, during one of Bell’s crises of meaningfulness. Anna Lensky marries Will Brangwen in December 1882. As its title indicates, the chapter has mostly to do with the means by which a woman of that generation might assert her individuality within the as yet unchallenged institution of marriage. Emerging from a blissful honeymoon, Anna and Will fight and make up repeatedly as they reach for some kind of equilibrium. These skirmishes, which begin with a bitter dispute about the significance of a lamb in the window of the local church (R 148–50), take place in their own ‘foggy weather of symbols’. Like Bernard Coutts and Winifred Varley, Anna and Will play, if not with fire, then with various other antagonisms supplied by the natural world: Anna performs as the plover to Will’s hawk, and so on (151). A predominantly visual symbolism shapes the dramatic action throughout, never more so than during the chapter’s climactic episode, when Anna dances, naked and pregnant, in front of the bedroom mirror. Anna’s vivid ‘dance before her Creator in exemption from the man’ (170) is, as Bell puts it, ‘a moment in which we sense, as well as the local truth to her particular feeling, a hyperbolical gesture on the part of the narrative itself’ (1992: 56). Breast-feeding subsequently seals her triumph over Will (R 178). Body, we might think, has triumphed over mind, the organic over the mechanical. It would be tempting to forget, at this stage, that Anna’s pride began, in the aftermath of the quarrel about the figure of the lamb, in a dance not before her Creator, but before a machine; and in sound, rather than vision. Will has carelessly littered the house with his tools, and she just as carelessly sweeps them out of the way. ‘They were very well matched. They would fight it out’ (R 152). Fighting it out involves a choice of weapon. ‘She turned to her sewing.’ Rather, she turns to a machine that expresses her more effectively than mere discourse ever could. ‘He hated beyond measure to hear the shriek of the calico as she tore the web sharply, as if with pleasure. And the run of

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the sewing-machine gathered a frenzy in him at last.’ Will demands that she sew only in the daytime. She refuses to restrict herself: Whereupon she turned back to her arranging, fixing, stitching, his nerves jumped with anger as the sewing-machine started and stuttered and buzzed. But she was enjoying herself, she was triumphant and happy as the darting needle danced ecstatically down a hem, drawing the stuff along under its vivid stabbing, irresistibly. She made the machine hum. She stopped it imperiously, her fingers were deft and swift and mistress. If he sat behind her stiff with impotent rage—it only made a trembling vividness come into her energy. (152) The first electrically-powered sewing machines did not come onto the market until the late 1880s, so Anna’s machine would either have been hand-cranked or driven by a treadle. Whereas Coutts’s swish and splash happen apart from him, over his head, the stutter and buzz of Anna’s machine arises out of the movements of her body. Life flows from human being into machine. But the terms ‘stutter’ and ‘buzz’ indicate that here, too, Lawrence has in mind a sound without meaning, an effect without an obvious cause. Anna makes her noise; it does not express her. Rather, it is her weapon of choice as she strikes at Will. If the weapon had expressed her more directly, he would have found it easier to protect himself against it. The hyperbolical narrative gestures yet to come will install Anna as the apotheosis of organic selfhood. But it takes a machine’s noisy disregard for meaning to get her started.

Electromagnetism It is generally agreed that Lawrence undertook a further ‘reappraisal’ of the relationship between human beings, technology and the natural world in the years after the suppression of The Rainbow; and that the reappraisal had something to do with electricity. Andrew Harrison has noted that a more general ‘attraction to machinery’ became the theme of the stories Lawrence wrote about the First World War on both its Western and Home Fronts (2019). But it is the engagement with electrical science that most extensively informs his remarkable post-war burst of creativity: Sea and Sardinia (1921), Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), England, My England (1922), Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) and Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), to name but a few. These texts articulated a major revision of his philosophy of being. Henceforth, he would try to understand the ‘unconscious’ – in his view, the source of being – as a function not of the ‘blood’ or the ‘flesh’, as he had previously thought, but of the physiology of the nervous system. The key terms in this new psychology were to be ‘polarity’ and ‘polarisation’. In physics, polarisation is the action or result of inducing electric or magnetic polarity: that is, the partial separation of positive and negative charge. Romantic philosophy incorporated both terms as a way to conceive the state of possessing two opposite or contradictory tendencies at once. Coleridge, for example, cited Heraclitus as the original promulgator of the ‘Law of Polarity’ (1969: 1). Lawrence undoubtedly belonged to this tradition. He spelt out the axioms of his new psychology in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious:

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We can quite tangibly deal with the human unconscious. We trace its source and centers in the great ganglia and nodes of the nervous system. We establish the nature of the spontaneous consciousness at each of these centers; we determine the polarity and the direction of the polarized flow. And from this we know the motion and individual manifestation of the psyche itself; we also know the motion and rhythm of the great organs of the body. (PFU 39–40) And so on. The new psychology’s pithiest, and best-known, exposition had already been undertaken, by Rupert Birkin, in Women in Love (1920). Birkin celebrates the dawn of a ‘new day’ in which there will only ever be the ‘pure duality of polarisation’. ‘Each acknowledges the perfection of the polarised sex-circuit. Each admits the different nature in the other’ (WL 201). Harrison locates the ‘modernity’ of Women in Love in its ‘persistent striving’ to imagine ‘psychological realities’ in the terms of the ‘new electrical science’ (2003: 144). So far, so electric, and so Romantic. But there is a literalness in the way Lawrence thought about the body’s polarities and circuits which could be taken to indicate that he was more alert than most to the significance of what had happened, technologically, since Coleridge wrote about Heraclitus. For electrical science was transformed, during the second half of the nineteenth century, by the harnessing of electricity for the purposes of communication at a distance: initially through or along wires and underwater cables, then across the airwaves (Carey 1989; Headrick 1981; Hampf and Müller-Pohl 2013). The latter development – electricity’s alliance with magnetism – was perhaps the most momentous of all, and the most mystifying. In the 1860s, as is well-known, James Clerk Maxwell developed a mathematical formula for the relationship between electrical and magnetic phenomena. Maxwell hypothesised that oscillating electrical and magnetic fields travel through space as waves at a speed approximate to that of light. But, oddly enough, he did not think it was possible either to generate such waves or to detect and measure them. It was not until 1887 that Heinrich Hertz and Oliver Lodge independently found ways to do so (Hunt 1991). Writing in the Fortnightly Review in February 1892, William Crookes, one of the most distinguished British scientists of his time, took stock of the implications of these developments: Whether vibrations of the ether, longer than those which affect us as light, may not be constantly at work around us, we have, until lately, never seriously enquired. But the researches of Lodge in England and of Hertz in Germany give us an almost infinite range of ethereal vibrations or electrical rays, from wave-lengths of thousands of miles down to a few feet. Here is unfolded to us a new and astonishing world – one which it is hard to conceive should contain no possibilities of transmitting and receiving intelligence. (1892: 174) Crookes let his imagination run riot on a range of ambitious electromagnetic projects ranging from thought-transference through wireless luminosity to climate control. It was no longer possible to sustain the claims to complete awareness that might once have been made on behalf of unaided human perception. Writing in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in June 1903, Carl Snyder pointed out that by far the larger part of the ‘ether vibrations’ penetrating the universe affect our senses but slightly: they pass through or

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around us unnoticed (1903: 119). That sense of the limits of perception lost none of its edge as science and technology began to exploit ever more far-flung ‘possibilities of transmitting and receiving intelligence’. The discovery and measurement in the 1880s of what Friedrich Kittler terms the ‘Olympian frequency domain’ – an electromagnetic spectrum far exceeding human perception – in effect produced a fundamental displacement of the sovereignty of consciousness (2006: 64, 69–70). In the light of that knowledge, Gillian Beer observes, existence as a whole had to be understood as ‘a medium, a discharge, a pathway’ (1996: 88). We have become acclimatised, to a degree, to an all-encompassing electromagnetic milieu. But it is important to remember that the industrial-technological revolution which rendered that milieu accessible, unlike previous ones, took place more or less overnight. ‘Electromagnetism’, Douglas Kahn observes, had nothing less than the historical misfortune among forces of nature to be disclosed at the moment of its industrialization . . . It was as though rivers had never existed before being harnessed for mills or dammed for hydroelectric production. For electromagnetism, there was no temporal split from culture, society, or technology within which ‘nature’ could be overcome. (2013: 13) Once electromagnetism had been installed in telegraphy and other systems, it became almost impossible to identify and define as a force of nature what had already become a force of culture. Lawrence, we might say, intended to blow the whistle on the consequences of that historical misfortune. He wanted to reopen a kind of temporal ‘split’ within which electromagnetism could be imagined, in effect for the first time, not as a fait accompli, but as a ‘nature’ to be overcome all over again. His figuring of an electromagnetic ‘swish’ and ‘splash’ in ‘The Witch à la Mode’ amounts to just such an attempt. So it is, for example, that in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious he describes the mind’s wilful interruption of the ‘extra-individual circuits of polarity’ as an exercise of the telegraphic principle: The brain is, if we may use the word, the terminal instrument of the dynamic consciousness. It transmutes what is a creative flux into a certain fixed cypher. It prints off like a telegraph instrument, the glyphs and graphic representations which we call percepts, concepts, ideas. It produces a new reality—the ideal. The idea is another static entity, another unit of the mechanical-active and materio-static universe. It is thrown off from life, as leaves are shed from a tree, or as feathers fall from a bird. Ideas are the dry, unliving, unsentient plumage which intervenes between us and the circumambient universe, forming at once an insulator and an instrument for the subduing of the universe. The mind is the instrument of instruments; it is not a creative reality. (PFU 41–2) There is some nature in this depiction of consciousness, but the life has long since ceased to flow within it. According to Lawrence, we now exist entirely in the realm of information, rather than energy: a virtual world created by the instrument of instruments. The moment of electromagnetism’s industrialisation as a telegraph system is already beyond recall.

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It was, ultimately, the failure of his attempts to recover and restore some of the nature concreted over by culture that led Lawrence to a more radical conception of technology’s own ultimate purposefulness than that proposed by any other writer of the period: nowhere more so than in the astonishing ‘Bare Almond Trees’, written in January 1921, in Taormina, in Sicily, and first published in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers. Taormina lies close to Mount Etna, which, like other volcanoes, generates its own lightning. The poem’s first stanza contemplates a garden full of almond trees on a distant slope. The black tree-trunks stick grimly out of the ‘Sicilian winter-green / Earth-grass’ like ‘iron implements’ (1Poems 253). Their mutation has been so rapid and so complete that Lawrence struggles to reconstruct the process of its occurrence. The questions put to these imaginary machines in the second stanza, which I quote in full, seek to convert the packages of networked information they now traffic in back into the boundless raw energy they once were: What are you doing in the December rain? Have you a strange electric sensitiveness in your steel tips? Do you feel the air for electric influences Like some strange magnetic apparatus? Do you take in messages, in some strange code, From heaven’s wolfish, wandering electricity, that prowls so constantly round Etna? Do you take the whisper of sulphur from the air? Do you hear the chemical accents of the sun? Do you telephone the roar of the waters-over-the-earth? And from all this, do you make calculations? This is full-on electromagnetism. The term ‘influence’ refers to the induction of an electric or magnetic state in an object by proximity rather than direct contact. That is how the strange ‘apparatus’ works. But the term still carries a trace (reinforced, perhaps, by the December downpour) of its derivation from the Latin for an inflow of water. Electromagnetic influence, too, once flowed, like the ‘wolfish’ nomadic lightning; now it runs in channels. However, as question succeeds question it seems increasingly unlikely that Lawrence will be able to recover the nature within this particular cultural object or system. Plausibility drains out of the conjunctions conjured by metaphor. Where, for example, is the membrane that will convert the pulses transmitted telephonically by the ‘roar’ of the ‘waters-over-the-earth’ (the rain, presumably) back into intelligible sound? The very failure of Lawrence’s questions to recover and restore any substantial trace of the energies subsumed into information – his failure to re-naturalise technology, to release its flow – generates a fabulous glimpse into the frequency domain. He cannot hear what the strange magnetic apparatus hears. This may be because there is in effect nothing to hear. The noise generated by the sun’s chemical accents and the roar of the rain is as much informational as sonic: the random fluctuations which interfere with the transmission of a signal. It takes a machine to filter all that out. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Lawrence conceives the human brain as an instrument transmitting and receiving messages in ‘fixed cypher’. The almond trees appear to have assumed a comparable function. ‘And from all this, do you make calculations?’ We could be inside a computer connected to the internet. Or a radio set tuned in to the BBC.

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The Noise of Iron At the beginning of Chapter X of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Clifford Chatterley decides that he no longer wants company at Wragby, or the sort of wide-ranging intellectual debate he had once encouraged. ‘He preferred the radio, which he had installed at some expense, with a good deal of success at last. He could sometimes get Madrid, or Frankfurt, even there in the uneasy Midlands’ (LCL 110). Clifford has become rather more intimate with his radio than Lawrence ever was with the bare almond trees at Taormina. His capacity to ‘sit alone for hours listening to the loud-speaker bellowing forth’ amazes and appals Connie. Lawrence, at the end of his career, still thought that technology matters; and that it is to be apprehended, first and foremost, as noise. Once again, the technological event occurs at the beginning of a chapter. Once again, it proves decisive: although such is the drama to come that we may well feel inclined to overlook its significance. Chapter X of Lady Chatterley’s Lover has a similar structure to Chapter VI of The Rainbow. In Chapter VI of The Rainbow, it is the power and dignity of motherhood which completes what the sewing machine had begun. In Chapter X of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the power and dignity of motherhood, while consistently invoked, is clearly not going to find straightforward expression. The process some version of it completes had also begun, however, in a technological event. The noise made by Anna’s sewing machine drives Will out of his mind, and out of the house. The noise made by Clifford’s loudspeaker has the same effect on Connie. ‘She fled up to her room: or out of doors, to the wood. A kind of terror filled her sometimes: a terror of the incipient insanity of the whole civilised species’ (LCL 110). This is the chapter in which she first has sex with Mellors. It, too, fills up with the foggy weather of symbols (Clifford reads Racine out loud to a distracted Connie). But technology’s noise has already cut through all that. It is Clifford’s weapon against her. Something, nonetheless, has altered in Lawrence’s apprehension of technology. Considerable technical expertise was required to operate the radio sets of the mid1920s (Trotter 2013: 115–18). Like the bare almond trees at Taormina, Clifford, out there in the ‘uneasy Midlands’, would have had to ‘make calculations’ in order to distinguish signal from noise. Lawrence, however, had lost interest in technology’s actual noise: its gentle swish, its stuttering and buzzing. His emphasis, instead, is on the bloodless gentility of the broadcast talks Clifford listens in to. For the noise the radio emits is the noise ‘of’ something: the noise, as Connie supposes, of ‘the incipient insanity of the whole civilised species’. Bethan Jones has noted that Lady Chatterley’s Lover shares with the late poems a ‘web of interconnected imagery associated with the machine’ (2010: 69). Radio noise belongs to that web. It is the noise of machine civilisation’s unquenchable taste for pre-packaged wisdom. In Chapter X, Mellors’s immediate response to the consummation of his desire for Connie, in the hut in the wood, is to declare that machine civilisation has no room in it for someone as tender as her. Ascending through the wood to the top of a hill, he looks out over the collieries at Stacks Gate and Tevershall. ‘The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it’ (LCL 119). Machine civilisation will surely destroy whatever it is that they feel for each other. ‘The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of machines.’ The understanding of technology

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at which Lawrence finally arrived, in the last poems and in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, subsumes the noise made by a particular machine into the general noise of iron. It is now fifteen years since Jeff Wallace argued that there are significant connections to be made between the ‘moment of the posthuman’ – a still-developing concentration of ‘debates around the relationship between humans, creatures, and machines’ – and the ‘moment of post-Darwinian evolutionary materialism’ with which he associates Lawrence (2005: 6). This chapter has necessarily confined itself to machines. But I hope that it has done something to suggest that he merits his place in those debates. Hearing technology as a noise beyond or at the very limit of sound, in texts such ‘The Witch à la Mode’, The Rainbow and ‘Bare Almond Trees’, Lawrence understood its inhumanness. But he never lost sight of its function as a catalyst: as that which enables human beings to accomplish, for better or worse, what they would not otherwise have accomplished.

Works Cited Bagwell, Philip and Peter Lyth (2002), Transport in Britain 1750–2000: From Canal to Gridlock, London: Hambledon. Beer, Gillian (1996), ‘“Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things”: Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century’, in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay, London: Routledge, pp. 84–98. Bell, Michael (1992), D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carey, James W. (1989), ‘Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph’, in Communication and Culture: Essays on Media and Society, Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, pp. 201–30. Chaudhuri, Amit (2003), D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1969), The Friend, 2 vols, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crookes, William (1892), ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’, Fortnightly Review, 51:302, pp. 173–81. Hampf, M. Michaela, and Simone Müller-Pohl, eds (2013), Global Communication Electric: Business, News, and Politics in the World of Telegraphy, Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Harrison, Andrew (2003), D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism: A Study in Influence, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Harrison, Andrew (2019), ‘“Men No More than the Subjective Material of the Machine”: Lawrence, Machinery, and War-Time Psychology’, in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, pp. 73–83. Headrick, Daniel R. (1981), The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1977), The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt, New York: Garland. Humphries, Andrew F. (2017), D. H. Lawrence, Transport and Cultural Transition: ‘a Great Sense of Journeying’, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hunt, Bruce J. (1991), The Maxwellians, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jones, Bethan (2010), The Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence: Shaping a Late Style, Farnham: Ashgate. Kahn, Douglas (2013), Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kittler, Friedrich (2006), ‘Lightning and Series – Event and Thunder’, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung, Theory, Culture & Society, 23:7–8, pp. 63–74.

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Leavis, F. R. (1969), English Literature in Our Time & the University, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Männiste, Indrek (2016), ‘D. H. Lawrence: Nature, Technology, and the Sense of Enframing’, in D. H. Lawrence: New Critical Perspectives and Cultural Translation, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 55–77. Männiste, Indrek, ed. (2019), D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Murphet, Julian, Helen Groth and Penelope Hone, eds (2017), Sounding Modernism: Rhythmic and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Reid, Susan (2019), D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Snyder, Carl (1903), ‘The World beyond Our Senses’, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, June, pp. 117–20. Trotter, David (2013), Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wallace, Jeff (2005), D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, Raymond (1990), Culture & Society: Coleridge to Orwell, London: The Hogarth Press.

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Plate 1 Watercolour copy by D. H. Lawrence of the painting An Idyll by Maurice Greiffenhagen (1911). University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections, La D 1/2.

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Plate 2 D. H. Lawrence, A Holy Family (1926). Oil on canvas. 75 x 65 cm. Plates 2–10 are from The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, London: Mandrake Press, 1929.

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Plate 3 D. H. Lawrence, Boccaccio Story (1926). Oil on canvas. 70 x 117.5 cm.

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Plate 4 D. H. Lawrence, Fauns and Nymphs (1927). Oil on canvas. 95 x 80 cm.

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Plate 5 D. H. Lawrence, Resurrection (1927). Oil on canvas. 95 x 95 cm.

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Plate 6 D. H. Lawrence, Family on a Verandah (1928). Oil on canvas. 35 x 47.5 cm.

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Plate 7 D. H. Lawrence, Dance-Sketch (1928). Oil on canvas. 37.5 x 42.5 cm.

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Plate 8 D. H. Lawrence, Contadini (1928). Oil on canvas. 40 x 32.5 cm.

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Plate 9 D. H. Lawrence, North Sea (1928). Oil on canvas. 40 x 32.5 cm.

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Plate 10 D. H. Lawrence, Spring (1929). Watercolour. 30 x 22.5 cm.

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Plates 11–20 show the illustrations by Anne Estelle Rice (1877–1959) for D. H. Lawrence’s Bay: A Book of Poems (1919), printed by Cyril Beaumont. Reproduced at close to original size. With kind permission of the estate of Anne Estelle Rice. Plate 11: ‘Guards !’.

Plate 12 ‘The Little Town at Evening’

Plate 13 ‘Last Hours’ (printed upside down in the original)

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Plate 14 ‘Town’

Plate 15 ‘After the Opera’

Plate 16 ‘Going Back’

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Plate 17 ‘Winter-Lull’

Plate 18 ‘Obsequial Ode’

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Plate 19 ‘War-Baby’

Plate 20 ‘Nostalgia’

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Plate 21 The first edition (cheap paper issue) of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), featuring the Lawrence phoenix on the front cover.

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Plate 22 D. H. Lawrence’s representation of a sun god designed as a frontispiece for the first unexpurgated edition of Sun (1928), published by The Black Sun Press.

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SECTION 1 VERBAL ARTS 13 The Idea of the Novel Keith Cushman

Introduction

T

he critical response to Lawrence’s prose has often been mixed. Truth to tell, even Lawrence’s most fervent admirers are sometimes taken aback when they encounter intense oddities of expression in his fiction, especially in The Rainbow and Women in Love. But readers certainly appreciate the vividness and immediacy of his prose, its boldness and directness, the liveliness and complexity of his characters, and the way he connects his characters to larger cosmic energies. Consider a short paragraph early in Sons and Lovers in which the unhappy Mrs Morel is standing in her front garden at sunset: The front garden was a small square with a privet hedge. There she stood, trying to soothe herself with the scent of flowers, and the fading, beautiful evening. Opposite her small gate was the stile that led uphill, under the tall hedge, between the burning glow of the cut pastures. The sky overhead throbbed and pulsed with light. The glow sank quickly off the field, the earth and the hedges smoked dusk. As it grew dark, a ruddy glare came out on the hill top, and out of the glare, the diminished commotion of the fair. (14) In six sentences we journey from the domestic front garden, to the sky, throbbing and pulsing with light, and back to the local scene. In simple language Lawrence brings the scene vividly alive. The reader seems to experience the sky along with Mrs Morel as it progresses from sunset towards darkness. In this chapter I aim to relate Lawrence’s ideas about novel writing to his own novels. His strongly worded opinions of other novelists also illuminate his fictional practice. A consideration of his ideas about the novel should enhance our understanding of his own fiction (including the passage quoted above). I begin with a discussion of two literary watersheds in Lawrence’s career: his struggles with ‘Flaubert and perfection’ as a beginning novelist (1L 417), and then his embrace of theoretical ideas

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that helped him produce his two greatest novels. Then my focus will shift to six essays he wrote about the novel, five of them in 1925, and how the ideas expressed in these essays inform his own fiction.

The ‘school of Flaubert’ and ‘the old stable ego of the character’ In November 1909 the English Review published five of Lawrence’s poems. This was the young writer’s first professional appearance in print. Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), the editor of the Review, introduced Lawrence to the London literary world and – even better – offered to read Lawrence’s writing. As John Worthen has observed, ‘at last’ Lawrence ‘had both encouragement and an experienced reader for his work’ (1991: 217). Lawrence wrote to Louie Burrows on 20 November 1909 that Hueffer was reading The White Peacock and ‘says it’s good, and is going to get it published’ (1L 144). Hueffer was impressed with Lawrence’s ‘very remarkable and poetic gifts’ and believed that, ‘properly handled’, the novel ‘might have a very considerable success’. But Hueffer also had reservations: the book ‘with its enormous prolixity of detail, sins against almost every canon of art as I conceive it’ (8L 2–3). Later he declared that The Trespasser was ‘a rotten work of genius’ with ‘no construction or form – it is execrably bad art’ (1L 339). From the beginning Lawrence resisted Hueffer’s artistic strictures: ‘He belongs to the opposite school of novelists to me: he says prose must be impersonal, like Turguenev or Flaubert. I say no’ (178). Hueffer’s Flaubertian idea of fictional art included carefully planned ‘construction’ and ‘form’, precisely chosen words, and authorial impersonality. Lawrence could even laugh about Hueffer’s criticism. As he was completing the first draft of The Trespasser, he felt ‘inclined to be rather proud of’ the novel even though he realised that ‘those who belong to the accurate-impersonal school of Flaubert will flourish large shears over my head and crop my comb very close’ (169). Lawrence’s difficulties in achieving the standard of artistic form ordained by the highbrow wing of the literary establishment continued with his new mentor, Edward Garnett, as he worked on Sons and Lovers. Lawrence believed that the ‘actual-impersonal’ version of fictional form eliminated the life from a novel. As he strikingly complained to Ernest Collings late in 1912, ‘They want me to have form: that means, they want me to have their pernicious ossiferous skin-and-grief form, and I won’t’ (1L 492). Nevertheless, he was obliged regularly to protest to Garnett – obviously in response to Garnett’s criticism – that his autobiographical novel did have form. As Garnett began cutting the novel to make it acceptable for publication, Lawrence apologised for being ‘so profuse – or prolix, or whatever it is’ (1L 517). ‘[I]t is a unified whole’ (522), he insisted. But in the letter he wrote to Garnett on 19 November 1912 Lawrence revealed that his notion of fictional form was decidedly un-Flaubertian: ‘I tell you it has got form – form: haven’t I made it patiently, out of sweat as well as blood’ (476). The sort of fictional form that results from blood and sweat surely derives from an organic – not an aesthetic – theory of fiction. Furthermore, writing fiction was self-therapeutic: ‘one sheds ones [sic] sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them’ (2L 90). These are not the words of a writer who believed that art must be impersonal. We can easily guess how Flaubert would have responded to Lawrence’s famous declaration that his ‘motto is “Art for my sake”’ (1L 491).

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At the end of 1913 Lawrence wrote to Edward Garnett that he would not write ‘in the same manner as Sons and Lovers again . . . in that hard, violent style full of sensation and presentation’ (2L 132). The Rainbow and Women in Love are the two novels in which Lawrence is unarguably a fictional innovator. The locus classicus for what he was attempting in The Rainbow is of course the letter he wrote to Garnett on 5 June 1914. In oddly scientific language, drawn in part from the Futurist Manifesto, he explained to Garnett that ‘that which is physic – non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element’ (182). Rather than caring about ‘what the woman feels’, he cared only ‘about what the woman is . . . inhumanly, physiologically, materially’ (183). Garnett would not be able to find ‘the old stable ego of the character’ in Lawrence’s novel: There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same radicallyunchanged element. Nineteenth-century modes of fiction were incapable of expressing and containing the complicated new forces that had been released in the new century. The urgent, repetitive, rather abstract language of crucial passages in both The Rainbow and Women in Love aims to express this new reality, even as it attempts to understand humanity in terms of the elemental laws of matter and energy that govern the universe. Lawrence never stopped creating recognisable individuals – not even in The Rainbow and Women in Love. The theoretical language of the letter to Garnett feeds into those two novels but has no bearing on Lawrence’s subsequent novels. Although the letter to Garnett is Lawrence’s best-known statement about fiction writing, six essays that he wrote in the 1920s are a much better guide to Lawrence’s main ideas concerning the art of fiction.

The Essays on the Novel As Bruce Steele points out, on 20 July 1922 the Sydney Bulletin published ‘a lengthy account of Meredith Starr’s interviews with sixty English writers concerning “the future of the novel”’ (STH xlv) – not including D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence read the Bulletin regularly, and Steele persuasively suggests that this article led to the composition of ‘The Future of the Novel’, which appeared in the Literary Digest International Book Review in April 1923. The publisher re-titled the essay ‘Surgery for the Novel – or a Bomb’ – which remained the catchy title of its first collected publication in Phoenix (1936). The other five essays – ‘Art and Morality’, ‘Morality and the Novel’, ‘The Novel’, ‘Why the Novel Matters’ and ‘The Novel and the Feelings’ – all date from 1925. ‘Art and Morality’ and ‘Morality and the Novel’ appeared in the November and December 1925 numbers of the Calendar of Modern Letters. ‘The Novel’ was published in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays (1925). Lawrence probably wrote ‘Why the Novel Matters’ and ‘The Novel and the Feelings’ near the end of 1925. These two essays remained unpublished until they found their way into Phoenix. All

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five essays are conversational and somewhat showy. No doubt Lawrence believed that this style would be more effective than anything remotely academic. The six essays on the novel receive scant attention in the biographies. Lawrence wrote so much: a biographer doesn’t have the space to discuss everything. But David Ellis supplies a convincing context for the essays in Dying Game, the third volume of the Cambridge University Press biography. Several general essays about Lawrence appeared in the 1920s. He must have felt that ‘his critics judged him by the wrong criteria and had failed to understand that he was in no sense a savage genius, warbling his native wood-notes wild, but someone who had thought hard about novel-writing and developed his own aesthetic’ (Ellis 1998: 249). Ellis observes that, ‘taken together’, ‘Art and Morality’, ‘Morality and the Novel’ and ‘The Novel’ ‘constitute one of the most impressive of all Lawrence’s many replies to his detractors and have provided crucial concepts, as well as striking phrases, for which many literary critics have been heavily in his debt ever since’ (250). ‘The Future of the Novel’ is something of an outlier among the six essays on the novel. While several key ideas overlap in the five essays published in 1925, for the most part ‘The Future of the Novel’ – written early in 1923 – takes up different issues. Lawrence observes that the modern novel is ‘almost dual like a Siamese twin’ (STH 151). Neither ‘the highbrowed, earnest novel which you have to take seriously’ nor ‘that smirking, rather plausible hussy, the popular novel’ offers a pathway to the future of the novel form. His examples of the serious novel are Ulysses, Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (1915) – the first volume in her series of thirteen semi-autographical stream-of-consciousness novels collectively titled Pilgrimage – and the novels of Marcel Proust. Lawrence amusingly ‘argues against the psychological minutiae’ (Harrison 2016: 256) of these novelists: “Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?” asks every character in Mr Joyce or Miss Richardson or Monsieur Proust. “Is the odour of my perspiration a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and Shetland tweed?” (STH 151) Popular novels like The Sheik, Babbitt and the Westerns of Zane Grey ‘are just as self-conscious, only they do have more illusions about themselves’ (153). But the novel ‘has got a future’ after all (STH 155). The novel of the future will ‘take the place of gospels, philosophies, and the present-day novel as we know it’. Like the gospels, novels will offer ‘a clue for the future, a new impulse, a new motive, a new inspiration’ (154). There must be no ‘sniveling’ about the past or present ‘or inventing new sensations in the old line’ (155). The genuine novelist of the future has the power and capacity to discover and present a ‘new world’. Arguably, The Plumed Serpent is Lawrence’s most notable attempt to create a new world. Several of Lawrence’s ideas about fiction writing overlap in the other five essays. This is hardly unexpected, given the fact that he wrote all five in 1925. The ideas that seem to have most bearing on his own practice as a novelist are (1) open fictional form, (2) ‘quickness’, (3) the rejection of all absolutes and (4) the relation between characters and the ‘circumambient universe’. I propose to discuss each of the essays briefly before relating these four ideas to Lawrence’s own fiction, while also incorporating his opinion of other fiction writers. Lawrence’s ideas about fiction writing are to an extent interrelated rather than existing as totally distinct categories.

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In a letter of 11 July 1925 Lawrence described ‘Art and Morality’ and ‘Morality and the Novel’ as ‘stones to pull up and throw at the reader’s head’ (5L 275). Despite this declaration, the essays are gentle enough. Lawrence begins ‘Art and Morality’ with a discussion of a Cézanne still life. Most people cannot understand that the painter is trying to ‘maintain himself in true relationship to his contiguous universe’, which is ‘like Father Ocean, a stream of things slowly moving’ (STH 167). Lawrence’s assertion that ‘Design, in art, is a recognition of the relation between . . . various elements in the creative flux’ refers to fictional form as well as to Cézanne’s still lifes. He concludes idiosyncratically that ‘A new relationship between ourselves and the universe means a new morality’ (168). ‘Morality and the Novel’ has a good deal in common with ‘Art and Morality’. While ‘Art and Morality’ features a Cézanne still life, ‘Morality and the Novel’ begins with a Van Gogh sunflower (see Colour Plate 29). As in ‘Art and Morality’, Lawrence declares in ‘Morality and the Novel’ that ‘The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment’ (STH 171). But, as one would expect from the title of the essay, ‘Morality and the Novel’ focuses more specifically on the novel. The novel is ‘the highest complex of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside its own place, time, circumstance’ (172). In one of Lawrence’s wittiest, most-quoted statements about the novel, ‘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.’ As in ‘The Future of the Novel’, Lawrence positions the ‘moral’ novel between serious and popular novels. Here his serious novel is Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov’s murder of the old pawnbroker is ‘actual enough’ but ‘never quite real’ (STH 174). Lawrence’s examples of popular novels are long since forgotten. Once again an essay ostensibly about morality emphasises a world of ceaseless change and openness in which ‘opposites sway about a trembling centre of balance’, and ‘Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance’ (173, 172). The novelist must respect and attempt to communicate ‘the changing rainbow of our living relationships’ (175). ‘The Novel’ reiterates some of the ideas found in ‘Art and Morality’ and ‘Morality and the Novel’. The novel is ‘the highest form of human expression so far attained’ because it is ‘incapable of the absolute’ (STH 179). In a novel ‘everything is relative to everything else, if that novel is art at all’. Furthermore, in a novel ‘everything is true in its own relationship, and no further’ because ‘the relatedness and interrelatedness of all things flows and changes and trembles like a stream’ (185). Lawrence also returns to ‘the idea he had deployed so effectively in Studies in Classic American Literature: that in many great novelists there is a conflict between a ‘didactic “purpose”’ and their ‘passional inspiration’ (Ellis 1998: 251). ‘[O]ld Leo’ Tolstoy is an ‘old liar’ in pursuit of the ‘absolute of love’ when he privileges the ‘dull’ Pierre over the ‘quick’ Vronsky in War and Peace (STH 180, 187, 183). Lawrence declares that readers are ‘delighted when Vronsky gets Anna Karenin’ because they ‘hear what the novel says’ and what that ‘dribbling liar’, the novelist, denies (180, 190). Vronsky’s quickness leads Lawrence to one of the main ideas of ‘The Novel’, for the novel ‘can’t exist without being “quick”’. The ‘quickness of the quick’ seems ‘to consist in an odd sort of fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful relatedness’. The

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‘ordinary unquick novel . . . disappears into absolute nothingness’ (STH 183). The ‘quick’ of the novel puts a person in living contact with the ‘God-flame’ (182–3). ‘Quickness’ is one of Lawrence’s most significant – and elusive – concepts in his practice of novel writing. Lawrence covers familiar ground in ‘Why the Novel Matters’ when he asserts that ‘all things flow and change’ and that it is time to ‘have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute’ (STH 196). This essay does include the best-known sentence in the six essays on the novel: ‘The novel is the one bright book of life’ (195). ‘The Novel and the Feelings’ is all about the ‘whole stormy chaos of “feelings”’ (202) and not at all about the novel until the final paragraph, which seems tacked-on. The main ideas of Lawrence’s essays on the novel can sometimes seem rather grandiose when applied to his actual novels with their mostly realistic texture. Nevertheless, let us explore the ways in which the ideas relate to and illuminate the fiction.

The Idea of the Novel No one would be likely to accuse Sons and Lovers of having ‘ossiferous skin-and-grief form’, although the novel does include plenty of grief. Still, the novel is hardly ‘formless’. Paul Morel’s relationships with the three women in his life – his mother, Miriam Leivers, Clara Dawes – are a formal element as he moves forward through Lawrence’s Bildungsroman. Frieda argued that the novel had the ‘hang’ of form and that the ‘mother is really the thread, the domineering note’ (1L 479). The Cambridge Edition of the complete, uncut manuscript revealed another structural element more clearly. In his need to reduce the manuscript by ten per cent Edward Garnett eliminated many passages – including entire scenes – from the life of Paul’s older brother William. Garnett’s cuts substantially diminished William’s role in the novel as a precursor to Paul, thus blurring a structural element. But even though Lawrence gratefully commended Garnett for his editing job on Sons and Lovers, he heartily resented ‘those damned old stagers’ who ‘want to train up a child in the way it should grow, whereas if it’s destined to have a snub nose, it’s a sheer waste of time to harass the poor brat into Roman-nosedness’ (1L 492). The poor brat with the snub nose was eager to go his own way. After his break with Garnett over Garnett’s response to The Rainbow, Lawrence would never again have a mentor. The three-generational organisation of The Rainbow with its complex pattern of similarity and difference provides a structure for the novel. The fluid, dance-like organisation of Women in Love is an important aspect of that novel’s innovativeness. To a significant degree the novel is structured not only around two couples, but also around pairs of chapters, for example ‘Sisters’ vs ‘In the Train’, ‘Man to Man’ vs ‘Woman to Woman’, ‘Rabbit’ vs ‘Moony’, and (most importantly) ‘Excurse’ vs ‘Death and Love’. The novel’s key locales of disintegration – Shortlands, Breadalby, the Pompadour Café, Will and Anna’s home – also function structurally. But any organisational elements in the two novels seem insignificant in the midst of the novels’ onrushing narrative energy and their verbal and intellectual vitality. The reader is in direct contact with the excitement Lawrence felt as he immersed himself in the creative process, writing and rewriting the novels. In March 1915 he described his excitement upon completing The Rainbow to Bertrand Russell: ‘I feel like a bird in spring that is amazed at the colours of its own coat’ (2L 300). As he worked on

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Women in Love, he reported to Lady Ottoline Morrell that composition ‘is like a malady or a madness while it lasts’ (656). The Flaubertian art prescribed by Hueffer seemed to Lawrence like calculation. And calculation threw up a roadblock to the discovery – and self-discovery – that were so crucial to Lawrence’s artistic process (and to his life as well). In late 1912 he wrote to Ernest Collings that the difficulty in composition is ‘to find exactly the form [of] one’s passion – work is produced by passion with me, like kisses’ (1L 491). It is difficult to imagine a less Flaubertian artistic credo. The open endings of Lawrence’s novels are another significant non-Flaubertian aspect of his practice as a fiction writer. Paul Morel, leaning against the stile with the ‘immense dark silence . . . pressing him, so tiny a speck, into extinction’, refuses to ‘give in’ and walks ‘towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly’ (SL 464) to confront an unknown future. The Rainbow concludes with Ursula’s radically hopeful vision of the future without offering a path to the accomplishment of that vision. At the conclusion of Women in Love Gerald is dead, Gudrun has gone to Dresden, and Birkin is telling Ursula that she isn’t enough for him, he needed Gerald as well. The final chapter of Aaron’s Rod – ‘Words’ – underscores the impossibility of creating a novel that is a coherent artistic whole when novelists have only words at their disposal. The political resolution at the end of The Plumed Serpent seems willed and unconvincing, and the marital resolution is purposely tentative. Lady Chatterley’s Lover persuasively, even movingly, brings Connie and Mellors together, but at the end of the novel they are separated and Sir Clifford is refusing to give Connie a divorce. Lawrence consistently provides his novels with open conclusions. Elise Brault-Dreux begins her carefully argued essay ‘The “Thingness” of the Quick’ by observing that ‘the word “quick” lies at the heart, or even at the quick of D. H. Lawrence’s writing’. ‘Quick’ (as in the Biblical ‘quick and the dead’) means being alive, but being ‘quick’ in Lawrence’s writings is ‘being more alive . . . And the individual’s relation with the external world (human, animal, organic, cosmic) depends on the very intensity of his/her quickness.’ Brault-Dreux demonstrates that Lawrence’s use of ‘quick’ is nuanced and complex; the word can even have negative connotations. But in this chapter I am concerned only with Lawrence’s practice of ‘constantly infusing’ the word ‘quick’ with ‘extra vitality’ (Brault-Dreux 2013: 23). In ‘The Novel’ Lawrence says that ‘the quick is God-flame, in everything’ (STH 182–3). The various forms of ‘quick’ appear frequently throughout his writings. Most famously – as I quoted above – Paul Morel walks ‘toward the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly’ – that is, with the vitality that clearly says that he is walking determinedly towards renewed life despite the death of his mother and his tangled love relationships. A few other examples must suffice. Paul is ‘too quick’ for Miriam (SL 247). As Ursula looks at Birkin ‘as he sat crouched on the bank’ in the chapter titled ‘An Island’ in Women in Love, ‘the moulding of him was so quick and attractive’, but ‘it was this duality in feeling which he created in her, that made a fine hate of him quicken in her bowels’ (129). As Connie watches Mellors washing himself, ‘naked to the hips’, in Chapter VI of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, she observes that his white, slender back was curved over a big bowl of soapy water, in which he ducked his head, shaking his head with a queer, quick little motion, lifting his slender white arms and pressing the soapy water from his ears: quick, subtle as a weasel playing with water. (66)

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As the priestess of Isis looks at the sleeping man who had died, ‘she was touched on the quick at the sight of a man, as if the tip of a fine flame of living had touched her’ (VG 147). Dozens more quotations with ‘quick’ in its various forms can be found in Lawrence’s fiction, poetry and essays. Quickness is the most problematic of the important ideas found in Lawrence’s essays on the novel. In fact Lawrence acknowledges that distinguishing between the quick and the dead can be difficult. It is not even necessary to be living and breathing to be ‘quick’. In the room where he was writing ‘The Novel’, there was ‘a little table’ and a ‘glass lamp’ that were dead while ‘a ridiculous little iron stove’ and an ‘iron wardrobe trunk’ were mysteriously quick (STH 183). With his tongue in his cheek Lawrence describes the challenge of creating a male protagonist who is necessarily required to have ‘a quick relatedness to all the other things in the novel: snow, bedbugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper’. While quickness is everywhere in the novels, it remains difficult to define. My own favourite candidates for scenes of obvious, indelible quickness would include the cherry tree scene in Sons and Lovers, the sheaves-stacking scene in The Rainbow, ‘Excurse’ and ‘Death and Love’ in Women in Love, ‘The Nightmare’ in Kangaroo and the boat journey across Lake Chapala in The Plumed Serpent. Lawrence criticised novelists whose works he believed lacked quickness. Thomas Mann’s ‘work has none of the rhythm of a living thing’, and of course Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was ‘dead in respect to the living rhythm of the whole work’ (IR 212). Meanwhile it is not difficult to identify the contemporary novelist who was the poster boy for Lawrence’s assertion that ‘the ordinary unquick novel, even if it be a best seller, disappears into absolute nothingness, the dead burying their dead’ (STH 183). That best-selling novelist is John Galsworthy. Lawrence’s essay ‘John Galsworthy’ appeared in Scrutinies by Various Writers (1928), a volume in which younger writers examined ‘the reputations of certain writers who are the object of indiscriminate admiration’ (STH li). Lawrence and Galsworthy had met over lunch in 1917, after which Lawrence pronounced Galsworthy a ‘sawdust bore’ (3L 183). As I wrote in my essay on the two writers, Lawrence had ample reason to dislike John Galsworthy. The stuffy, serenely confident establishment writer made it clear that he considered Lawrence a provincial and a collier’s son. He told Lawrence that The Rainbow was a failure, and he refused to lend his support to the publication of Women in Love. (Cushman 2011: 94) Lawrence wouldn’t have known that Galsworthy had also criticised Lawrence’s ‘revelling in the shades of sex emotions’ in Sons and Lovers in a letter to Edward Garnett (86). Lawrence’s personal dislike of Galsworthy might have coloured his opinion of Galsworthy’s novels – but only slightly. When he sent Nancy Pearn the manuscript of the essay to have it typed, he acknowledged that the essay wasn’t ‘very nice to Galsworthy – but really, reading one novel after another just nauseated me up to the nose’ (5L 649). Organising his essay around the distinction between a ‘social being’ and a ‘human being’ (STH 210), he argues that Galsworthy’s novels are only populated with social beings, ‘those who fear life because they are not alive, and who cannot die because they cannot live’ (214). ‘Money, or property’ determines the ‘being’ of

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Galsworthy’s characters (212), whether positively or negatively. The Forsytes are ‘all fallen, all social beings, a castrated lot’ (214). Lawrence perceived Galsworthy as his antithesis: the master of ‘unquickness’. In ‘Why the Novel Matters’ Lawrence asserts that ‘There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right’ (STH 196). His emphatic rejection of absolutes infiltrates his opinion of some of his great predecessors. In ‘The Novel’ Lawrence criticises Tolstoy not only for wanting ‘the absolute: the absolute of love’ but also for wanting ‘to be absolute’ (187). Dostoevsky – whose novels are ‘great parables’ but ‘false art’ (2L 544, 543) – was also guilty of wanting to ‘be a pure, absolute self’. ‘Oh damn, damn, damn all absolutes!’ (STH 184). In Study of Thomas Hardy Lawrence describes the way that ‘in the Cathedrals . . . the gargoyles the imps, the human faces . . . jeered their mockery of the Absolute’ (66). Lawrence of course dramatises this interpretation of the gargoyles on a medieval cathedral in ‘The Cathedral’ in The Rainbow. In ‘Art and Morality’ Lawrence eloquently describes his perception of a world in which there are no absolutes: ‘Each thing, living or unliving, streams in its own odd, intertwining flux, And nothing, not even man nor the God of man, nor anything that man has thought or felt or known, is fixed or abiding. All moves’ (167). As Lawrence explains definitively in ‘The Crown’, ‘All absolutes are prison-walls’ (RDP 287). This vision of the universe informs Lawrence’s fiction as early as Sons and Lovers. It is present in the scene in which Mrs Morel looks out at the changing sky from her garden that I quoted at the beginning of this chapter. In ‘Lad-and-Girl Love’ Paul explains to Miriam why she likes his pictures so much: ‘It’s because—it’s because there is scarcely any shadow in it—it’s more shimmery— as if I’d painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living.’ (SL 183) Paul is wary of Miriam’s belief that ‘one should be religious in everything’: an absolute. He explains that ‘“It’s not religious to be religious”’, intuitively realising that ‘“God doesn’t know things, he is things”’ (291). Will and Anna stacking sheaves, Ursula’s moon-consummation in The Rainbow, Birkin throwing stones into the pond in ‘Moony’, Somers wandering in the bush at evening are examples of scenes in which the characters are acting within the rhythm of the mysterious flux and flow of the universe. Such scenes – Lawrence at his best – are numerous, but it is not as if every important scene somehow expresses the ‘trembling and oscillating of the balance’. For example, the notorious scene in which Connie and Mellors run naked in the rain strikes me as worked-up and self-conscious. It almost goes without saying that the ‘changing rainbow of [characters’] living relationships’ is a problematic commonplace in a fictional canon filled with complicated characters in ambiguous, shifting relationships that do not often bring to mind the rainbow’s promise. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are not the only eminent writers whom Lawrence criticised for pursuit of the absolute. The final chapter of Studies in Classic American Literature is devoted to Walt Whitman, ‘the great poet’, who ‘has meant so much to me’ (SCAL 155). Lawrence satirises Whitman for declaring (in Lawrence’s upper-case letters) ‘I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE’. Lawrence asks Whitman to

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‘leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And your ache doesn’t include all Amorous Love’ (149). Whitman ‘becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time’, reaching ‘the state of ALLNESS’ (151). Although he loved Whitman the great poet, he could not tolerate Whitman the grand embracer of the absolute. In ‘Art and Morality’ Lawrence explains that when Cézanne painted a still life, he wasn’t producing a ‘kodak snap’ but simply maintaining ‘himself in true relationship to his contiguous universe’ (STH 165). After all, the universe is constantly streaming and changing, and ‘nothing is true, or good, or right, except in its own living relatedness to its own circumambient universe’ (167). And as Lawrence asserts in the first sentence of ‘Morality and the Novel’, ‘the business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment’ (171). Lawrence’s novels are filled with memorable scenes in which that relation is dramatised. Think of Paul Morel, ‘high in the [cherry] tree’, with the ‘wind, moaning steadily’, making ‘the whole tree rock with a subtle, thrilling motion that stirred the blood’ as ‘Immense piles of gold flared out in the south-east, heaped in soft, glowing yellow right up the sky’ (SL 329). Tom Brangwen is connecting with the circumambient universe when he takes the terrified child Ursula out to the barn to calm her by feeding the cows while Anna is in labour in the house. After feeding the cows Tom holds Ursula closely, and as she sinks into sleep, his mind goes blank: ‘When he came to, as if from sleep, he seemed to be sitting in a timeless stillness’ and seems to be ‘listening for some sound a long way off, from beyond life’ (R 76). Birkin, ‘naked among the primroses’ after Hermione has ‘smashed’ him with the paperweight, is experiencing a similar connection: ‘To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one’s belly and cover one’s back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman’ (WL 105, 107). And Somers and Harriett, riding in a small carriage shortly before leaving Australia, are also in contact with the cosmos: out of the hollow bush of gum-trees and silent heaths, all at once, in spring, the most delicate feathery yellow of plumes and plumes and plumes and trees and bushes of wattle, as if angels had flown right down out of the softest gold regions of heaven to settle here, in the Australian bush. (K 355) I will quote in full a two-sentence, insignificant paragraph from the fourth chapter of Sons and Lovers that beautifully demonstrates Lawrence’s skill at connecting ordinary humanity with the glowing circumambient universe: They all loved the Scargill Street house for its openness, for the great scallop of the world it had in view. On summer evenings, the women would stand against the field fence, gossiping, facing the west, watching the sunsets flare quickly out, till the Derbyshire hills ridged across the crimson, far away, like the black crest of a newt. (102) Among the great modernists only Lawrence made connecting his characters and the quotidian world with the cosmos a part of his enterprise. This aspect of his fiction is an important part of his accomplishment.

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Perhaps it is paradoxical that this chapter has only glancingly mentioned the three novels that date from the period of the six essays on the novel: Aaron’s Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926). It’s one thing to read the essays back into the three great novels Lawrence wrote before 1920. It’s quite another to consider these three ‘problem’ novels in the context of the essays on the novel. Even as Lawrence’s reputation soared during the 1960s, Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent remained unloved by critics. Keith Sagar speaks for these critics when he says that Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo lack the ‘form, coherence, range and density’ of The Rainbow and Women in Love (1966: 102). Frank Kermode declares that Aaron’s Rod develops its themes ‘with virtually complete indifference to the form of the novel’ (1973: 84), while Macdonald Daly observes that Kangaroo is considered ‘an egregious failure’ with ‘virtually no plot, and that which it has . . . is rather improbable’ (1997: xv). John Worthen concludes that The Plumed Serpent is ‘melodramatic as romance, inadequate in its version of the everyday and necessary life of ordinary people, crude in its versions of political events, vicious in its version of political retribution’ (1979: 165–6). But more recently, revisionist interpretations of the three novels convert their seeming weaknesses into strengths. Aaron’s Rod is a picaresque novel whose perceived formlessness captures the post-war chaos of Europe: ‘Aaron’s Rod as a novel struggles to find its way, tremulously seeking out a vision that will be adequate to its turbulent historical moment’ (Vine 1995: xviii). The virtually plotless Kangaroo, with its thematic contradictions, problematic characterisation and ‘prolix, quasi-philosophical disquisitions’, is actually a pioneer postmodernist novel (Daly 1997: xvi, xiv). The Plumed Serpent, which combines travelogue, manifesto and hymn book, profits from its presentation of multiculturalism, from having a female protagonist, and from Lawrence’s having ‘created his own independent theory of dialogics’ (Hyde 2001: 173). Do the three novels merit sustained reassessment on the grounds of experimentation and Lawrence’s loosening and blending of forms? I will allow readers to answer that question for themselves. While they are at it, they can decide which scenes, characters and random objects in these novels are quick and which are dead. Interestingly, the revisionist interpreters of these novels regularly evoke the essays on the novel to bolster their arguments. To William R. Barr, Aaron’s Rod embodies Lawrence’s argument in ‘The Future of the Novel’ that the novel has ‘got to break a way through, like a hole in the wall’ (1976: 223; STH 155). In his Introduction to the Penguin paperback of Kangaroo, Daly quotes the same passage at great length to validate the novel (1997: xvii). Virginia Crosswhite Hyde points to the importance of Lawrence’s ‘1925 essays on the novel as a form, almost all belonging to the months immediately following The Plumed Serpent and therefore having special relevance to the fiction of that time’ (2001: 173). And John Worthen proclaims that if one of [Lawrence’s] conclusions about the novel [form] is that it ‘can make the whole man alive tremble’, as he says so well in ‘Why the Novel Matters’, it is at least arguable he discovered that while writing Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent. (1979: 137; STH 195) In my opinion the jury is still out on these reassessments.

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Smashing Through Other ideas about the novel play into Lawrence’s opinion of his fellow fiction writers. Not surprisingly, manhood (and also womanhood) figure in his essays on the novel. He explains in ‘Morality and the Novel’ that ‘The only morality is to have man true to his manhood, woman to her womanhood’. In ‘The Novel’ he declares that ‘A man’s manhood is to honour the flames in him, and to know that none of them is absolute’ (STH 175, 189). He had no patience with writers he considered unmanly. Chekhov was a ‘second-rate writer and a Willy wet-leg’, Proust was ‘too much water-jelly’ (7L 94, 6L 100). Commercially successful authors of ‘ordinary unquick novels’ earned his scorn. As discussed above, he was especially bitter about Galsworthy. But Arnold Bennett was a ‘journalist, a time-server’ who was also a ‘sort of pig in clover’ (8L 19, 6L 342). H. G. Wells and Somerset Maugham were ‘rich as pigs’, and Maugham was a ‘narrow-gutted “artist” with a stutter’, while Wells’s characters ‘have no personality – no passion’ (7L 615, 5L 157, 2L 74). The novel of the future had ‘got to have the courage to tackle new propositions without using abstractions; it’s got to present us with new, really new feelings, a whole new line of emotion, which will get us out of the old emotional rut’ (STH 155). Grateful though he was to Ford Madox Ford and Edward Garnett for their mentorship, he firmly believed that their artistic values kept literature safe and devitalised inside the wall of fictional convention. Novels that could capture and communicate human experience needed to be filled with the energy that could blast their way through the wall. Lawrence often described novel writing in terms of violent energy. In 1916 he declared that when he is finished writing Women in Love, he will have ‘knocked the first loophole in the prison where we are all shut up’ (2L 663). His novels found their own form. Frieda spoke eloquently to Lawence’s qualities as a fiction writer in a substantial addendum she attached to the letter Lawrence wrote to Garnett on 19 November 1912, the letter in which he explains the novel’s form via his ‘split’ theory (1L 476). Frieda’s vigorous response to Garnett deserves to be better-known. Her use of Lawrence’s ‘smashing’ metaphor strongly suggests that they had discussed Garnett’s epistolary lectures about fictional form. She had heard so much about ‘form’ with Ernst [the Germanised name of her husband Weekley], why are you English so keen on it. Their own form wants smashing in almost any direction, but they cant [sic] come out of their snail house. I know it is so much safer. (1L 479) Frightened Englishmen like Weekley and Garnett were afraid to venture out from the protective wall of artistic form. Frieda’s description of Lawrence’s writing rings boldly true. He ‘is so plucky and honest in his work, he dares to come out in the open and plants his stuff down bald and naked’. She even says that she hates ‘art’ – as Garnett understands it: ‘it seems like grammar’. In contrast to the art that is like grammar, ‘Look at the vividness of his stuff, it knocks you down’ (more violence). Near the end of her self-described ‘tirade’, she unequivocally places Lawrence outside Flaubert’s literary sphere. Lawrence ‘is a real artist, the way things pour out of him, he seems only the pen’ (1L 479). Frieda’s remarkable defence of Lawrence’s writing shows how well she understood it and also demonstrates the wisdom of her decision to leave Weekley for the young writer.

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But D. H. Lawrence deserves the last word. In 1924 the Italian critic Carlo Linati informed Lawrence that he wished to write an article about him for the Corriere della Sera. Lawrence’s exuberant response to the article is one of his most satisfying descriptions of his practice as a novelist. As he runs metaphorical circles around Linati, he colourfully demonstrates the difference between a dull critic and a dynamic, fully engaged novelist. He asks Linati whether he thinks that books should be ‘all finished and complete’ (5L 201). Even J. M. Synge, whom Lawrence admired ‘very much indeed, is a bit too rounded off’. Lawrence can’t ‘bear art that you can walk round and admire’. 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’. Lawrence concludes his letter to Linati with one of the most wonderful sentences in his over 5,600 surviving letters: ‘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’. In his rejoinder to Linati, Lawrence is dramatising many of the distinctive qualities of his best fiction: incomplete, open form – forcefulness, struggle and even danger – energy and quickness. These are the qualities that explain his enduring position as one of the great modern novelists. This is why he proudly proclaimed, ‘I am a novelist’ – and consequently superior to ‘the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet’ (STH 195).

Works Cited Barr, William R. (1976), ‘Aaron’s Rod as D. H. Lawrence’s Picaresque Novel’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 9, pp. 213–25. Brault-Dreux, Elise (2013), ‘The “Thingness” of the Quick’, Études Lawrenciennes, 44, pp. 23–43. Cushman, Keith (2011), ‘“We Have to Hate Our Immediate Predecessors”: Lawrence and Galsworthy’, Études Lawrenciennes, 42, pp. 75–96. Daly, Macdonald (1997), Introduction to D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, London: Penguin, pp. xiii–xxxi. Ellis, David (1997), D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Andrew (2016), The Life of D. H. Lawrence, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Hyde, Virginia Crosswhite (2001), ‘Picking Up “Life-Threads” in Lawrence’s Mexico: Dialogism and Multiculturalism in The Plumed Serpent’, in Approaches to Teaching the Works of D. H. Lawrence, ed. M. Elizabeth Sargent and Garry Watson, New York: The Modern Languages Association of America, pp. 172–82. Kermode, Frank (1973), D. H. Lawrence, New York: Viking. Sagar, Keith (1966), The Art of D. H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vine, Stephen (1995), Introduction to D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, London: Penguin, pp. xv–xxxvi. Worthen, John (1979), D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel, Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1979. Worthen, John (1991), D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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14 Practitioner Criticism: Poetry Holly A. Laird

Introduction

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his chapter places Lawrence’s poetics, as developed in his poetry, in relation to his responses to other poets and to particular poetic tendencies and movements from his past and present, such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Symbolism and Aestheticism as well as contemporary free verse, Realism and Imagism. Lawrence knew and corresponded with many poets throughout his career, from Yeats and Pound to Amy Lowell and H. D. The extent to which he assimilated or resisted such diverse influences is the focus of this re-evaluation of Lawrence’s paradoxical status as an outsider inside. While regularly represented, for example, by sizeable selections in Norton’s Anthologies of English Literature and of Poetry, and featured in the most recent Cambridge University Press scholarly collection, A History of Modernist Poetry (2015), Lawrence is missing from Lawrence Rainey’s prominent Modernism: An Anthology (2015) and is barely mentioned in the Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (2007). Lawrence remains even today a maverick within the canon of modernist poetry. So dissimilar are the kinds of verse to which Lawrence responded that his general openness to old and new voices, alike, helps account not only for this maverick status, but for the sheer variety of verse forms practised in his poetry. His poetics eludes simple definition. Through the poetry of Whitman, Lawrence recovered the sense of ‘wonder’ that he had felt as a child hearing the Bible and listening to church hymns (LEA 131). In his direct interactions with friends, family and schoolmates, poetry also became a form of play with others. As I have argued previously, dialectical or conflictual relationalism counts among the principal ways in which his mature verse swerves from and inflects his Whitmanesque style (Laird 1988: 88, 129). His style is often also playful. He soon discovered, though, how much work, or ‘groping’ (IR 115), was entailed in writing. As a person, a poet and a critic, he was inclined to shift perspectives, sometimes abruptly: from sympathetic attention to sharp critique in his relationships, from self-expression to self-critique in his poetry, from appreciation and acclamation to deprecation and judgement in his responses to others’ writing, and the reverse. Both his own verse and his writing about verse are double-edged. Whether mild or fierce, the ‘jagged’ edge perceived by Conrad Aiken (quoted Draper 1997: 100) became yet another signature trait. Given the already copious scholarship on Lawrence’s poetic relations to his most famous peers, on the one hand, and on Lawrence’s openness to others’ voices, on the other, this essay narrows its topic to focus on several of the earliest influences on Lawrence’s complex signature traits, from his youth to the war years, and shows how he wrestled with them in his letters, reviews and poems.

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Lawrence, His Poetic Development and Other Poets John Worthen writes that the ‘main effect’ of Lawrence’s childhood years of ‘attendance and instruction’ in the Congregational religion was ‘a kind of unconscious submersion in the language and imagery of the Bible and of the hymns which he sang’ (1991: 67). Looking back as an adult in 1928, the year in which he collected and revised his books of verse, Lawrence recalled feeling ‘eternally grateful for the wonder with which it filled my childhood’ (LEA 132). It is no surprise, then, that the central root of Lawrence’s signature style is Whitman’s Biblically-inflected writing with its repetitive syntactic parallelism, as in ‘Song of Myself’: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume ... I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. (1891–2: 29) Not only the rhythmic Biblical parallelism of such lines, but the arhythmic shift in the last-cited line, anticipate Lawrence’s favourite techniques. Lawrence sought the ‘language and imagery’, as Worthen notes, with which to recapture ‘the wonder’ of childhood in his verse (1991: 67). At least as early as 1909, in the first year of his career as a writer, he was consciously cultivating his Whitmanesque poems. As Christopher Pollnitz explains: Rhymes, quatrains and accentual metre fell away, until at the close he was writing the freest of declamatory, Whitmanesque free verse. The discovery that he could write free verse was important to Lawrence. Later in the spring, he composed the five-poem ‘Movements’ sequence, experiments in blending parallelist and accentual-syllabic rhythms to suggest a toddler running, a man punting on a river or a regiment marching . . . (3Poems lxxxvii) Stephen Greenblatt has famously defined ‘wonder’ as ‘the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention’ (1991: 42). Throughout his career Lawrence thought of the poem as ‘an act of attention’, as Sandra Gilbert (1990) has shown: in May 1928 he composed an essay, ‘Chaos in Poetry’, which opens with the definition of a poem precisely as ‘a new effort of attention’ (IR 109). He did not see this as an easy thing to do – it was ‘an effort’ – but he did see it as the desired culmination of the art of ‘expression’: What does it matter if half the time a poet fails in his effort at expression! The failures make it real. The act of attention is not so easy . . . Failure is part of the living chaos. And the groping reveals the act of attention, which suddenly passes into pure expression. (IR 115) While ‘wonder’, as Greenblatt defines it, brings the reader or viewer to a halt, ‘arresting’ him or her in a still, yet live, moment, Lawrence emphasises the necessarily contingent character of an ‘act of attention’ or its dependence on effort, ‘groping’ and ‘failure’

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itself, ‘chao[tically]’, prior to its revelation. Neither an ‘act of attention’ nor ‘wonder’ can occur outside time or outside their contexts in the lived durée. When Lawrence composed, revised, sequenced and reordered prior sequences of poetry, he did so in accordance with these poetic principles, and he did this not only for the sake of sustained self-expression, but with his reader in mind. The reader is repeatedly enjoined in various introductions to his verse-books to read his writing as alive both to failure and wonder. Lawrence also thought of writing as a form of play. We narrow our understanding of him as a thinker as well as a writer if we apply a descriptive phrase too narrowly or attempt to constrain his poetics to a single nomenclature, no matter how apt. Worthen quotes Lawrence’s sister Ada describing the care-free joy with Bert that I know I can never experience again. It seemed inevitable that Bert should spend his life creating things. He was never content to copy others, and perhaps found more pleasure in inventing games that [sic] in playing them . . . he had a genius for inventing games, especially indoors. (1991: 79) Lawrence’s love of theatre as entertainment is well-known: he liked to assign roles to his schoolfriends, for example: ‘You are a bird, you are a rabbit, you are a flower, you are a horse, you are a cow.’ But, as Worthen notes, prior to offering that example, Lawrence also loved playing in verse, through a kind of oral co-authorship, as his childhood friend Mabel Thurlby recounts: “‘Everywhere is blue and gold.” Now you say a line.’ Worthen adds: ‘We find him, around the age of 19, insisting’ to friends, ‘Now it’s your turn, you’ve got to compose a little poem.’ Friends and acquaintances who experienced this side of Lawrence ‘found it “uncanny”’ – a wonder. As Lawrence says in the conclusion to his 1911 review of Georgian Poetry, in a striking synthesis of these principles, ‘And my hymn and my game of joy is my work’ (IR 204). As a critic, absorbing and evaluating others’ poetry, Lawrence was guided by these early understandings of verse as occasional wonder, effort and relational play. We know that he was sensitively impressionable as a person; so too as a writer. As a young man, he was especially absorbed with and influenced by others, reciprocating their efforts in his writing. As Pollnitz explains, ‘From the perspective of [Lawrence’s position as a writer in] 1909, developing a facility for free verse was one part of a larger project, to equip himself to write in a range of forms and styles’ (3Poems lxxxix). Yet he was equally judgemental of others once he had come to know them and no less critical of others’ writing. The well-known pattern of his relationships, of sympathy followed by judgement or, in more psychological terms, of merging followed by detaching, informed his relationships to others’ poetry. His verse is double-edged: whether writing about a bird, a rabbit, a flower or a beloved, edges of irony, unconventionality, satire, abrupt deflation, open ending or simply a break in rhythm shaped his writing. So too his responses to other poets, even when favourable, were mixed. In part because his writing about other poets was necessarily retrospective, however, judgement precedes sympathy in his published reviews and essays on poetry. In time, Whitman himself came in for his share of scathing commentary. ‘A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human parts. A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his beatitudes’ (SCAL 148) – so goes Lawrence’s judgement in the opening to the 1923 essay on Whitman, the final essay in Studies in

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Classic American Literature. Having mastered a style that went beyond Whitman to carve out a distinctive manner in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Lawrence put that style too behind him. Then, after re-arranging and revising all his previously published books of poems in the 1928 Collected Poems, he began another stage of development as a poet. In his final years, the remarkable poetry of ‘The Ship of Death’ and other last poems emerged. The occasionally rough breaks with rhythm and wording – the jaggedness of his verse style up to this time – are almost entirely confined now to what he thought appropriately termed by Frieda the ‘doggerel’ (7L 64) of his satiric Pansies and Nettles. In contrast, his mythic and dying poems are composed in patterns of gracefully flowing syntactical repetition and variation, generated by a keen sense of the ebb and flow of thought and feeling, as in ‘Now it is autumn and the falling fruit / and the long journey towards oblivion’ and ‘Have you built your ship of death, O have you? / O build your ship of death, for you will need it’ (1Poems 630). There are, of course, striking consistencies in thought and style that thread through his career despite his commitment to changing and changing again. Among the most striking in this context is his characterisation of Whitman as ‘ghoulish’ and ‘portentous’. So too, as early as January 1909, he described Yeats (while acknowledging Yeats’s greatness) as ‘vapourish, too thin’ (1L 107) and in December 1914 as ‘sickly’ (2L 248). Yeats treated Celtic symbolism, Lawrence argued, ‘egoistic[ally]’ as ‘a subjective expression’ rather than recognising the ‘unintelligible’ one must face when one turns outward to consider – as Lawrence thought we should – ‘the whole history of the Soul of Man’. He had met both Yeats and Pound in his first year in London when Violet Hunt – the partner of Ford Madox Hueffer, his editor and ‘discoverer’ (Nehls 1957: 107) – invited him to her home in November 1909. Pound was the same age as Lawrence but, despite his energetic charisma, there is less evidence of the impact that Pound had on his self-acclaimed fellow ‘imagiste’ H. D. It is important here to recognise that Lawrence was often the recipient of high praise in his twenties: he could not fail to notice this, though a habitual diffidence kept him faithful to his fierce disapproval of egotism. Although scholars have generally quoted with amusement comments like Hueffer’s – that he had discovered a ‘genius’ in Lawrence (LEA 179) – such reactions would have helped Lawrence to take himself seriously and, while eager to absorb what others were doing, to be desirous of giving poetry his own spin. A few years later, we find him writing to David Garnett (who became a good friend and trusted editor): I register what you say about my ‘pottery’, and am glad to succeed the salvation army on the throne of your heart. No, I don’t think I’m the greatest poet that ever lived – I’m not very conceited. I should not like to say I thought myself as great a poet as Lord Tennyson – perhaps when I’ve finished, I shall, perhaps I shan’t. But let me finish first. You are only twenty yet – I’m only 27. (1L 536) Lawrence refers unironically to Tennyson’s greatness here, and his letters from 1901 to 1913 allude to Tennyson’s poetry slightly more often than Whitman’s, including references to Maud, The Princess and ‘Lady Clara Vere de Vere’. Prior to publication of the Cambridge Edition of The Poems, much had been made by critics of the seemingly decisive turn Lawrence marked when, in his 1928 Collected Poems, he grouped four of his first five books of verse under the title ‘Rhyming Poems’

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in opposition to the so-called ‘Unrhyming Poems’, comprised of his book to Frieda of 1917, Look! We Have Come Through!, together with his 1923 Birds, Beasts, and Flowers. In the prefatory note to his 1928 collection, he declared his ‘Rhyming Poems’ nearly all juvenile efforts of a past, groping, conventional self, inclined to stifle the ‘demon’ of the man who wrote Look! We Have Come Through! (1Poems 652). (A mature poet of that era was expected, of course, to be critical of his earliest poetry and to have grown past it.) This account is decisively revoked by the scrupulous attention Pollnitz’s introductions give to these volumes and to Lawrence’s actual development as a poet. From the start of his career, Lawrence was intent on self-invention followed by re-invention of himself, and his experiments with rhyming were intrinsic to those developments. By 1916, he was advising others to ‘Use rhyme accidentally’ rather than ‘as a sort of draper’s rule for measuring lines off’ and to ‘break the rhyme rather than the stony directness of speech’ (2L 503). Dismissals of Lawrence’s earliest poetry by some of his contemporaries and subsequent scholars have often been accompanied by disdain for the Pre-Raphaelite and Aestheticist influences on Lawrence despite his own willingness to acknowledge these; Pound, for example, found his earliest published love poems ‘a sort of pre-raphaelitish slush’ (Draper 1997: 149). But to be a young poet eagerly reading verse in the first decade of the twentieth century was to find oneself immersed not only in Tennyson and Browning, but in what people still considered the more radical poetics of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne and Ernest Dowson (all three of whom Lawrence cites in his letters of 1901–13 as often as Whitman and Tennyson). Thus, though Pollnitz does not write about the Pre-Raphaelite or Aestheticist influences on Lawrence’s verse, these counted as much as Whitman in paving the way for a ‘modern’ poetry of taboobreaking love. For the working-class-oriented verse Lawrence was writing of nature and farmers, similarly, he had the poetry of Robert Burns and William Blake as precedents. Lawrence’s second extant essay, meanwhile, was a talk given in 1910 on a contemporary woman Pre-Raphaelite, Rachel Annand Taylor. Here he moves from criticism to profound appreciation in terms that anticipate his own interests in writing of the ‘Madonna’ (for Lawrence, the beloved mother) and the ‘dreaming woman’ (for Lawrence, the young female fellow artist) – both of which he ultimately also renounced, as was his wont (STH 147). Lawrence probably wrote (and perhaps suppressed) some thoroughly sentimental, conventional love poetry (unlike Taylor’s), but the only extant evidence is four lines of verse written in 1897 when he was twelve to ‘his childhood sweetheart’, who quoted them, as follows, after his death: We sit in a lovely meadow My sweetheart and me And we are oh so happy Mid the flowers, birds, and the bees. (Nehls 1957: 32) By contrast, the poems that Lawrence recalls as his earliest – the ‘effusions’ of ‘Campions’ and ‘Guelder Roses’ (1Poems 651), now the first two poems in Volume III of The Poems (which anthologises the verse not published in Lawrence’s lifetime) – indicate a precocious writer who is dynamically both assimilating and resisting what was bold and engaging in the Pre-Raphaelites’ poetry. In addition, several trademark gestures of the mature poet can be discerned, as he writes that ‘the guelder-rose is too chaste

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and pure / Ever to suffer love’s wild attack / For with the redness of laughter the battle is waging in the campions’ rosy wrack’ (3Poems 1397). Not only do we already find his defiantly anti-conventional vision of erotic love imbued with both ‘laughter’ and ‘battle’, but we can see also his facility with the ebb and flow of free verse, despite the rhyming, as in the penultimate stanza: The campions drift in fragile, rosy mist Draw nearer, redden and laugh like young girls kissed Into a daring, short-breath’d confession Which opens earth and Heaven to Love’s fugitive, glowing progression. ‘Campions’ is indeed a ‘rhyming’ poem, and he wrote dismissively of it, while leaving it unpublished when he developed his Collected Poems, but it deploys its rhymes deftly, often playing them off against strategic run-on lines, as in the second and third lines in both the stanzas cited above.

Lawrence as Poetry Critic A critical edge was an even greater prerequisite for the poetry reviewer and critic than for a poet’s self-reflections. In the highly polemical literary market-place of the early 1900s, acerbity was essential if a reviewer was to prove his mettle. Although Lawrence wrote just a few reviews of others’ poetry, he used these strategically to show where he stood in arguments among his contemporaries over the broadly (and reductively) labelled styles of Victorianism, Symbolism, Romanticism and Realism. Such polemics suited his temperament, as we see in his earliest collected letters. In 1908, he has more admiring remarks to make of Lord Alfred Douglas’s poems than of Yeats’s, though his admiration was laced with condemnation of death-mongering: Alfred Douglas has some lovely verses; he is affected so deeply by the new French poets, and has caught their beautiful touch. But, being a Lord, the fat-head writes ‘A Prayer’ . . . just because he feels himself heavy with nothing and thinks it’s death when it’s only the burden of his own unused self. (1L 107) The first piece in A. Banerjee’s 1990 anthology, D. H. Lawrence’s Poetry: Demon Liberated, is a December 1908 letter to his friend Blanche Jennings in which he critiques A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad: ‘The little red book you sent me delighted me like a glass of wine poured out for me. But the wine was home-made; it was elderberry, turbid, inky, flat, with a rough medicinal flavour suggestive of colds on the chest’ (102). What starts as a tribute again shifts quickly to judgement. Lawrence takes his stand alongside the ‘modern’ poets he was reading in contemporary journals, as against the popular, lopsidedly either tragic and melancholic or cheerily jingoist verse of both the Victorians and his contemporaries. He is insisting here on a modern frankness about life, calling for the candidly autobiographical and biographical. Thus, yet another characteristic trait emerges when he reads Housman’s poetry as autobiography. Although the New Criticism of the mid-twentieth century turned scholars, often salutarily, away from biographical reading between the lines, Lawrence is engaged in the following passage not with generating a legitimate, publishable swath of literary biography, but with assessing

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the aliveness and life-givingness of this verse. We can also see him trying his hand, in these early letters, at the both personalised and manifesto-like rhetorics of his most powerful, published non-fiction, as in Study of Thomas Hardy and Studies in Classic American Literature: ‘The Shropshire Lad’ is, I presume, a lad. He gives himself out a ploughman; I could conceive him a little independent farmer; but that he really has broad shoulders I will not believe. He is thin, gloomy, I swear; he sits by the fire after a raw day’s singling the turnips, and does not doze, and does not talk, but reads occasionally Blatchford, or perhaps Night Thoughts; he is glum; Death has filched the pride out of his blood, and there is the conceit of death instead in his voice. Do you know anything of A. E. Housman? He is no poet; he can only sing the tale of the bankruptcy of life, – in death. I believe he comes of a consumptive family; I believe he himself is consumptive. Bah! To a man, and supremely to a man who works in the wholesome happiness on a farm, Life is the fact, the everything: Death is only the ‘to be concluded’ at the end of the volume. (1L 102–3) (The full title of the long poem to which Lawrence refers by its more common shortened title, The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality, was composed in the mid-eighteenth century by Edward Young; ‘Blatchford’ probably refers to Robert Blatchford, a journalist and author of Merrie England in 1893, also discussed in Howard J. Booth’s chapter ‘Politics and Art’ in this Companion.) Although the original publications of A Shropshire Lad had not done well in 1896, it became increasingly popular as decades passed, starting with people’s concern over British soldiers dying during the later Boer wars, until several poems became oft-cited traditional favourites among the British people. Lawrence’s letter about Housman in January 1908 anticipates the sentiments expressed in his subsequent review of Georgian Poetry (1911) as he declares: Nevertheless, I thank you heartily for the volume. I have now a passion for modern utterances, particularly modern verse; I enjoy minor poetry, no matter how minor; I enjoy feeling that I can do better; I have a wicked delight in smashing things which I can make better; besides, I do so much want to know, now, the comrades who are shuffling the days in the same game with me. I put out my hands passionately for modern verse, and drama – and, in less degree, novels. (1L 103) True also to the word of this early letter, ‘minor poetry’ or the poetry of emerging poets continued to interest him throughout his career as, for example, in his heralding of Harry Crosby’s verse in ‘Chaos in Poetry’ (1928). A well-read person himself, Lawrence was excited in the early years of his career as a publishing poet by the contemporary work of his day and, with his letter about Housman, consigns an important, now canonical volume to the ash-heap of death-mongering poets. Indeed, Housman’s verse offers a study in contrasts to both Lawrence’s pre-war and wartime poetry. As if offering Lawrence a playbook for what he wished not to do as a poet, Housman’s poems sought a perfection in rhythm and rhyme (which Lawrence abjured) in patriotic, balladic verse about ‘lads’ in rural landscapes courting young women in conventional ways, sacrificing love and life for country. In his volume’s seventh poem, Housman’s protagonist ‘picked a stone and

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aimed it / And threw it with a will: / Then the bird was still’, but the bird’s ‘flut[ing]’ voice stays with him, to say ‘The road one treads to labour / Will lead one home to rest, / And that will be the best’ (Housman 1917: 11–12). Lawrence’s ‘Cherry Robbers’ implies more than it states in the lines ‘Three dead birds lie: / Pale-breasted throstles and a blackbird, robberlings / Stained with red dye’ (1Poems 8). He also juxtaposes these ‘robberlings’ with a laughing ‘girl’ ornamented by ‘Cherries hung round her ears’. Housman’s single allusion to male ‘thieve[s]’, in his fifth poem, takes a traditional approach to courtship when the speaker says, ‘Some lads there are, ’tis shame to say, / That only court to thieve’ (1917: 9). He evokes those sly dogs as a foil for himself, ‘My love is true and all for you’, and the woman addressed responds, equally predictably, ‘Perhaps, young man, perhaps.’ Lawrence’s poem ‘Tease’ overturns such conventions when its speaker tells the female subject, ‘You have fingered all my treasures / Have you not, most curiously’ (1Poems 61). In response to her desire to ‘know’ all his ‘secrets’, he replies, ‘Maybe yes, and maybe no, / You may have it as you please.’ Lawrence would shortly become preoccupied with death, however, in the elegies to his mother, written before and after her death, and in his First World War verse. Housman comes closest to the tack Lawrence takes in figures like those found in the twenty-eighth piece of A Shropshire Lad, where he makes his ‘mother’s marriage-bed’ the site where ‘the vanquished bled’ (1917: 41), and the protagonist thinks, ‘They kill and kill and never die;/ And I think that each is I’ (42). Similarly, in ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’, Lawrence’s ‘I’ ‘hate[s] myself, this body which is me’, yearning ‘to cut off my hands, / And take out my intestines to torture them!’ (3Poems 1517). The greater explicitness of Lawrence’s lines sets the stage for an explicitly homoerotic conclusion in which he reconceives an enemy soldier as ‘Like a bride’ to take ‘my bayonet, wanting it’ (1518). Lawrence’s war poems make a sharp break, above all, from the strict metrics and rhyming of Housman’s verse. But in the midst of the First World War, in January 1916, it is Housman’s forty-eighth poem (beginning, ‘Be still, my soul, be still’ [1917: 73]) that he recalls in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell: ‘One has only to say to one’s soul, be still, and let be what will be’ (2L 502). Publicly taking his stand, then, against the Victorian and the sentimental as opposed to the Symbolist and the modern, Lawrence also aimed to complicate his readers’ understanding of what poetry was, could or should be. His first published review places him, beyond the immediate English scene, in a cosmopolitan frame, as he reviews ‘Contemporary German Poetry [as] very much like the recent Contemporary Belgian Poetry’ and critiques a poetics that strikes him as overly dependent on the Symbolist tradition (IR 187). Describing the ‘bulk of the verse [as] of the passionate and violent kind’, he judiciously qualifies that initial generalisation as possibly ‘owing to’ its translator’s ‘taste’. He finds it ‘remarkable how reminiscent of Verhaeren and Iwan Gilkin’ this anthology is, and if ‘representative’, ‘the influence of the Belgians on Germany is beyond all proportion’: These poets seem like little brothers of Verhaeren and Albert Mockel and the rest, young lads excitedly following the lead of their scandalous elders. Baudelaire, a while back, sent round with a rather red lantern, showing it into dark corners, and saying ‘Look here!’; considerably startling most folk. Verhaeren comes after with a bull’s-eye lantern of whiter, wider ray than Baudelaire’s artistic beam, and flashes this into such obscure places – by no means corners . . . These Germans follow like tourists after a guide . . . After that, one thinks of Verlaine’s ‘Green’. (187–8)

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Lawrence associates this verse not only with the Belgian and French Symbolists, but with the English: Synge asks for the brutalising of English poetry. Thomas Hardy and George Meredith have, to some extent, answered. But in point of brutality the Germans – and they are at the heels of the French and the Belgians – are miles ahead of us. (188) Then he adds, in a characteristic gesture of ironic reversal, ‘or at the back of us, as the case may be’. For ‘Many of the Germans’ in this volume are ‘sentimental, dishonest’, not, he says, because ‘the subject is wrong’ but because it is ‘lurid’, only ‘half-realised’, or ‘degraded’ – as if ‘the poet was not able to imagine the woman, so he slopped over the suggestion of her with sentimental philosophy’ (189). In contrast to this ‘degraded’ verse, Lawrence advocates a ‘brutality’ that encompasses the ordinary, the forthright and the sexual, and the larger point made here finds parallels in the later remarks of other modernists, such as Gertrude Stein’s on ‘ugly’ art in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933): Sure, she said, as Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it. (1990: 23) Similarly, Virginia Woolf writes in ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919) of the first periodical publications of James Joyce’s Ulysses that ‘the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably important . . . he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain’ (1984: 161). Woolf resembles Lawrence too in this essay, in stressing the ‘fumbling’, the ‘everyday imperfection’ and the ‘labour’ of writing (161, 158). Writing as a young man of twenty-six, his first books still ahead of him, Lawrence already speaks with the rhetorically intense voice of his later philosophic writing, asking: Why do we set our faces against this tapping of elemental passion? It must, in its first issuing, be awful and perhaps, ugly. But what is more essentially awful and ugly than Oedipus? And why is sex passion unsuited for handling, if hate passion, and revenge passion, and horror passion are suitable, as in Agamemnon and Oedipus, and Medea. (IR 188–9) Ultimately critiquing the translator nearly as harshly as selected poems from the volume, he nonetheless qualifies that judgement too, writing that it is ‘absurd to think of translating the spirit and form of a whole host of poets. But here, each poem retains its personality, some of its distinct, individual personality, that it had in the original’ (189). He concludes, articulating what would become another of his most influential definitions of poetry: ‘The translator is best when he has the plain curve of an emotion – preferably dramatic – to convey.’ Lawrence wrote and published not only this review of German poetry, but three reviews in quick succession, from November 1911 to January 1912. In the second

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review, it becomes clear that Lawrence was nearly as immersed in German verse as a child as he had been in the Congregational hymns: there are here all the poems in German which we have cherished since School days. The earlier part of the book seems almost like a breviary. It is remarkable how near to the heart many of these old German poems lie; almost like the scriptures. We do not question or examine them. Our education seems built on them. (IR 193) As an example, he cites the first three lines of Paul Gerhardt’s ‘Geh aus, mein Herz, und suche Freud’ [‘Go out, my heart, and seek joy’]. That joyous influence, he quickly adds, includes the classical or higher German music of ‘Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf’. Yet it is in more recent poetry that he is especially interested in this review: discovering Liliencron, he applauds his ‘free[dom] from the modern artist’s hypersensitive self-consciousness’ and ‘wish[es] England had a poet like him, to give grit to our modern verse’. ‘Joy’, ‘grit’, and ‘blithe . . . unconcern’ as well as an ‘artless manner’ (in a third review in 1909 [198]) join ‘the plain curve of an emotion – preferably dramatic’ (189), along with ‘daylight’, ‘brutality’ and ‘passion’, in the rapidly accumulating vocabulary of his poetics.

Inside Modernism and the Influence of H. D. Earlier generations of scholars saw Lawrence as considerably more ‘outside’ his contemporary literary circles than we now know he was. As soon as Hueffer accepted Lawrence’s work for publication in the English Review, he brought the young poet into the circle of the most respected modern writers. As Annalise Grice has shown, ‘Lawrence was more aware of the necessity to ‘advertise’ himself and to fashion his identity as a particular kind of writer than has been recognized’ (2015: 48). He took the opportunity that the poet-editors Rupert Brooke and Edward Marsh provided, when they assigned him the first volume of Georgian Poetry to review, ‘to align himself with others in the poetic field’, while ‘us[ing] his own distinctive idiom’ and ‘covertly promot[ing] Love Poems and Others’ just ahead of its publication in 1913. The inclination to pit old rhetorically against the new, which was to become a trademark of his prose, rings strong and clear in his review of the Georgian Poetry anthology. Here what has been most pathbreaking in recent literature is now ‘old’ – ‘Ibsen, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy’ – as he pushes them into the past as merely ‘destructive’, where the new Georgian poets are ‘joyous’ and enraptured by a sense of ‘wonder’ (46). Yet if, as Grice notes, these were ‘realist’ writers whom he sought to supersede, he does not oppose realism per se in this account. Pound would shortly praise a section of what he called ‘realist’ poems in Lawrence’s first book of poetry for bringing ‘contemporary poetry up to the level of contemporary prose’ (quoted in Draper 1997: 151); that last achievement, of course, fulfils one of Pound’s most famous aims for poetry: that it should be as well written as prose. Imagism itself emerges only rarely as an explicit interest or concern in Lawrence’s earliest writings, and he later considered that concept merely an ‘illusion’ made up by Pound (7L 223; though see also Helen Carr [2009] for an in-depth and nuanced study of the Imagist poets that also considers Lawrence). It is not until 1914 that he began to correspond with Harriet Monroe and Amy Lowell about verse he might submit to their important journals, and he does not identify himself entirely with Lowell’s aims

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(3Poems ciii). But we do see Lawrence intent in 1910 on redefining one of Imagism’s central doctrines of ‘impersonality’ to suit his own vision of life and art (1L 169), and as Lee M. Jenkins writes, while ‘Lawrence’s association with Imagism has been dismissed as nominal and expedient . . . it amounted to more than the regular if meagre royalties he received from Amy Lowell’s anthologies’ (2018: 58). It was in their anthologies and in the Imagist journals that he published some of the most Imagistic of the new poems inspired by Frieda and their lives abroad, especially in Italy and in the Alps, including ‘Green’ and ‘All of Roses’ (the latter split apart in Look! We Have Come Through!, and re-titled ‘River Roses’, ‘Roses on the Breakfast Table’ and ‘Gloire de Dijon’). Moreover, as Jenkins argues, ‘It was Amy Lowell who marketed him as an Imagist’, while ‘by way of intertextual exchanges with H. D.’, Lawrence’s ‘relationship to the poetics of Imagism was worked out’, and this ‘continue[d] long after their personal friendship came to an end’. Lawrence was open to influence, then, by contemporary women editors and poets, such as Lowell and Monroe. Although men’s names predominate in his letters, reviews and essays cited above, his detailed assessment of Rachel Annand Taylor in 1910 counts as just the earliest evidence of this interest. He frequently encouraged the women poets he met, as he does Catherine Carswell in 1915–16 and Dollie Radford in 1916, writing to the latter that she makes ‘fine, exquisite verse’ (2L 515). Critics have found striking parallels, moreover, between H. D. and Lawrence’s verse and have analysed the forms their arguments with each other took in poetry – staged through the mythic figures of Persephone and Pluto, Orpheus and Eurydice. H. D. herself wrote of Lawrence’s impact on her in her autobiographical novel, Bid Me to Live (1960). But influence did not flow in only one direction. Recently, Pollnitz reprised an earlier essay on form in Lawrence’s poetry (published in 1990 but unfortunately overlooked by critics) to argue that H. D.’s verse played a key role in the development of Lawrence’s free verse style in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. H. D., then, has a comparable impact to Whitman: the development of Lawrence’s verse technique in Birds, Beasts and Flowers is based on the influence of H. D.’s short-lined free verse, on Lawrence’s adding prosy, ironic mid-length lines to the tonal palette of his poems, and on his juxtaposition of varying tones in individual poems. (Pollnitz 2018: 126) Jenkins too corrects previous inattention to H. D.’s influence on Lawrence in her analysis of H. D.’s partial inspiration of ‘Hymn to Priapus’, ‘Purple Anemones’ and ‘Medlars and Sorb-apples’, noting parallels, for example, between a ‘revised version’ of ‘Hymn to Priapus’ in Look! We Have Come Through! and H. D.’s ‘Priapus / Keeper-of-Orchards’, first published in Poetry in 1913 and republished as ‘Orchard’ in Sea Garden (Jenkins 2015: 61). Another excellent, earlier study by Helen Sword closely attends to parallels between them and characterises their relationship as ‘less influence’ than ‘inspiration and initiation’ (1995: 189). Understanding this relationship primarily, as Sword and other critics have done, as gendered argument, Jenkins reads H. D.’s powerful mythic poem ‘Eurydice’ as a rebuttal of Lawrence’s criticism (amid admiration), especially his recommendation to her to ‘Stick to the woman-consciousness, it is the intuitive woman-mood that matters’ (quoted in 2011: 36). As Jenkins puts it, Lawrence’s ‘Persephone-poet’ in ‘Purple Anemones’ ‘glances back at H. D.’s “Eurydice” through the related chthonic myth of Persephone, [and] the autonomy of the “late-enfranchised” New Woman is trumped by phallic “mastery”’ (2015: 60).

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Lawrence appears more deeply influenced by H. D. even than such intertextual contention suggests, absorbing her poetic themes and style in a manner that parallels his absorption of the prose writings of Helen Corke in his second novel The Trespasser and in his co-authorship of The Boy in the Bush with Mollie Skinner. In 1914, he wrote to Amy Lowell comparing her poetry with H. D.’s: how much beyond us you are in the last stages of human apprehension of the physico-sensational world . . . beyond tragedy and emotion, even beyond irony . . . where life is not yet known, come to pass again. It is strange and wonderful. I find it only in you and H. D., in English. (3L 30–1) Sword, Jenkins and Pollnitz all emphasise the appeal for Lawrence of H. D.’s poetry in Sea Garden (1916), published after his first volume Love Poems and Others (1913). It is not the Imagistic poems in that volume that she swayed (Gilbert cites three of these as Lawrence’s only Imagist verse in this first volume, ‘Aware’, ‘A Pang of Reminiscence’ and ‘A White Blossom’ [1990: 35]), but rather the verse to come – poems like ‘Hymn to Priapus’, as noted by Jenkins and Sword. Not only Sea Garden, however, moulded Lawrence’s impression of what was possible in poetry. He was instantly struck by ‘The God’ and ‘Adonis’, published in the Egoist in 1917. In other words, not only her ‘flower poems’ appealed to him, as H. D. describes Lawrence’s interests in her verse in Bid Me to Live, but still more crucially, her early mythopoetics. Writing about H. D.’s ‘The God’ and ‘Adonis’ in January 1917, Lawrence asks Edward Marsh, ‘Don’t you think H D [sic] – Mrs Aldington – writes some good poetry? I do – really very good’ (3L 84). While ‘The God’ resembles poems Lawrence wrote in dialogue with Frieda, published the same year in Look! We have Come Through!, H. D.’s mythopoetics are echoed, more obviously, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Both volumes reflect the aesthetic strategies of her mythic poems (as well as the influence of Sea Garden that Pollnitz discerns). The same direct, colloquial manner H. D. adopts in the first section of ‘The God’ – ‘I asked of your face: / is it dark // . . . mysterious and far distant’ (1917: 19) – recurs in Lawrence’s ‘One Woman to all Women’ from Look! We Have Come Through!: ‘You may look and say to yourselves, I do / Not show like the rest. / My face may not please you’ (1Poems 205). The trope of dessicating salt embraced by H. D. – ‘I thought I would but scatter salt / on the ripe grapes’ (1917: 21) – echoes Lawrence’s figuration also of Frieda as Lot’s wife in ‘She Looks Back’, where ‘the kiss was a touch of bitterness on my mouth / Like salt, burning in’ (1Poems 167). But when H. D. writes, in the second section, beneath my feet, the rocks have no weight against the rush of cyclamen, fire-tipped, ivory-pointed, white; beneath my feet the flat rocks have no strength against the deep purple flower-embers, cyclamen, wine spilled (1917: 20)

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the echoes in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers become faintly uncanny, as in ‘Almond Blossom’, which Lawrence portrays as storming up Strange storming up from the dense under-earth Along the iron, to the living steel In rose-hot tips, and flakes of rose-pale snow Setting supreme annunciation to the world. (1Poems 259) Lawrence’s own ‘Sicilian Cyclamens’ also evokes H. D.’s imagery, hyphenated wordcombinations, lineation and vernacular: Pagan, rosy-muzzled violets Autumnal Dawn-pink, Dawn-pale (266) Where H. D. positioned herself at the brink of the unknown, as in the last stanza of ‘The God’ – Now I am powerless to draw back for the sea is cyclamen-purple, cyclamen-red, colour of the last grapes, colour of the purple of the flowers, cyclamen-coloured and dark (1917: 22) – Lawrence discovered a ‘strange and wonderful’ ‘physico-sensational world’ ripe for re-conjuring, for himself: ‘Dawn-rose / Sub-delighted, stone-engendered / Cyclamens, young Cyclamens’ (‘Sicilian Cyclamens’, 1Poems 265). Pushing past prior literary modes of ‘tragedy’ and ‘irony’, H. D.’s verse had opened up worlds beyond, ‘where life is not yet known’. Although Lawrence turned sharply away from H. D. in 1919, Sword reminds us that his thoughts probably returned sympathetically to her in his final years and to Persephone in ‘Bavarian Gentians’. H. D.’s friend Stephen Guest believed that Lawrence had written The Man Who Died for her (quoted in Sword 1995: 193). Lawrence’s mythic character, Osiris, represents ‘the twin brother initial sharer who had inspired her artistically but whose shattered image she must now in turn gather up, reconstruct, re-member’ much as Lawrence’s Isis ‘ministers to and regenerates the risen Christ/Osiris’ in The Man Who Died (VG 194).

Conclusion Lawrence’s debts to H. D. and other women poets were not disclosed, however, in what is now the best-known statement of his poetics, ‘Poetry of the Present’, where Lawrence placed himself in the canon of then-enshrined Anglo-American men poets, including Shelley, Keats and Whitman. Originally published by Playboy magazine in 1917 and republished later that year in an American, second edition of New Poems,

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this is probably his boldest statement, if possibly also his least complex articulation, of what he deems is wrong versus right for poetry ‘of the present’. This essay’s powerful rhetorical fluency unfolds manifold characteristics of a self-proclaimed Whitmanesque writer. Deliberately emphasising two British poets considered the most ‘modern’ of their own generation, Shelley and Keats, Lawrence defines himself sharply against both, to ally himself instead with the more radical ‘modern’ nineteenth-century American poet, Walt Whitman. Thus, while he was amused to find himself acclaimed as ‘great’ as Tennyson by a young admirer, David Garnett (1L 536, as cited above), when he considered himself still quite early in his career, he was both drawn to and unabashed by such greatness. From the moment of his early reception as a ‘genius’ by Hueffer, Lawrence was probably as compelled by great expectations as by the verse of his predecessors and peers. Even about Shakespeare, Lawrence would eventually prove undaunted in delivering judgement: as he writes in the 1928 prefatory Note to his Collected Poems when defending his own autobiographical method, ‘If we knew a little more of Shakespeare’s self and circumstance how much more complete the sonnets would be to us, how their strange torn edges would be softened and merged into a whole body!’ (1Poems 656). Still more astonishingly, in Pansies (1930), he writes satirically: When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language. Lear, the old buffer, you wonder his daughters didn’t treat him rougher, the old chough, the old chuffer! (428) Following those opening salvos, the critique intensifies, hammering Hamlet and Macbeth, until the refrain of ‘lovely language’ is recast to conclude, uglily: ‘How boring, how small Shakespeare’s people are! / Yet the language so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar!’ (429). For Lawrence, the artist’s vision of what could and should be – of the ‘wonder’ people might, utopically, convey or attain – outweighs even the values not only of the ‘lovely’ but of the ordinary, the rough and the real. It is easy enough for a critic to turn this same satiric hammer and salt back against Lawrence as a poet, but also worth recalling his insights as a reviewer who recognised how ‘absurd’ it is ‘to think of translating the spirit and form of a whole host of poets’ and who eschewed movements even as he engaged with ‘a whole host of poets’ (IR 189). This should give us pause before we ‘think of translating the spirit and form’ of Lawrence’s poetry into a single category – whether ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ modernism, in appreciation or critique. Instead we might grant his verse the extended attention that he brought to it through long labour, a reawakened sense of wonder and the willingness to fail in trying.

Works Cited Banerjee, A. (1990), D. H. Lawrence’s Poetry: Demon Liberated, New York: Macmillan. Carr, Helen (2009), The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and the Imagists, London: Jonathan Cape. Draper, Ronald (1997), D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, New York: Routledge.

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Gilbert, Sandra (1990), Acts of Attention: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (1991), ‘Resonance and Wonder’, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 42–56. Grice, Annalise (2015), ‘“That’ll Help Perhaps to Advertise Me”: Lawrence’s “The Georgian Renaissance” Review in Rhythm’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 40:2, pp. 34–53. H. D. (1917), ‘The God’, Some Imagist Poets: An Annual Anthology, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 19–23. H. D. (2011), Bid Me to Live, ed. Caroline Zilboorg, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Housman, A. E. (1917), A Shropshire Lad, Bodley Head, NY: John Lane. Jenkins, Lee M. (2015), The American Lawrence, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Gainesville. Laird, Holly A. (1988), Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Nehls, Edward (1957), D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Volume One, 1885–1919, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Pollnitz, Christopher (1990), ‘Craftsman Before Demon: The Development of Lawrence’s Verse Technique’, in Rethinking Lawrence, ed. Keith Brown, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, pp. 133–50. Pollnitz, Christopher (2018), ‘Verse Forms’, in D. H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 119–30. Stein, Gertrude (1990), Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), New York: Vintage. Sword, Helen (1995), Engendered Inspiration: Rilke, D. H. Lawrence, and H. D., Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Whitman, Walt (1891–2), Leaves of Grass, Philadelphia: David McKay, Woolf, Virginia (1984), ‘Modern Fiction’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4: 1925 to 1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie, London: The Hogarth Press. Worthen, John (1991), D. H. Lawrence, The Early Years 1885–1912, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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15 Revising and Rewriting Paul Eggert

Introduction

I

n a book about D. H. Lawrence and the arts, the question of how his creative practice might affect our understanding of its outcomes is significant. Accordingly, this chapter is less about what he wrote than how he wrote, looking in particular at his process of revising, rethinking and rewriting. Though relatively short-lived, Lawrence was a prolific writer. Characteristically, he would be writing and revising multiple works, often across genres, at or around the same time. Taking a break from one to write the other became habitual – and understandable given the extended period that, say, a novel might take to bring to completion. Each work became an element in the fertile soil from which the others sprang. To demonstrate the truth and implications of this it is only necessary to take a cross-section of his contemporaneous writings at any one creative moment. The surprisingly provisional nature of his usually forcefully expressed ideas comes into focus when we do this; and accepted practices of interpretation, based on the published forms of his writings taken as individual objects, as separate works, become problematic. An unfamiliar Lawrence emerges. Study of his practice of revision also bears on the question of reception, discussed in various ways throughout this Companion. Editors, publishers, typesetters, translators and adapters play their role in the life of a work. Readers all, they temporarily cohabit the work’s environment. They extend its life into the future in their every transaction with its material forms. Later, readers play their different role in the realising of his works. Just as they perform a work it performs its work in their lives, differently on each occasion.1 Readings happen only in their own contexts of performance. Each time a work is read it takes on a form subtly changed from its immediate predecessor. Over time, substantially different understandings of a classic writer’s works emerge that answer to the intervening shifts in cultural awareness. Thus each age produces its own Lawrence, as does each national or other group. The 1950s Lawrence, for instance, is no longer ours. Yet what this account of his reception – almost conventional now – leaves out is his habit of revision. Prior to the publication of his works Lawrence was intimately involved in moulding his own reception. Like any professional writer he tried to anticipate it, for he had to sell his writings to live. Lawrence tried more vigorously and directly than most. Earnest exhortation directed towards an audience he at first trusted in the 1910s was replaced, in the 1920s, by a quicksilver, sometimes antagonistic, even hectoring, attitude towards his readers. In turns, he optimistically encouraged, cagily trifled with or pessimistically despised them.

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For the purposes of this chapter his revisions, both on the draft-manuscript page and from version to version, are the first indisputable receptions of his own, prior writing. (One must first read in order to revise.) Those revisions are a private forerunner of the public reception that his works would receive in reviews, exhibitions, bibliographies, new editions and dustjackets, critical discussions and adaptations. From the point of view of reception, the only difference between the pre- and post-publication phases was their agency and material base. Reception presupposed writing, writing presupposed reception, and revision presupposed them both. There is a larger issue in play in this idea of revision. In his late essay of 1905, ‘What Pragmatism Is’, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce wrote: a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is ‘saying to himself,’ that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and [therefore] all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. (1998: 338) Lawrence offers a fruitful case study for this claim, if only because the reasoning of his ‘critical self’ left its material record on the page; and the dynamism of Peirce’s semiotic model corresponds to the peculiar malleability of Lawrence’s practice of revision. As we will see, his writings, prior to their publication in book form, give us rich evidence of this. To entertain the present chapter’s approach, we have to be prepared, temporarily at least, to resign our ordinary expectations about literary study. First, we have to jettison the misconception that works (normally materialised as books) and texts are the same thing. Works may have multiple, variant texts. Second, we have to understand an oeuvre not as a series of works all neatly listed as separate entries in a bibliography, say, but rather as a continuity of separable but not fundamentally separate versions, fragments and drafts. We have to entertain the idea that the thing most worth studying may be the process that brought them into being when we have been used to confining ourselves to its published products. Under this approach ‘works’ retreat to the status of naming or regulative devices, labels to help organise discussion of a more mysterious and fluid process. The study of Lawrence’s art in creation and revision is, unavoidably, a study of the writing’s intimate relationship with its biographical author: the exigencies of his life, his changes of heart and understanding, his reactions to current events and to his reading, and his grasping of commercial opportunities. Understanding reception in this way, especially at the author-production end, turns Foucauldian study of discourse on its head. Study of Lawrence’s writings shows that the creative writer (whether or not taken as dynamic focus of the discourses of the period or epoch) produces writings in an overlapping and recursive series that can be aligned along a chronological axis. This phenomenon may be studied provided one has access to the materials. The Cambridge University Press series of the complete works of Lawrence (1979– 2018) has opened up the possibility of such study. Each volume’s introduction traces the textual development of one or more works and then documents it in textual apparatus. Simultaneously, each volume has gingerly to bridge over the textual proliferation

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it has exposed by organising the whole edition around the establishment of a reading text, thus satisfying the traditional expectation that one will be provided. Scholarly editors have to be extraordinarily attentive to the writing habits of their author if they are to remove the hundreds of alterations typically imposed by publishers and other participants in the original productions.2 It is possible to go a step further with editors’ macro- and micro-discoveries, and I am recommending that we should. As a mode of analysis, we may now study the process of Lawrence’s composition and revision as a series of agented moments. The text produced so far on a manuscript may be struck through in the next movement of the pen, abandoned or retrieved in part, or revised, or amplified or shifted elsewhere. This presupposes a material carrier of text (a manuscript, say). So text and material carrier are always in an opportunistic co-relationship. The available space in a notebook or, equally tempting, the interlinear space on a neatly typewritten copy (as in the first case study below) may suddenly open up or perversely impede a process of creative renewal or extension or bravura display or change of strategy. Or, the inspiration will fizzle out, visibly. As readers we normally see only the published results at the very end of the process where (we assume) the work reached a textual stasis allowing the author to move on to the next discrete work. Insofar as we think of the preceding stages at all we are apt to think of them as benignly evolutionary, in a state of gradual perfecting whose endpoint was always in view from the start. Close study of Lawrence’s writing practices shows this is rarely the case. His art was exploratory, at every stage.3 We would do better to understand Lawrence’s printed books as the end-point of a process of composition and revision that was terminated, more or less artificially, by the commercial pressure on him to finish the work. This was necessary if he was to monetise his intellectual property via the acts of publication and distribution. Intellectual property is protected by copyright laws, but they in due course dictate its expiry. At that time, with the author now long dead, the work is in effect handed over to us, and we negotiate among ourselves the conditions of its use. That is what I am doing here. To the extent that we participate in the life of the work (as readers, students on a course, reviewers, critics, editors) we exercise our right to study that life in its phases, unfinished and finished: as fragment, as developing draft, as version, as published work. An ethics of reading that would restrict us to the published forms alone (the so-called concrete work, typical of the New Criticism) would be a denial of our participation in the work and the ethical rights that implicitly go with it.4 Does this freedom mean, however, that we should declare a carte blanche, a declaration that, in literary criticism, anything goes? The material record of the creative stream stops us, or ought to stop us, straight away. The writer of the document (and equally the producer of the book) is or was an intelligent agent, a maker of intentional marks: this word, this mark rather than that. The book-as-document declares it. Thus the work is not simply our quarry. It speaks back. We see we are dealing with a biographically focused phenomenon whose intriguing and often challenging presence is worthy of respect. We see that the very act of reading is an attempt to understand more fully the making of those marks and the conditions of their possibility. What forms of inquiry can be envisaged that respond to the textual and documentary conditions I have been describing? How may the insight be put into operation? By way of example I will take two cross-sections at moments in Lawrence’s career where we can see the filaments of various more or less contemporaneous works gradually

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interweaving, affecting and conditioning one another’s thematic projects. The first and third case studies take this multi-work, creative-context approach. Comparing successive versions of a single work separated, say, by a year or so is more familiar, and it is pursued in the second case study. Ultimately the two approaches – the one multi-work, the other versional – circle back around on one another in complementary ways.

Moment of Revision 1: A Multi-Work Approach to ‘The Return Journey’ My first example involves a traveller depicted in Twilight in Italy – the ‘perishingly victorious’ Englishman in ‘The Return Journey’ (TI 210; written October 1915, proofs corrected January–February 1916).5 When considered from the angle I have been adopting he looms into view, surprisingly at first, as a forerunner of that doomed dynamo, Gerald Crich of Women in Love. Its first version (published in 1998 as The First ‘Women in Love’) was written and revised during April–November 1916. The example crosses work boundaries; but since the unfolding intellectual project is the same one, we should not be surprised at the parallel. Nor at the fact that it would not have been possible for Lawrence to have conceptualised his Englishman before mid-1915 even though he had met the man on whom the Englishman is based two years earlier. It was only when Lawrence began to revise the travel essays he had written in 1912–13 for collection in book form, and to write some more afresh, including this one, that he apprehended the tragic case that the man now represented for him. The 1915 date needs some discussion. Lawrence’s adoption of polarities as a vehicle for his imaginative thinking is obvious in Women in Love (1916–19, published 1920), and then became habitual in his later writings. Its advent may be more precisely pinpointed, however, in a two-page typescript fragment of another travel essay that Lawrence heavily revised in August–early September 1915 for Twilight in Italy, ‘The Lemon Gardens’. The fragment is preserved in the Nottinghamshire Archives in the Douglas Clayton collection. Lawrence had supplied Clayton, his typist, with a version of the passage. Clayton typed it, but when Lawrence read it over for correction he felt compelled to reject the transcendence trope that, in one form or another, he had previously imagined as actively reconciling the antitheses that he had been projecting since Study of Thomas Hardy in 1914. The overarching and uplifting rainbow at the end of his novel of the same name was its latest embodiment (the ending was written in early 1915 and revised by 31 May). Since then, and immediately before revising ‘The Lemon Gardens’, Lawrence had been reading the early Greek philosophers: they ‘have clarified my soul. I must drop all about God’, he reported to Bertrand Russell (mid-July 1915; 2L 364). Lawrence mentions Heraclitus in the letter but, because of certain parallels, Empedocles was the more likely source, to whom he could have returned after the writing of the letter (see TI xlix–lviii). Now, in his handwriting on the two-page typescript fragment, the decisive change of tack is recorded, one that would put fresh wind into the sails of his thinking by lending it structure. It would give him the warrant for his push towards extremes of emotion and thought, of life directions and national character – for it was at the extremes, he now believed, that truth was to be found, however unaccommodating the knowing of it might prove to be:

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[There are] two Infinites, [a] twofold approach to God. And man must know both. But he must never confuse them. They are eternally separate. The lion shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally shall devour the lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured of the lion. Man knows the great consummation in the flesh, the sensual ecstasy, and that is eternal. Also the spiritual ecstasy of unanimity, that is eternal. But the two are separate and never to be confused. Confusion is horror and nothingness. (252) ‘God’ sinks to the status of the relation between the two poles, an abstraction without content. Lawrence’s stirring account of the principle of the Tiger (in the first of the two philosophical additions he made to ‘The Lemon Gardens’) appears earlier in the same essay. Both were written directly after his having composed his magnificent account of Hamlet in ‘The Theatre’, which is a sort of grand history of the two impulses, driven to their radical end-points. Now, our ‘perishingly victorious’ Englishman falls into place. He was ‘a tall thin young man, whose face was red and inflamed from the sun’ (TI 209–10). The man is ‘sick with fatigue and over-exhaustion’ (210), but the Lawrence traveller-figure coaxes him into conversation: Then he began, like a general explaining his plans . . . He had walked round over the Furka Pass, had been on foot four or five days. He had walked tremendously. Knowing no German, and nothing of the mountains, he had set off alone on this tour: he had a fortnight’s holiday. So he had come over the Rhone Glacier across the Furka and down from Andermatt to the Lake. On this last day he had walked about thirty mountain miles . . . But then, when he reached his Furka, only to walk along the ridge and descend on the same side! My God, it was killing to the soul. And here he was, down again from the mountains, beginning his journey home again: steamer and train and steamer and train and Tube, till he was back in the machine . . . The way he sank on the table in exhaustion, drinking his milk, his will, nevertheless, so perfect and unblemished, triumphant, though his body was broken and in anguish, was almost too much to bear . . . he would not relinquish his purpose nor abate his will, not by one jot or tittle. His body must pay whatever his will demanded, though it were torture. (210–12) The northern nations of Europe, as against Italy and the south more generally, is a traditional antithesis, very familiar in Lawrence’s time; it still has currency today. Lawrence’s deepening of it into a tense polarity of spirit vs flesh, of intellect and will vs sensuous ease, is the real subject of his travel book. That deepening was simply not available to him in 1912–13 even though the inherited one was; those early versions are pleasing but tame as a result. It is no surprise, then, to find the same polarity structuring his portrayal of the tragically doomed modernising industrialist and man of will, Gerald Crich in Women in Love. Gerald is driven one step further than the Englishman. Goaded by Gudrun’s mockery, and after having nearly strangled her in a last, desperate act of vengeance for having exposed the hurt man within him, he sets out automatically, half-consciously into the mountain snow on a track to the south. Near the summit he comes upon a

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wayside crucifix and half-identifies with the ‘little Christ’ before drifting into unconsciousness (FWL 438, WL 473 and cf. TI 100). Gerald does not – could not – achieve the southern release, and his family later insists on the return of his corpse to England. Yet there is a lonely courage in his acceptance of his fate. His death is a final expression of the national or northern extreme that Lawrence had already identified and, freshly embodied in Gerald, now pushes to its tragic end-point. This ‘perishingly victorious’ Englishman pays the ultimate price. In the first essay in Twilight in Italy, ‘The Crucifix Across the Mountains’ (late July 1915), Lawrence’s depiction of the Alpine Christs’ desolating awareness of being dead in the flesh without the compensating awareness of heavenly release shockingly located, for Lawrence, the consequences of extreme self-abnegation in the service of a spiritual ideal. This is the ‘horror and nothingness’ of the typescript fragment. He would later identify it as the cause of the guiltily philanthropic Mr Crich (Gerald’s father)’s, deep-rooted moral sickness. It is surprising also to realise, then, that the earlier Englishman’s was one of Lawrence’s own alternative fates. In the travel essay, Lawrence notes from the hotel register that the man has a ‘fair, clerkly hand’ (TI 212) – just as Lawrence did. He himself had been a clerk in a Nottingham factory and habitually wrote ‘fair’. There is sufficient evidence from Lawrence’s letters at the time of his walk, and from other sources, to show that the Englishman’s exhausting ‘thirty mountain miles’ of walking – a crucial detail – was replicated the next day by Lawrence, but more fatiguingly up the valley instead of down. The day before, Lawrence had walked for eight and a half hours; the day before that he had covered perhaps twenty-six miles; and two days after meeting the Englishman (if Lawrence’s memory of a train fare can be trusted) he walked an impressive thirty-eight miles, almost fifteen of which were very steep (see explanatory notes, TI 296–7). Like the Englishman’s his purse was ‘definitely limited’ (211) – to three shillings a day – and a comparison Lawrence made to himself in a letter he wrote during his next walk through the Alps in 1914 (2L 186) was transferred to the Englishman in 1915: ‘So he had walked on and on, like one possessed, ever forward. His name might have been Excelsior, indeed’ (TI 211). But unlike the Englishman’s, Lawrence’s ‘Return Journey’, as the essay is titled, was to the south: the Englishman’s fixity was his alternative fate. Lawrence realised he must trust himself, now, to its polarised opposite; and his later works would explore the consequences. Lawrence would never achieve a serene distance from what he wrote. Frieda later said that ‘His courage in facing the dark recesses of his own soul . . . scared me sometimes’ (F. Lawrence 1934: 56). He would be implicated in everything he wrote, no matter how unsettling, even at times scarifying, the writing experiments must have been. This meant, in turn, that every writing was provisional, and that the conclusions would never settle down for long. Each fictional experiment would inhabit and be distended by a polarised force-field of not quite achieved, never quite embodied opposite extremes, the terms of which evolved slowly over time.

Moment of Revision 2: A Versional Approach to ‘The Blind Man’ Lawrence’s short story ‘The Blind Man’ dates from 1918–20. Maurice Pervin is blind, the result of a wartime injury. Since he is now living in isolation with his wife Isabel,

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his bonds with her have tightened, and he finds solace in the rhythms and chores of farming life. In addition, she is pregnant: so that a link is set up almost immediately between fecundity and the absence of light and sight. The couple is visited by Isabel’s friend, of whom Maurice is slightly suspicious; the friend is a barrister from Edinburgh, Bertie Reid. It is a stormy night; he follows Maurice to the barn with a lantern and finds him tending horses in the dark. As a blind man might, Maurice wants to run his hands over Bertie’s head; and he asks Bertie to touch his blinded eyes and his facial scar, his war wound. The two men reconcile and swear an eternal friendship, comforting to both, but Bertie nearly faints. Although the hints of a fragility and even emasculation are already there in Bertie, he is not so much undermined as redeemed by their touching a deeper level in one another – or almost redeemed, for there is some ambiguity. This is the first version, a manuscript of late 1918. When he sent it to his agent, J. B. Pinker, on 4 December 1918, Lawrence described its ‘end’ as ‘queer and ironical. – I realise how many people are just rotten at the quick’ (3L 303). In light of this comment and in the absence of this manuscript when the Cambridge Edition of England, My England containing ‘The Blind Man’ appeared in 1990, its editor Bruce Steele assumed it to have witnessed the same version as appeared in the English Review in 1920, on which he based his reading text. The English Review’s version is almost identical to those printed in the American and British first editions of England, My England, published in 1922 and 1924 respectively. The rediscovered manuscript (first published in The Vicar’s Garden in 2009), however, turns out to witness an earlier version. The toughness of the familiar second version now stands out in decided relief. In its new scene, set before the one in the barn, Maurice’s wife identifies the ‘incurable weakness, which made [Bertie] unable ever to enter into close contact of any sort’, despite his being ‘a brilliant and successful barrister, also a littérateur of high repute, a rich man, and a great social success’ (EME 58). At the end of the scene, Bertie wants to know what it’s like to be blind. Maurice’s answer – that blindness means ‘“You cease to bother about a great many things”’ – is not enough for Bertie. He persists with his question: ‘“what is there in place of the bothering?”’. Maurice’s final but unsatisfactory answer, before he goes off to the barn to get himself out of the tiresome conversation, poses the central challenge of Lawrence’s writing from July 1914 when he revised the final version of his short story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: ‘“There is something,” [Maurice] replied. “I couldn’t tell you what it is”’ (58–9).6 The scene in the barn provides the substantive answer: or at least Lawrence’s go at it this time round, in response to the given fictional circumstances. They themselves needed to stay somewhere within the range of expectations of editors of magazines, aiming at a middlebrow readership, such as Pinker was likely to approach. Evidently Austin Harrison, editor of the English Review, felt Lawrence had successfully achieved this; difficult post-war readjustment for returned servicemen would have been topical; and, although there is a displaced erotic charge in the hands-on scene in the barn, there is nothing overt. The judgement of Bertie implied in Lawrence’s letter upon finishing the earlier version is only now realised. Bertie, in the later version, is desperate to escape Maurice’s ‘soft, travelling grasp . . . Perhaps it was this very passion of friendship which Bertie shrank from most.’ And when he comes indoors Bertie meets Isabel’s eyes ‘with a furtive, haggard look; his eyes were as if glazed with misery . . . He was like a mollusc whose shell is broken’ (EME 62–3).

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Thematic notes from ‘The Crown’ of 1915 (uncollected until 1925) and the also stillunpublished Women in Love (written 1916–19, published 1920) are present here but re-imagined. The effort of writing and then (probably) rewriting by hand the successive versions of this story brought the whole thing into a distinctively Lawrentian focus but within a conventional short-story mode. The polarising pressure helps create the stronger valency of the 1920 version. But Lawrence withholds the full pseudo-philosophical apparatus that so often attended his non-fiction prose writings and novels after The Rainbow (1915), usually voiced stridently by one character only to be undercut by another (e.g. Birkin and Ursula in Women in Love). Jack Grant’s trajectory in The Boy in the Bush (dealt with in the next case study) – the extremity, the objectionableness of it in his day as well as ours – is less surprising when this habit is borne in mind. Lawrence was an experimenter, an explorer; and polarised options gave him the space – once the thronging, indicative detail of realism became an optional extra after Sons and Lovers (1913) – to drive his imagination further, fearlessly. He was never afraid to generalise from his own predicaments and insights, especially after his achievement in The Rainbow of a vocabulary and syntax of intense, overwhelming subconscious emotion tracked to its source. Such grand, reader-participatory gestures needed room to function in; polarities cleared the ground, opened up the way forward. They became the vehicle for his imaginative excursuses.7 Faced in his daily life with Frieda’s disillusioning reception of his wilder ideas, Lawrence must have known in some part of himself that they were provisional, that he was trying them on for size on the page, that their truth claims might not stand up tomorrow. He knew also that he might shortly rewrite or revise them, or take off on another tangent under the stimulus of some new reading or experience. Meanwhile he would follow the insight wherever it would go, however unbalanced it might seem to someone else. He had refused to internalise the dominant paradigms of knowledge of his own period and its accepted manners of intellectual debate. His unreasonableness in his day – his lack of fit – helps explain why he retains currency a century later.

Moment of Revision 3: A Multi-Work Approach to The Boy in the Bush Most readers of Lawrence know The Boy in the Bush as his collaborative novel, his rewriting of a novel by Mollie Skinner, the West Australian bush-nurse, with whom Lawrence and Frieda boarded in the hills outside Perth in May 1922. She sent him a typescript called ‘The House of Ellis’ in August 1923, hoping he would find a publisher for it. He instead offered to rewrite it and immediately set to work (BB xxi–xxxi). The day before the typescript arrived in New York on 19 August 1923 Lawrence had given an interview to the New York Evening Post (published on the 20th). He is reported as predicting an impending cultural collapse: There has got to be a thread that carries through from our Western civilization . . . Christianity cannot do it again . . . I think it will hasten the crash . . . A few people make the destinies of the world . . . It is the few people of the world I care for, not the many . . . the people who are living forwards . . . [not the] people who are just sitting and eating their Sunday dinner in their cottages every week . . . They are the stomach of humanity. (Anon. 1923: 4; cf. BB 319)

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After finishing his manuscript rewriting of the novel in Mexico in November 1923 Lawrence returned to a depressing English winter, recorded in his essay ‘On Coming Home’ (RDP 175–83). As he waited for the typescripts of the novel to be sent to him (there were complications) new hope arose unexpectedly: Dorothy Brett promised to join him and Frieda in establishing a utopian community in New Mexico; he received the Christmas 1923 number of a little magazine from Santa Fe, Laughing Horse (BB xxxi–iii); and he read Joseph Conrad’s latest novel, The Rover, about the taciturn, inscrutable, solitary old sailor, Peyrol. Each would leave its mark. Lawrence immediately set to work and wrote a new last chapter (the present one) for his novel. This was January 1924.8 Instead of Jack’s returning to Perth (Western Australia) with a flea in his ear after Mary’s rejection of his bigamous proposal, the novel now ends with Jack confirmed in his determination to remain aloof from the entanglements of civilised society in Perth (a determination reinforced by his new, centaur-like bond with his horse, Adam), and assured of a patriarchal future in the only lightly populated north-west with his wife Monica and Hilda Blessington (based on Brett). This major revision had centrifugal effects on Lawrence’s subsequent revision and correction of the typescripts, one prepared for his English publisher and the other for his American. They bear a great many alterations that are clearly aimed at preparing for the new last chapter. The formerly mercurial Mr George becomes more fully implicated in a newly darkened portrayal of the cowardice and enclosure of ordinary social living. In her appearances prior to the last chapter Hilda’s character is newly charged with suggestions of a latent potential and daring. And Jack, particularly in his relations with Monica but also in those with other men, is portrayed as more selfcontrolled, self-sufficient and remote, and more deeply sustained by his relationship with his personal God. For the reader of this novel, to have regard only to the texts published in 1924 in New York and in London (and even they were subtly different) is to conflate two sets of authorial intention pre- and post-January 1924. Worse, it is to distance this avowedly Australian novel from a major part of its actual context in the continuum of its author’s thinking, as witnessed in a series of reviews and essays about American life that Lawrence had been writing between late 1922 and 1923. Conversely, his reactions to American life had been conditioned by his actual experience of Australia recorded in Kangaroo, the novel he wrote when he was in that country during May–August 1922. National descriptors, into which literary critics fall so readily, partly because of disciplinary subdivisions of English Studies, only interrupt our new, spectators’ view of what I am arguing was the main game for Lawrence. Arriving in the USA from Australia in September 1922, Lawrence soon apprehended a spiritual emptiness in American life. In a letter of 30 December 1922 he wrote, ‘there’s no inside to the life: all outside’ (4L 365): precisely what he had diagnosed in Australia in response to his experience of its egalitarianism and mateship. That response went with a deepening anxiety about the doctrines of democracy and freedom: ‘Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes’ (written November–December 1922; SCAL 18). For Lawrence the doctrines connect with a propensity to idealism and self-consciousness that he found possible to escape only in Mexico after he arrived in March 1923: ‘The great paleface overlay hasn’t gone into the soil half an inch. The Spanish churches and palaces stagger . . . the peon stills grins his Indian grin behind the Cross . . . He knows his gods’ (‘Au Revoir U.S.A.’,

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April 1923; MM 132). In May and June 1923, while in Mexico, Lawrence wrote Quetzalcoatl, the first version of The Plumed Serpent, where he canvasses a revived relationship of the peons to the ancient gods, mediated by a powerful priest-like figure. In Kangaroo, Benjamin Cooley’s mystic seership, especially when speaking on the topic of love in a revolutionary context, is part of the provenance of the idea. And a subsequent letter of 4 January 1923 records another step: ‘To me, loyalty is far before love. Love seems usually to be just a dirty excuse for disloyalties’ (4L 368). In Lawrence’s essays the deity idea rapidly generalised: ‘The proper study of mankind is man.—Agreed entirely! But in the long run, it becomes again as it was before, man in his relation to the deity’ (‘The Proper Study’, by mid-September 1923; RDP 172). As Lawrence got into his rewrite of Mollie Skinner’s novel (September–November 1923) the cluster of ideas that he had been cogitating inevitably conditioned its narrative. He seized on the opportunity that Skinner’s novel gave him to experiment with the idea of a new source of inner power for the young Briton Jack Grant, forced to deal with the brutality of male competitiveness and the extremities of climate in colonial outback Western Australia. Although Jack’s relationship with his dark gods is portrayed as sustaining his courage and justifying his deeds, he is prey to others’ mocking scepticism and Monica’s disgruntled resentment. He does not escape unscathed. As a result of the revisions Lawrence made in London and the addition of the new last chapter (January 1924), the authority of Jack’s position is more generally acknowledged and has become nearly impregnable. His followers’ loyalty to him becomes paramount. The notion of a formidable inner strength, powerful and authoritative and wise, is now past the stage of being experimental. Stripped of its connection to the divine it undergirds the mysterious, unaccommodating presence of Alan Anstruther in the powerful short story ‘The Border Line’, of March 1924. What this tracing of a line of development of a single cluster of related, evolving ideas illustrates is the general truth that the major landmarks of Lawrence’s oeuvre (in this case, Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent) are only the expression of an elaborate filigree of thematic crossovers, subject to continual adjustment according to the opportunities of the moment and the given genre (essay, review, letter, poem, novel). The shape that this continuous unfolding of a thinking mind would have to take in print usually gave the provocation for the latest experiment and defined its boundaries. Intellectually and artistically, Lawrence rarely stood still; he was ceaselessly experimental, and he worked fast. He never fully finished his works, never finalised their thinking. His writings were always in a process of becoming, or of only gradual abandonment – a phenomenon that we are at last beginning to understand. So why should our criticism be dictated and boxed in by the deadlines and boundaries of the publishing industry of his time? The versional nature of his works, as well as the micro-evidence of manuscript revision on the page, invite us to reform our assumptions. Revision and re-vision were closely aligned for Lawrence, so why not for us, his informed readers and critics?

Notes 1. This line of thinking, only summarised here, derives from recent editorial theory and book history. For a fuller account of the change in thinking and of its significance, and for references to other allied discussions, see Eggert 2019. For each national group producing its own Lawrence (next paragraph) see Iida 1999.

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2. A digital presentation of the Lawrence materials, if it existed, would make the task easier: see Eggert 2018: 312–14. 3. Lawrence’s writings have long been valued as exploratory (e.g. Kinkead-Weekes 1968), but observation of this at every stage of a work’s coming into being has been granted far less attention. Studies by various critics in the 1970s of the versions of the stories in The Prussian Officer collection, published in book form in 1914 (e.g. Cushman 1978, and see Ross 1979 on the composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love), set a scene for which the successive Cambridge editions of the Works would lay the broader documentary groundwork. The three-volume Cambridge biography of Lawrence applied the new information biographically to great effect (most fully in Kinkead-Weekes 1996), though without querying the accustomed pre-eminence of the finally published forms. 4. For Wellek and Warren in 1948, ‘the object of literary study [is] – the concrete work of art’ (1966: 147). For the ethical rights see further Eggert 2019. 5. The proof revisions were relatively minor, the principal exception being his amendments to the two new ‘Lemon Garden’ passages (see below). 6. For the versions of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, see Eggert 2009: 161–3. 7. The next case study partially exemplifies this line of argument. It is more fully developed in Eggert 1982, 1983 and 1990. 8. See further Eggert 1990: 41–2, from which the following paragraphs have been adapted and revised. Similarly, in the second case study, see Eggert 2009: 161–3; and, in the first, Eggert 1997: 230–1.

Works Cited Anon. (1923), [Interview with D. H. Lawrence], New York Evening Post, 20 August, p. 4. Cushman, Keith (1978), D. H. Lawrence at Work: The Emergence of the Prussian Officer Stories, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Eggert, Paul (1982), ‘Lawrence and the Futurists: The Breakthrough in his Art’, Meridian, 1, 21–32. Eggert, Paul (1983), ‘Lawrence and the Crucifixes’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 86, pp. 67–85. Eggert, Paul (1990), ‘Opening up the Text: The Case of Sons and Lovers’, in Rethinking Lawrence, ed. Keith Brown, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, pp. 38–52. Eggert, Paul (1997), ‘Discourse versus Authorship: The Baedeker Travel Guide and D. H. Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy’, in Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation, ed. Philip Cohen, New York: Garland, pp. 207–34. Eggert, Paul (2009), ‘The Silent Witness of Book Logic: The Cambridge Lawrence at its 35th Volume’, Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society, 1:4, pp. 153–70. Eggert, Paul (2018), ‘The Cambridge Edition’, in D. H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 304–14. Eggert, Paul (2019), The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iida, Takeo, ed. (1999), The Reception of D. H. Lawrence throughout the World, Fukuoka, Japan: Kyushu University Press. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark (1968), ‘The Marble and the Statue: The Exploratory Imagination of D. H. Lawrence’, in Imagined Worlds: Essays in Honour of John Butt, ed. Ian Gregor and Maynard Mack, London: Methuen, pp. 371–418. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark (1996), D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, Frieda (1934), Not I, But the Wind . . ., New York: Viking. Peirce, Charles Sanders (1998), ‘What Pragmatism Is’, in The Essential Peirce, ed. N. Houser et al., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 331–45.

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Ross, Charles (1979), The Composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love: A History, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Wellek, René and Austin Warren (1966), ‘The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art’, in Theory of Literature, London: Cape, pp. 142–57.

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SECTION 2 PERFORMANCE ARTS 16 Performance John Worthen

Introduction

P

erformance, as in a charade or a play? Lawrence as ‘artist-performer’ (Reid 2015: 101) was fascinated by both. Performance meaning reliable in fulfilling a promise? Lawrence always performed. What about the meaning – from 1927 – of a ‘performer’ as a profitable investment? Lawrence’s manuscripts would undoubtedly perform. But then what of the meaning of male sexual performance, first recorded in 1902 (Farmer and Henley 1902: 173)? Can we position Lawrence in relation to that kind of performance? As those definitions suggest, the word goes in many directions; but we need to recognise that, in particular following his experiences in New Mexico in the mid-1920s, Lawrence found all kinds of reasons to think negatively of ‘performance’. To him, it came to mean something ‘ostentatious’, ‘Just a show!’, Indian ceremony, for example, seen by unthinking white onlookers as ‘entertainment’ or ‘primitive performance’ (MM 90, 187, 62, 87): this is what we find in essays like ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’, ‘Just Back from the Snake Dance’, ‘Indians and Entertainment’ and ‘The Dance of the Sprouting Corn’. This may be hard to understand, given the way his interest in performance had made itself felt throughout his writing, not just (obviously) in his plays, or in chapters like ‘The Theatre’ and ‘The Dance’ in Twilight in Italy, or in the descriptions of the marionettes in Palermo in the chapter ‘Back’ of Sea and Sardinia. His first published piece of work, ‘A Prelude’ in 1907, had described the preparations for and performance of the Christmas entertainment, the Guysers, and had ended with two girls singing first a carol, then ‘the beautiful song of Giordani’s’ (LAH 14). But the list of performances in Lawrence’s fiction is almost endless – the dancing and partying in The White Peacock, the dancing in ‘The White Stocking’, the multiple episodes in The Lost Girl of film and then the stagings of the Natcha-Kee-Tawara troupe, the public meetings in Kangaroo, even the notorious cricket match in The Boy in the Bush.

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But the episodes of massed religious ceremony, chanting and, finally, execution in The Plumed Serpent have arguably a different quality of ‘performance’ – as has, in another way, Constance Chatterley’s sardonic observation of the ‘humiliating performance’ of Mellors’s lovemaking – ‘for it was a performance’ (LCL 172). And – going back to 1915 – what are we to make of Skrebensky’s nightmare vision in The Rainbow of the ‘performing puppets’ and ‘performing tricks’ of ordinary society (416)? It is clearly very hard to pin down a word – but also a habit of mind and a kind of behaviour – that was of importance to Lawrence, but which he could also view almost entirely negatively.

Dramatics The author of The Daughter-in-Law and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd could have been, in some ways should have been, a dramatist: it is one of the greatest pities in the career of any twentieth-century writer that Lawrence was not encouraged as a stage writer before the First World War (Moran 2015: 2). It was as if he could only make up for this by engaging with performance in his fiction; it was the only place he could thoroughly stage his imaginings. It was, for example, his innate sense of what makes theatre (and what constitutes performance) which made it so easy, between 1966 and 1967, to turn sixteen of his short stories into television films (Ward 2016: 16). By his teens, as well as taking part in play-readings at the Haggs, he was going to as much theatre in Nottingham as he could and – afterwards – re-creating what he had seen: performing it, getting it both into and out of his system, both sending it up and discovering it, in what Jessie Chambers called ‘his characteristic blending of the serious with the comic’ (1980: 109). She remembered him doing this with Hamlet, Macbeth and La Dame aux Camélias: ‘On the Saturday afternoon he . . . showed us how Sarah Bernhardt died in the last scene. He looked quite worn out with emotion’; Frieda remembered his imitation, years later, of Sarah Bernhardt’s dying cry of ‘Armand, Armand’ (Lawrence, n.d.). As well as his eight plays and two unfinished fragments, there are odd survivals like the poem ‘Two, there are two words only’ for drum performance (3Poems 1528–9) and the ten musical settings for the play David (Plays 590–601), as well as odd nonsurvivals like the play ‘about Heseltine and his Puma and so on’ which Frieda, Dikran Kouyoumdjian, Philip Heseltine and he started to write (‘all of us together’) at night in January 1916, ‘which is rather fun’ (2L 501, 508). Not a scrap survives, but it surely contributed to the Halliday/Heseltine scenes in Women in Love. It is worth noting that Lawrence also staged himself as a performer in the character Jimmy in The Fight for Barbara and would later put the Mabel Dodge Luhan circle on stage as performers in the fragment Altitude. Compared with those, Touch and Go in 1918 would be a rather muted combination of Women in Love material with contemporary mining issues. But by the time Lawrence was finally established as a writer, and could decide whether or not to spend time writing a play, all he wanted to produce was David, that cross-breed of Indian Pueblo setting, King James Bible and Lawrentian insistence, with nothing in it that could be called dialogue – and dialogue had always been his greatest dramatic strength: the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald would perceive how dialogue was ‘a natural element to him’ (2003: 504).

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Readings Did Lawrence’s reading aloud of his work in fact constitute some kind of performance (performance implicitly demanding an audience)? Back in 1910 he had read his own poetry aloud very quietly at ‘the Rhyses’, but only when invited to do so; in 1915, however – in the ‘loud and declamatory voice’ it required – he would read Swinburne aloud at Garsington (1L 156; Nehls 1957: 130–1, 310; 3L 42). The Carswells in 1918 heard no more than the ‘outline’ of ‘The Blind Man’ (Nehls 1957: 475) and the Brewsters in 1921 only heard him ‘outlining the story’ of Aaron’s Rod (Brewster 1934: 243), just as Murry had heard him ‘expounding The Rainbow’ in 1915, though not reading it (Nehls 1957: 279). But after 1922, when there were more friends who wrote memoirs of him, there are more frequent reports of his reading aloud. Dorothy Brett and Frieda, for example, heard him giving an impassioned performance of part of St. Mawr in 1924; the Brewsters and Brett heard his ‘most recent poems’ in 1926, the same year as the Brewsters heard him read ‘The Blue Moccasins’, while they also heard Lawrence’s unfinished novel ‘The Flying-Fish’ in 1928 (Brett 2006: 138; Brewster 1934: 288). A visitor to the Mirenda in 1927, too, remembered how Lawrence would call Frieda into his room ‘and read to her what he had just written. Sometimes they laughed together and at other times she would sound a little shocked and in her deep, throaty voice, said: “Lorenzo, you cannot say that”’ (Hilton 1993: 53): he was reading from the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Reading aloud to Frieda was probably Lawrence’s normal practice: her recollection of his reading Apocalypse to her in the winter of 1929 – ‘how strong his voice was still’ (Nehls 1959: 438) – certainly suggests so. And it was not just his own work that he read aloud. John Collier was profoundly impressed by Lawrence’s reading of Balzac’s Séraphîta ‘through many hours’ in 1922: ‘I have never feasted on such a reading of anything by anybody, before or since’ (Nehls 1958: 198). Other readings were comic: ‘he would read poetry magazines or letters aloud, giving everything the most ludicrous interpretation until we were all roaring with laughter and in the best of humor’ (236). Brett liked to believe that the St. Mawr reading she heard was special – ‘How rare it is that you read out anything’ (as ever in Brett’s account, Lawrence is ‘you’) – but she demonstrated a reader steeped in the practices of performance: You read it with such keen joy and pleasure at the final downfall of Rico and the terrible revenge of the horse, that Frieda is horrified; she says you are cruel and that you frighten her. But you are too immersed in the people and the story to care what anyone says. With great relish and giggling, you describe Rico’s plight. You hate Rico so, that for the moment you are the horse; in fact, you are each person yourself, so vivid are they to you. With each character your voice and manner change: you act the story rather than read it, and we sit entranced, horrified, amused – all by turns, while your lunch gets colder and colder on your plate. (2006: 138) In 1925, too, he performed the whole of his new play David to Frieda, Ida Rauh and Brett; this took even longer, partly because he had been ill. All the same, he acted it out:

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you sing in a soft voice the little songs you have invented for the play. You live every part. In some subtle way you change and change about, as the characters alter from men to women, from young to old. You read till evening, with pauses for tea; then suddenly you stop in the very middle of one of the songs and say: “I feel so embarrassed. You all embarrass me. I cannot go on.” But my enthusiasm for the play urges you on again . . . (219) When he stepped out of role, interestingly, Lawrence felt self-conscious, ridiculous outside the performance which had permitted so much; but he continued the following day, only to be faced by Ida Rauh’s lack of enthusiasm for the part written for her.

Mimicry Simply from reading his fiction and observing how well ‘He can “do” voices, tones, accents and dialects’, Fitzgerald also called Lawrence ‘a faultless impersonator’ (2003: 505). Brigit Patmore, who knew him from 1914, believed that ‘There never was a mimic who could give a more exact reproduction of any voice or sound than Lorenzo. His ear for tone and accent was perfect’ (1968: 80). David Garnett recalled his 1912 rendition of London literary life, when ‘straightway Yeats or Pound appeared before you’ (1953: 245). Idella Purnell saw his Pound ten years later: Lawrence with the red beard vanished, and there stood a young, callow, swashbuckling Ezra, with an earring in one ear, very affected and silly. Then came his parents to see him . . . and Ezra died away, and there were pa and ma, good and plain and middle-western, and poor Ezra not knowing what to do about them. (Nehls 1958: 268) The earliest surviving example of his mimicry seems to come from Lawrence’s time at J. H. Haywood Ltd when he was sixteen: he sent the Chambers family ‘into gusts of laughter’ with his imitation of two old ladies there, ‘mimicking their tones in forcing him to accept and use cough lozenges they had bought for him’, while Jessie Chambers recalled him sending up a teacher at University College Nottingham (Nehls 1959: 573; Chambers 1980: 78). Neither May nor Jessie Chambers ever forgot the imitation which they heard at the Haggs of his father interrupting his mother: ‘he turned and looked at her, “Woman, how’d tha feeace” he said’; and as late as 1925, Kyle Crichton listened as Lawrence ‘acted out the Midland dialect’ of his father (Chambers 1980: 32; Nehls 1959: 579; Nehls 1958: 418). But even such a triumph as the language of Mrs Gascoyne in The Daughter-in-Law (Lawrence always enjoyed the talk of a powerful woman) was a careful amalgam of dialect habits with standard speech. It gives only a faint idea of how he must have sounded when at full stretch of mimicry, to become the ‘side-splitting mimic’ Willard Johnson recalled (Nehls 1958: 236). Cynthia Asquith remembered his version of Eddie Marsh as both ‘excellent’ and ‘merciless’: ‘poor little Eddie . . . lamenting Rupert Brooke over his evening whisky’ (1968: 94). He also transformed individual items of mimicry into comic turns. Brigit Patmore witnessed a performance to a group of friends in 1917 which started with Lawrence asking ‘“Did any of you hear Florence Farr do her ping-wanging?”’ (1968: 81). The actress and singer Florence Farr (1860–1917) had, from 1901, recited poems by Yeats

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while playing a lap harp. Lawrence had heard her around 1909–10, and developed a comic turn of walking through London at midnight with Pound, accompanying ‘a tipsy and amorous woman-poet, old enough to be their mother, whose harp they were carrying’ (Chambers 1980: 205). In 1917, it turned out that only Richard Aldington had experienced what George Bernard Shaw had called the ‘nerve-destroying crooning’ of ‘an idiot banshee’ (Foster 1997: 257), and Lawrence gave his friends Florence Farr’s performance of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’: ‘You who are bent and bald and blind . . .’ Paused, then stretched his thin hands over his knees delicately, as if an instrument lay there, plucked an imaginary string and whined: ‘Ping . . . wa . . . n . . . ng.’ Then, three semitones lower: ‘Ping . . . pi . . . iing, wang.’ Deepening his voice, ‘With heavy heart, staccato ping-wang and a wandering mind.’ And he pinged so violently to show the state of his mind that our hoots of laughter swept him with us and he couldn’t look holy any longer. (Patmore 1968: 81) That became a party piece; Francis Brett Young saw it in Capri in the spring of 1920, as did Earl and Achsah Brewster, eighteen months later. Lawrence had met them for the first time in April 1921: they too had spent time in Taormina, and Achsah remembered him ‘telling us the news and gossip . . . We could see each person he mentioned, so perfect was his mimicry – our first experience of him as an impersonator’ (Brewster 1934: 243). In September 1921, when they met again, Frieda (who knew his Florence Farr performance) ‘induced him to describe a concert in which an aesthetic lady played upon the psaltery’. And Lawrence re-created what he had seen nine or ten years earlier. He rose languidly, arranging imaginary robes that flowed and trailed around him, seating himself gracefully and played with languishing movements long arpeggios upon the psaltery, chanting in an ecstatic voice. Cadences rushed into crescendo and lulled away into rapt silences where he sat with his hands clasped over the imaginary psaltery, his eyes closed in rapture. Full poems were chanted and gracious encores given in this amazing performance. (243–5) The Brewsters, enjoying it so much, perhaps provoked an even more richly extemporised version. And as late as April 1927, in Scandicci, Lawrence brought it out again: Frieda’s daughter Barby remembered how, at the Wilkinsons one evening, everyone was asked to do a “turn” . . . Lawrence, who had once seen Miss Florence Farr in London, sat down at an imaginary harp, drew his hands across it, began “I will arise and go now” in a falsetto voice, and ended it with a “ping-a-ling.” This take-off of the high-faluting was over the heads of the company. On the way home Lawrence raved at Frieda for having allowed him to do it. (Nehls 1959: 138–9) If Barby can be trusted, Lawrence had even used a better-known Yeats poem than ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, which he had employed in London, but he probably never opted for Florence Farr again.

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Such performances nevertheless bridged the gap between mimicry and performance, as did an event witnessed by Rhys Davies in December 1928: He had a magical talent for burlesque, and his performance of a certain novelist as a pompous whale churning the literary seas and spouting up water was so realistic that both the great industrious novelist and the stupid mass of whale were present in the room, but miraculously united. (Nehls 1958: 195; 1959: 277) The novelist was almost certainly H. G. Wells, whose pomposity Lawrence had skewered in his review of the first volume of The World of William Clissold in 1926 (IR 279–83). The biographical record is crammed with accounts of Lawrence as a performer: his other way, beside creative writing, of staging his imaginings. But charades – in which he encouraged others to engage – went further still.

Charades Charades are often the silent enactment of situations or events to elicit a syllable or a word, with two sides competing against each other. Lawrence’s participation can be dated back to the Haggs in 1902. Charades were, Jessie Chambers recalled, ‘thrilling . . . with Lawrence directing things, and father joining in the play like one of us’ (1980: 42). David Chambers, then a boy of five, thought that Lawrence at the age of sixteen ‘was at his greatest in charades’: I remember him playing the part of coachman, sitting on our parlour table and suddenly jumping up to whip the horses, with the effect of bringing my father’s tall hat, which he had borrowed for the part, into violent contact with the ceiling and ramming it over his ears and face, to my quite inexpressible delight; and another, when he played the part of Pharaoh, with the milksile [milk strainer] on his head for crown, and hardened his heart ineluctably against the pleas of Moses and the children of Israel. (Nehls 1957: 47–8) On such occasions, ‘the house was turned upside down to find props for scenes about Arabs, Israelites, gipsies, funerals . . . and the old family coach’ (Chambers 1980: xvii). But the charades staged by the Lawrences later on were sometimes different; he and Frieda ‘invented a special form’ (Carswell 1932: 105). David Garnett recalled, of his time with Lawrence and Frieda in the summer of 1912, for example, that ‘we all three of us acted complicated nonsense charades, without an audience. The last time we met, Frieda asked me: “Do you remember, David, the head of Holofernes? . . . Oh, you looked such a fool!”’ (1953: 246). Garnett’s dangling head, eyes closed, mouth open, tongue lolling, body hidden by Frieda’s scarves, as she recalled in November (1L 476), was probably manoeuvred offstage by Frieda (as Judith) after she had beheaded him, following his attempt to seduce her. Identifying the characters – like Holofernes – happened when more players were involved: to Frieda’s suggestion ‘“Let’s play charades”’ late in 1917, Lawrence responded ‘“No. We’ll act characters and guess who we are.”’ Frieda was eager to follow that up, as Brigit Patmore recalled:

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“Oh yes, Lorenzo. Do you remember last summer how you were Adonis and Cecil [Gray] was the boar?” “Yes, Frieda, but I’m not going to be Adonis tonight.” Frieda’s recollections were too fascinating for her to drop them. “Cecil, do you remember the corn had just been cut and how it scratched just where Adonis had to lie down and Lorenzo was so cross because a harvest bug . . .” “Yes,” broke in her husband’s crisp accent, “and you as Venus, my dear, gave such a squawk of fear because a little—a wee, wee field mouse ran too close to the goddess’s ankle.” (Nehls 1959: 98) Clearly a performance in a Cornish field, but – including the details which Lawrence so crisply excised – extremely bad for the Lawrences’ reputation, given that by the summer of 1917 they were under constant surveillance. Adonis, Venus and the boar also suggest the actual relationships of the participants. This would have been true of the wartime charade of which we can be reasonably sure we have a full account (H. D. 2011: 67), when a performance staged by the Lawrences, the Aldingtons, Arabella Yorke, Cecil Gray and Jack White in London, a few weeks later, had no effective audience: certainly no guessing audience (everyone being involved). It was clearly a complex group interaction: a piece of living fiction. The American poet Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) re-created it in Bid Me to Live, in which, arguably, ‘distinctive versions of Lawrence, Frieda, Richard Aldington, Arabella Yorke, Cecil Gray and others appear’, re-named (Worthen 1996: 28–9). The actual relationships of the performers were potentially explosive: in particular, the relationship between Aldington (cast as Adam) and Arabella Yorke (cast as Eve), at a time when H. D. – still married to Aldington – felt horribly abandoned. Lawrence, directing proceedings, made her the Tree of Life, but she would have been still more conscious of not being Eve, just as Aldington would have been very aware of his role as first man. Lawrence gave Frieda the role of the snake as tempter: there can have been no doubt in his mind about the relationship she fantasised with rampaging boar Gray. What the participants referred to as charades were, with the Lawrences, improvised performances of characters and situations, or even versions of plays, in as much costume as could be acquired. Charades granted other people in the Lawrence circle the freedom which he himself always exercised, as a writer, to re-create real life; they offered him the chance to stage real life in ways that did not leave people hurt or vituperative. Above all, perhaps, like the readings aloud they offered the creative writer (who worked on his own most of the time) a chance to experience, and enjoy, the interactions about which he usually only wrote.

Performances The presentation of actual relationships could, too, add frisson to the occasion, especially if people were prepared to be laughed at. Mabel recalled a charades evening in Taos in 1924 when, again, there was no guessing at syllables or titles, or even presenting fictional characters: One night we acted a scene that represented me taking Tony to Buffalo to introduce him to my mother! Lawrence was my mother, Ida [Rauh] was I, and Tony

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was Tony! Spud [Willard Johnson] was my step-father, Monty; and Frieda was “a guest.” That was so funny we couldn’t finish the act! Tony, wrapped in his blanket, very seriously making deep bows to Lorenzo, who was dressed in a shawl and a big hat, flourishing a horrified lorgnette. (Luhan 1933: 176–7) Lawrence thus relishing the role of another powerful matriarch. It is, however, clear that Tony – having been ‘roped in’ – was not acting but ‘very seriously’ re-creating his role in real life. And this had repercussions: Dorothy Brett observed how, solemn, bewildered, he re-enacts with Mabel their marriage. “I have married an Indian Chief,” announces Mabel. “No,” says Tony, with offended dignity, “not a chief.” And he turns and walks solemnly out of the room, which brings the charade to an abrupt finish. (2006: 125) Tony was not being a bad actor: he was being himself. Actors need necessarily to be liars, in that their responses, however realistic and convincing, are not their own but enacted: but as was once said about an autistic boy taken up by a theatre group, because he ‘couldn’t lie, he couldn’t be an actor – he could only be situated and displayed as if he were an actor’ (Schechner 1988: 275). That was Tony Luhan’s position: refusing to lie, unable or unwilling to be an actor, but situated and displayed in that role by those around him. Another occasion at Mabel’s with perhaps an equal chance of Tony being offended had Lawrence and Frieda being ‘Tony and me in the front seat of the car’ (Luhan 1933: 75): Frieda probably taking the role of solid, monosyllabic Tony, Lawrence being word-spilling Mabel, ruthlessly sent up. Mabel nevertheless loved it: ‘We used to laugh until we were tired’ – and she recalled how Lawrence not only ‘loved charades’ but was ‘so gay and witty when he was playing! He could imitate anything or anybody.’ She added, however, in a sentence replete with envy: ‘His ability to identify himself intuitively with things outside himself was wonderful.’ That was something she found impossible. But Lawrence could throw himself into performances identifying with other people: indeed, becoming them. Achsah Brewster recalled an occasion on Capri, shortly before the Brewsters left for India and the house was stripped for their departure, when what might have begun as the illustration of a word turned into an extraordinary performance in its own right: With his hair plastered down into bangs [square across the forehead], a red bow tie under his chin, he was a clerk in a shoe-shop – the empty library shelves stocked with all the stray shoes the house had. The skill with which he argued his customers into buying what they did not want would have been the envy of any salesman. (1933: 267) Brigit Patmore once attempted to explain how ‘Lorenzo’s imitations aren’t acting – they’re . . . they’re inspired, they’re demoniacal possession’ (1968: 82). Lawrence had, also, performed some version of Othello at Garsington, using the ‘heaps of coloured cloths and things’ gathered by Ottoline Morrell (2L 465), probably complete with tragic death. He could certainly stage a death scene, as Dorothy Brett would observe in another charade:

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You are lying on the floor, dying. I [Brett] am the nurse and you have sent for your wife, Frieda. In comes Frieda, with one of Mabel’s hats perched on her head, a variety of shawls draped round her. “Is she here yet?” you ask, irritably, “Is that her? Does she smell good?” And Frieda stands, giggling helplessly. Then you roll over, wriggle and groan, and with a final convulsed twitch, you die. (2006: 125) Frieda could not be guaranteed not ‘to corpse’ (to laugh on stage) although even an experienced performer like Ida Rauh was at times ‘helpless from laughing’. Ida could also stand in for Frieda: Dorothy Brett watched, with fascination, how you and Ida are in bed together, lying side by side under a blanket on the floor, and quarrelling as to who should get up, as you think you hear a burglar in the house. The quarrel is the exact replica of yours and Frieda’s famous quarrels . . . (2006: 52) Those recollections, too, confirm what David Garnett saw in 1912, and is too easily forgotten by those who (like Aldington) thought Lawrence insistently in the role of ‘Gawd-a’-mighty’ in the performance of self (H. D. 2011: 67). The person ‘whom Lawrence most constantly made fun of’, said Garnett, ‘was himself’: He mimicked himself ruthlessly and continually and, as he told a story, acted ridiculous versions of a shy and gawky Lawrence being patronised by literary lions, of a winsome Lawrence charming his landlady, a sentimental Lawrence being put in place by his landlady’s daughter, of a bad-tempered whining Lawrence picking a quarrel with Frieda over nothing. (1953: 245) Exactly this behaviour can be seen in Lawrence’s writings: when, for example, Lilly in Aaron’s Rod insists to Aaron that the First World War ‘“never happened”’, or that – in love – ‘“being with another person is secondary”’, for which he is appropriately savaged by Argyle: ‘“My dear boy, you are becoming metaphysical, and that is as bad as softening of the brain”’ (118, 246–7). And there is too the ruthless sending-up of Rupert Birkin, the painful helplessness of Gilbert Noon, the poignant absurdity of Alexander Hepburn, the ridiculousness of Richard Lovatt Somers: all examples of bitter self-mimicry carried over into and made fiction. We can see the self-mimicry in Lawrence’s letters too: not just in the tirades of anger spilling over into conscious absurdity as he denounces ‘the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters . . . that make up England today’, but also in the burlesque performance of himself he sets up in a 1925 letter, where he presents himself in the Stift in Baden-Baden, on a visit to Frieda’s mother, and the coal-miner’s son plays whist with the nobility: ‘I can hardly believe my own ears when I hear myself saying (in German of course) – But, Excellence, those are trumps!’ (1L 422; 5L 329). What Frederick Carter called ‘the queer humour and acrid penetrative analysis’ of Lawrence’s conversation (Nehls 1959: 413) was something that clearly got into his performances; Cynthia Asquith thought that ‘There is so much delicious laughter in him which he entirely extinguishes on paper’ (1968: 98).

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Song and Dance It would be possible to write as much about Lawrence’s engagement with singing and with dance. But though all his life he loved singing, and in spite of occasions like his singing ‘Throw out the life-line’ in the train between Florence and Turin (‘He stood up and threw an imaginary lasso to the drowning souls, hauling them in strenuously’ [Brewster 1934: 282]), his own singing was more often private and incidental, in the full sense. Examples would be the singing he inspired around the parlour fire at the Haggs and the famous occasion when – after a quarrel with Frieda – he went into the scullery to do the washing-up, singing to himself, only for Frieda to crack him over the head with a stone dinner plate for his insouciance (Chambers 1965: 81; Carswell 1932: 76). In his writing, too, it is striking that Lawrence chose to make Gilbert Noon a musician who is compiling a book of songs but who is never seen singing, not even to himself; at least Aaron Sisson plays his flute for the Marchesa to sing, and the Somers couple sing German folk songs in Cornwall, as well as finding ‘Hebridean Folk Songs . . . wonderful’ (AR 256, K 233, 245). It is also significant that Hermione’s ‘sing-song’ voice so constantly recorded in Women in Love should ally itself with the ‘sing-song’ voice adopted by Halliday when he reads Birkin’s letter aloud (WL 40, 84, 89, 141, 299, etc., 383); Birkin’s preaching has the same self-absorbed quality. There is, however, a significant discrepancy between intimate, incidental singing – such as that of the work-girls with Paul Morel, or the Leivers family’s singing round the fire (SL 138–9, 267) – and the clearly performed, as when the singer lets rip accompanied by the ‘great black piano appassionato’ in ‘Piano’, or Ursula sings ‘Annie Lowrie’ to the folk in the mountain hostel, ‘exerting herself with gratification’ (1Poems 108, WL 407). The singing of the Quetzalcoatl hymns in The Plumed Serpent is poised between the two modes: clearly public and performative, on the one hand, but also inner and compelling: singing ‘not outwards, but inwards, the soul singing back to herself’ (175). Dance, too, came to occupy the very centre of Lawrence’s interest when he went to New Mexico, as he travelled emotionally and imaginatively a huge distance from his resigned insistence in 1922, having seen his first Native American ceremonies, that ‘I can’t cluster at the drum any more’ (MM 120). By 1924 he was doing his very best to imagine and re-create ‘the delicate, pulsing wonder of solemnity, which comes from participating in the ceremony itself’: by 1928, ‘Never shall I forget the deep singing of the men at the drum, swelling and sinking, the deepest sound I have heard in all my life’ (65, 179). An excellent essay by Mark Kinkead-Weekes, ‘D. H. Lawrence and the Dance’, shows how writing about dance ‘runs like a vein of ore throughout Lawrence’s work’ (1992: 59), and it is clear that the last thing Lawrence wanted to do was regard the Native American dances he saw as entertainment. There is not only the long essay ‘Indians and Entertainment’ addressing that issue head on, but also the scathing, satirical short version of the Hopi Snake Dance encounter, ‘Just Back from the Snake Dance’. Lawrence was too serious about what Indian ceremonies meant to their performers ever to think of them as performances, as when he described the dances and singing, with concentric rings of participants around a central drummer, he had seen in Taos. The dances may or may not have a name. The dance, anyhow, is primarily a song. 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

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centre of the earth. The drums keep up the pulsating heart-beat. The men sing in unison, though some will be silent for moments, or even minutes. And for hours, hours it goes on: the round dance. It has no name. It has no words. It means nothing at all. There is no spectacle, no spectator. (MM 63) The facts of ‘no drama’ and ‘no spectacle’ show how different such things were to Lawrence from the charades and the mimicry: it perhaps took a man so adept at the latter to realise and convey the difference of the dance and of such singing. Dorothy Brett in December 1923 saw him demonstrating ‘the curious tread of the Indian dance step, treading it slowly in a circle round the room, humming the Sun Dance song’ (2006: 24); Rolf Gardiner saw it too, in 1926, Lawrence ‘getting up and showing me the sensuous, birdlike tread of the steps in their round dances’. But then he also told Gardiner about ‘the wild maniacal dances of the Singhalese dervishes or devil-dancers’ he had seen in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). And those he staged as performances. He did not just describe or even show: he became, ‘giving an imitation of their frenzy, quite terrifyingly, his piercing blue eyes popping right and left out of his pale face as he twisted like a cobra, shuffling in his carpet slippers like one possessed by demons’ (Nehls 1959: 83). The same happened when he asked Richard Aldington whether he had ever heard ‘the night noises of a tropical jungle’ and then produced them (1950: 248). He had written very little in Sri Lanka, but his experiences there could be performed: sight and sound, not words. Performance and entertainment in his writing, including descriptions of dance, were, however, usually at the opposite pole from the kind of inner stillness he identified in the singing and dance of the Native American: ‘Face lifted and sightless, eyes half closed and visionless, mouth open and speechless, the sounds arise in his chest, from the consciousness in the abdomen’ (MM 62). It is no accident that the Lawrence fictions arguably most concerned with performance should also be the ones most filled with violence: we need only think of suicidal Siegmund in The Trespasser, in ‘a mesmeric performance’ preparing his own death (204), Aaron performing but sexually withered, blasted and scorched in Aaron’s Rod (256, 262–3) and the bullfight in The Plumed Serpent, ‘just a performance of human beings torturing animals’ (26). It looks as if he had always known, instinctively, what he finally found realised in the dancing, singing and drumming of New Mexico: performance in the sense of display was alien to inwardness.

Women in Love And then there is Lawrence’s other novel of murderous, performed violence, Women in Love. Readers will recall how the novel is built up of scene after scene imbued with a gallery of performers; the novel is fascinated with the way the inner self constantly enacts itself in performance. Ursula’s singing of ‘Ännchen von Tharau’, ‘My love is a high-born lady’ and eventually ‘Way down in Tennessee’ in ‘Water Party’ (WL 165–7) may seem neutral enough, but Gudrun transforms the singing by turning it into performance, first by doing Dalcroze movements to it and then by violently dancing at the fascinated cattle. Just as ordinary language used in a non-ordinary context or manner may mean that it becomes performative, the same applies to song, rhythm and dance: Gudrun’s dance is followed by Birkin singing and dancing, with his feet beating

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‘a rapid mocking tattoo’ in an ‘incredibly rapid, slack-waggling dance’ (169): at this stage of the book, he dances at Ursula, not with her. And that incident is succeeded by the awful episode of the drowning and Winnie’s screaming ‘Di—Di—Di—Di—Oh Di—Oh Di—Oh Di!’ (179): a horribly performative incantation. Then comes Birkin stoning the moon and exclaiming while Ursula is his unseen audience (WL 246–8), Birkin and Gerald’s ‘Gladiatorial’ wrestling at Shortlands (266–72), Halliday reading Birkin’s letter aloud in the Café Pompadour (383–4), Loerke’s recital in the Cologne dialect (405–6), and the voice which Gudrun hears singing outdoors: ‘Mach mir auf, mach mir auf, du Stolze’: a violent contrast to Ursula’s performance of ‘Annie Laurie’ (419, 407). In passing, Birkin refers to ‘the young lady performing on the pianoforte’ (56), though the word ‘performance’ itself never appears in the novel, only being used regularly in The Lost Girl. And what about Gudrun’s performance in the Pompadour, taking Birkin’s letter from Halliday and leaving the café to a storm of booing? When Gudrun considers moving to Dresden, she is drawn by ‘these eurythmic displays, and the German opera, the German theatre’. Throughout the novel, too, the extraordinary descriptions of clothes are a reminder of how everyone performs, often aggressively costumed: Ursula walks through Beldover in ‘an orange-coloured knitted coat, Gudrun a pale yellow, Ursula wore canary-yellow stockings, Gudrun bright rose’ (WL 384–5, 464, 114). There are the bathers at Breadalby, like actors, Gerald with ‘a scarlet silk kerchief round his loins’, seeming ‘to flaunt himself a little in the sun, lingering and laughing’, and ‘lastly Hermione, striding with stiff grace from out of a great mantle of purple silk, her head tied up in purple and gold’ (100–1). Thus she performs. And, finally, even Gerald’s assault on Loerke in the snow, and his attempt to strangle Gudrun, are events narrated as a performance of which the reader is the fascinated spectator, and which ends with Gerald turning away, disgusted. He does not strangle Gudrun. Instead, like Lawrence growing self-conscious during his David performance, Gerald steps outside his role, asking ‘Ah, what was he doing, to what depths was he letting himself go!’ (WL 471–2). Lawrence was clearly compelled to include performers and performance in this particular fiction, and in performances of the habits of the modern world he showed exactly the opposite of the non-performance he would celebrate in his dance essays. Women in Love integrated the idea and fact of performance in the fiction as something both revelatory and potentially terrible.

Conclusion My conclusion appears to be that while in private life Lawrence was the most expert, brilliant and persuasive performer, and – via his sense of drama and capacity for dialogue – also an expert playwright, his fiction, drama, essays and at times his poetry (e.g. ‘The oxford voice’ and ‘The English are so nice!’) are deeply suspicious of, and at times hold themselves back in real distaste from, what he denigrated as performance. Captain Hepburn in The Captain’s Doll behaves towards his wife as one who ‘Performed all his pledges and his promises’ (Fox 105), the word conveying the kind of enacted and soulless dutifulness which typifies his relationship with her. After Richard Lovatt Somers in Kangaroo has observed how ‘various doctor-fellows were performing’ at his final medical examination, he also thinks grimly of ‘the whole performance of the war’ (252, 262). Performance is equally dubious in Lawrence’s

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analysis of what he saw as sexual performance, for example Henry’s revulsion in The Fox at the idea of making love to March – ‘He shrank from any such performance’ (53) – and in Lawrence’s acute analysis of the ‘noble Englishman’ ‘Taking it out, in spite, on women’ in sex (3Poems 1591–2). In Women in Love, too, Gerald’s last desperate sexual assaults on Gudrun are arguably his desperate final performances of himself; such things help make Women in Love a kind of special arena for Lawrence’s demonstration of the awful power of performance.

Works Cited Aldington, Richard (1950), Portrait of a Genius, But . . . The Life of D. H. Lawrence, 1885–1930, London: William Heinemann. Asquith, Cynthia (1968), Diaries 1915–1918, London: Hutchinson. Brett, Dorothy (2006), Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship, ed. John Manchester, Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press. Brewster, Earl and Achsah (1934), D. H. Lawrence: Reminiscences and Correspondence, London: Martin Secker. Carswell, Catherine (1932), D. H. Lawrence: The Savage Pilgrimage, London: Chatto & Windus. Chambers, Jessie (1980), D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farmer, John S. and Henley, W. E. (1902), Slang and its Analogues Past and Present. A Dictionary, vol. 5, n. p. Fitzgerald, Penelope (2003), ‘Aspects of Fiction’, A House of Air, London: Flamingo. Foster, Roy F. (1997), W. B. Yeats: A Life, I: The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garnett, David (1953), The Golden Echo, London: Chatto & Windus. H. D. (2011), Bid Me to Live, ed. Caroline Zilboorg, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Hilton, Enid (1993), More Than One Life: A Nottinghamshire Childhood with D. H. Lawrence, Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark (1992), ‘D. H. Lawrence and the Dance’, Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, 20:1, pp. 59–77. Lawrence, Frieda (n. d.), Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, FL Box 1 Folder 6 (a) Notebook 3. Luhan, Mabel Dodge (1933), Lorenzo in Taos, London: Martin Secker. Moran, James (2015), The Theatre of D. H. Lawrence, London: Bloomsbury. Nehls, Edward (1957), D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Volume One, 1885–1919, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Nehls, Edward (1958), D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Volume Two, 1919–1925, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Nehls, Edward (1959), D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Volume Three, 1925–1930, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Reid, Susan (2015), ‘From Rope-Dancer to Wrestler: The Figure of the Artist as Performer in Women in Love’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 40:1, pp. 99–119. Schechner, Richard (1988), Performance Theory, London: Routledge. Ward, Jason Mark (2016), The Forgotten Film Adaptations of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories, Leiden: Koninklijke Brill. Worthen, John (1996), ‘Drama and Mimicry in Lawrence’, in Lawrence and Comedy, ed. Paul Eggert and John Worthen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–44.

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17 Drama and the Dramatic Jeremy Tambling

Introduction

D

rama may appear only a comparatively minor part of Lawrence’s writing, though references to plays and acting are frequent. This chapter first summarises Lawrence’s dramatic output, before considering his understanding (influenced by thencontemporary anthropology) of drama as ritual; how ritual appears in the early trilogy of mining plays (with a particular focus on the mother figure); and finally, how F. R. Leavis’s understanding of Lawrence’s fiction as ‘dramatic’ can help us to interrogate the concept of the ‘dramatic’ in Lawrence’s oeuvre as a whole, inside and outside of his dramatic output. Lawrence wrote eight full-length plays and two fragments. Three observe mining life. A Collier’s Friday Night (1909) uses the autobiographical material of Sons and Lovers (1913); comparisons may start with the mother, Mrs Lambert, and her relations with her miner husband, her son Ernest and Ernest’s girlfriend, Maggie. With this comes The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1910, published 1914) and The Daughter-in-Law (1913). Two more concern Eastwood and mining: The Merry-go-Round (1911) and Touch and Go (1919), though the latter, for which Lawrence supplied a preface, is problematic in its handling of mining disputes (Trussler 1999: xxxii–iv). Both The Married Man (1912) and The Fight for Barbara (1912) include versions of Frieda, whom Lawrence met in March 1912 and left England with that May: in the first she is Elsa Smith; in the second, Barbara Tressider. In the latter, a ‘comedy’ about Barbara/Frieda’s first marriage (1L 466–7), Jimmy Wesson, a miner’s son, has gone with Barbara to Villa di Gargano, adjoining the Lago di Garda, where Lawrence and Frieda stayed in 1912–13. As Barbara’s parents, Sir William and Lady Charlcote, and her husband Dr Frederick Tressider, all try to get Barbara to return, there are many caricatural features of the upper class, anticipating Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There is also the prudery of the establishment, the social class whose hypocrisy Wesson has offended: Sir William has a mistress, Selma, and an illegitimate son (Plays 243–4, 272). Men – married or not – can have unmarried women but must not touch the sanctity of marriage. The eighth play, David (1926), stands apart as non-realist drama. Lawrence, however, had not forsworn this mode of writing, as emerges in the fragment Altitude (written in 1924), which concerns the people staying with him at Taos in New Mexico. The last fragment, Noah’s Flood from early 1925, an early start on the material of David, was only published in 1999. Three plays were published in Lawrence’s lifetime, and only two were staged: The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (variously staged in 1916, 1920 and 1926) and David (1927). An adaptation of The Daughter-in-Law was

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staged in 1936 as My Son, My Son. The 1960s productions of the ‘trilogy’ by Peter Gill are discussed by James Moran (2016), although an excellent pioneer critique preceded from Michael Marland (1968: xi–xxxvi). It is an impressive, varied achievement, and Lawrence had little to guide him in writing drama. As Sean O’Casey said of A Collier’s Friday Night after its 1934 publication: ‘had Lawrence got the encouragement the play called for and deserved, England might have had a great dramatist’ (quoted in Moran 2016: 2–3). England, the imperial power, could not read its own talent, though an Irishman could. Raymond Williams distinguishes those plays where Lawrence writes with and in the mining world, following its rhythms of experience, from those where he is writing as if separated from it – especially in Touch and Go – and also draws out a cultural barrier that historically separated Lawrence’s plays from finding an audience (1968: 292–6). But Jessie Chambers made the essential point about theatre-going after seeing a London play with Lawrence, The Making of a Gentleman: Lawrence explained to me that the theatre existed mainly in the interests of fashion, and that the leaders of Society came not for the play (which was obviously rubbish) but to observe the varied and beautiful dresses worn by the leading ladies. (1980: 165–6) John Worthen, in his chapter on ‘Performance’, emphasises Lawrence’s gift for mimicry (1996: 19–44). A private thing in him, unlike Dickens, who used mimicry publicly, it suggests Lawrence’s confidence for drama, which he certainly possessed, telling Garnett in January 1913 that his current play (probably The Daughter-in-Law) is neither a comedy nor a tragedy – just ordinary. It is quite objective, as far as that term goes . . . laid out properly, planned and progressive . . . I enjoy so much writing my plays – they come so quick and exciting from the pen . . . (1L 500–1) Further: I believe that, just as an audience was found in Russia for Tchekhov, so an audience might be found in England for some of my stuff, if there were a man to whip ’em in. It’s the producer that is lacking, not the audience. I’m sure we are sick of the rather bony, bloodless drama we get nowadays – it is time for a reaction against Shaw and Galsworthy and [Granville-] Barker and Irishy (except Synge) people – the rule and measure mathematical folk . . . But I don’t want to write like Galsworthy nor Ibsen, nor Strindberg nor any of them, not even if I could. We have to hate our immediate predecessors, to get free from their authority. (1L 509) We note his knowledge of modern drama: by 1909 Ibsen and Synge (1L 113–14, 142, 465; WP 368) and Galsworthy’s Strife (1L 138), Hauptmann and Yeats by 1910 (1L 164–5, 168, 171, 186), Chekhov in 1912 (1L 385; see Sklar 1975: 25–6), and Strindberg by the same year (1L 464, 465). We may add ‘The Theatre’ in Twilight in Italy (1916) – important for this chapter – after he had seen such things as Rigoletto, D’Annunzio’s The Light Under the Bushel, Silvio Zambaldi’s The Wife of the Doctor, and Hamlet (winter 1912–13 near Lake Garda, performed by the touring Compagnia Drammatica Italiana Adelia Di Giacomo Tadini). In 1912 he had seen Man and

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Superman (Nottingham, March), a Passion play at Beuerberg (May) and Ghosts in Munich (Worthen 1991: 458). (Worthen also discusses Lawrence’s school stagings of The Tempest and As You Like It [208], the latter play echoing in several of his own.) Jessie Chambers mentions Ibsen, D’Oyly Carte operas and Tannhaüser (1980: 108–9), and, significantly, recalls Lawrence on Coriolanus: ‘it’s the mother who counts, the wife hardly at all. The mother is everything to him’ (63–4). The mother figure will be discussed further in a section on the ‘Trilogy’ – but first I consider the anthropological context in which Lawrence understood drama as ritual.

Theatre and Ritual Drama Jessie Chambers records Lawrence reading Gilbert Murray’s Euripides translations (1980: 121); Murray, Professor of Greek at Oxford, together with Jane Harrison, F. M. Cornford and J. G. Frazer, constituted the Cambridge Anthropological School, which saw ancient drama as the outworking of ritual. They drew on Greek and near-eastern mythologies to ‘explain’ such rituals as comprising mock death-and-resurrection. Jessie Weston, whose From Ritual to Romance (1920) influenced The Waste Land (1922), is relevant here, as is E. K. Chambers’s The Medieval Stage (1903) – a still-definitive study of folk ritual theatre which F. R. Leavis silently evokes when finding the world of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight inside the mumming scenes of ‘The Widening Circle’ chapter of The Rainbow (Chambers 1996: 186; Leavis 1964: 140–1). Sir Gawain places death (by ritual beheading) and resurrection at its centre, and John Speirs in Scrutiny aligned this to Frazer, and to the spring’s fertility depending on such dramatic rites. In the nineteenth century, mummers, like those in Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878: book 3, chapter 4), record and revive such Christian and pre-Christian rituals of the year. Lawrence sided with these critics (2L 470, 558–9; 3L 526) in their reading of dramatic fertility rituals: of mock killings followed by rebirth; of life asserting itself in death. Further, Murray and Harrison strengthened his commitment to Euripides and Sophocles; in 1911 Lawrence called The Trojan Women ‘the finest study of women from ancient times’, Oedipus ‘the finest drama of all times’, and admired The Bacchae (first staged, in Murray’s translation, in London in 1908) for its ‘flashing poetry’ (1L 261). In these plays he found women as forces for new life. He may have felt the same on seeing Sarah Bernhardt (‘wonderful and terrible’, 1L 59) in La Dame aux Camélias in Nottingham on 15 June 1908 (WP 30); this apprehension is apparent in his own drama. Greek drama made Lawrence fascinated by tragedy, ‘the most holding, the most vital thing in life . . . all great works are [tragedies] . . . Tragedy is beautiful also’ (1L 261–2). The drama made him read Murray’s Euripides and His Age (1913), and Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual (2L 90, 114, 119); the latter’s anti-Aristotelian conviction that drama is not representation (mimesis), but acting, doing, self-absorbed, impersonal, with no spectator involved (anticipating Artaud), constructs art for Lawrence. Life is poetry and drama neither records nor represents: it creates, and does so in the present. Harrison’s application of Nietzsche’s sense of the Dionysian (in his 1872 The Birth of Tragedy) to Mexican tribes (Harrison 1912: 9–48) almost certainly informed Lawrence’s admiration for ritual in his 1924 essays ‘The Dance of the Sprouting Corn’ and ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’. ‘Indians and Entertainment’ specifically recalls Greek drama, though for contrast with Native American religion, since Lawrence feels that

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the latter seems not to include death. Native American rituals are not ‘entertainment’, unlike American theatre (MM 59). Theatrical ‘entertainment’ implies representation; ‘the ideal mind’ as the ‘actual arbiter’ of what is seen creates a Cartesian separation between audience and stage, only intensified in the cinema: In the moving pictures he [i.e. ‘every member of the mass’] has detached himself even further from the solid stuff of earth. There, the people are truly shadows: the shadow-pictures are thinkings of his mind. They live in the rapid and kaleidoscopic realm of the abstract. And the individual watching the shadow-spectacle sits a very god, in an orgy of abstraction, actually dissolved into delighted, watchful spirit. (60) This is not Lawrence’s only view of cinema, but it enforces his preference for art which is neither mimesis nor entertainment. In contrast with this detachment is the relationship to theatre described in Lawrence’s essay ‘The Theatre’. This mocks Enrico Persevalli’s acting of Hamlet for its self-regarding theatricality (‘histrionics’ is Lawrence’s word), and recalls a childhood visit to the ‘twopenny travelling theatre’ production of Hamlet, with its audience interruptions (TI 149). He summarises the essay by saying: ‘I loved the theatre, I loved to look down on the peasants, who were so absorbed’ (150). Theatre as ritual is implicit here. He is aware of the theatre’s potential, even in Italy’s ‘twilight’, to be popular, communal. Leavis’s discussion of ‘The Theatre’ pairs it with Gilbert Murray’s British Academy lecture Hamlet and Orestes (1914), which is a sustained comparison of traditions behind northern (Hamlet) and southern (Orestes) heroes who are charged with revenge and renewal (1969: 154–66). Leavis, without subscribing to any nostalgia implicit in substituting mythology for criticism, sees Murray’s reading chiming with Lawrence’s: Hamlet echoes pagan rituals, but ends them, because Hamlet (disdaining women and their sexuality) can only be the wintry destroyer, unable to bring in the new year, renew life and seasonal traditions; he is a modern; the old ritual pattern, though it may still be glimpsed, is broken, and that lies behind his decision ‘not to be’. A major part of this context is Hamlet, a son and lover in thrall to his mother.

The Trilogy: Violence and the Mother Discussing A Collier’s Friday Night, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and The Daughterin-Law, Simon Gray notes that each play shows the men to be ‘pathetically incomplete’ (1973: 455). Each focuses on the mother, a figure also central to The Merry-go-Round, whose death seems necessary before there can be any agreements to marry; three agreements and pairings spontaneously emerge at the end of The Merry-go-Round in As You Like It style (Shakespeare’s title is quoted). In the trilogy’s first two plays the wife and mother is more middle-class than her miner husband; and the ensuing rows recall Sons and Lovers. In the second play Lizzie Holroyd has two children and is wooed by Blackmore, the pit electrician, who is therefore just above her husband in status. The title indicates a gradual ‘widowing’ of Mrs Holroyd throughout the three acts, culminating in the necessity to wash and lay out the dead body of the husband who was killed at the pit. ‘Widowing’ also implies the husband drifting apart from his wife by his drinking and his dancing (this has Dionysiac implications) with other women. One,

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Clara, herself a widow (Plays 77), is therefore proleptically an image for Mrs Holroyd. ‘Widowing’ includes Mrs Holroyd’s slow disengagement from her husband, whom she would have left for Blackmore had the miner husband not died first. The husband’s offstage dancing partakes of drama, and of ritual, as well as life, and the woman ‘widows’ herself of these in reaction to her husband’s excesses. She spends her time cleaning and washing, as appears in the first stage direction, but she ends the play washing the body of her husband. The laying out, and the mourning, is another ritual, having the dramatic dimensions of Sophocles’s Antigone, wherein, as Hegel says, the woman is ‘the everlasting irony in the life of the community’, the community being considered as male (1977: 288). Mourning, standing outside the activities of the community, is indispensable for its continuance, indeed its life. Husband and wife embody dual rituals, of life and death, but Lawrence is fascinated by an incompatibility between the sexes which is ironically pointed up by the Grandmother’s ‘Some women could have lived with him happy enough’ (Plays 99) – a statement which, however, remains to be proved. Her choice of tense is proleptic of his death, especially as it is followed by an Ibsen-like knock on the door, announcing his death. As in Ibsen, drama begins with an entry from outside, which brings back a repressed past, and an offstage experience those onstage have ignored. In The Daughter-in-Law the widow Mrs Gascoyne has two sons: Joe and Luther, who has married the middle-class Minnie. Like the mother in The Merry-go-Round, Mrs Gascoyne is working-class. Minnie accuses both sons of being controlled by the mother, and if she scores two victories in the play, one is over the mother, who has to say that she can keep Luther (though she adds that Minnie will have ‘sorrow’ with him ‘an’ wi’ th’ sons tha has’ [1 Plays 358]). The other is over Luther, whose last gesture is to cry in her arms (360). Both The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and The Daughterin-Law feature a mother-in-law; Mrs Holroyd senior has had five sons working down in the pits (100), and embodies the mourning that is inseparable from the mining life. The last stage direction of The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd is ‘She is weeping’ (110). This contrasts with the end of The Daughter-in-Law. For Mrs Holroyd weeps while removing her dead husband’s boots, which is particularly ironic since at the end of the first Act he had unlaced them, cut his foot, and – after she has refused to help – limped, Oedipus-like, in unlaced boots to the door (80). Further, in Act 2 Blackmore himself unlaces Holroyd’s boots when he is drunk (86). It is as if Lawrence wants to draw attention to the boots as elements or emblems of a man’s, or specifically a miner’s, work, as if aware of Van Gogh’s rendering of peasant shoes. Lawrence wanted to show the same, but with more sense of the alienation the industrial worker must endure, wearing heavy pit-boots. In The Daughter-in-Law’s ending, Minnie is taking off Luther’s boots; his face is bloodied after a fight with some blacklegs in the strike. His weeping is both non-ironic and ironic at the same time. It is relief, a gesture of reconciliation; perhaps a sign that the woman has won, as ‘she takes him in her arms’ (360; compare the end of Strindberg’s The Father where the woman has complete control over the husband who is in a straitjacket). Giving The Daughter-in-Law that title emphasises the mother, and the sons, making Minnie the intruder, not connected by ties other than the legal; but Lawrence, like Minnie’s mother-in-law, emphasises the trouble that this man’s world is, and will be, to her. The mother-figure is decisive for the trilogy, and, in a more minor way, for the other plays. She dominates two scenes of Touch and Go, where, like the angry

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Mrs Crich in Women in Love, Mrs Henrietta Barlow is a mad eavesdropping figure threatening to kill her son Gerald (Plays 402). She claims that all her children have the artist in them: ‘They get it from my family. My father went mad in Rome.—My family is born with a black fate—they all inherit it—’ (385). The mother – angry with her husband for his attempts to run a capitalist venture as though he were a paternalistic Christian – is repressed, unable to act, but still the force of irony within the community, seeing the contradictions in his conduct and wanting to remove his Christian patronising spirit, paternalism, and to be as violent to the workers as capitalism’s ideology requires. She is a reverse of Barbara’s mother in The Fight for Barbara, who defends the patriarchal order while conscious that her own husband has a mistress. Mr Barlow in Touch and Go, and Sir William Charlcote in The Fight for Barbara, uphold bourgeois double standards. Lawrence’s early plays, then, treat women’s position under patriarchy; rebellious or mourning, attempting to control or realising that control is out of their hands. The behaviour of the mothers contrasts with their daughters’, and the relationship of mothers to daughters is one of comparative neglect in A Collier’s Friday Night; in The Daughter-in-Law, Mrs Purdy’s attitude to her pregnant daughter simply relates to the money she wants in order to deal with the situation. Hence the irony of Mrs Gascoyne: ‘It’s trew what they say: “My son’s my son till he ta’es him a wife / But my daughter’s my daughter the whole of her life”’ (Plays 343). The woman tries to hold on to the son, on the basis of this bitter-sweet proverb, because she cannot always have him unless she prevents him from marrying (as in The Merry-go-Round). Mrs Gascoyne’s effect on Joe is devastating, de-sexing, castrating, as is hinted in the symbolism of his broken arm in the first scene (the symbolism of him unable to feed himself is simple, but profound): Tha knows I couldna leave thee, mother—tha knows I couldna. An’ me, a young man, belongs to thy owd age. An’ there’s nowheer for me to go, mother. For tha’rt getting nearer to death, an’ yet I canna leave thee to go my own road.—An’ I wish, yi often, as I wor dead. (350) The recognition is dramatic, being that of the tragedy of this death in life of the old and young, the mother and the son confined together. Mrs Gascoyne is not so interested in her daughter because she always has her, and is uninterested in Minnie until the end, when the two women see that the son cannot be possessed, either as son or husband; nor can Luther and Joe, as brothers together. Mrs Gascoyne does not realise that Minnie and Luther have separated, temporarily; neither Luther nor Minnie have told her. Nor does Minnie know about the strike: she is shut out of things by her husband. Such irony shows everyone as losing and compels the audience to double-read everything said on stage. Sylvia Sklar comments: the text is designed so as to reveal in performance . . . the contrast between Minnie and Luther’s spoken and unspoken feelings for each other. On the surface they are being honest and even brutally frank. But the dialogue and the action are so intimately intertwined with each other, and with the truth to life of the setting, that we feel we know even better than the participants themselves that the open hostility is only a mask for their hidden mutual desires. (1975: 101)

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Sklar traces the Freudian sense that characters do not know what they feel through several of the plays. She goes halfway towards noting that ‘character’ is an inadequate way to think of their lives. Lawrence impels an audience to read what is said doubly, as if each situation were itself, and were another as well. Sklar, not uniquely, finds ‘naturalism’ in the trilogy, a word used loosely, and applied to the Manchester school of realist drama associated with Ben Iden Payne: Lawrence encountered him in 1912. The term had been used of the stories in The Prussian Officer (1914) when that was first reviewed (PO xxxiv). But in any generic sense the description fails, for naturalism, as in Zola’s works, assumes that character and incident may be explained in environmental and scientific terms through understanding heredity, for instance. Lawrence systematically fights such reductionism, and determinism: it would deny the freedom of men and women. Yet social history creates people: The Daughter-in-Law has as its background a strike of the 1908–12 period, while looking back to a lockout of 1893. This subject also informs Touch and Go, which has parallels with Women in Love, even to the extent of calling the youngest member of the Barlow dynasty who run the pits Gerald. Here, the strike is also of 1912 (a national coal strike from 26 February to 11 April), following a first strike of 13 June–25 November 1910. Given these contexts, the play’s violence, including Gerald’s near-lynching, is unsurprising: other examples are Mr Holroyd’s death and two acts of violence towards Minnie in The Daughter-in-Law. There, in Act 1 Scene 2 Joe deliberately breaks two plates bought by Minnie to make the home more suited to her middle-class tastes, defying her to break another plate over his head (Plays 323). In Act 3, Luther flares up to burn the prints she bought (354), which she waved ostentatiously, saying that her former Manchester employer helped her choose them. Luther’s suddenness, a new discovery or recognition happening within him, shows that if the marriage survives it will not be based on prudential economising, but be like the potlach, which Georges Bataille calls the ‘spectacular destruction of wealth’ related to ‘religious sacrifices’ (1985: 121). In the potlach, part of an agon (or struggle, as Bataille argues), ritual drama persists: Dionysiac life, going beyond the merely personal (the Apollonian – the terms are Nietzschean) means that however much life is thrown away, it still revives. Displayed on stage, the agon is dramatic: not theatrical, nor ‘histrionic’.

On the Dramatic Leavis, in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955), says nothing of the plays, nor much about Sons and Lovers. He sees the interests of Sons and Lovers as too personal to Lawrence; relevant here is Lawrence’s letter to Garnett (19 November 1912, 1L 476–9) anticipating the material of The Rainbow and Women in Love, which Leavis praises (1964: 19; 2L 182–4). Yet Leavis dismisses neither drama nor the dramatic. His essays first appeared in Scrutiny under the generic heading ‘The Novel as Dramatic Poem’, implying that the texts are already dramatic whether or not they are part of the theatre (‘dramatic’ meaning that issues are presented, not stated); that the writing has the quality of poetry in the intensity of its language, which cannot be paraphrased without losing contradiction, ambiguity and allusiveness; and, thirdly, that the language works beyond conscious intention. Leavis concludes his discussion of Women in Love with images from drama, referring to

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manifestations of life in the actors [which] are not concerned with ‘character’ . . . Lawrence brings into the drama the forces of the psyche of which the actors’ wills have no cognizance, and which consequently do not seem to belong to their selves. (1964: 201) Reading the chapter ‘Water-Party’, Leavis finds the terms ‘symbol’ and ‘symbolism’ too simple. There is no sense that one thing ‘stands for’ another. These terms associate with what he calls ‘mental consciousness’ which (as with the case of Gerald, of whom Leavis uses the phrase since Gerald embodies it) implies that there can be ‘mastery’ over the text. Interpretation must be baffled: textual significance exceeds what can be said about it. Leavis says that the ‘effects’ in this chapter ‘are no more to be brought helpfully under the limiting suggestion of “symbolism” than the Shakespearian means in an act of Macbeth’ (1964: 203–5). The simplest way to take this requires thinking how much any single speech in Macbeth varies in images and half-spoken allusions; characters’ images in their speeches do not ‘reflect’ their character; associations are created through speeches showing not character in action, but action happening in language. Perhaps Leavis invoked Macbeth deliberately, because it seems to ghost Lawrence’s consciousness, as when the latter tells Bertrand Russell ‘I am afraid of the terrible things that are real, in the darkness, and of the entire unreality of these things I see’ (2L 307). Truly, ‘nothing is but what is not’ (Macbeth 1.3). If drama partakes of the nature of a poem, the concept of ‘character’ is over-simple, restricting significance to individual voices and their self-authorising accounts. What is said comes from intentions that do not know themselves, actions springing from a repressed unconscious (like Minnie spending the money, or Luther burning the prints). The term ‘character’ closes down possibilities in speech which are themselves not recognised, surpassing one character’s attempt in self-understanding, or in controlling the other. When Luther ‘rams’ the prints in the fire, telling Minnie – appropriately because of the prints’ destination – ‘Tha can go to Hell’, this is not a symbolic act, readable univocally (Plays 354). The prints embody many things: the money Minnie has which theatrically declares her superiority; the art showing her ability to deploy her taste against him; valuing art over contact with people. In saying ‘The prints belong to both of us. You haven’t said if you like them yet’, to which he reacts by burning them, she indicates her superiority (if you stay in the marriage you must like my tastes). It also shows a death-drive (Freud 2001: 18), because for him to burn the prints must also be what she wants, since she has been goading him into showing his masculinity. Burning the prints is the counter-rational action of someone (‘Yi, what do I care what I do—’) who does not understand what he has done in this spontaneous act, so it is part of his own death-drive, which is also the ritual impulse to discard individual identity. Likewise his participation in the strike cannot be justified financially, since the miners, and their wives, can only lose out. Luther is no longer the Protestant, contained personality his name implies: he loses his definable ‘character’, becoming Dionysiac. The symbolism (which pairs with ‘character’) has no single referent, so it is not symbolism, but it does have significance – as when Minnie, ‘white and intense’, asks Luther if he wants to throw her ring into the fire (Plays 354). Does the stage direction ‘white’ imply that her inner fire is more intense after his action? Is it fear at what the man can do against her; at what she has unleashed in him? Or the realisation that her buying the ring (he having failed to) was also a patronising act, speaking for him, so

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that she really does mean that the ring should go? Lawrence’s writing obliterates the distinction between the dialogue and the stage directions, which have a novelistic force. Seeing the play is insufficient; it must be read: and that gives an intuition that drama may not be adequate – the novel is needed. Yet character in neither play nor novel is fixed, but is created by something beyond it. It is dramatic not ‘theatrical’, which would imply that an act is staged for someone else’s benefit, and is a self-fashioning which conceals while it points at the mask which it displays (Tambling 2019: 94–9). A dramatic act happens, unpremeditated; it cannot be told, only shown, and since it has double meanings within it, it brings out an essential within drama: opposition. Leavis’s sense of novels as ‘dramatic poems’ permits no significant generic distinctions between drama, novel and poetry; no single ‘genre’ is self-sufficient. Lawrence argues for ‘The Novel’ in a 1925 essay, its virtue being that everything in it is relative to everything else; ‘every other medium’ – drama, poetry – allows the author to fool the reader (STH 181). Leavis’s approval of that praise of the novel needs weighing, and since it puts the novel above drama or poetry, it is puzzling, perhaps contradictory in him. Lawrence writes: ‘You can write Hamlet in drama: if you wrote him in a novel, he’d be half comic, or a trifle suspicious.’ Or, returning to ‘The Theatre’: I had always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean thing he seems, on the stage, whether he is Forbes Robertson or anybody else. His nasty poking and sniffing at his mother, his setting traps for the King, his conceited perversion with Ophelia make him always intolerable. The character is repulsive in its conception, based upon self-dislike and a spirit of disintegration. (TI 143–4) ‘The Novel’ pairs Hamlet, as a ‘suspicious character’, with Dostoevsky’s Idiot (STH 181). That, with potential contradictory effect, implies that The Idiot fails to be a novel. And Birkin, after criticising Ursula as being a Cordelia (i.e. an absolute, ideal figure) dislikes his own tendency to ‘Hamletise’ in speaking over-seriously (WL 169, 187). ‘The Novel’ contentiously calls the Old Testament books, like those used for David, great novels: these authors did not ‘quarrel with their passionate inspiration. The purpose and the inspiration were almost one’ (STH 181). The title character of Lawrence’s play David has purpose and inspiration: ‘my soul leaps with God!’ (Plays 449). This makes him the play’s motivating spirit and raison d’être; such leaping recalls the Anna Victrix of The Rainbow (dancing before the Lord, asserting her ‘exultation’, or ‘exaltation’) (R 169–71). However, putting David into a ‘poetic’ drama, in heightened prose deriving from the King James Bible, rather than in a novel with its greater flexibility of language, contradicts Lawrence’s own prescription, though Anna’s dancing (equivocally Dionysian, because more self-assertive) is dramatic, in a way that exceeds the novel’s ‘realism’. Making David drama restores to Lawrence the problems he located in Hamlet. David, an autobiographical name for an ambiguous figure recurring in complex ways throughout Lawrence’s oeuvre (Hyde 1992: 56–63), is not reducible to a single symbolism. In the play he is too absolute for the form, poetic as it is, and so Lawrence must relativise David’s potency and energy by that of Saul (whose mad aggression recalls Mrs Barlow), and that of Jonathan. Finally, Jonathan does not commit himself to David, but says, ‘alone in the twilight’, foreseeing his own imminent death: ‘thy virtue is in thy wit and thy shrewdness. But in Saul have I known the splendour and the magnanimity of a man’ (524). Further, David knows ‘no depth of yearning’. We

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may reflect on a possible Lawrentian self-criticism, but this strange condemnation from the friend qualifies David’s heroism, as would happen in the novel-form: there can be no Hamletising there. While David combines purpose and inspiration, the text endorses Saul’s and Jonathan’s tragic spirit; for David Ellis, Lawrence sees Saul ‘as a last representative of the old, animist, world-order, and David as the inaugurator of the modern era of the personal God’ (1998: 245). This aligns David to Hamlet in ‘The Theatre’. It makes Saul part of the old order recalled in the warlike, unselfconscious old Hamlet, now the Ghost, while David, like Hamlet, is the new more repressive, authority-bound, self-conscious, suspicious ego. His essence is evoked in the 1918 version of ‘The Spirit of Place’ (SCAL 167–79). The God David’s soul leaps with is no spontaneous figure uniting a community; He is, rather, divisive. Hence David must fail in performance (Ellis 1998: 164–5), for, despite the challenges presented to David by other characters in the play, Lawrence’s choice of medium put him on the wrong side of his own argument; this drama tends towards endorsing an absolute, which is humourless, un-Dionysian, lacking the witty flow of popular speech of The Daughterin-Law. Returning to such a form of drama is contradicted by the European historical movement proceeding from absolutes towards the novel’s ‘relatedness’. Yet Hamlet as the modern man, the separate individual whose avatar is David, terminates drama as a communal ritual, where an audience cannot be the privileged ideal consciousness wanting ‘entertainment’, nor see life represented objectively. That older drama did not, perhaps could not, survive the Puritanism which founded modern America in the mode ‘The Spirit of Place’ describes, and closed the playhouses. The question now is whether ‘the dramatic’ inheres more in modern drama or in the novel. Lawrence’s plays demand the ritualistic, as in the laying-out of Holroyd’s body. He takes advantage of what drama can do over the novel: that it shows – as is often not the case with film – it has a present-tense nature, making an audience experience something that neither they nor the actors know of certainty will end right. Its absence of commentary means that it withdraws explanation. Its dual space of onstage and offstage make people emerge and return into the shadows; it exemplifies irony, as actions are repeated from scene to scene, with different emphases, letting the audience work out the differences: in Act Two of The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, she and Blackmore talk over Holroyd’s drunken body lying between them on the sofa (Plays 86–93). In Act 3 that body lies between them, dead.

Towards a Conclusion: Novel versus Drama The plays, even at their considerable best, may show the novels and short stories as more flexible, and the drama as more restricted. The point holds if we compare The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1910, published 1914) with Odour of Chrysanthemums (1911). The play was indebted to J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea (see 1L 260–1; compare 5L 201). The play differs from the story in containing Blackmore; Mrs Bates has an engine-driver father about to remarry, unlike in the play, and the story does not show Bates alive: he has died before the action opens. Simon Trussler calls the play ‘a modern tragedy’: For if Holroyd’s death is the judgment his wife declares it, it is the judgment not of the Christian God she assumes, but of the cruel gods of classical tragedy – the gods of the underworld where Holroyd meets his death. (1999: xxv)

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These gods demanding ritual bring out Lawrence’s perception of the agon within Greek/Shakespearian tragedy. Heroes find themselves ‘daggers drawn with the very forces of life itself’ (life including nature, which must be ritually appeased); whereas in ‘modern tragedy’ – as in Hardy – ‘transgression against the social code is made to bring destruction’ (STH 30). This gives a more arbitrary fate to characters. Lawrence hardly writes ‘modern tragedy’ in this Hardy-esque mode, though he has enough social awareness to critique any appearance of arbitrariness (lives are shown to have social contexts: though perhaps not in David). He notes ‘the antinomy . . . the conflict necessary to every tragic conception’ (89). Antinomies between two types of tragedy in his plays – which we may characterise as the Dionysian (where lives are thrown away) and the Hardy-esque type, where lives are defeated by societal pressures – are matched by sexual differences which swell into people’s asserting their individual ‘character’ (like Minnie), which is the reverse of the Dionysian. This is half-recognised in Mrs Holroyd’s speech to her dead husband, who was smothered but left inviolate. She mixes grief and blame and (self-)exculpation, speaking as though the corpse were a child: I never loved you enough.—I never did. What a shame for you! It was a shame. But you didn’t—you didn’t try. I would have loved you—I tried hard. What a shame for you! It was so cruel for you. You couldn’t help it—my dear, my dear. You couldn’t help it. And I can’t do anything for you, and it hurt you so! (She weeps bitterly, so her tears fall on the dead man’s face; suddenly she kisses him.) My dear, my dear, what can I do for you, what can I? (She weeps as she wipes his face gently.) (Plays 108) Language – including stage directions, which, as in Ibsen, tip the play towards the novel – fractures single personality. Note slippages of tense, and phrases lacking a clear reference point: what was the shame for the man? That he was not loved enough, or that he was killed? What does ‘shame’ mean: that the woman shamed him? What could the man not help? The language is not poetic beyond its social context, and it is evidently not adequate for the purpose, as no realist language can be, for death, and mourning. The female subject disintegrates into fractured statements applicable to a more trite situation, because the situation exceeds her language. This shows not the plight of a single character, but what happens when ‘character’ ceases to be individualistically ‘Apollonian’ and instead becomes impersonally and self-destructively Dionysiac: the dramatic state of Lawrentian tragedy. The violence which has killed the man, which in the ‘trilogy’ comes from outside (‘you couldn’t help it’) as well as from within, from the clash of identities, must be appeased by ritual. Michael Black calls Odour of Chrysanthemums ‘dramatic’, since the events take place in a few hours and have the weight and inevitability of those climactic moments in which a fate is worked out. There is a sense of years being summed up and given a meaning; but no eventful ‘plot’ and only one central character – the miner’s wife. (1986: 203) A sparseness, and a gradually closing sense of darkness, permeate the story, unlike the play, in which the events are more disparate. Chrysanthemums, winter flowers (this story is set late in the year), with no single symbolism evoke marriage, the first child’s birth, the father’s drunkenness, pregnancy and death (PO 186, 194). Yet they evoke

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life-in-winter, like the flowers which Gertrude – a figure of the earth and of fertility, according to Murray (1956: 39–40) – strews on Ophelia’s grave (Hamlet 5.1). In that way, Shakespeare’s Gertrude is warmer than Lawrence’s harder, less ritual-bound, Gertrude Morel. The language, formal, strange, and impersonal, is not just Elizabeth’s: All the while her heart was bursting with grief and pity for him. What had he suffered? What stretch of horror for this helpless man! She was rigid with agony. She had not been able to help him. He had been cruelly injured, this naked man, this other being, and she could make no reparation. (PO 198) The referents are ambiguous, applying to his life, and death, and his posthumous state, his nakedness recalling his exploitation, or reduction, by the mine-owners – as much as by his sexual relationship, and the present stripping of him by wife and mother as though they were still possessing him. The idea of separateness (a wall-like rockfall blocked the man off) applies to everything, but is not all that is expressed, and exceeds drama’s scope since an actress must channel the speech’s disparateness into one realist interpretation. The tale’s language exceeds the play’s: the dead man being ‘inviolable’, ‘impregnable’ as if virginal to the woman who would ‘claim’ him (196). Religious references imply the Pietà: the miner made a Christ whose sufferings may be given a limiting and confining meaning, as the women attempt to appropriate his body for something. (Lawrence’s anti-Christianity critiques its appropriating qualities, which are, of course, called ‘love’.) The Pietà narrows ritual by claiming for it a determinate meaning, with two possible Marys: the mother and the wife. It evokes death and mourning, differing from Gertrude’s more spontaneous gesture with flowers towards the dead Ophelia. That Gertrude belongs to the older form of tragedy; Lawrence’s mothers belong to the newer tragedy, of oppressive social relationships. Yet Elizabeth remains silent, unlike her mother-in-law, and unlike the play. To invoke Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917): the play mourns, but the story is more modern since, paraphrasing Lacan’s argument about Hamlet, ‘traditional rituals of mourning are in decay’ (Halpern 1997: 266). Loss eludes being symbolised, and invites melancholia: Hamlet’s state. Mourning’s rituals fail before the ‘ultimate master’ (PO 199); Elizabeth ‘knows whom she has lost, but not what she has lost’ in the one who has died (Freud 2001: 245). That elusive loss, which opens up as being beyond language’s appropriations, defeats her, and it eludes mourning as ritual. Odour of Chrysanthemums is more modern, melancholic and tragic than the mourning in The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, as an instance of how Lawrentian drama rightly gives way to Lawrentian fiction. Rather than make a limiting judgement about Lawrence as dramatist, we should see that the dramas experiment, and that he recasts drama into the novel – ruining, as always in his writing, the concept of timelessly maintained separate single genres. Failed rituals in modern life, and so failing in drama, need writing to go beyond the theatre to ask what Elizabeth’s silence contains.

Works Cited Bataille, Georges (1985), ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. A. Stoekl, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 116–29. Black, Michael (1986), D. H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction: A Commentary, London: Macmillan.

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Chambers, Jessie (1980), D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dawson, S. W. (1970), Drama and the Dramatic, London: Methuen. Ellis, David (1998), D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freud, Sigmund (2001), The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, vol. 14. Gray, Simon (1973), ‘Lawrence the Dramatist’, in D. H. Lawrence, ed. H. Coombes, London: Penguin, pp. 453–7. Halpern, Richard (1997), Shakespeare Among the Moderns, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harrison, Jane (1912), Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Jane (1913), Ancient Art and Ritual, London: Williams & Norgate. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hyde, Virginia (1992), The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Leavis, F. R. (1964), D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Leavis, F. R. (1969), English Literature in our Time and the University, London: Chatto & Windus. Marland, Michael, ed. (1968), D. H. Lawrence: The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and The Daughter in Law, London: Heinemann. Moran, James (2015), The Theatre of D. H. Lawrence: Dramatic Modernist and Theatrical Innovator, London: Bloomsbury. Murray, Gilbert (1956), ‘Hamlet and Orestes’ [1914], in The Critical Performance, ed. S. E. Hyman, New York: Vintage, pp. 16–45. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1956), The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing, New York: Doubleday Anchor. Sklar, Sylvia (1975), The Plays of D. H. Lawrence: A Biographical and Critical Study, London: Vision Press. Speirs, John (1949), ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Scrutiny, 16, pp. 274–300. Tambling, Jeremy (2019), Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby and the Dance of Death, London: Routledge. Trussler, Simon, ed. (1999), D. H. Lawrence: The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and Other Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Raymond (1968), Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, London: Penguin. Worthen, John (1991), D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worthen, John (1996), ‘Drama and Mimicry in Lawrence’, in Lawrence and Comedy, ed. Paul Eggert and John Worthen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–44.

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18 Music Susan Reid

Introduction

L

awrence’s writing demands that we listen – often by deploying music. From the piano-playing in parlours that accompanies the early fictions to the ten songs he composed for his last play David (1926), music resounds throughout his oeuvre. His eclectic taste is summed up by his response to Compton Mackenzie’s survey of musical preferences (published in the November 1926 number of Gramophone magazine): ‘My favourite song is, I think, “Kishmul’s Galley”, from the Hebridean Songs, and my favourite composer, if one must be so selective, Mozart; and singer, a Red Indian singing to the drum’ (5L 570). An even greater range emerges from the body of his work: hymns, music-hall songs and folk songs from across the British Isles, France, Germany and Italy; and classical music from the Baroque period (Bach, Handel and Scarlatti) to the modernists (Debussy, Strauss and Stravinsky), via Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and the grand operas of Verdi and Wagner. All were experienced live since Lawrence ‘mortally hate[d]’ the new gramophone technology through which his friend Mackenzie was promoting home-listening libraries (7L 566). While many of his contemporaries, including E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf, became dedicated collectors of classical recordings in the 1920s, Lawrence continued his commitment to live music, often performed by enthusiastic amateurs and featuring the human voice. How Lawrence’s lifelong engagement with music shaped his art is the focus of this chapter, beginning with the importance to him of music as shared experience and his developing critique of listening to music as a mode of engaging with others and with the world. The soundworlds of his works considered here – The White Peacock, The Rainbow, The Lost Girl, Mr Noon, Aaron’s Rod and David – suggest textual experimentation beyond the sound of words that reaches towards the non-representational potential of music, to evoke states of embodied being in relationship with other beings and places.

Arts of Listening: Lawrence, Adorno, Lefebvre Lawrence’s life was full of song, and singing with friends, as numerous memoirs about him attest, was probably his favourite way of experiencing music. He was not a passive listener. He often cemented his relationships with what David Chambers called a ‘signature tune’ (Nehls 1957: 48): with the Chambers family it was the rousing ‘Tavern in the Town’ which they sang together at Haggs Farm, and with the singer Grace

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Crawford it was her private performance of an aria from Scarlatti’s Il Pompeo (Lovat Fraser 1970: 135). Catherine Carswell fondly recalls Lawrence’s signature ‘howl[ing]’ of ‘The Seal-Woman’s Croon’ (1981: 90–1), which like his favourite ‘Kishmul’s Galley’ was from Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s three-volume Songs of the Hebrides (published in 1909, 1917 and 1921); these were popular among musical modernists, including Ezra Pound and Cecil Gray (who loaned his copy to Lawrence). His favourite songs recur throughout his work, and so his 1924 essay about ‘Indians and Entertainment’ observes how ‘Sometimes the [seal woman’s] song has merely sounds . . . low and secret . . . approaching the Indian song’ (MM 62). ‘But’, he reflects, ‘even this is pictorial, conceptual far beyond the Indian point.’ Throughout his life and work, music supplemented verbal and visual modes for exploring inner and outer worlds that were at once ‘secret’ yet capable of being shared. Many of the characters in Lawrence’s novels also have a signature tune that reveals their state of being at key moments: George Saxton crooning the exciting pirate song ‘Ballad of Henry Martin’ while confined at home with his baby (WP 292), Ursula Brangwen glowing with self-sufficiency as she sings ‘Annie Laurie’ (WL 407), Gilbert Noon shedding his Englishness by ‘warbling’ a song by the German Minnesingers (MN 235) and Harriett Lovatt Somers (based on Frieda Lawrence) playing Schumann’s sentimental ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’ (K 44, 367). These selective examples also indicate a mixture of ‘art music’ with the ‘low-brow’ genres of popular and traditional music in Lawrence’s work, that is a key theme of this chapter and of the modernist period more generally. His friend the composer Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) was similarly attracted to the putatively ‘high’ and ‘low’ in music, exemplified by his limpid Elizabethan-style carols and bawdy drinking songs, while T. S. Eliot mourned the passing of music hall along with its most popular performer in his 1922 essay about Marie Lloyd (who was also admired by Frieda, according to Carswell 1981: 137). Lawrence’s knowledge of the classical repertoire was impressive even before he left Eastwood – where his sister Ada played Chopin on piano, his friend George Neville played Brahms on violin, Neville’s older brother was a church organist (like the father of Lawrence’s fiancée, Louie Burrows) and a neighbour Thomas Cooper played the flute (AR 313). But what mattered more to him than musical genres was the element of live, spontaneous performance (see also John Worthen’s chapter on ‘Performance’). Lawrence was thus an informed listener with marked preferences, who displayed characteristics akin to those described in Theodor Adorno’s ‘Types of Musical Conduct’, an essay that explores the sociological ramifications of musical engagement among eight ‘types’ of listener and regrets the dissemination of music via gramophone as a ‘mechanical means of mass reproduction’ (1962: 1). Lawrence resembles both Adorno’s definition of a ‘good’ listener, who is as close as one can get to an ‘expert’ musician under ‘prevailing social conditions’, and an ‘emotional’ listener, for whom music ‘becomes crucial for triggering instinctual stirrings otherwise tamed or repressed by norms of civilization . . . a source of irrationality’ (5–9). As Adorno concedes, however, internal and external influences are always in play, since ‘As a matter of fact, without an affective factor adequate listening is not conceivable either’ and behaviour is also shaped by ‘social conditions’ (not least by matters of class and technologies of popular culture considered respectively by Howard J. Booth and Gemma Moss in their chapters in this Companion, which also perceive parallels between Lawrence and Adorno).

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The interplay between modes of listening implicitly explored in one of Lawrence’s most musically engaged novels, Aaron’s Rod, anticipates some elements of Adorno’s critique of ‘Musical Conduct’. The narrator’s descriptions of the eponymous flautist playing music by Mozart, Scarlatti and Scriabin reveal an in-depth knowledge of the flute repertoire and technique (as recognised by amateur flute player Ian Thomson: 2018), that suggests Lawrence’s capacity for what Adorno called the ‘structural hearing’ of a ‘good’ listener (1962: 5). Aesthetic distinctions between ‘tune’ and ‘melody’, and between instrumental music and Romanticised interpretations of birdsong as music, are drawn during a scene with the Marchesa in which [Aaron] put his flute to his lips, and began to play. It was a clear, sharp, lilted runand-fall of notes, not a tune in any sense of the word, and yet a melody: a bright, quick sound of pure animation: a bright, quick, animate noise, running and pausing. It was like a bird’s singing, in that it had no human emotion or passion or intention or meaning—a ripple and poise of animate sound. But it was unlike a bird’s singing, in that the notes followed clear and single one after the other, in their subtle gallop. A nightingale is rather like that—a wild sound. To read all the human pathos into nightingales’ singing is nonsense. A wild, savage, non-human lurch and squander of sound, beautiful, but entirely unaesthetic. (AR 227) While birdsong exists naturally, for its own sake, human music is ordered and aesthetic, an art form. But music also has emotional consequences and here the flute is an instrument of seduction – used specifically ‘to get back the spell with the woman’ (the Marchesa). The duet that Aaron goes on to perform with the Marchesa is the prelude to their brief affair: his playing restores her ability to sing and he experiences ‘a sort of mastery . . . Suddenly, and newly flushed with his own male super-power, he was going to have his reward. The woman was his reward’ (AR 257). The flute is thus linked with the protagonist’s sexual and emotional being in ways that contrast with Lawrence’s muchdiscussed poem ‘Piano’, which he revised for publication in 1918, soon after starting work on Aaron’s Rod in late 1917 (3L 181). In ‘Piano’, the speaker is ‘Betray[ed]’ into ‘weep[ing]’ by ‘the insidious mastery of song’ (1Poems 108), almost undone by his emotions, like Adorno’s ‘emotional listener’ who is ‘easily moved to tears’ (1962: 8). But, as I. A. Richards argues, the poet nonetheless exerts mastery by retaining poetic control of his materials (1929: 105–17). Aaron, however, has no such mastery of language – ‘He was a musician. And hence even his deepest ideas were not word-ideas, his very thoughts were not composed of words’ (AR 164) – and ultimately his means of expressing himself, through his instrument, are destroyed. Aaron’s ‘rod’ is broken by an anarchist bomb (284), a trauma which yet has the potential benefit of releasing him from a system of elitism and patronage that has been repeatedly critiqued in the novel. When Aaron plays in a performance of Verdi’s Aïda at Covent Garden Opera, the audience’s enjoyment of ‘the strange intoxication of social pre-eminence’ (AR 46) suggests another type of listener – Adorno’s ‘culture consumer’, who ‘respects music as a cultural asset, often as something a man must know for the sake of his own social standing’ (1962: 6). In Novara Aaron’s wealthy patron Lady Franks goes further by using music to insulate her social standing against ‘the moderns’, represented by ‘Strauss and Stravinsky’ who ‘are not so deep’ as the ‘great masters, Bach, Beethoven’ (AR 167–8).

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In this respect she resembles Adorno’s ‘resentment listener’, who flees ‘back to times he fancies are proof against’ commodity culture (1962: 10). Although Aaron prefers the even older style of Pergolesi, Scarlatti and Corelli, this is because of their musical qualities: instead of the ‘depth’ of the German masters he seeks ‘frail, sensitive, abstract music, with not much feeling in it, but a certain limpidity and purity’ (AR 210). What he wants is music that is just music; music that simply lets him be, rather than manipulating thoughts and feelings – or cementing social status. Aaron’s Rod therefore mounts a sophisticated critique of listening, which undercuts Elgin Mellown’s assertion that Lawrence displays his musical knowledge primarily as cultural capital (1997: 49). Lawrence’s awareness of music is culturally engaged but in a critical way that extends the non-representational potential of music to the other arts. This was a shared concern with those among his modernist contemporaries who, heeding Walter Pater, also looked to music as ‘an art which transcends referential or lexical meaning, and which has the power of some kind of excessive, yet essential, element to which the literary may point, but which it can never fully encompass’ (Bucknell 2001: 1). Aaron Sisson, as noted above, is a flute player who thinks not in words but in music (AR 164). Resonant here (as with Pater and his modernist successors) is Schopenhauer’s idea of music as a ‘universal language’ that ‘refers to the innermost being of the world and of our own self’ (1909: 342). Likewise, Lawrence reaches beyond the verbal associations of songs, or metaphorical associations of music, to probe the limitations of language. ‘We have no language for the feelings’, he wrote in his 1925 essay ‘The Novel and the Feelings’ (STH 203), and his writing frequently invokes music, in its texture and structure, to reveal those gaps. Such, I would suggest, is the effect of some of his finest writing, such as the rhythmic opening of The Rainbow with its ensuing generational structure of widening circles, like the movements in a symphony, and the phrasing, repetition and sonic references of its most celebrated passages (Reid 2019: 85–97). Occasionally music is linked more directly to states of being, as in the culmination of the chapter ‘Wedding at the Marsh’, when: There came a shrill sound, two violins and a piccolo shrilling on the frosty air. “In the fields with their flocks abiding.” A commotion of men’s voices broke out singing in ragged unison. Anna Brangwen had started up, listening, when the music began. She was afraid . . . She remained tense, her heart beating heavily, possessed with strange, strong fear. Then there came the burst of men’s singing, rather uneven. She strained still, listening . . . They were silent, listening . . . She listened still. But she was sure. She sank down again into bed, into his [Will Brangwen’s] arms. He held her very close, kissing her. The hymn rambled on outside, all the men singing their best, having forgotten everything else under the spell of the fiddles and the tune. The firelight glowed against the darkness in the room . . . And they crept closer, closer together, hearts beating to one another. And even as the hymn rolled on, they ceased to hear it. (R 133)

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Music casts a ‘spell’ – a notion that recurs in Aaron’s Rod, as noted above – over the drunken men singing hymns to the fiddle and over the union of the young couple on their wedding night: a conjunction of the sacred and profane that animates this novel. At first Anna is startled and ‘her heart beat[s] heavily’, fearfully, but as she listens, she relaxes into her husband’s arms, their ‘hearts beating to one another’. Initially the rhythm of the sentences is ‘ragged’ and ‘uneven’, like the men’s singing, but the clauses become longer and the language more lyrical, with the alliteration of ‘fiddles’ and ‘firelight’ and the repetition of ‘closer, closer’. Anna’s experience of the music thus reveals her emotional interiority and connections with the external world in a way that illustrates Lawrence’s stated intention after Sons and Lovers to write in a ‘quite different manner from my other stuff – far less visualised’ (1L 511). As if to underline this, the quoted passage uses the word ‘listen’ four times in rapid succession. At the end of his essay ‘The Novel and the Feelings’ Lawrence exhorts us to ‘look in the real novels, and there listen in. Not listen to the didactic statements of the author, but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny’ (STH 205). He is reaching for a ‘language for the feelings’ (203) that is conveyed in ‘real novels’ through a different version of realism: an art of listening as well as looking. His repeated invitations to ‘listen’ are echoed by the philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), whose concise Rhythmanalysis (1992) contains thirty-one instances of the word, and urges, in similar ways to Lawrence, that we ‘Go deeper, dig beneath the surface, listen attentively instead of simply looking, of reflecting the effects of a mirror’ (2013: 31). This late work drew on early concerns with temporality that preceded Lefebvre’s more famous writings on space to bring the concepts together – notably through music, pondering whether ‘Perhaps music presupposes a unity of time and space, an alliance. In and through rhythm?’ (60). Although rhythm has been the subject of several fine studies of Lawrence’s work – by Peter Balbert (1974), Kirsty Martin (2013) and Helen Rydstrand (2019) – critics usually do not engage directly with its musical origins (surprisingly in the case of Rydstrand, who cites Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis in her thoughtful introduction but does not extend its musical insights to her readings of Lawrence’s short stories). Lefebvre suggests how we can, even should, relate rhythm explicitly to music and the body in ways that resonate with Lawrence’s work. The rhythmanalyst, he insists, ‘listens – and first to his body; he learns rhythm from it in order consequently to appreciate external rhythms’: The body consists of a bundle of rhythms, different but in tune. It is not only in music that one produces perfect harmonies. The body produces a garland of rhythms, one could say a bouquet, though these words suggest an aesthetic arrangement, as if the artist nature had foreseen beauty – the harmony of the body (of bodies) – that results from all its history. (Lefebvre 2013: 19–20; original emphasis) A harmonious or ‘eurhythmic’ body can exist in a ‘polyrhythmic’ state with other bodies (human and otherwise), Lefebvre goes on to argue, while ‘disturbances’ to rhythm or ‘arrhythmia’ ‘sooner or later become illness (the pathological state)’ (20). The harmonious bliss of the newly-weds in The Rainbow described above suggests an example of polyrhythmia, which wears off during the post-honeymoon period when

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Anna and Will ‘wake up’ to ‘the noises outside’ and turn on each other ‘blindly and destructively’ (135, 141) – or arrhythmically. Examples abound within Lawrence’s fiction and recur later in this chapter, leading also to parallels with Lefebvre’s sense of a rhythm of place: ‘Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm’ (2013: 15). Lefebvre’s term ‘interaction’ is crucial because, like Adorno, he eschews ‘passive’ listening and, like Nietzsche, looks back to older traditions that brought ‘the Word . . . to life among listeners, who did not remain passive, who reacted by singing by dancing, by speaking out’ (61). As is the case for Nietzsche too, Lefebvre’s sense of time is musical and remains open to the irrational or Dionysian – a debt shared by Lawrence as discussed in my chapter about ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’. My readings in the rest of this chapter adopt a listening approach to explore how, in a series of works from The White Peacock to David, Lawrence uses music as a bridge between individual and social experiences, with an ever-increasing awareness of embodiment and interrelationship with other bodies and places. A key development is in the treatment of popular music, which is snobbishly dismissed by the narrator of The White Peacock as ‘rather vulgar and very tiresome’ (247) but is embraced by Alvina Houghton in The Lost Girl and frequently invoked in Mr Noon. The putatively ‘low’ form of music-hall culture often featured in works of ‘high’ modernism, including Lawrence’s own Women in Love (Poplawski 2002) and more prominently in James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s verse play Sweeney Agonistes. However, music hall had already found enthusiastic literary champions during the fin de siècle, in Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons, so that what emerges from Barry J. Faulk’s fascinating study of Music Hall and Modernity (2004) is an ambivalent space where the intellectual met the popular. The following sections of this chapter consider how Lawrence’s works intersperse allusions to ‘art music’ with music-hall songs to reflect states of being and becoming – for Lawrence’s female characters through the 1910s, and then for Lawrence’s male alter egos in his writings of the 1920s.

Piano Girls and Music-Hall Turns: Music, Bodies, Places Many of Lawrence’s female characters are pianists, usually within the domestic sphere. In the nineteenth century, ‘girling at the piano’ became a standard rite of passage through ‘feminine’ accomplishment towards the institution of marriage (Fillion 2010: 57), as exemplified by Elizabeth Bennett in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and satirised by man-hunting Becky Sharp in W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. In The White Peacock, Lettie Beardsall is at once a continuation of the nineteenth-century trope of ‘piano girl’ and a challenge to it: for the piano is also an outlet for her feelings and these are not always demure. Like Lucy Honeychurch in Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), whose tempestuous playing suggests her passionate nature (Fillion 2010: 58–9), Lettie uses the piano ‘to dispel her moods’: ‘When she was angry she played tender fragments of Tchaïkowsky [sic], when she was miserable, Mozart’ (WP 25). She also ‘flattered herself scandalously through the piano’, using it as an instrument of flirtation. But, spirited though she is, Lettie ultimately subjugates her passion for the farmer George Saxton for a more socially advantageous match that condemns her to ‘a small indoor existence’ (291). When they meet again, after several years of loveless marriage to others, Lettie’s swansong of ‘O star of Eve’ is a pale imitation of earlier

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scenes in which she used music to provoke a response from George, from insisting he tell her ‘“how did the music make you feel?”’ to vamping like Bizet’s Carmen (301, 16, 96). Her final performance is a lament for the chaste heroine of Tannhäuser, Wagner’s opera about the conflict between sacred and profane love – a knowing choice by Lawrence that underlines the themes of his novel and the self-sacrificing choices of his characters. In denying their instincts, both Lettie and George display pathological symptoms of disturbances to rhythm that Lefebvre calls ‘arrhythmia’ (2013: 20): the novel leaves Lettie ‘looking fixedly at the wall’ of the home that imprisons her in safety and George ‘Like a tree that is falling, going soft and pale and rotten, clammy with small fungi’ (WP 304, 324). In The Lost Girl, Alvina Houghton follows an opposite trajectory to Lettie’s by breaking free of social and gendered norms. Alvina is ‘naturally musical’ (LG 6) and therefore a precursor of Aaron Sisson and Gilbert Noon. As a spinster who needs to support herself, she rejects the respectable path of her governess Miss Frost, who ‘trudged the country’ giving music lessons for a pittance to miners and their children (10), and instead she descends through the morally dubious world of music hall to marry one of its performers – an Italian labourer masquerading as a Native American. Along the way the narrator mocks Alvina’s status as spinster by quoting verses of a German street song, and her fate as ‘lost girl’ is sealed by the sale of her piano along with the house and its contents (84, 238). The piano’s use as a social marker in Lawrence’s work is complicated here, as David Deutsch observes, by the presentation of Miss Frost’s endeavours as reinforcing ‘music as a refining art’ which the middle class have to sell to the working class to salvage their lifestyle while the ‘miners gain a sense of respectability and gentility’ (2015: 120). However, any sense of workingclass ‘gentility’ is undercut by the role of music hall in the novel – as a popular form of entertainment that is exciting but not ‘wholesome’ (LG 110). Unlike Lettie, whose extensive piano repertoire is inventoried in The White Peacock, we are not told what Alvina plays, until she becomes an accompanist at Houghton’s Pleasure Palace. Here she performs ‘Welcome All’ (‘a ridiculous piece’), and the Toreador Song from Carmen, and accompanies ‘Miss Poppy Traherne, a lady in innumerable petticoats, who could whirl herself into anything you like, from an arum lily in green stockings to a rainbow and a catherine wheel and a cup and saucer’ (LG 107). (The latter is perhaps a nod to the famous skirt dances of Loïe Fuller, a pioneer of modern dance.) There is a symbiotic relationship between musician and dancer: ‘“A little faster . . . a little slower . . . Can you give it expression?”’, Poppy exhorts Alvina with ‘a sound of real ecstasy in her tones’ (107), and Alvina shares in the ecstasy, looking ‘almost indecently excited’ as ‘she slipped across in front of the audience, to the piano, to play the seductive “Dream Waltz!”’ (110). The audience is excited too: these are not the passive absorbers of culture that Adorno descries, but full-bodied participants who stamp their feet, call out and sing along (109). As critics have observed (see Ardis 2002: 87; and Gemma Moss on ‘Popular Culture’ in this Companion), music hall compares favourably to the new mass-media form of cinema that is replacing it as a passive and predominantly visual experience, ‘all through the eye, and finished’ (LG 149). Music hall represented an alternative world of fluid and fantastic identities where men could dress as women, and women as men, to sing subversive songs and challenge physical capabilities. Accordingly, Alvina is intrigued by the various transformations of

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Poppy Traherne, of impresario Mr May into a dog and later a ‘squaw’, and above all by a group of continental Europeans into the Natcha-Kee-Tawara troupe (that includes her future husband, Ciccio). As Ann Ardis points out, this is theatre as ‘Bakhtinian carnival: a forum in which middle-class notions of bodily integrity and gender identity . . . are subverted, at least temporarily’ (2002: 87). Music hall is thus important for Alvina’s transformation into Allaye, the consort of Ciccio, but she soon realises that ‘They were unreal, Madame and Ciccio and the rest’ (LG 143). A more fundamental transformation is marked within her musical nature. Disturbed by Ciccio, she plays the piano ‘angrily’ – she ‘flashed at the piano, almost in tears’ (161) – but then plays to please music-loving Madame Rochard, who observes that ‘Music goes straight to the heart’ (197). Ciccio’s playing to Alvina of the ‘mandoline’ precedes their first sexual encounter (200), and twice more he will woo her with his ‘wildly-yearning Neapolitan songs’ (210). When she invites him to accompany her to Woodhouse, ‘The sound penetrated her like a thread of fire, hurting, but delicious, the high thread of his voice . . . She seemed almost to melt into his power’ (211). Later, he serenades Alvina in a pantomime-like scene – incongruously staged while she is attending a patient, Mrs Tukes, in labour – that jolts her out of her role of maternity nurse towards a life in which she will become wife and mother: from outside, once more, came the despairing howl of the Neapolitan song, animal and inhuman on the night . . . “Ma nun me lassà—!” she [Mrs Tukes] murmured, repeating the music. “That means Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!—But why? Why shouldn’t one human being go away from another? What does it mean? That awful noise! Isn’t love the most horrible thing! I think it’s horrible. It just does one in, and turns one into a sort of howling animal. I’m howling with one sort of pain, he’s howling with another. Two hellish animals howling through the night! . . . What does he look like, Nurse? Is he beautiful? Is he a great hefty brute?” (279) This scene marks a transition from a music-hall style to what Ardis interprets as a reinforcement of the literary in the novel’s final retreat into Romanticism and Primitivism, in the sublime setting of Italy, though she acknowledges how these pages also capture the ‘quickness’ of life that is Lawrence’s hallmark (2002: 92–3; see also Keith Cushman’s discussion of ‘quickness’ in his chapter on ‘The Idea of the Novel’). But Ciccio had already grown ‘tired of being dead’ in his role in the Natcha-Kee-Tawara and breaks the theatrical ‘fourth wall’ by announcing that he is alive (LG 162). Music hall is not real life, or a fitting conclusion for ‘real novels’ (STH 205), and for that Ciccio must leave England for Italy, taking Alvina with him. There is thus a process of becoming ‘unEnglished’ as Lawrence subsequently puts it in Mr Noon (107), a novel which continues his unfinished business with the quintessentially English form of music hall. The Lost Girl echoes the trope of lament for the worthy but disappearing music hall celebrated, for example, in a 1913 essay by G. H. Mair in the English Review, which asserted that ‘The music hall is our one pure-blooded native amusement. It has a pedigree that is clear and undoubted, through the tavern, that great agent of social continuity, back to Elizabethan days’ (quoted in Faulk 2004: 41). Yet, as other contemporaries had noticed, the music hall in its nineteenth-century heyday was often a vehicle for commercial and national concerns that did not always coincide with the

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interests of its predominantly working-class audiences, and this became stark during the First World War – the point at which The Lost Girl finishes. Laurence Senelick explains how music hall coined the term ‘jingo’ – in the chorus of what came to be known as (Gilbert Hastings) ‘MacDermott’s War Song’, about conflict with Russia over Constantinople: ‘We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do’ (1877) – and championed the Boer War and First World War with jingoistic songs (1975: 168–79). This situation was not lost on Lawrence, who rails against popular songs about the First World War in ‘The Nightmare’ chapter of Kangaroo – ‘It’s a long long way to Tipperary’ and ‘Good—bye—ee’ – describing them as ‘The wails of a dying humanity’ (229–30). Lawrence’s withdrawal from music hall at the end of The Lost Girl suggests his scepticism about its ability to do what he first set out to do in this novel, which was to offer an ‘answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people, not to just what they fancy they want’ (1L 511). As Gemma Moss argues in her chapter, ‘Lawrence is interested in who can resist popular culture and how they might do so’, and this is an outlook we can also see in his evolving approach to music. Lawrence’s distancing himself from music hall, that most ‘English’ of forms, coincided with an increasingly localised sense of the music of place, which culminates in his writings influenced by the songs of the Native Americans in New Mexico, to which I turn in my concluding discussion. At the end of The Lost Girl, however, the narrator recognises the music of the Italian peasants as ‘the very voice of the mountains’: Suddenly, in the grey morning air, a wild music burst out: the drone of a bagpipe, and a high man’s voice half singing, half yelling a brief verse, at the end of which a wild flourish on some other reedy wood instrument. Alvina sat still in surprise. It was a strange, high, rapid, yelling music, the very voice of the mountains. Beautiful, in our musical sense of the word, it was not. But oh, the magic, the nostalgia of the untamed, heathen past which it evoked. (322) This is ‘wild’, ‘entirely unaesthetic’ music, akin to the nightingale’s song described in Aaron’s Rod (227). It prompts Lawrence to acknowledge the magical, transformative powers of older, more traditional forms of music that suggest a Lefebvrian harmony between bodies and places, across times and spaces – collapsed here in a sense of the ‘heathen past’. In The Lost Girl, Alvina achieves a polyrhythmic state – ‘happy in the quietness with Ciccio’ (331) – having transitioned through classical piano to music hall to an appreciation of Italian peasant music. In Mr Noon, Lawrence’s fictional alter ego and style undergo a similar transformation – although, crucially, by ending as a ‘warbling Minnesinger’ (235) Noon continues to make music while Alvina becomes, problematically, a more passive participant. Although Mr Noon is not overtly about music hall, there are significant instances of music-hall songs and adaptations of the tone and style of music-hall performance – not least in the oft-discussed role of the intrusive, even hectoring narrator. George Hyde’s description of The Lost Girl seems even more appropriate for this most performative of Lawrence’s novels: At every stage, Lawrence’s text draws attention to its own coming into being, its “mode of production”, by means of a gesturing, self-dramatising narrator who, like a music-hall entertainer, enacts the disconcerting switches of code that frustrate and disorientate passive readerly expectations. (1990: 81)

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To make his reader listen, Lawrence’s narrator highlights sounds and songs throughout Mr Noon in ways that gesture towards the intermedial forms of The Plumed Serpent and David, but that also draw attention to modes of being and becoming. Hyde describes how the prolonged play on the word ‘spoon’ that provides the title to Chapter II – ‘Mr Noon was a first-rate spoon’, that morphs to ‘Nun’ (pronounced noon), the German word for ‘now’, when he arrives in Germany (MN 21, 99) – resonates with the popular song ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’ (1909) with its repetitive rhymes moon/spoon/croon/tune/June/soon: By the light of the silvery moon, I want to spoon, to my honey I’ll croon love’s tune, Honeymoon keep a-shining in June, Your silvery beams will bring love’s dreams, we’ll be cuddling soon, By the silvery moon. The corny sentimentalised view of love encapsulated in these lyrics is what Lawrence’s novel eschews: in Part I through Noon’s womanising ways, advertised by the signature tune of his youth ‘Down Among the Dead Men’ (about wine, women and song) and in Part II through Johanna’s pursuit of free love, to which I shall return. Popular songs are inserted at key points throughout Mr Noon, interspersed with the hymn-singing of the ‘Fallen angels’ in the church choir and ‘high-brow’ genres invoked in references to Wagner, Mendelssohn and the ‘Russian ballet’ (MN 47, 255), which are also mockingly treated here. From the outset Mr Noon moves beyond nineteenth-century visual realism to operate in an aural mode; Gilbert Noon is first identified by his ‘bass voice’ (7) when he visits his friend Patty, who feels that her husband ‘always sounded in her universe: always . . . His voice could speak to her across a hundred miles of space’ (5–6). A deliberate shift to music is reinforced by a description of Noon’s room, in which ‘was not a picture, not a book . . . But next to his bedroom was a sort of study, with many books, and a piano, a violin and a music-stand, piles and sheets of music’ (35). This is a book about the artist as composer that caught the attention of writer-composer Anthony Burgess, who takes seriously Noon’s credentials as a musician: ‘a highly skilled one, apparently, since he is working on a violin concerto and, in Part II, is assembling the materials for a symphony’ (1986: 396). Noon finishes neither concerto nor symphony, but he does complete his ‘book of songs’ (MN 234) – transcriptions of a book of folk songs that he found earlier (196). Since he walks off ‘like a warbling Minnesinger’ (235), we can assume these are German. The reference is to old German songs, of which Lawrence approved, in an early review of Jethro Bithell’s The Minnesingers, as offering an antidote to ‘A bookful of courtly, medieval love-song [that] soon cloys . . . So the inclusion of coarse, harsh folksong among so much sugar-cream of sentimental love is welcome’ (IR 198). English songs, by contrast, are often sentimental. Part I concludes by mocking Emmie’s transformation from Noon’s willing ‘spooning’ partner into a seemingly tame, if somewhat duplicitous, fiancée (reminiscent of Lettie in The White Peacock) by invoking piano songs of the nostalgic type that became popular during the War: ‘The cottage homes of England’ and ‘There’s a little grey home in the west’ (MN 87). These exemplify the kind of parochialism that Noon sheds in Part II when he absconds to

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Germany and begins the process of becoming ‘unEnglished’ (107), largely through the triumph of sexual over romantic love. Noon’s first meeting with Johanna is preceded by a scene in which Noon’s German hosts (whom we might associate with the free love practised by Frieda’s relatives, the Jaffes, on whom they are based) mock an English music-hall song about possessive love that they find completely hilarious: Jost like the ivee On the old garden wa-all Cling-ging so tightly What e’er may befall— As you grow older I’ll be constantly true And jost like the ivy I’ll cling to you. (115–16)1 Noon betrays his music-hall credentials by insisting on the correct wording ‘“Constant and true”’, but nonetheless he rejects the suggestion that he might resolve his need to earn some money by ‘“writ[ing] music for England?—Well do! do! . . . Perhaps you will begin with writing a song for the music-hall”’ (115). He states that he will ‘“do the opera in preference”’ to this quintessentially English form. Noon’s first impression of Johanna, in the next chapter, reveals his bias towards Wagnerian opera, that he must also shed. She appears to Noon ‘like a Wagner Goddess’ (MN 120), rising up from the floor like Erda (Goddess of the Earth) in Das Rheingold, as Lindeth Vasey notes (314). Soon after, Johanna pronounces that she ‘hate[s] worship’ (125), and indeed the ‘high’ Wagnerian style, of love and music, is satirised in the following chapter. A passionate interlude is invoked by a storm scene to rival the near-climax of Das Rheingold and then interrupted by a scene of comedic opera-style recitative where punctuation functions as musical markings: “Johànná! Jo—hàn—náh—h—h!” That is the voice of Alfred, calling from the door of the drawing-room in a long-drawn musicality, high-low. “Dìn—nerŕŕ! Esséńńn! Kòmḿḿ!” “Jà—áh—h!” piped the shrill voice of Johanna from the ever-closed door. “Kòm—mé—e—!” And in two more minutes she appeared, bright, a little dazzled, and very handsome . . . “Where is Mr Noo—oon?” he asked, still singing. “Mr Nòo—oó—n!” sang Johanna in antiphony. (137–8; emphasis added to highlight musical descriptors) In Wagnerian opera, love and sex are matters of life and death (as I discuss in my chapter on ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’), but Johanna treats them lightly: her doctrine is ‘free sexual love, as free as human speech’ (193). Yet she also ‘took her sex as a religion’ (139), which gives rise to much of the carnivalesque comedy of Part II of Mr Noon.

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During a journey through the Alps there is prolonged and blasphemous punning on the inscription ‘INRI’ (meaning ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’, written on the crucifixes in the mountains) and the music-hall song ‘Henery the eighth I am’ (258).2 Lawrence presents the chorus in full to underline its significance as regards Johanna’s multiple sexual partners – one of whom initiates the pun after having sex with Johanna during her ‘honeymoon’ with Noon: Ennery the eighth I am. I got married to the woman next door She’d been married seven times before And every time ’twas an Ennery, She never had a Willie nor a Sam; I’m the eighth old man called Ennery, Ennery the Eighth I am. (259) In such ways Mr Noon repeatedly sends up possessive love of the sort that gives rise to ‘the tragedy of the bedroom’ (190), and instead celebrates sex as a wholesome activity between consenting adults. Earlier on, Johanna restores a former lover to ‘his manliness’ (140) and, shortly thereafter, also reassures Gilbert of his virility: ‘“it isn’t every man who can love a woman three times in a quarter of an hour—so well—is it—?”’ (145–6). (This double-edged compliment resembles a stock music-hall joke about the brevity of male sexual performance.) Further sexual innuendo would seem to follow in an allusion to ‘man [as] a smith’: ‘Bing—bang—bump goes the hammer on the anvil’ – which echoes other popular songs, including another of Lawrence’s favourites, ‘Twankydillo’ (transcribed by him for Catherine Carswell): ‘It makes his bright hammer to rise and to fall.’3 Noon’s transition from English to German songs in Part II of the novel marks a resurgence of his creativity that coincides with his greater sexual fulfilment with Johanna. Ultimately, Noon is reborn through ‘the terrible agony and bliss of sheer passion, sheer, surpassing desire’ that, we are told, ‘is the real creation’ (MN 225, 226). Soon thereafter he ‘finished his book of songs’ and is transformed into ‘our hero, strutting very heroic and confidential and like a warbling Minnesinger’ (234–5). But his transformation is also accompanied by an increasing emphasis on the musicality of nature: So they sat by a waterfall and made tea from the ringing water, under a birch-tree. A grasshopper, a wonderful green war-horse of some tiny medieval knight sprang on to Gilbert’s knee, and he watched it with wonder. He felt it musically—it had a certain magic, which he felt as music. Johanna gathered tall, black-blue gentians that stood in the shadow. (241) This attentiveness to the rhythms and otherness of nature foreshadows Lefebvre’s meditation: what does a midge perceive, whose body has almost nothing in common with ours, and whose wings beat to the rhythm of a thousand times per second? This insect makes us hear a high-pitched sound, we perceive a threatening, little winged cloud that seeks our blood. In short, rhythms escape logic, and nevertheless contain a logic . . . (2013: 10)

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Both passages also chime with Lawrence’s playful encounter in ‘Mosquito’, with a ‘winged blood-drop’ playing its ‘small, high, hateful bugle in my ear’ (1Poems 288–9). Indeed, there is much in the poetic final pages of both Mr Noon and The Lost Girl that presages the poetry of Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Lawrence’s sense of wonder – that owes much to Whitman, as Holly A. Laird discusses in her chapter ‘Practitioner Criticism: Poetry’ – infuses both poetry and prose, increasingly blurring generic boundaries in works that finally burst into song in 1926: in the series of ‘Songs and Hymns of Quetzalcoatl’ at the heart of The Plumed Serpent (as discussed in my chapter on ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’) and the music he wrote for David. In Mr Noon, the writer cast his fictional alter ego as a composer as if in preparation for his only extant composition of music, and while the hymn-like pieces for David may seem far removed from the irreverence of music hall, the two forms had a symbiotic relationship. Songwriters often borrowed or mimicked hymns (Senelick 1975: 156) and, conversely, the Salvation Army was not averse to borrowing music-hall tunes that would be well-known to the souls it sought to save; as its founder William Booth reportedly quipped, ‘Why should the devil have all the good tunes?’. In New Mexico Lawrence found a new rhythm that brought religion down to earth, seeking to bridge the concepts of the sacred and the profane, as he did throughout his work.

Lawrence as Composer: The Music for David Lawrence’s descriptions of Native Americans singing to the beat of the drum (his favourite kind of singing [5L 570]) foreshadow Lefebvre’s later notion of ‘polyrhythmia’ or harmony with others, human and non-human. ‘Take’, for instance, ‘the round dances, round the drum’: The dance, anyhow, is primarily a song. All the men sing in unison, as they move with the soft, yet heavy bird-tread which is the whole of the dance . . . The drums keep up the pulsating heart-beat. The men sing in unison, though some will be silent for moments, or even minutes. And for hours, hours it goes on: the round dance. It has no name. It has no words. It means nothing at all . . . Yet perhaps it is the most stirring sight in the world, in the dark, near the fire, with the drums going, the pine-trees standing still, the everlasting darkness, and the strange lifting and dropping, surging, crowing, gargling, aah-h-h-ing! of the male voices. (MM 63) The rhythms of the song-dance are in harmony with bodies, with trees, with the ‘everlasting darkness’ of the cosmos. These are the rhythms and themes that Lawrence incorporated in his last play David, which combines Biblical sources (the Books of 1 Samuel and Psalms) with songs and dances to drumbeats or pipes that owe much to the Native American ceremonies he witnessed. As Susan Jones observes in her chapter on ‘Dance’ there is also much in Lawrence’s interest in Native American rituals that parallels the Ballets Russes’s The Rite of Spring (1913), which I would extend to include Stravinsky’s modernist innovations in musical rhythm and his further experiments with rites and chants in his Symphony of Psalms (1930). Lawrence’s music for David has rarely been performed and has attracted little critical attention. It was not published in the original Secker edition in 1926, but has been included in an Appendix to the Cambridge Edition of The Plays. His music – detached

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from the play – received (probably) its world premiere at the University of Nottingham in 1996, in an arrangement by Bethan Jones (Plays 588). The music is unscored, from which Jones infers that ‘Lawrence clearly intended to leave the exact scoring to the performers’, and the vocal line ranges to unrealistic extremes of high and low (2012: 161–3). This more spontaneous and improvisational way of working may also reflect non-Western traditions of music-making. The rhythms are repetitive – perhaps monotonous to Western ears in their privileging of primal ‘heart-beat’-like rhythms over melody – and yet repetition is the very basis of rhythm. As Lefebvre explains, there is ‘No rhythm without repetition in time and space . . . But there is no identical absolute repetition, indefinitely. Whence the relation between repetition and difference’ (2013: 5–6). Through the repetitive rhythms and ululations of his song 2, ‘Lu-lu-a-li-lu-lu-lu!’ (Plays 591; Musical Example 18.1), Lawrence points through cultural difference to the

Musical Example 18.1 Extract from D. H. Lawrence, ‘Lu-lu-a-li-lu-lu-lu!’. Song written for Scene 9 of David (Plays 591).

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similarity with ‘Hallelujah’ choruses from hymns to Handel’s Messiah, and the interrelationship of sacred rites among peoples, times and places. This song hymns David’s victory over the Amalakite, which is also a dramatic turning point in Saul’s descent into jealous madness: since the women sang—nay in all the cities they sang the same: Saul hath slain his thousands, but David hath slain his tens of thousands, it gnaws me . . . I feel I am no longer king in the sight of the Lord. (Plays 486) David’s music – that soothes Saul in the Bible story – further inflames him here: ‘Na-a! But what is this sound that comes like a hornet at my ears, and will not let me prophesy! Away! Away!’ (490). Saul’s inability to tolerate music is symptomatic of a pathological arrhythmia that underlies his repeated attempts to kill his rival. His speech is composed of expletives and irregular rhythms that contrast with the lyrical utterances of Samuel in particular, which resemble a prose poetry that ‘demands to be chanted to the beating of a drum’ (Reid 2019: 196). The climactic penultimate scene – in which half of the ten songs that Lawrence wrote are clustered – ends with Saul rending his clothes and baring his body. His Dionysian frenzy contrasts with the Apollonian order that David represents and that Lawrence also seems to resist: he is reluctant to kill his Saul and have David triumph and so neither has the last word. After much weeping, David and Jonathan ‘embrace in silence, and in silence DAVID goes out’, and Jonathan resolves to ‘wait and watch till the day of David at last shall finish . . . and the blood gets back its flame’ (Plays 524–5). The cadences of his final speech are thus reminiscent both of Samuel’s prophecies and of the ‘blood’ rhythms of Native American chanting.

Conclusion From the sacred rhythms of David to the profanities of music hall, Lawrence invoked music and its rhythms throughout his oeuvre to entice us to ‘listen in’ to his characters (STH 205) and to their worlds. As an expert and far from passive musical listener himself, Lawrence sought to deploy the non-representational potential of music to fill the gaps he perceived in the verbal and visual arts and evoke states of embodied being in relationship with other beings and places. Like Lefebvre’s, his writing points to the possibility of a polyrhythmic state of harmony with other people, places and, ultimately, the universe – akin to the music of the spheres that Anna and Will briefly experience in their newly-wed state: 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 . . . at the centre where there is utter radiance, and eternal being, and the silence absorbed in praise . . . for their moment they were at the heart of eternity, whilst time roared far off, forever far off, towards the rim. (R 135) The hymn-like incantations (‘far off . . . far off’) exemplify the coexistence of the sacred in the everyday and a rhythmic harmony between bodies and the external world. In the ever-increasing noise of modernity the music of the spheres and the rhythm of our bodies become more difficult to hear, as Lawrence repeatedly warned us. One of his final invocations to listen, in his poem ‘Listen to the band!’ (from ‘The “Nettles” Notebook’),

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underlines how we attune to the wrong things, arrhythmically as individuals and perhaps also as readers, and so fail to notice the harmonious rhythms inherent in our world, to which Lawrence attends, musically, throughout his work: There is a band playing in the early night, but it is only unhappy men making a noise to drown their inner cacophony: and ours. A little moon, quite still, leans and sings to herself throughout the night and the music of men is like a mouse gnawing, gnawing in a wooden trap, trapped in. (1Poems 566)

Acknowledgements Regrettably, personal circumstances prevented Fiona Richards from writing this chapter, as originally intended, but I am grateful for her comments on my first draft. My thanks also to Gemma Moss for her insightful reading.

Notes 1. This popular song first appeared in 1903. A version sung by the music-hall artiste Maria Kendall is available at: . 2. A 1911 recording sung by Harry Champion is available at: . 3. The words and music of several songs copied out by Lawrence for his friends reside uncatalogued in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin (Reid 2019: 29). My thanks again to Terry Gifford for sharing this information.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. (1962), ‘Types of Musical Conduct’, in Introduction to the Sociology of Music, New York: Seabury Press, pp. 1–20. Ardis, Ann (2002), Modernism and Cultural Conflict 1880–1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Balbert, Peter (1974), D. H. Lawrence and the Psychology of Rhythm, The Hague: Mouton. Bucknell, Brad (2001), Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burgess, Anthony (1986), ‘Lorenzo Elopes’, in Homage to QWERTYUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978–1985, London: Hutchinson, pp. 396–8. Carswell, Catherine (1981), The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deutsch, David (2015), British Literature and Classical Music: Cultural Contexts 1870–1945, London: Bloomsbury. Faulk, Barry J. (2004), Music Hall and Modernity: The Late Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

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Fillion, Michelle (2010), Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E. M. Forster, Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press. Hyde, G. M. (1990), ‘Carnivalising the Midlands: The Lost Girl and Mr Noon’, in D. H. Lawrence, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 76–91. Jones, Bethan (2012), ‘D. H. Lawrence and the “Insidious Mastery of Song”’, D. H. Lawrence Studies (Korea), 20:2, pp. 155–75. Lefebvre, Henri (2013), Rhythmanalysis, London: Bloomsbury. Lovat Fraser, Grace (1970), In the Days of My Youth, London: Cassell. Martin, Kirsty (2013), Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mellown, Elgin W. (1997), ‘Music and Dance in D. H. Lawrence’, Journal of Modern Literature, 21:1, pp. 49–60. Nehls, Edward (1957), D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Volume One: 1885–1919, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Poplawski, Paul (2002), ‘Comic Elements in Women in Love: Laughter, Parodic Skaz and the Music-Hall “Turn”’, Études Lawrenciennes, 26/7, pp. 183–203. Reid, Susan (2019), D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Richards, I. A. (1929), Practical Criticism, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Rydstrand, Helen (2019), Rhythmic Modernism: Mimesis and the Short Story, London: Bloomsbury. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1909), The World as Will and Idea, trans. W. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, London: Kegan Paul. Senelick, Laurence (1975), ‘Politics as Entertainment: Victorian Music-Hall Songs’, Victorian Studies, 19:2, pp. 149–80. Thomson, Ian (2018), ‘The Flute in Aaron’s Rod’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 5:1, pp. 163–78.

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19 Dance Susan Jones

Introduction

D

. H. Lawrence’s presentation of dance and the moving body reveals the profound importance to him of physical expression and, at the same time, provides us with a striking critique of language and performance. Readers and critics often perceive evocations of dance in his work as a medium through which, paradoxically, to express in words communication beyond language. At times dance seems to be the only form through which to address radical questions of ‘being’: those of individual and communal identity, sexual harmony and conflict, mystical tranquillity and violence, the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. Lawrence’s work also reflects a moment of extraordinary innovation in physical expression and modernist dance forms: experimental dance developed by soloists such as Loïe Fuller (1862–1928) and Isadora Duncan (1877–1927); a prolonged period of developments in Greek dance (a movement based on speculative reconstructions of ancient Greek forms) from the fin de siècle to the early twentieth century; the Ballets Russes (1908–29); new physical health practices and martial arts; European Expressionist dance; and the rise of contemporary American dance and jazz. This chapter considers the distinctive development of Lawrence’s thinking about the corporeal through representations in three major areas of interaction: first, social dance as a site of awakening of the subject to unconscious drives, which supplements his enquiries into psychoanalysis; second, the impact of European body culture in the early twentieth century; and third, the critique of performance dance in the West through a turn to indigenous forms of ritual.

Social Dance and Freedom from Repression Mark Kinkead-Weekes shaped the emerging debate about dance in Lawrence’s work by arguing that, in the earlier period of his career, Lawrence’s works are searching for what human beings ‘are at their innermost, unbeknownst to themselves’ (1992: 59). Lawrence reveals the awakening consciousness of his protagonists and, to some extent, his presentations draw on and parallel the work of proto-modernist writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, whose 1886 essay on ‘Ballet’ suggested the open-endedness of any dancer’s movement: ‘par le prodige de racourcis ou d’élans . . . une écriture corporelle’ [‘through a miracle of short-cuts and dashes . . . a bodily writing’] (2003: 201). The dancer’s gesture constitutes action not yet completed, aligning itself with the notion of process, of passage, of incomplete identity moving towards the act of becoming. Lawrence’s treatment

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of subjectivity focuses on gesture’s open-endedness throughout the fiction, but he also uses dance to represent the moment at which unconscious experience is delivered into consciousness. In his emphasis on social dance in works up to 1915 we see how he uses the moving body to explore the expression of unconscious drives. We therefore need to look ahead in time to Lawrence’s publications on psychoanalysis in the 1920s to examine the way in which his early presentation of social dance contributed to an ongoing process of thinking about the function of the corporeal and its relationship to the unconscious. In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) Lawrence takes a rather different position from that of Freud. Lawrence moved away from the idea of the unconscious as a repository of repressed emotions and drives and suggested that the Freudian unconscious is a mere subsidiary, an extension of consciousness – a storehouse that has been filled consciously by the mind. This allowed Lawrence the freedom to develop his own sense of what constitutes the unconscious – something closer to a ‘tabula rasa’, which he calls the ‘pristine unconscious’ (PFU 12). Although Lawrence does not explicitly cite dance in his work on psychoanalysis, he refers to the unconscious as free from the unsavoury content implied by Freud: ‘The Freudian unconscious is the cellar in which the mind keeps its own bastard spawn.’ Physical expression is for Lawrence frequently driven by an unconscious motive – but, from the evidence of this work on psychoanalysis, one that originates in a pure, ‘pristine’ unconsciousness that represents a kind of ‘life force’, Dionysiac energy, free of its Freudian associations of guilt and shame. Lawrence developed these ideas right from his first engagement with dance in the early fiction. He devised a number of tropes and themes to express release from repression and the arousal of imminent states of being, not simply to escape the shackles of Victorian and Edwardian repression, but to tap the potential of what he thought of as the ‘pristine unconscious’. Dance, as experienced by Elsie in ‘The White Stocking’ (1914; first drafted 1907), Lettie with George in The White Peacock (1911) and Ursula and Skrebensky in The Rainbow (1915), acts as a catalyst and shows the first coming to consciousness of the unconscious perceptions and desires to which Kinkead-Weekes refers. In all these works, predominant motifs are initiated through dance in order to convey the subject’s shift in consciousness, in turn precipitating an ontological shift, perhaps, through a half-willingly induced intoxication that triggers awakening perception and experience. In ‘The White Stocking’, the practice of social dance is presented as a form of ‘intoxication’ for the female protagonist, while the confluence of self and other is evoked through a water metaphor that recurs in later narratives: After the first few steps, she felt herself slipping away from herself . . . she seemed to swim away out of contact with the room, into him. She had passed into another, denser element of him, an essential privacy . . . like under sea . . . she would be as liquid to him, as an intoxication only. (PO 152–3) Lawrence’s passionate conjoining of the couple in this story, as the woman is propelled into the whirling of the dance by the man, anticipates an explicitly erotic movement, ‘when she would fuse down into perfect unconsciousness’ (153). Lawrence’s use of the idea of water as metaphorical medium for expressing this ‘intoxicating’ shift in consciousness occurs on several occasions and, intriguingly, is echoed by Virginia Woolf

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in her perception of the fluidity of the sound of the waltz in The Voyage Out (1915), where ‘the rhythmic swish of the dancers sounded like a swirling pool’ (1995: 141). In The Rainbow (published in 1915, the same year as Woolf’s novel), the music of a ‘deep underwater dance’ ‘came in waves’ (295) and the water motif communicates Ursula’s sense of initial hesitation combined with the pull of the rhythm of the social dance and the pull of desire at the scene of the wedding of Fred Brangwen. When ‘the music began to play’, Ursula first feels that she ‘wanted to let go’, as ‘one couple after another was washed and absorbed into the deep underwater of the dance’. A notable recapitulation of this trope comes with Connie’s dancing in the rain in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where the watery medium is the place through which the subject experiences ‘becoming’ (221). Yet the dance in The Rainbow is also a site for the awakening of deeper conflict, and of previously unrecognised and unconventional states of being. Thus something other than ‘intoxication’ is going on in this scene. By the end of the dance, in which Skrebensky ‘took [Ursula] into his arms’ (R 295), Ursula discovers in herself a ‘cold passion’ (297) and an uncompromising individuality in her sexual power, and in her violent resistance to Skrebensky’s desire, ‘which she wanted to dissipate, destroy as the moonlight destroys a darkness, annihilate, have done with’ (298). These motifs will be used again repeatedly by Lawrence: the physical pull of the rhythm, the intoxication of the subject, the initially individual and then communal ‘baptism’ associated with the immersion of the dancing body in the fluidity and compulsive power of movement – one that initiates both surrender and conflict. The motif of physical destabilisation by unconscious drives, the sense of identity being swept off balance by the experience of being immersed in a dance, is an important outcome of Lawrence’s narrative strategies. Again he echoes the effect of dance in Woolf’s The Voyage Out (‘there was a crash, and the circles were broken up into separate pieces’ [1995: 141]). In ‘The Dance’, a 1916 essay by Lawrence evoking a peasant dance in Italy, ‘suddenly the dance crashed to an end, and the dancers stood stranded, lost, bewildered, on a strange shore’ (TI 169). Here the third-person narrator reveals a loss of equilibrium. But earlier in The White Peacock, a complex array of viewpoints contributes to the experience of a de-centred identity. During the description of a social dance, the gaze of the first-person narrator and other onlookers within the text, and, by implication, the reader, invokes a form of kinaesthetic empathy: But they whirled on in the dance, on and on till I was giddy, till the father, laughing, cried that they should stop. But George continued the dance; her hair was shaken loose . . . her [Lettie’s] feet began to drag; you could hear a light slur on the floor; she was panting—I could see her lips murmur to him, begging him to stop; he was laughing with open mouth, holding her tight; at last her feet trailed; he lifted her, clasping her tightly, and danced twice round the room with her thus. (WP 95) With the rapid shift in narrative perspective from ‘George’ to ‘you’ to ‘she’ to ‘I’, Lawrence develops a sense, as the American philosopher Suzanne Langer suggests, that one ‘can suppose a near-total experiential union between subject and object, a breach of individual separateness’ (1972: 129). The observer no longer distinguishes clearly between their spectating self and a witnessed other, but rather becomes ‘invested in both subject and object in a shared materiality of sensation’ (Reynolds 2012: 129). Lawrence again drew attention to the psychological effects of such kinaesthetic empathy in Women in

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Love, noting how Ursula, in her singing, ‘caught some of the unconscious ritualistic suggestion of the complex shuddering and waving and drifting of her sister’s white form’ as Gudrun dances (166). But the multiple viewpoints suggest that kinaesthetic empathy may be shared by subject and object, onlooker and reader. Lawrence not only invokes visual description: he also reveals the inwardness of the perceiver and a sense of equivocation on the part of the dancing subject. In the dance scene in ‘The White Stocking’, for example, ‘she was connected with him, as if the movements of his body and limbs were her own movements, yet not her own movements’ (PO 153). The exploration of destabilised subjectivity and surrender of subjectivity to the other suggests an equivocation on the part of the protagonist in which dance triggers a complex range of perceptions dependent on the physiological experience of the moving body, moving with another. All these examples show Lawrence’s interest in uncovering unconscious desires and perceptions. Such treatments of the unconscious, in terms of dance’s presentation, of its function in the narrative strategy and the reader’s reception, recur right up to his later evocations of Native American and Pueblo Indian dance, which convey the sense of unconscious propulsion combined with a half-understood realisation of choice of action. In the later works Lawrence more frequently emphasises integration of individual self into the larger community, and in the subsequent sections of this chapter we shall see how the idea of dance emanating from ‘the pristine unconscious’ plays out in a new direction in the Mexican fiction.

Körperkultur The metaphorical use of dance to show the release of repressed identity is also developed by Lawrence with reference to the specificity of new dance forms and physical practices arising in Europe in the early twentieth century. European Expressionist dance appears in both Mr Noon and Women in Love, and in the latter Lawrence refers to the practice of Eurhythmics with a degree of understanding of its specific exercises. Philosophical sources for forms of Expressionist dance include Nietzsche’s recovery of the Dionysiac in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), an impulse expressing both physical freedom and struggle that helped to deconstruct the boundaries of what might be called exclusively ‘dance’, and to give rise instead to a far broader category of ‘movement’ in all forms of quotidian, social and theatrical practices, irrespective of any performative quality associated with it. It is important to establish Lawrence’s often astute response to the nuances of a whole range of innovative movement forms, frequently known in Europe by the umbrella term Körperkultur (body culture), which constituted alternatives to traditional danse d’école (ballet) in Europe of the early decades of the twentieth century. Specialist systems like Eurhythmics, Greek dance, Ausdruckstanz (Expressionist dance) and certain kinds of physical health regimes occupy a place in this group. Thus Körperkultur demonstrated in all its forms a new perception of the physical, emerging simultaneously with developments in anthropology, philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis. As one of the initiators of the body culture movement in Europe, the musician and pedagogue Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) had originally developed his system from a quasi-medical, physiological interest in enabling musicians to acquire a freer, more relaxed, yet more dynamic style of playing. In 1910, after teaching at

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the Conservatoire in Geneva, he established what became a famous centre for the teaching and practice of Eurhythmics at Hellerau in Germany. His work was disseminated widely, and his theatre productions, such as Gluck’s opera Orpheus (at Hellerau in 1912 and 1913), attracted an international audience from all the arts and promoted wide literary dissemination of his work. Lawrence used Dalcroze as a contemporary reference-point, the music educator’s method of ‘Eurhythmics’ becoming a watchword for physical freedom emphasising the outward expression of an internalised experience of rhythm. Lawrence’s bestknown reference to Eurhythmics appears in Women in Love (1920) as Gudrun dances to ward off the onslaught of a herd of advancing cattle – famously interpreted by Glenda Jackson in Ken Russell’s 1969 film. Largely working against the traditions of ballet, Eurhythmics incorporates the Dionysiac elements of an unrefined movement vocabulary, where the dynamics include unrestricted leaping, reaching for asymmetrical attitudes and off-balance gestures and poses that undermine the notion of a centred, rational equilibrium of the human figure. Nevertheless, in a psychological sense Dalcrozian exercises were intended to bring the body back into harmony with itself, and, in this memorable scene, Gudrun demonstrates her ‘oneness’ not only with herself but with the natural world. We are told expressly that she performs a dance in the style of ‘Eurhythmics’, while her sister Ursula accompanies her in song: Gudrun, looking as if some invisible chain weighed on her hands and feet, began slowly to dance in the eurythmic [sic] 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 . . . (WL 166) Lawrence’s account of Gudrun’s dance (she is the rhapsode to the ‘chorus’ of cattle), with the sense of gravitational grounding, cross-rhythms performed by the arms working against the swifter pulsation of the feet, provides a surprisingly plausible depiction of the foundations of Eurhythmic exercises, enabling the full physical (and spiritual) engagement of music and movement together. Several critics, including Terri Mester (1997) and Marina Ragachewskaya (2013), have discussed this scene in their studies of Lawrence’s modernist use of dance, and Earl G. Ingersoll (2016: 75–8) shows how Lawrence learned about Ausdruckstanz through Frieda and her contacts with Ascona (a Swiss centre and refuge for artists developing new forms of physical culture). Ingersoll claims that Lawrence’s citations of Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics are in fact gesturing to a much wider appreciation of Ausdruckstanz rather than Eurhythmics per se (76). However, his assertion does not entirely account for the accuracy with which Lawrence describes Gudrun’s practice. What Lawrence achieves distinctively in Women in Love is to overlay the effect of pulse and rhythmic complexity with the intensity of Expressionist gesture: ‘now spreading her arms wide, now raising them above her head, now flinging them softly apart, and lifting her face’ (166). The arm movements, worthy of exponents of Ausdruckstanz like Mary Wigman or Suzanne Perrottet, and not unlike some of the famously photographed gestures of Isadora Duncan, express the passional impulse for outward gesture sourced internally at the point of the solar plexus (Franko 1995: 17).

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Lawrence elsewhere gestures more broadly to the new sense of physical liberation of Ausdruckstanz. In the second part of his unfinished novel Mr Noon, Lawrence recounts a number of moments in which the main protagonists, Gilbert and Johanna, during their Alpine travels, represent Lawrence’s apprehension of Expressionism. As they dance in their apartment, Gilbert is ‘stiff and constrained’ and embodies English awkwardness, while Johanna emulates the free dance of the new innovators. ‘And with her arms spread on the air, she floated round in triumph’ (MN 213), demonstrating the characteristic sense of liberation with unconstricted, circular trajectories of the legs and body and expressive, open-arm gestures thrust above the head that constituted the vocabulary of Ausdruckstanz. One of the main driving forces behind the development of European Körperkultur lay in the harmonious interrelationship of body and mind – mens sana in corpore sano – and to some extent the movement represented a kind of preventative medicine in this period. In this context Nacktkultur (or nudity culture) became one of the most influential subsections of Körperkultur, generating the promotion of physical health practices while stimulating many intellectual discourses that apportioned metaphysical significance to the body and presented the ‘unveiled’ body as a sign of modernism. In Sein und Zeit (1927), for example, Martin Heidegger linked the mysterious concept of ‘unveiling’ the body simultaneously to the construction of truth and to the manifestation of being itself (Toepfer 1997: 31). Lawrence was drawn to the phenomenon of nudity. In Mr Noon, Johanna swims naked in the Isar river in the manner of the physical exercise practices of Nacktkultur: ‘She came from the water full-blown like a water-flower, naked and delighted with her element’ (211); and in Women in Love, ‘Ursula had thrown off her clothes and had slipped naked into the water, and was swimming out. Quickly, Gudrun joined her. They swam silently and blissfully for a few minutes, circling round their little stream-mouth’ (164). The contemporary influence of Eastern culture also played its part in promoting physical health (we can find allusions to this frame of reference in Women in Love – Birkin had learned the rudiments of jujitsu from a Japanese in Heidelberg [269]). Lawrence may have been sympathetic to Nacktkultur, but legal and social circumstances in Europe, differing from those in Britain, led to the wider dissemination in Europe of Nacktkultur or Freikörperkultur (free body movement), which can be traced back to the 1870s. Lawrence engages with this issue in The Rainbow. Anna Brangwen expresses her frustration and disappointment in her marriage as she dances pregnant and naked before the mirror in her bedroom – an intensely private moment of self-determination: ‘She would not have anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss. She danced in secret before the Creator, she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness’ (R 170). Anna deliberately excludes her husband from her private dance – and by associating her actions with the Biblical ‘David, who danced before the Lord’, Lawrence suggests that her need to express her own identity as separate from her husband is underscored by spiritual authority. On another occasion she deliberately defies her husband’s ‘ownership’ of her by dancing alone while he is in the house: On a Saturday afternoon, when she has a fire in her bedroom, again she took off her things and danced, lifting her knees and her hands in a slow, rhythmic exulting. He was in the house, so her pride was fiercer. She would dance his nullification, she would dance to her unseen Lord.

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Lawrence’s third-person narrator enters Anna’s consciousness while delivering the description of her internal experience in the evangelical tone of the preacher, capturing the sense of moral imperative that lay behind aspects of Nacktkultur’s principles of uncovering true identity through physical expression. In fact, both Nacktkultur and Ausdruckstanz reveal a residual moral component that lies behind the emergence of physical health and dance practices of the period; these practices find their antecedents in the eighteenth century in Schiller’s essay ‘On Grace and Dignity’ (1793). But in the English context, while the reader is invited to experience the eroticism of Lawrence’s presentation, it is significant that Anna’s dance in The Rainbow focuses on the privacy as well as the spirituality of the moment. Likewise, in Mr Noon, Johanna ‘would dance in her glowing, full bodied nudity round and round the flat’ (213). Again, in Women in Love, when Gerald and Rupert wrestle naked in front of the fire, the occasion is supremely intimate. Nacktkultur, as it was associated with dance and movement in mainland Europe, had entered social spaces – practised as exercise regimes in groups, in the milieu of sophisticated cabarets (not the kind we associate with ‘striptease’ in a modern sense) and other performance venues. In characterising nudity and movement as something confined to the domestic space, Lawrence reflects to some extent the narrow English attitudes to the body. There has been much theorising about the inception of the free body culture movement in Europe. Karl Toepfer explains that the emphasis on the holistic expression of Körperkultur occurs in opposition to the modernist aesthetics of fragmentation and categorises physical health and gymnastics as a distinctive signification of the modern body. He shows how ‘historically unique conditions of modernity activated a cognitive condition that focused the perception of the body as a source of meanings that hitherto had remained hidden’ (Toepfer, 1997: 10). Material and social conditions such as industrialisation, urbanisation and the rise of feminism were no doubt contributing factors, as they were for Lawrence’s particular interpretation of the (dancing) body. On the other hand, these movement practices by no means focused exclusively on the harmonic and expressive body. Aspects of Ausdruckstanz either emphasised the agonistic strains of Nietzsche’s Dionysiac, as in the jerky, conflicted violence of Mary Wigman’s Expressionistic leaping in Hexantanz II (1926); or they explored the human body as mechanical, deriving their practice from sources such as Heinrich von Kleist’s essay ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ (1810) and Edward Gordon Craig’s evocation of the Über-marionette (1908). This particular branch of Ausdruckstanz explored puppet-like choreography, as in Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922) or his Bauhaus Dances (1926), where figures clad in costumes based on contemporary industrial materials move in highly regulated rhythmic patterns (Jones 2013: 89–91). In part, the focus on the body as mechanical reflects the burgeoning effects of industrialisation echoed in Gerald’s comment on his participation in industrial development: ‘It was like being part of a machine. He himself happened to be a controlling, central part, the masses of men were the parts variously controlled’ (WL 227). Further consequences of the Expressionist turn in body culture were associated with an ‘anti-intellectual, proto-fascistic response to the problems of urbanization’ (Toepfer 1997: 31), and some branches of Nacktkultur used racial and eugenic theory to justify nudism. One of the most complex contradictions of Körperkultur appeared in this vein in the writings of the metaphysician Wolfgang Graeser, who sought to reveal the transformative value of body culture. Graeser offers a striking parallel with

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Lawrence’s desire to develop a more abstract condition of being, one that transcended oppressive constraints on identity through rationalistic identification of categories. Graeser privileged gymnastics and dance because they brought people closer to the unconscious identity of life itself, to blood, breath, pulse, rhythm (Toepfer 1997: 13). But Graeser also developed an emphasis on physical strife, and one aspect of Lawrence’s representation of physicality follows this line of thinking. Both focus on conflict as an important foundation of the new body consciousness. In 1927 Graeser reflects the idea of ‘blood consciousness’ as Lawrence developed it in his fiction of the 1920s. Graeser wrote that ‘Reason and will do not undermine the pulsebeat of our blood, it is completely spontaneous and the most elementary life-rhythm which penetrates our being’ (1927: 145). Lawrence may have been utilising the currency of theories about the body circulating in pre- and post-war Europe as a springboard for his thinking about dance in his later novels. For example, the scene of the ‘Schuhplattler’ dance in Mr Noon, with the rhythms and ‘violent animal spirits’ with which Gilbert Noon ‘with his fatal reserve, hung back from mingling’ (249), introduces dance as the same site of powerful, male expression of ‘blood consciousness’ that pervades the later Mexican fiction. Johanna accepts the invitation to dance with ‘a lusty villager with long moustaches and a little Tyrolese hat’, and the narrator (occupying Gilbert’s consciousness) is mesmerised by the male power and erotic force of this man’s confidence (this scene also appeared in Women in Love [410–12]). This feature of dance finally develops into a form of impersonality, most strikingly in the context of the Mexican writing, where, in The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence emphasises a distinctive kind of abstraction that emerges from ‘blood consciousness’ – the ‘indifference’ and ‘passive negation of the Indian’ who most acutely ‘understands Soul, which is of the blood’ (116). Lawrence’s conception of authoritarian social organisation in The Plumed Serpent derives in part from his familiarity with German thought and his engagement with völkisch ideologies emerging from Herder and German Romanticism. Jad Smith does not mention Graeser, but convincingly suggests that völkisch ideological influences remain the culminating point of the second major period of Lawrence’s career (Fjågesund 1991: 129–30). According to Smith, it is precisely in their unfolding of the gaps and contradictions within proto-fascist leadership ideologies that Lawrence divides völkisch organicism against itself: ‘Whereas proto-fascists and fascists tended to reconcile . . . reactionary ideologies by way of a simplistic irrationalism, Lawrence pits them against each other, fleshes out the levels of contradiction between them’ (2002: 8). Dance offers an important motif for expressing these levels of contradiction in The Plumed Serpent. Kate’s struggle to capitulate to Ramón’s conception of a new social structure encapsulates the tensions in her search for self, and her desire to give in to a new communal identity is symbolised by her decision to join ‘the beautiful slow wheel’ of ceremonial dance in Sayula (PS 131). The revival of the practices and ideologies of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, drawn from the energy of the indigenous landscape and peoples, is both seductive and terrifying to Kate. Here Lawrence repeats the motifs of intoxication and immersion of his earlier representations as she decides to dance with one of the Quetzalcoatl men: ‘How strange, to be merged in desire beyond desire, to be gone in the body beyond the individualism of the body.’ She slips into a trance-like ‘second consciousness’ and finds herself ‘caught up and identified

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in the slowly revolving ocean of nascent life’ around her (129–31). At this point she identifies with a realm beyond her Western thinking, moving from individualism to the subjectivity of the community. The rhythms of the drums and the dance shift her centre of identity. The experience is not unlike the sense of intoxication perceived by Lawrence’s earlier dancing heroines, who access energy and potential from a ‘pristine unconscious’, but here the shift is far more radical, overlain with Graeserian thinking as Kate ‘loses’ her individualism in the communal will (131). By using the figure of the indigenous, ritual dance, Lawrence interrogates and communicates, without words, the ambivalence in Kate’s encounter with Mexico. In spite of the radical difference of these indigenous sources for dance, Lawrence reveals that his European sources, drawn both from Ausdruckstanz and ideologies such as Graeser’s, continue to inspire aspects of the Mexican fiction.

The Ballets Russes and Lawrence’s Critique Dance frequently appears in Lawrence’s fiction through forms that have little to do with actually watching performances in a conventional theatrical space. Yet his understanding of the cultural impact of performance dance is acute. In many ways Lawrence’s engagement with all forms of dance generates a critique of performance dance as understood in the West. In Women in Love Lawrence interestingly parodies performances of Ausdruckstanz in Birkin’s performative action, his ‘loose, vibrating body, perfectly abandoned to its own dropping and swinging’ (169). But in his critique of theatrical dance, Lawrence’s strategies focus attention on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, especially in Women in Love and Mr Noon. At first, Lawrence seems to celebrate the Ballet Russes’s innovative engagement with a whole range of forms of physical theatre (see also Susan Reid’s discussion of this scene in her ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ chapter). His citation of Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky, for example, reveals the spectacle and energy of the Russian Ballet’s contribution to European aesthetics (WL 91). At Hermione’s dinner party near the beginning of Women in Love, three women perform as the Old Testament characters of Naomi and her daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah, from the Book of Ruth: ‘The idea was to make a little ballet, in the style of the Russian ballet of Pavlova and Nijinsky.’ Lawrence clearly presents the associations of class with the audience for the Ballets Russes, since this party is organised by the aristocratic and intellectual Hermione Roddice (based on the society hostess and patron of the arts Lady Ottoline Morrell). In Mr Noon Lawrence again shows how attendance at performances of the Russian dancers had associations with cultural exclusivity when narrating an incident of dance based on the Biblical story (in the Apocrypha) of ‘Judith and Holofernes’. The scene occurs in Chapter 21 and is the occasion of an extended pastiche of the Russian Ballet, and by extension, the Bloomsbury elite among its London audience. The event in the novel has autobiographical resonances and owes much to Lawrence’s recollection of an actual occurrence in which the Bloomsbury writer David Garnett danced in Lawrence and Frieda’s room on a visit to them at Icking, near Munich in 1912. In Mr Noon, the protagonists, Johanna and Gilbert, have been joined in their travels across the Alps by Terry (a character based on Garnett, who also gives a version of this scene in his 1953 memoir, The Golden Echo). The theatrical amusement that Terry brings to Gilbert and Johanna’s rural adventure is a reminder of Bloomsbury sophistication

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and the aristocratic parties of Ottoline Morrell: ‘At night . . . they improvised ballets. The Russian Ballet with Anna Pavlova and Nijinsky had just come to London. Neither Gilbert nor Johanna knew it. But Terry drilled them’ (MN 255). Gilbert, ‘feeling rather a fool’, represents awkward, English repression as he sits on the bed and watches as Terry stripped himself naked save for a pair of drawers and a great scarlet turban . . . and with a great orange and lemon scarf round his head, was being Holofernes. Johanna, handsomely rigged in shawls, was to be Judith charming the captain. In fact, when Lawrence wrote to David Garnett’s father, the publisher and writer Edward, about this real-life incident (1L 429), the Russian Ballet was in London (12 June–1 August 1912) without Anna Pavlova and they had never performed a ballet on the theme of Judith (although an opera Judith by Alexandr Serov was included in the Ballets Russes’ first 1911 London season and Pavlova and Nijinsky had danced together in an autumn tour of 1911). Yet in Mr Noon Lawrence captures the flavour of wild extravagance and colour in designs for ballets such as Léon Bakst’s costumes for Shéhérazade, and the energy and bravura of the company’s performances. Lawrence’s letter to Garnett rehearses the scene with equal vitality: Oh but you should see him [Bunny] dance Mordkin passion dances, with great orange and yellow and red and dark green scarves of F[rieda]’s, and his legs and arms bare; while I sit on the sofa and do the music . . . Such a prancing whirl of legs and arms and raving colours you never saw: And F. shrieks when he brandishes the murderous knife in my music-making face . . . and at last he falls panting. (1L 429) Lawrence’s invocation of the popular Russian dancer Mikhail Mordkin (who frequently partnered Pavlova and was often thought to be as accomplished as Nijinsky) shows an up-to-date knowledge of the ballet. Interestingly, when he writes Mr Noon the shift in his references – to Pavlova and Nijinsky – reflects the ascendancy of Nijinsky’s postBallets Russes fame, since the dancer had in fact left the company by 1916. But if Lawrence satirised the Ballets Russes he also exploited its aesthetic innovations in his fiction. His interest in silence, inwardness and the concept of tension, frisson, connection without touching is one that he frequently addresses. ‘Why was there always a space between them, why were they apart?’ is the question posed in the Rainbow (115) and in terms of intense physical engagement – such as Gerald and Birkin’s wrestling match in Women in Love – the communication beyond language resonates: ‘There were long spaces of silence between their words’ (272). Lawrence’s focus on the absence of sound and communication and the intensity of silence is also an inseparable part of experiencing movement for Lawrence (see also Reid 2019: 95–7), and in this respect the Ballets Russes offered him some striking aesthetic possibilities, especially for the ritual dances of the Mexican fiction, to which I will return. The Ballets Russes’s choreographic innovation in L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912) resonates with the notion of inwardness in Lawrence’s later fiction. Nijinsky provided an entirely new form of practice that was not simply based on the exuberant leaps for which he was famous as a performer. His experimental choreography for L’Après-midi lay in the frieze-like groupings and in the expression of protracted unfolding and intense

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expression of interiority in dance forms formerly unrecognised in the context of theatre dance (especially ballet). As a result of the recovery of Nijinsky’s notation for this ballet by Claudia Jeschke (Guest 1991: 3–34) we now have greater insight into Nijinksky’s choreographic method,1 which helps us in part to locate Lawrence’s development of a particular quality of inwardness as corresponding to one expressed in dance. Nijinsky’s extraordinary evocation of Primitivism – Greek dance style, two-dimensional movement in profile to the viewer, as inspired by temple pediments and friezes – honours moments of utter stillness, while the principal couple, facing one another in a deep unravelling back-bend in profile, connect impalpably, not actually touching, in flattened, twodimensional lines (Jones 2013: 40–1). The stillness captured in Nijinsky’s choreography is not reflected in Lawrence’s work as corporeal stasis as such, but is closer to T. S. Eliot’s well-known reference in ‘Burnt Norton’ to a ‘still point of the turning world’ (1952: 119), where the proprioceptive activity of the body’s musculature is at rest, but alert, ‘actively’ still, always gathering energy in readiness to move. The effect of the performance of these phrases is to create what seems like a contradictory affect – an abstraction, almost an emotional indifference – without histrionic expression, but at the same time conjuring the most powerful intensity in both performer and onlooker. Lawrence re-creates this sense of impersonality in a number of evocations of movement: he describes Birkin, in the wrestling match in Women in Love, as so ‘abstract as to be almost intangible’ (269); in The Plumed Serpent there is ‘the heavy negation of indifference’ of the Indians’ spectatorship of the frivolous Fifis’ dance and ‘the unemotional melody with drum for syncopated rhythm’ that initiates their own dance (116–17). In ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ Lawrence increasingly focuses on the very intensity of physiological stillness, ‘the strange tense silence’ that accompanies ‘the long line of the dance unfurling’ (WWRA 59–60) – an intensity harnessed by Nijinsky in his choreography of L’Après-midi. Another oblique connection between Lawrence and the Ballets Russes appears in the latter’s 1917 production Parade (Reid 2015: 109). The scenario for Parade had grown out of Jean Cocteau’s story, initially focusing on the Biblical David, who retreats to a cave to meditate on his faith. Cocteau’s original idea emerges in the oblique critique of militarism in the wartime Parade. He envisioned a drop curtain: ‘on frontstage we behold one thing—la parade—while behind the curtain a hidden performance is going on as if in another world—le spectacle intérieur—’ (Aschengreen 1986: 61). It is interesting to note that Lawrence also exploited the story of David and that his own modernist spectacle, The Plumed Serpent, is to an extent predicated on an idea of theatrical presentation – Susan Reid observes the operatic quality of the rituals in this novel and in his play David (2019: 188–91). Both emphasise what Cocteau called ‘le spectacle intérieur’. In Parade the term referred to the privacy of backstage retreat, but Lawrence suggests a different inflection in relation to his fiction. In The Plumed Serpent, for example, the spectacle’s interiority emerges from the looking inward of both individual and community, achieved through the outward expression of the life force constituted by ceremonial dance. Lawrence’s references to the innovations of the Ballets Russes are often allusive rather than explicitly influential, or parodic rather than overtly critical. But his critique of the conventions of ballet performance in 1924 is explicit, when he makes a

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deliberate comparison between the ceremonial Hopi Snake Dance of Arizona and the Ballets Russes. In an essay in Theatre Arts Monthly Lawrence observes: One may look on from the angle of culture, as one looks on while Anna Pavlova dances with the Russian ballet. Or there is still another point of view, the religious . . . Therefore, please, no clapping or cheering or applause, but remember you are, as it were, in a Church. (MM 80–1) This remark to some extent illustrates what Mark Kinkead-Weekes (1992) has observed as Lawrence’s shift from an earlier apprehension of dance’s evocation of individual expression to a later perception of dance as communal ritual in some way constituting a form of religion in itself. In his 1920s writing, Quetzalcoatl, The Plumed Serpent, ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ and the non-fiction Mornings in Mexico, Lawrence takes a distinctively ethnographic turn. But at the same time he often echoes an earlier sense of the potential within European performance and social forms for the release of repressed subjectivity. Perhaps Lawrence came to equate such liberation more forcefully with a religious sense, when the ceremonial dances of the Mexican fiction enabled a wilder, more unconfined identity. Nevertheless, he recognised in the formalities of European social dance, performances and certain physical practices the possibility for achieving alternative modes of being, and in the later fiction he returns to these sources while simultaneously discovering the radicalism of indigenous forms of dance. In ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ Lawrence continues to engage with the aesthetics of the Ballets Russes yet incorporates into his radical narrative the unfamiliar material of the Pueblo dances. On the surface, the short story springs from anthropological interests in ritual dance stimulated by Lawrence’s travels in the American Southwest and in Mexico (Jones 2013: 109–17). These inspired him to explore dance’s religious function as an aspect of primitive ritual. But the story also indicates in its structure and tone that Lawrence’s thinking about Primitivism owed something to his understanding of performance dance. In addition to the tangential connections to choreography for L’Après-midi, The Rite of Spring, Nijinsky’s most radical ballet of 1913 for the Ballets Russes, with music by Igor Stravinsky and design by Nicholas Roerich, offers a more obvious analogy. Written in a ‘Primitivist’ vein, Lawrence’s story echoes the scenario of Nijinsky’s version of The Rite in which a woman’s ‘inevitable fate’ finds her ‘overtaken by unconsciousness or death’ (Gilliam 1924: 192–3). Lawrence’s immediate inspiration for his story came from his New Mexican travels in 1924. But the New Mexican landscape of the story bears reminders of the visual and dramatic structures of the 1913 Rite of Spring. First, Lawrence represents a series of modernist landscapes: rather than building the teleological thrust of the story through the conventional ordering of events he creates narrative anticipation through the presentation of successive ‘blocks’ of text that deliver painterly ‘blocks’ of colour, suggesting setting and mood, as if leading the reader through a series of ‘staged’ scenes to convey aspects of the woman’s physical and emotional journey towards death. She stands ‘in the vast open world’ where she could see ‘great, void, tree-clad hills piling behind one another, from nowhere into nowhere’ (WWRA 39).

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Lawrence shared with Nicholas Roerich (designer of The Rite) a surprising visual affinity in the treatment of landscape: the Primitivism, broad brushstrokes, use of bold blocks of colour, and, at times, a mystical evocation of subject matter, opened on to a vacant centre, a representational symbol of the extinction of the woman. Lawrence also suggests the same group indifference to the Chosen One of Nijinsky’s ballet, and the inevitability of her compelling and ‘active’ participation in the Rite is echoed in Lawrence’s story. As Lawrence put it, the unnamed woman ‘had no will of her own’ (WWRA 45). Her abductor deprives her of subjectivity: ‘He looked at her . . . As if she were some strange unaccountable thing, incomprehensible to him, but inimical’ (47). Unlike the Chosen One of the ballet, the Woman herself does not physically join the dance. But she is moved and terrified by it, and the narrative emphasis on her active desire to lose her identity in the journey towards sacrifice, experienced against the relentless rhythms of the communal dance, presents her trance-like semi-consciousness as an element of partly willing participation in her journey towards death: ‘So, the long line of the dance unfurling . . . strange scent of incense, strange tense silence, then the answering burst of inhuman male singing . . . For hours and hours she watched, spellbound, and as if drugged’ (59–60). The incantatory tone of the passage reflects the mesmeric final dance of the Chosen One in the ballet. But, as we have seen, Lawrence had earlier expressed this dissolution of the self through the seduction of dance in his evocations of social dance in England in ‘The White Stocking’ (1914). Lawrence’s repetition of the effect of dance among the Pueblo Indians seems to confirm a Primitivist frame of mind in the later story, but this time combined with a striking dimension of ethnic observation. ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ opens up questions about Lawrence’s narrative strategy. Adorno theorises the Primitivist turn in Stravinsky’s music, where ‘subjectivity takes on the character of sacrifice, but . . . the music identifies not with the victim but with the annihilating authority’ (2006: 109–10). We might ask whether Lawrence also follows this line of thinking. In ‘Indians and Entertainment’, Lawrence in fact remarks on his own lack of authority: ‘The Indian is completely embedded in the wonder of his own drama . . . It can’t be judged, because there is nothing outside it, to judge it’ (MM 67). ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ does to some extent express a dance of inwardness that requires no outside onlooker or judge. Yet Lawrence’s representation borrows a performance aesthetic from the ‘spectacle’ offered by Diaghilev’s most controversial ballet. Lawrence illustrates how the innovative pre-war Rite of Spring produced an allusive but compelling echo in inter-war British literary modernism.

Conclusion The periods spent in Mexico and New Mexico galvanised Lawrence’s ideas about the purpose and function of dance as communal ritual. But we have seen that an underlying political component in this shift to ceremonial dance also drew on some fascinating connections he made at this time between his thoughts about European and Mexican dance traditions and his increasing rejection of European values. He therefore turned to alternative ways of structuring life and society in Quetzalcoatl and The Plumed Serpent. In these novels dance played a fundamental role in conveying how the West might need to surrender to a ‘new way’ of life to survive – as explored

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through Kate’s experiences of the god-like Quetzalcoatl in The Plumed Serpent or the Woman’s strange compulsion towards/acceptance of her death in ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’. This chapter has examined several ways in which Lawrence’s aesthetics explore dance as a medium that radically shifts understanding of individual and social identities, communicating meaning beyond language itself. Lawrence uses dance to uncover the repressed desires of a ‘pristine unconscious’, exploiting the experiences of social dance and many forms of Körperkultur. In later works the incarnation of non-theatrical forms of indigenous dance demonstrates further the ‘blood consciousness’ that Carrie Rohman perceives as fundamental to Lawrence’s aesthetics (2018: 43). In his presentation of this experience in the dances of the Mexican fiction Lawrence nevertheless exploits performative aspects of Western theatre dance, thus complicating any straightforward notion of Western uses of Primitivism. Ultimately dance represents for Lawrence a universal expression of individual and social identity, offering the potential for his most radical turn away from Western convention.

Note 1. For a reconstruction of L’Après-midi d’un faune 1912 see ; performed 27 February 1998, by the Chamber Dance Company, University of Washington; choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky; reconstruction, Ann Hutchinson Guest and Claudia Jeschke, from Nijinsky’s notation score.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. (2006), Philosophy of New Music, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Aschengreen, Eric (1986), Jean Cocteau and the Dance, trans. Patricia McAndrew and Per Arsum, Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Craig, Edward Gordon (April 1908), ‘The Actor and the Über-Marionette’, The Mask: Journal of the Art of the Theatre, 1:2, pp. 3–15. Fjågesund, Peter (1991), The Apocalyptic World of D. H. Lawrence, Oslo: Norwegian University Press. Gilliam, Florence (March 1924), ‘The Russian Ballet of 1923’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 8, pp. 191–4. Guest, Ann Hutchinson (1991), ‘Nijinsky’s Faune’, Choreography and Dance, 1, pp. 3–34. Eliot, T. S. (1952), The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950, New York: Harcourt Brace. Franko, Mark (1995), Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Graeser, Wolfgang (1927), Körpersinn, Munich: Beck. Ingersoll, Earl G. (2016), ‘“Ausdruckstanz” and “Ars Amatoria”: D. H. Lawrence and the Interrelated Arts of Dance and Love’, Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society, 4:2, pp. 73–92. Jones, Susan (2013), Literature, Modernism, and Dance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark (1992), ‘D. H. Lawrence and the Dance’, Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, 10:1, pp. 59–77. Langer, Suzanne K. (1972), Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, vol. 2, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mallarmé, Stéphane (2003), Igitur, Divagations, Un Coup de dés, ed. Bertrand Marchal, Paris: Gallimard.

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Mester, Terri (1997), Movement and Modernism: Eliot, Lawrence, Williams and Early TwentiethCentury Dance, Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press. Ragachewskaya, Marina (2013), ‘No Dancing Matter: The Language of Dance and Sublimation in D. H. Lawrence’, Études Lawrenciennes, 44, pp. 187–204. Reid, Susan (2015), ‘From Rope Dancer to Wrestler: The Figure of the Artist as Performer’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 40:1, pp. 107–27. Reid, Susan (2019), D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Reynolds, Dee (2012), ‘Kinesthetic Empathy and the Dancer’s Body: From Emotion to Affect’, in Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, Bristol: Intellect, pp. 121–38. Rohman, Carrie (2018), Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Jad (2002), ‘Völkisch Organicism and the Use of Primitivism in Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent’, in D. H. Lawrence Review, 30:3, pp. 7–25. Toepfer, Karl (1997), Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Cutlure, 1910–1935, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Woolf, Virginia (1995), The Voyage Out, ed. C. Ruth Miller and Lawrence Miller, Oxford: Blackwell.

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Plate 23 Lincoln Cathedral. Photo: Artur Bogacki, Getty Images.

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Plate 24 Inside Lincoln Cathedral. Photo: Petrina Calabalic, Dreamstime.

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Plate 25 Sandro Botticelli (c.1445–1510), Mystic Nativity (1500). Oil on canvas. 108.6 x 74.9 cm. National Gallery, London.

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Plate 26 Raphael (1483–1520), The Madonna and Child (‘The Ansidei Altarpiece’) (1505). Oil on panel. 209.6 x 148.6 cm. National Gallery, London.

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Plate 27 Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879–80). Oil on canvas. 46.4 x 54.6 cm. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

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Plate 28 Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–84), Pauvre Fauvette (1881). Oil on canvas. 162.5 x 125.5 cm. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.

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Plate 29 Vincent van Gogh (1853–90), Sunflowers (1888), fourth version, exhibited at the National Gallery, London. Oil on canvas 95 x 73 cm. © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

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Plate 30 Mark Gertler (1891–1939), The Creation of Eve (1914). Oil on canvas. 75 x 60 cm. Private Collection, reproduced by kind permission of the owner, image courtesy of Ben Uri Gallery and Museum.

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Plate 31 Mark Gertler (1891–1939), Merry-Go-Round (1916). Oil painting on canvas. 189.2 x 142.2 cm. © Tate, London.

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Plate 32 Edmond Xavier Kapp (1890–1978), D. H. Lawrence (1923). Chalk. 44.5 cm x 38.4 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London. Courtesy of Chris Beetles Gallery on behalf of the Edmond Xavier Kapp Estate.

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Plate 33 Dorothy Brett (1883–1977), Portrait of D. H. Lawrence with Halo (1925). Oil on canvas. 78 x 48.3 cm. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy of Christopher Esher of the estate of Dorothy Brett.

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Plate 34 Ernesto Guardia, D. H. Lawrence (blue tone) (1929). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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Plate 35 Ernesto Guardia, D. H. Lawrence (sepia) (1929). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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Plate 36 Dorothy Brett (1883–1977), Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ (1963). Reproduced in Keith Sagar, The Life of D. H. Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography, London: Chaucer Press, 2003. Courtesy of Christopher Esher of the estate of Dorothy Brett.

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Plate 37 Cover image of Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage (London: Abacus, 1997). With kind permission of Geoff Dyer and Little, Brown and Company.

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Plate 38 Title image of ‘D. H. Lawrence – Zombie Hunter’ in Dawn of the Unread, Hunt Emerson and Kevin Jackson (Nottingham: Spokesman, 2016). With kind permission of James Walker.

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SECTION 3 VISUAL ARTS 20 Practitioner Criticism: Painting Jeff Wallace

They are quite simple, with no tricks: but I consider they are, what very few pictures are, organically alive and whole. All the modern smartness only succeeds in putting pictures together, it practically never makes a picture live as a whole thing. (6L 446) If only we could get rid of the idea of “property”, in the arts! (LEA 259)

Introduction

D

. H. Lawrence was a maker of pictures, until in 1926 he became a painter. This fairly standard interpretation of Lawrence’s history as a practitioner of paint hinges on a date in late October 1926, when Maria Huxley left four stretched canvases at the Villa Mirenda, where the Lawrences were staying, near Florence. Here is another, more gnomic assertion: Lawrence was always a painter, even if never really a painter. My chapter consists in an unravelling of the relationship between these statements, exploring what it means to talk about Lawrence as a painter, and considering the ways in which being a practitioner of painting might be connected with the critical writing about visual art that Lawrence produced throughout his life.

Early Painterly Criticism John Worthen has ventured to suggest that painting was for Lawrence the art that preceded writing as his ‘first love’ (1991: 132). A picture emerges of Lawrence in his teens and early twenties, taking on a leading and charismatic role in the joyous practice of painting with friends and associates – ‘Bert in his shirt sleeves painting furiously’ (May Chambers, quoted in Sagar 2003: 9). At the age of twenty, wise (or not) beyond his years, he characterised painting as part of the standard, gendered life-repertoire of the bright and active male, in contrast with the plight of female domestic passivity: ‘A man can do many things’, he wrote to Jessie Chambers, ‘He reads, he paints, he can get across his bicycle and go for a ride, but a woman sits at home’ (1L 27). As if to prove

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it, ‘I spent all Sunday painting those nasturtiums’, he writes, in October 1908, to Louie Burrows, and then, a month later, to Blanche Jennings: ‘At present I am painting for my dear life, and enjoying myself immensely. I have just finished my third landscape – I began the first ten days ago’ (88). But, painting? Or making pictures? It is well established that the painting that Lawrence delighted in was largely the copying of the work of established others, from Italian Renaissance artists to contemporary watercolourists – making pictures of pictures. Jessie Chambers recalls going to Nottingham with her brother to buy Lawrence, for his twenty-first birthday, an incomplete series of the book English Water-Colour first published in 1902 by the Studio Library (1980: 134–5). Years later, in the 1929 essay ‘Making Pictures’, and precisely when he might justifiably claim that he had become a painter, the significance of this gift remained vivid. He remembered that he only ever had six of the eight parts in the series, but could ‘never be sufficiently grateful’ for the invaluable and testing copying material it gave him: ‘Surely I put as much labour into copying from those water-colour reproductions as most modern art-students put into all their years of study’ (LEA 230). At the time of his mother’s death, Lawrence began a copy of Maurice Greiffenhagen’s An Idyll, a painting he was to reproduce several more times (as in Colour Plate 1). Indeed, this principle of reproducibility is at the heart of the fact that Lawrence seemed to spend an estimable part of his life happily making pictures as gifts for others – as wedding presents, for example. Nevertheless, Lawrence became a writer. Painting happened in the light, as it were; as Worthen astutely observes, it was ‘a very public activity’ in his early life, surrounded by, and for the benefit of, friends and family. Even at the New Mexico ranch, between 1922 and 1925, the painter Dorothy Brett recalls Lawrence’s cheeky interventions in her own landscapes, and the collective shaping of her ‘big picture of the desert’: ‘We are all working on it. [Frieda painted the chickens.] You and I do most of it – most of the squabbling about it, too’ (quoted in Sagar 2003: 24). At the same moment, Brett recalls Lawrence’s playful-tiresome provocation: ‘“Oh, painting is easy; writing is far more difficult”.’ Writing became, early, the more darkly joyful necessity of Lawrence’s life. The sharing with Blanche Jennings of his delighted immersion in painting (above) is pointedly prefaced by: ‘I shall try writing again; I don’t believe I shall ever do much at it. My nature is versatile and volatile’; to Ada Lawrence, ‘I’ve been painting lately . . . I’ve not written much: I find I can’t’ (1L 88, 231). The pattern of these responses sees painting as good cop to writing’s bad cop, offering respite from the struggle of writing, healing after bouts of illness, bringing light and – a crucial and recurrent word in the 1929 retrospect ‘Making Pictures’ – ‘delight’ (LEA 230–2). Nevertheless, it would be a mistake thus to consign painting to a therapeutic role in Lawrence’s life, even before the paradigm shift of October 1926. Understanding Lawrence’s relationship to painting requires us to think more broadly about its status and authority in his development as an artist and a thinker. Without a doubt, Lawrence’s Eastwood circle, including the ‘progressive’ socialist clique that he worried about losing touch with in a letter to Willie Hopkin during his Croydon years, avidly claimed and embraced painting, both as practice and as historical resource and archive, as a vital aspect of those cultural riches to which they were urgently claiming democratic entitlement (1L 176). Within such groups in early twentieth-century working-class culture, images and words could become seamlessly interchangeable elements of progressive intellectual discourse.

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Availability was what differentiated these forms, however, and the question of access to painting within a class- and property-based society was always crucial to Lawrence and such groups as his Eastwood milieu. As he was to reflect in the 1929 essay ‘Pictures on the Wall’, a ‘great reading-public’ had been enabled only by the emergence of industrial print culture, encompassing cheap commercial print and the rise of the municipal lending library, when books ‘ceased to be looked on as lumps of real estate, and came to be regarded as something belonging to the mind and consciousness, a spiritual instead of a gross material property’ (LEA 262). The whole import of the essay is, however, that the question of access to paintings remained more problematic than that of access to writing. Art books were expensive (‘they said we could have [it] for a guinea’, Jessie Chambers notes of the purchase of English WaterColour [quoted in Sagar 2003: 9]), paintings themselves more so. Mrs Gascoigne in The Daughter-in-Law refuses to believe that Minnie has paid twenty-five pounds for three prints, while Mr Morel in Sons and Lovers marvels at ‘“twenty guineas for a bit of a paintin’ as he knocked off in an hour or two—!”’, when Paul’s landscape wins first prize in the Nottingham Castle winter exhibition (Plays 353; SL 296). The ordinary home would have a precious few, if any at all, endlessly pored over and rarely replaced or augmented. Trips to art galleries would entail the cost of travel, meaning that access was usually restricted to the collections or exhibitions of galleries in the immediate vicinity. In Sons and Lovers, when Paul wins two first prizes in the student exhibition, Mrs Morel makes several poignant and surreptitious trips back to the Castle to see her son’s winning painting in its place there. The paintings are transformed, newly estranged, by their official display, in a gallery where ‘in her life-time she had seen so many pictures’, and Mrs Morel becomes highly self-conscious of her identity in this public space; the scene becomes one of intense class consciousness and triumph, as she expresses her pride in relation to the ‘well-dressed ladies’ she sees in the Park on the way home: ‘“Yes, you look very well – but I wonder if your son has two first prizes in the Castle”’ (SL 222). Lawrence’s writing here is inevitably informed by his own transformative experience of gaining access, not just to Nottinghamshire’s cultural resources, but to those of the metropolitan centre. The move to Croydon to take up a teaching post in the autumn of 1908 was of enormous cultural-geographical significance: he now had the London galleries within reach (‘I can go to London by motor-bus for fourpence’ [1L 82]). Like Mrs Morel, however, a gallery visit – for example, to the winter exhibition at the Royal Academy – could be distracted by second-order experience. In the West End, perhaps on his way to Burlington House, Mrs Morel’s well-dressed ladies arrest Lawrence in his tracks: ‘women such as I have never seen before, beautiful, flowing women, with a pride and grace you never meet in the provinces’ (115). As if in anticipation of Leonard Bast’s encounter with the Schlegel sisters in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), these women signify something about the class ownership of culture; so that in looking at Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Pauvre Fauvette (Colour Plate 28) – a peasant painter, and a peasant subject – Lawrence, it seems to follow, finds himself at the same time looking at someone else looking at a picture – the woman whose discourse on painting he eavesdrops upon: ‘Too sad,’ she says to the gentleman. ‘But the country does desolate one like that; I have felt like it myself’. She moves on to a romance picture of Abbey, and talks

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brightly about Maurice Hewlett. Pauvre Fauvette is a terrible picture of a peasant girl wrapped in a lump of sacking; you feel her face paint itself in your heart, and you turn away; the sorrow is too keen and real. The academy is full of magnificent works. (1L 116) ‘Terrible’ here registers of course nothing like disapproval, but instead the sublimity of real pain and destitution that painted itself onto Lawrence’s heart. He continued to linger, in his letters, on the affect of Pauvre Fauvette and two more of Bastien-Lepage’s paintings. They were ‘haunting’ – ‘Life must be dreadful for some people’ – and he could be both painterly enough to record the colours that achieved this effect – ‘grey, grey-green, and brown’ – and art-critical enough to identify their social realism, the ‘awful’ and ‘cruel sorrow of destruction’, as a sign of Bastien-Lepage’s modernity as a painter, one of the ‘moderns’ (120, 124). Intermingled with these reactions, nevertheless, remained a self-consciousness about the cultural capital enshrined in the Royal Academy itself – ‘The academy is full of magnificent works’ (1L 116); that is, about a material relation to the ownership and accessibility of art which came to shadow his own critical discourse on painting. Very rapidly, while in Croydon, Lawrence was to find himself, through the initial publication of his fiction and poetry, thrust into a parallel world of the literary arts, introduced even as a genius by Ford Madox Hueffer. The liaison and flight to Europe with Frieda Weekley in 1912, combined with the growing reputation of his writing, completed Lawrence’s initiation into a cosmopolitan sphere at which, only recently, he had seemed to gaze from the outside. And in this life to come, as it turned out, ‘far more of Lawrence’s friends were to be painters than writers’ (Sagar 2003: 17). Lawrence thus quickly began to claim, in terms of status and belonging, what in Eastwood he had already insisted upon as the democratic entitlement conferred by increasing social mobility: the right to a discourse on painting. In the first instance of this discourse on painting, contained in Chapter VII, ‘Of Being and Not-Being’, of the Study of Thomas Hardy (completed in 1915 but posthumously published), it is therefore poignant to be reminded that Botticelli’s ‘Nativity of the Saviour’ is ‘in our National Gallery’ just as Correggio’s ‘Madonna with the Basket’ is ‘of the National Gallery’ (STH 66–7). Lawrence instructs his readers about the availability of the paintings, in a small but significant recognition that their location cannot be taken for granted. However, the manner in which Lawrence then takes critical possession of the paintings could not be further removed from the material constraints of time, space and money. The Study frames European art within a highly idiosyncratic narrative of religious and theological history, where Christianity represents the individualistic ‘male’ principle of a knowledge of God as ‘Not-Me’, in contrast with the prevailing ‘female’ and bodily Monism of Judaism and the Old Testament. While the work of Albrecht Dürer had expressed the latter in its ‘sense of Absolute Movement, movement proper only to the given form’, Lawrence detected a ‘great outburst of joy’, deriving from the ‘Greek stimulus’ in Renaissance painting, with a more scientific emphasis on relative movement ‘driving the object’ (66). What Lawrence saw, then, when he looked at Botticelli’s ‘Nativity of the Saviour’ (actually the Mystic Nativity as shown in Colour Plate 25) was the ultimate expression of the union of spirit and flesh, or of male and female principles:

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Still there is the architectural composition, but what 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, the earthly father, Joseph, is folded up, like a clod or a boulder, obliterated, whilst the Angels fly round in ecstasy, embracing and linking hands. The bodily father is almost obliterated. As balance to the Virgin Mother he is there, presented, but silenced, only the movement of his loin conveyed. He is not the male. The male is the radiant infant, over which the mother leans. They two are the ecstatic centre, the complete origin, the force which is both centrifugal and centripetal. (STH 66–7) This is clearly a practitioner criticism of sorts. Without explicitly attending to how paint is applied to canvas, Lawrence does alert us to the decisions made by Botticelli concerning spatial dynamics and modes of figuration. But equally clearly, the reading of the painting is iconographic: Botticelli’s compositional choices – the radiant infant, the cloddish Joseph – are referred onto the plane of Lawrence’s metaphysical schema. Thereafter, in Whiggish art-historical mode, Lawrence traces the ‘development’ in painting after Botticelli’s expression of ‘perfect religious art’ (STH 67). Correggio begins to embody a more secular realism: his Madonna is no longer ‘the great female mystery’ but rather an individual woman, drawn from his own experience, thus leading on to ‘the whole of modern art’ (68). In Raphael’s Madonna degli Ansidei (Colour Plate 26), however, ‘the child is drooping, the mother stereotyped, the picture geometric, static, abstract’ – the result, Lawrence claims, of Raphael’s inability to ‘find’ the joy of male movement circulating around the sacred female as represented in Botticelli’s balanced composition (STH 69). Raphael could only find in the idea of the Virgin as ‘essential female’ a negation (‘Such must have been his vivid experience’); yet, Lawrence asserts, this Raphaelesque geometrical variation on Botticelli comes to dominate Italian art after the Renaissance. The Study of Thomas Hardy is a boldly exploratory work, an early attempt at a metaphysic that Lawrence was to pursue throughout his writing. My account here does not fully encapsulate the often perplexing turns of the argument, and scholarship has yet to account fully for the sources informing Lawrence’s sense of a ‘fight against the body’ in European art or in what Jack Stewart has called an ‘ontotheology of body and spirit, light and darkness, that largely pre-empts formal aesthetics’ (STH 65; Stewart 2018: 162). My stress, for the purposes of this chapter, is on the impressive scale and critical confidence of Lawrence’s first foray into the evaluation of paintings. It bespeaks the seriousness of painting for Lawrence and his early milieu, such that, when he takes his own place in the world of art, a critical disposition is already well primed. This seriousness about painting is multi-dimensional. It is about the always-indexical value of paintings, pointing beyond technique and the canvas to the national cultures and states of civilisation or spirituality they encapsulate. There is, further, the seriousness of artistic purpose, voluntary or otherwise. In referring to Raphael’s ‘vivid experience’, ‘vivid’ is comparable to Lawrence’s use of the word ‘unconscious’ (Correggio ‘continued, unconsciously’, the movement from symbol to representation, leading to the ‘unconscious struggle’ of the entirety of modern art, between male and

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female principles), implying a fullness of experience without the necessity of conscious reflection (STH 67–8). The art history of the Study in effect supplies a strong metalanguage for the unconscious processes of artistic creation, based on the necessary assumption that the paintings can be taken as indices of historically and culturally grounded psychologies. Finally, these aspects of the seriousness of painting converge in the question of the relationship between art and religion. It need hardly be said that Lawrence is writing about religious paintings. Yet in his sweeping survey of the ‘development’ towards modernity it is noteworthy that philosophical and intellectual changes – the onset of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, for example, or of the Enlightenment – are invariably presented as expressions of more fundamental shifts in religious world-view: science, for example, as driven by the Christian search for knowledge as light, ‘the constant symbol of Christ in the New Testament’ (STH 82). Earlier in the essay, Lawrence seems to insist on ‘a fundamental, insuperable division, difference, between man’s artistic effort and his religious effort’: while the former seeks to symbolise that which the human soul ‘yearns for’, the latter is the utterance of knowledge of that which has been achieved (59). Yet this knowledge might itself be of a moment, such as that in Botticelli’s painting, where ‘the two wills met and intersected and left their result, complete for the moment’. Art, in other words, remains tied to the religious will. Lawrence’s first foray into painterly criticism in 1914–15 thus confirms, at the level of theory, the conviction more subjectively expressed in what was virtually his last, ‘Introduction to these Paintings’ in 1929, that ‘At the maximum of our imagination we are religious’ (LEA 193). Paintings, as I will go on to suggest, continued to carry for Lawrence the serious burden of responsibility for the religious impulse, though what counts as religious undergoes transformation in Lawrence’s hands. By way of comparison, the Christian theologian and art theorist Rowan Williams builds his 2005 study Grace and Necessity around the question of ‘whether there is an unavoidably theological element to all artistic labour’, for example through Jacques Maritain’s Thomist claim that ‘any visible or tangible object made by art, is already a metaphysical statement’ (2005: 5, 17). Wisely, Williams acknowledges at the outset that such a totalising and indeed involuntaristic theory risks seeming ‘hostile to the honest practice of art’ (4). Lawrence, we might say, from his early development as modest practitioner, copier of canvases, and as high theorist, could see both sides of this argument. Seeming to constellate all of the above, and as a kind of conclusion to this early phase of practitioner criticism on painting, is Lawrence’s response to Mark Gertler’s Vorticist work Merry-Go-Round (Colour Plate 31; also discussed in the chapters on ‘Sculpture’ and ‘Biofiction’ in this Companion). Lawrence had met Gertler at Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor in 1914, and in October 1916 received a photograph of the recently completed painting. In Keith Sagar’s view, the subsequent letter to Gertler is ‘a striking example of [Lawrence’s] ability to penetrate to the innermost meanings of paintings far removed from those he was to produce’ (2003: 18): Your terrible and dreadful picture has just come. This is the first picture you have ever painted: it is the best modern picture I have seen: I think it is great, and true. But it is horrible and terrifying. I’m not sure I wouldn’t be too frightened to come and look at the original.

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If they tell you it is obscene, they will say truly . . . But then, since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art – or almost the only stuff. I won’t say what I, as a man of words and ideas, read in the picture. But I do think that in this combination of blaze, and violent mechanical rotation and complex involution, and ghastly, utterly mindless human intensity of sensational extremity, you have made a real and ultimate revelation . . . I must say, I have, for you, in your work, reverence, the reverence for the great inarticulate extremity of art. (2L 660–1) Let us say, in critical dialogue with Sagar, that this is a discourse on art that claims the ability to penetrate to the innermost meaning of a painting. We see the moral weight of a vocabulary of the sublime that Lawrence already routinely deploys in response to art: ‘terrible’ and ‘terrifying’, ‘horrible’, ‘obscene’, ‘great’, and ‘true’. There is hyperbole here, but as the overstatement of an artist seeking to pay tribute to the authenticity and courage of a fellow artist, and in the context of a private letter in which bracing critical judgement can be shared without embarrassment or the constraints of politeness. The overt disclaimer as a ‘man of words and ideas’ does not really detain Lawrence. So, Gertler’s picture is great, because it is ‘terrible and dreadful’. The ‘innermost meaning’ to which Sagar refers is, however, entirely indexical rather than painterly: Gertler has revealed the out-of-control, rotational and yet static machine obsession and consequently the degraded sensuality of early twentieth-century Western civilisations. ‘Revelation’ thus also leads to ‘reverence’: Lawrence’s tribute to Gertler’s religious intensity – ‘you, in your work’ – is also a tribute to ‘the great articulate extremity of art’. With such a model of critique established, it is hardly surprising that, years later in 1926, after having finally started in on his own painting, and even arranging to have a proper studio easel made for him, Lawrence should wonder, ‘What will Gertler say’ (5L 606).

Later Painterly Criticism A long pause in critical engagement with painting follows the Hardy study, as outrage at the social and cultural devastation of the war and post-war led Lawrence’s philosophical work away from the field of culture and, more overtly, into speculation and theorisation around politics, education, mental and physical health and human physiology. A notable exception, in the years between 1917 and 1923, is the development of Studies in Classic American Literature. Lawrence’s only work of sustained literary criticism, Studies is prefaced and informed by a now-famous general aesthetic, ‘Art-speech is the only truth’ (SCAL 14), which became a keynote of Lawrence’s re-engagement with painting, when this was initiated in June 1925 with the essay ‘Art and Morality’. Written in the last months of the Lawrences’ residence at Kiowa Ranch in Taos, ‘Art and Morality’ is the first of a cluster of essays ostensibly on the subject of the modern novel (as discussed in Keith Cushman’s chapter ‘The Idea of the Novel’). David Ellis notes that the 1920s had seen an increasing critical disapprobation of Lawrence’s work, often revolving around the charge of immorality (1998: 249–50). Lawrence chose to respond to this criticism with some fundamental thinking about aesthetic criteria and his role as a novelist: what is art, what should it do, and what is its relation to questions of morality anyway? While four other essays on the novel were indeed written in 1925, it is significant that he began this process of reflection, in ‘Art and Morality’, with the medium of painting, because the crucial issues were

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‘easier to see in painting, to start with’ (5L 276). Immediately, the reader of the essay is immersed in the same questions of class and its relation to the impact of painting that had earlier preoccupied Lawrence. Characterising épater le bourgeois as a modernist fashion, with artists everywhere ‘running to put on jazz underwear’, Lawrence also notices that most people, not having learnt ‘the trick of being arty’, feel a ‘real moral repugnance’ towards paintings such as the still lifes of Paul Cézanne: ‘a water-pitcher and six insecure apples on a crumpled tablecloth’ (STH 163). But why, he asks, is it the moral instinct of ‘the man in the street’ that is aroused? Why can’t the said ‘man’ simply dismiss the picture as a ‘poor attempt’, a failure to make those simple objects lifelike – ‘I could do better myself!’? The answer proposed lies in the historical dominance of that relatively unexamined realist epistemology that Lawrence calls ‘Kodak vision’. Camera technology and its internalisation are not simply a very recent retooling of the human psyche, but a further development of the Christian impulse towards knowledge and science. The camera confirms the ‘slowly formed’ and ‘hard-boiled’ (say, hard-wired) habit of conviction that we can separate subject and object and register ‘real objective reality’ – the perception, that is, of the ‘All-seeing-Eye’ which had informed the painterly tradition itself in its move towards realism and the secular, ‘Giotto, Titian, El Greco, Turner, all so different, yet all the true image in the All-seeing-Eye’ (STH 166). Because this mode of vision has also determined the way we see ourselves, any departure from it is therefore morally offensive not only to our conceptions of the course of Enlightenment civilisation but also to the assumed integrity of the humanistic subject that underpins it. Paul Cézanne signals the first and most significant radical break from this condition of epistemological and ideological capture, and ‘Art and Morality’ is the first statement of Lawrence’s well-documented late endorsement of Cézanne’s painting (a famous example of his work is shown in Colour Plate 27). The immorality of this painting is precisely, in the crucial Nietzschean twist of Lawrence’s aesthetic thinking, what makes it a finer morality; and, as he wryly and approvingly notes at the outset, he had always found painters ‘far more morally finicky’ than the bourgeoisie (STH 163). Humans are in a relationship with the universe, rather than recorders of it; the moral function of art is ‘to reveal things in their different relationships’ (166). An apple might be a sin, or a knock on the head, or a belly-ache, or part of a pie, or sauce for the goose; it will differ also, Lawrence conjectures, for those non-human creatures with whom we share the universe: a thrush, a cow, a caterpillar, a hornet, or ‘a mackerel who finds one bobbing on the sea’. With Cézanne’s apples, ‘man is by no means the absolute’; compared to the ‘nailed-down’ fruit of the derivative painter Henri FantinLatour, a new relationship with the universe is proposed (168). Cézanne is not, however, the only ‘modern’ to contribute to this paradigm shift. In seamless continuation, the essay that follows in Lawrence’s notebooks, ‘Morality and the Novel’, begins by refreshing the same aesthetic formula – ‘The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment’ – and then finds this relation exactly as the ‘third thing’ achieved in Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers (171; see Colour Plate 29). In a vertiginous statement of his aesthetic which extends the critique of realist epistemology, Lawrence allocates painting-as-art to the ‘fourth dimension’, ‘utterly intangible and inexplicable’, and ‘incommensurable’ both with ‘Van Gogh as human organism’ and the ‘sunflower as botanical organism’.

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These essays of 1925 demonstrate the continuity of Lawrence’s nuanced and selfconscious thinking about painting and its relation to class and social life, adding into this frame the significance of experimental modernism for issues of visual literacy and aesthetic education. Movingly, they offer a defence of, and sense of identity with, the defamiliarising and counter-intuitive techniques typifying the struggles of Cézanne and Van Gogh against what Lawrence was later to call the ‘optical cliché’ (LEA 211). The ‘third thing’ in painting is precious, necessarily the result of continuous, implicitly religious striving, and never guaranteed: after ‘a fight tooth and nail for forty years’, Lawrence ventures, Cézanne succeeded in ‘knowing’ an apple and, ‘not quite as fully, a jug or two’ (202). Yet the essays also acknowledge the social formations of exclusivity that made painterly modernism unreadable and a source of moral suspicion: how is ‘being arty’ learnt, and how far might it constitute a ‘trick’? Lawrence could satirise middle-class philistinism, a somewhat easy target; but he too perhaps had been ‘the man in the street’, and knew the cost of the aspiration to escape. For this reason, the writing on Cézanne and Van Gogh is very far from a carte blanche for painterly modernism per se. Lawrence maintained, in particular, a pronounced critical suspicion about Cubist-oriented abstraction. In 1915 he had advised that the Bloomsbury artist Duncan Grant be persuaded out of it (2L 263), and seemed, as Ellis suggests, to be reminded of this following a visit to the studio of the Florentine abstractionist Alberto Magnelli in January 1927, delivering afterwards a withering assessment: Very clever work, quite lovely new colour and design, and inside it all, nothing – emptiness, ashes, an old bone. All that labour and immense self-conscious effort, and real technical achievement, over the cremated ashes of an inspiration! It put me in a vile temper, which I’m still in, and made me long for a bolshevik revolution, which won’t come. (5L 629–30) ‘[B]olshevik revolution’ may have a touch of flippancy, yet it also carries a charge about class and ownership. What if so-called new and experimental painting maintains the exclusivity of the art world by perpetuating professionalism and technique without creative and therefore moral substance? Revolution for Lawrence might consist not just in a common ownership of the artistic means of production, but also in the necessity of distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic painting, where authenticity is represented by the conscientious striving for and rare achievement of the ‘life’ of that third thing on the canvas. This of course is supremely difficult, given that we are all in the grip of the visual cliché in its association with the scientific ideology of modernity. Hence the concept of ‘the picture’ becomes, in ‘Art and Morality’, a peculiar conjunction of the real and the ‘nice’, at once a philosophical assumption and the source of our relentlessly anthropomorphic sentimentalism or kitsch commodification of the self: the Kodak snaps ‘your sweetheart, complete in herself, enjoying a sort of absolute objective reality: complete, perfect, all her surroundings contributing to her, incontestable. She is really a “picture”’ (STH 165). This critique underlines the ambiguity and instability of the relationship between ‘picture’ and ‘painting’ in Lawrence’s thinking about visual art. Even as he claimed to ‘verily believe’ that he was a maker of pictures, and insisted that ‘the art of painting

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consists in the making of pictures’ (LEA 229), his critical practice could suggest otherwise. Using ‘picture’ as a gesture of inclusivity, bringing ‘painting’ down to earth, could also reveal the susceptibility of the picture to aesthetic devaluation through the ease of mechanical reproduction and commodification represented by the camera as an instrument of democratic access to representation. Lawrence could therefore selfidentify both as a humble maker of pictures, an activity in theory open to anyone, and as a painter, for whom the stakes could not have been higher: an artist (of any kind) must be ‘pure in spirit’, and ‘can only create what he really religiously feels is truth, religious truth really felt, in the blood and the bones’ (229, 196). ‘Life’, therefore, both ‘third thing’ and spark of fourth-dimensional relatedness (does this numerical proliferation underline its elusiveness?), became in the 1925 essays the leading aesthetic criterion for Lawrence, combining religious impulse with vitalist philosophy. Arguably, it had been there much earlier, glimpsed in the ‘shimmer’ of the young Paul Morel’s sketches: ‘Only this shimmeriness is the real living’ (SL 183). How, then, could this not have constituted a pre-formed structure of self-evaluation when Lawrence’s own painting began, as it were, in late October 1926, and when this work was very soon caught up in the possibility of public exhibition, either in London via the offices of Dorothy Warren or in New York via those of Alfred Stieglitz? Nervily seeking Warren’s opinion in a first communication with her in 1928, Lawrence is nevertheless able to insist that his paintings are, highly distinctively, ‘organically alive and whole’, eschewing the trickery and smartness of ‘the modern’ and revealing its consistent failure to make a picture ‘live as a whole thing’ (6L 446). Stieglitz, the influential American modernist, is forewarned not to be alarmed, because ‘they’re quite good. Anyhow they contain something – which is more than you can say of most moderns . . . I know what I’m about’ (505–6). ‘I know they’re rolling with faults, Sladeily considered’, he writes to Mark Gertler: ‘But there’s something there’ (406). S. S. Koteliansky will, he predicts, ‘hate’ the paintings, despite the ‘certain something . . . that makes them good’; indeed the hatred might be the very proof of their something-ness: ‘People hate them so, there must be something in them’ (402, 378). ‘Something’ is ‘life’; Lawrence could not have persevered with his technically maladroit painting without the theoretical conviction that the painterly effect of the vital could be achieved outside of formal technique and training. ‘My paintings are alive’, he declaims, in the process of also insisting, to Koteliansky, that they are ten times better than those of Roger Fry (6L 564). Critics have consistently drawn attention to what Sagar calls the paintings’ ‘deficiencies of technique and particularly in anatomy’, their sins of disproportion identified in ‘seriously deformed’ bodies and ‘grotesque torsos’ (Sagar 2003: 67–80). David Ellis quietly attempts to link such disproportion to modernist anti-naturalism, yet still notes ‘obvious technical deficiencies’ and the fact, for example, that Lawrence was ‘without the resources’ to produce images in the manner of the Etruscans he so admired (1998: 357–8, 410). Yet Lawrence’s own criterion of vitalism has at the same time proved persuasive: Harry T. Moore argued that the paintings ‘depend upon their vitality to carry them beyond considerations of careless haste’ (1964: 18), while Herbert Read, a critical figurehead of painterly modernism, could discover that the paintings did indeed ‘achieve the quality that he himself most desired, vitality . . . one can admit that every picture lives – lives, as he said, “with the life you put into it”’ (1964: 64).

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Situated as it is, however, beyond technique, what does this admission amount to, and what does it allow us to say, further, about Lawrence’s paintings? The continuity so far traced between Lawrence’s practitioner criticism and his own painting allows us to see those paintings as part of the ‘fractured’, anti-totalising organicism outlined in Anne Fernihough’s unsurpassed study of Lawrence’s aesthetic. The ‘something’ that Lawrence required of art was also a fluency and indeterminacy of meaning, hence paradoxical as a theory or structure of interpretation: ‘his own model of the aesthetic rests on a kind of de-aestheticized art which is not guilty of coercing nature, or of sacrificing matter to spirit’ (Fernihough 1993: 190). And while this was pursued in part through an attack on Bloomsbury as the locus, in the form of Clive Bell and Roger Fry in particular, of a quasi-official aesthetic of formalism, it is the burden of Fernihough’s argument that Lawrence had far more in common with the aesthetics of Bell and Fry, particularly through their shared endorsement of the significance of Cézanne, than has been assumed. Fernihough’s view that it is ‘entirely inaccurate’ to see Lawrence’s hostility to Bloomsbury ‘in terms of a life–form distinction’ has been augmented by Sam Rose’s reassessment of what became in the period a ‘straw man’ of aesthetic formalism in general; Rose stresses instead the prominence of ideas of communication and intuition in formalism’s actual emergence as ‘a sustained communal engagement in criticism and aesthetic theory with the status of public, shareable meaning’ (Fernihough 1993: 99; Rose 2019: 12–13). The main repository of the ‘de-aestheticized aesthetic’ and of the attack on Bell and Fry is again the essay ‘Introduction to these Paintings’. Asked to write an introduction to the Mandrake Press edition of plates of his work, which would accompany the approaching exhibition, Lawrence chose to write nothing about ‘these’ paintings, but to offer instead a long and highly idiosyncratic art-historical narrative. Implicitly, he asks the reader to consider his paintings as historical entities in two ways: as an escape from the fear of the body and its sexual life, which had paralysed English and American painting since the spread of syphilis in the sixteenth century; and as sympathetically aligned with the radical break, once again, of Cézanne, whose apples were the first painterly sign ‘for several thousands of years’ that ‘matter actually exists’, and in a manner that was ‘neither optical nor mechanical nor intellectual’ (LEA 201, 211). He acquired via Koteliansky copies of Clive Bell’s Art (1914) and the more recent critical study, Cézanne: A Study of His Development (1927) by Roger Fry, quite overtly intending to make the essay a continuation of what I have called elsewhere ‘a kind of class war, fought around the ownership of, and access to, the languages of art criticism and art education’ (Wallace 2016: 3–4). Bell and Fry are anonymously mocked as ‘Primitive Methodists’ for their ideas concerning ‘aesthetic ecstasy’ and ‘Significant Form’, the objection relating to the ‘jargon’ of exclusion these terms represent: ‘a lot of jargon about the pure world of reality existing behind the veil of this vulgar world of accepted appearances, and of the entry of the elect through the doorway of visual art’ (LEA 200). It is likely that Bell’s nebulous and patrician tome would have been more rebarbative to Lawrence; Fry’s is, by comparison, a meticulously detailed study of Cézanne’s application of paint to canvas. While an emphasis on the ‘fundamental . . . organization of forms and the ordering of the volumes’ may have underwhelmed Lawrence, Fry’s chapter on the still lifes was surely close to the kind of attention to technique that Lawrence himself was always looking for when, through his copying as a mode of ‘close contact’ and ‘dwelling on’, he

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‘really learned what life, what powerful life has been put into every curve, every motion of a great picture’ (230–1). Fry, apologising for the ‘tiresome analysis’ of Cézanne’s Le Compotier (Colour Plate 27), which actually presents a remarkably detailed account of the relation between contour and hatching in the painting, nevertheless maintains that it is only through coming ‘to grips’ with the ‘actual material’ of paintings that we gain access to the ‘precise imprint’ of the artist’s ‘spirit’ – in Lawrence’s terms, ‘visionary awareness’ (Fry 1989: 49; LEA 230). The knowledge that education and privilege were still too closely entwined continued to impel Lawrence into suspicion of any professional painterly context, Bloomsbury or otherwise: ‘Sladeily’ in his letter to Gertler (above) was pointed, given that Gertler was trained at the Slade School of Art, and on reading Jan Gordon’s Modern French Painters (1922) in 1928, Lawrence wrote to Harry Crosby approving of the book, ‘even if he talks down to his reader as if to an eternal Slade student’ (6L 548). Yet, as I have suggested in my previous and more detailed treatment of ‘Introduction’, Lawrence’s address to the reader is equally open to the accusation of a closed approach to Cézanne’s painting, an alternative critical ‘jargon’ of authenticity founded precisely on its resistance to formal educability: is this, the ‘Introduction’ asks, one of the rare paintings that resists the optical cliché? Is it painted with the whole consciousness, or with the full intensity of the religious imagination? (Wallace 2016: 4). Perhaps Lawrence saw this paradox. In May 1929, to P. R. Stephensen, the Australian socialist editor at Mandrake whose radicalism had provoked, in correspondence, some passionate political exchanges, he wrote: I hope you are keeping the plates of the pictures, so we can publish a cheaper edition later on – for which, if you like, I can write a quite different introductory essay, more simple, more popular, and referring to the pictures themselves. That would make quite another book of it. (7L 300) What would this book have looked like? A version of it is surely ‘Making Pictures’, written during a short visit to Barcelona in April 1929 and after Lawrence had corrected the proofs for ‘Introduction to these Paintings’. Here, he recalls the painting of that first ‘real picture’ to emerge on Maria Huxley’s canvases, A Holy Family (Colour Plate 2): ‘In a couple of hours, there it all was, man, woman, child, blue shirt, red shawl, pale room – all in the rough’ (LEA 228). The painting is presented as evidence that ‘real physical action’ takes place only when instinct and intuition get ‘into the brush-tip’; Lawrence claims, by contrast, that his long experience ‘among painters and around studios’ convinces him that they know too much modern theory to be able to paint with the necessary feeling: ‘The modern theories of art make real pictures impossible.’ It is touching and ironic therefore to see in A Holy Family a compositional structure that clearly refers back to the medieval and Renaissance iconography that he had often copied in search of technique. Maria Huxley’s canvas was therefore never, as it were, empty – to paraphrase an argument of Gilles Deleuze’s, in which he draws on Lawrence’s ‘Introduction’ in order to suggest that the clichés with which Cézanne struggled were those that already fill the canvas for any painter, ‘before the beginning’ (Deleuze 2004: 87). In letters to his sister Ada and to Dorothy Brett in November 1926, Lawrence called his picture ‘nice’ and ‘modern’ – both terms, of

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course, highly problematic in statements of his own aesthetic elsewhere (5L 578, 585). Yet both equally help to capture the painting’s playfulness and irreverence: the child’s winsome smile at the moustachioed father, the pouting mother and the firmly caressed left breast. An alternative, ‘popular’ Introduction would surely have continued the combination of self-deprecation, ironic humour and sincere vitalist aesthetic (or antiaesthetic) that characterised Lawrence’s correspondence about the paintings. Part of the amusement, he confessed again to Ada, was in not quite knowing how to paint, and he remained open to technical advice from the likes of Earl Brewster (‘I love a bit of real advice’) about the mastery of proportion and perspective (5L 637). The failings in human modelling in his sequence of paintings after 1926 were so evident that, when things did happen to go right, there is marked critical agreement about the success, as in the case of Contadini (Colour Plate 8), his ‘most widely praised painting’ after Sunday Times critic Frank Rutter’s initial identification of it as ‘technically his best exhibit’ at the Warren Gallery in the summer of 1929 (Sagar 2003: 52; Levy 1964: 79). By contrast, Boccaccio Story (Colour Plate 3) gained notoriety entirely because of its scandalous treatment of its subject matter; the gardener, as Lawrence wrote to Spud Johnson, ‘with his shirt blown back from what other people are pleased to call his pudenda, and which the nuns named his glorietta. Very nice picture!’ (5L 600). Lawrence made no bones about hunting around or seeking suggestions for further subject matter for his paintings, religious or mythical, and it is this tendency, for critics such as Herbert Read and Jack Stewart, that ensured his work was detained in the literary rather than painterly domain (Read 1964: 63–4; Stewart 1999: 170–1). The perhaps surprising note of vulgarity around the sexualised body, which culminated in a reference to the Rape of the Sabine Women canvas as a ‘Study of Arses’, also threatens to trivialise or betray both the seriousness of his vitalist aesthetic and its associated critique of pornography as a mode of ‘doing dirt’ on sexuality (6L 353). The latter was precisely the motivating force behind Lady Chatterley’s Lover, whose composition and subsequent troubled publication history ran in parallel with the painting. My suggestion, however, is to see both as elements in a practitioner criticism strategically, if riskily, opposed to the ownership and professionalised exclusivity of discourses on art, counterbalanced in tension with the pursuit of that rare and vital ‘third thing’ on the canvas. Certainly, when Lawrence as a painter was faced with the publication and exhibition of his works, he could become highly professionally attentive, for example to the colour reproduction quality in the Mandrake edition – pointing out to Stephensen that Boccaccio Story had ‘gone very grey’, that the nuns should be silvery lavender and the trees pink (7L 279). What such considerations had to do with the required attainment of ‘life’ in the painting must, on Lawrence’s own terms, remain out of critical reach: as he noted to Stieglitz, ‘the meaning has to come through direct sense-impression’ (6L 506). Critics such as Sagar, committed to the sympathetic explication of Lawrence’s work, are left perhaps with the effort to conjoin, with delicacy, their own sense impressions with Lawrence’s aesthetic criteria in the evaluation of the paintings. Thus Sagar’s tentative approval of Dance-Sketch (Colour Plate 7) draws on the glimpse of an unusually clear linkage between painterly technique and metaphysic on Lawrence’s part. In a

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reminiscence after a meeting with Lawrence in January 1929, the American painter Brewster Ghiselin wrote: He himself was trying to find some expression in paint for the relations of things, he told me, perhaps by means of the touching and mingling of colors flowing from different things: as the color of the background, for example, approached any body it would diminish and take some of the color and quality of that body. (quoted in Sagar 2003: 63) Although it has been my aim throughout this chapter to characterise Lawrence’s practitioner criticism rather than to evaluate the paintings themselves, I cannot resist reinforcing here Sagar’s estimation of the beautiful painting Dance-Sketch. The ‘touching and mingling of colours’ between human and inhuman is discernibly part of its affect, along with a principle of movement similarly shared by human and inhuman, enabling the painting to transcend its literary origin (‘Adam and Eve under the tree of knowledge. God Almighty disappearing in a dudgeon, and the animals skipping’), and the optical clichés of realist figuration, along with its own technical ‘deficiencies’ in the realm of proportion (quoted in Sagar 2003: 63).

Conclusion Always a painter, even if never really a painter? I have tried to demonstrate a sense in which Lawrence was always, both intellectually and creatively, on the side of the painters rather than the picture-makers. Lawrence was a painter in his writing about painting, if not in his painting: the high seriousness with which he regarded painting, the empathy with painters, and the evidence of a visual or painterly imagination, all run though his writing. Yet when he began – almost inevitably, it seems – to paint, his technical limitations and literary preoccupations ensured that he remained, to critical eyes, a picture-maker. Nor could Lawrence ever remain haughtily dismissive of picture-making. The nature of his formation, his experience of the class parameters surrounding access to the paintings and the discourses of high art, and his subsequent wariness of academicism and technicality, shaped an aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, which insisted that the most humbly-wrought picture could contain the ‘something’, the spark of lively relatedness that made it art. This leaves us with a Lawrence perhaps necessarily suspended between an admiration of the aristocratic principle of individual painterly genius and a commitment to democratic inclusivity in both the production and the criticism of painting. Having known throughout his life that the discourses on painting remained entwined with issues of access and ownership, Lawrence’s own absence from the Warren Gallery exhibition in the summer of 1929, because of illness, seems more than poignant. There is, however, the story of 5 July 1929 related by Philip Trotter of the Warren Gallery. Just as the police were turning Contadini and Dance-Sketch to the wall, for the moral protection of the Great British Public, the Aga Khan appeared in the gallery. Meanwhile, a ‘shabby little man from Nottingham’ – in David Ellis’s words, ‘a far less socially distinguished visitor’ – had just been denied access to Contadini (Ellis 1998: 491; Sagar 2003: 73). Pointing his cane at the painting, the Aga Khan also requested to see the painting, his wish immediately granted by the police. ‘Then’,

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writes Trotter, ‘the Aga Khan signed the man from Nottingham to his side, and they enjoyed Contadini together’ (quoted in Sagar 2003: 74). Can we not say that at least one important, virtual version of Lawrence, a Lawrence that might-have-been, was present at the exhibition of his own paintings?

Works Cited Bell, Clive (1987), Art, ed. J. B. Bullen, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chambers, Jessie (1980), D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2004), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, London: Continuum. Ellis, David (1998), D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fernihough, Anne (1993), D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fry, Roger (1989), Cézanne: A Study of his Development, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Moore, Harry. T. (1964), ‘D. H. Lawrence and his Paintings’, in Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Mervyn Levy, London: Cory, Adams & Mackay, pp. 17–34. Read, Herbert (1964), ‘Lawrence as a Painter’, in Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Mervyn Levy, London: Cory, Adams & Mackay, pp. 55–65. Rose, Sam (2019), Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism, University Park, Pennsylvania, PN: Pennsylvania State University Press. Sagar, Keith (2003), D. H. Lawrence’s Paintings, London: Chaucer Press. Stewart, Jack (1999), The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Stewart, Jack (2018), ‘Chapter 16: Paintings’, in D. H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 161–70. Wallace, Jeff (2016), ‘Educability and Art: Lawrence, Paul Cézanne, Herbert Read’, Études Lawrenciennes, 47, . Williams, Rowan (2005), Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love, London: Continuum. Worthen, John (1991), D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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21 Book Design Jonathan Long

Is man nothing but a brainy child, amusing himself forever with the printed toys called books? (‘Books’, RDP 197)

Introduction

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f the many art forms with which Lawrence engaged, he is least known for his interests in design, which include illustrations for autograph albums and letters, and decorations on windows, doors and furniture as well as on boxes, wooden bowls and push plates for doors, plus tapestries and even models in plasticine (Kohno 2004: 4–146; Ellis 1998: 177). Particularly in his later years, Lawrence was also much concerned with the design of his books, the subject of this chapter. There were few books in the Lawrence family homes for him to read as he was growing up, but he became an avid reader, selecting books each week from the Mechanics Institute Library in Eastwood. There is no evidence of his interest in the design of books at that time, just of the wide range of their subject matter (Worthen 1991: 120–3; Long 2016).1 His love of books soon manifested itself in his generous gifting of books (and as his own books were published he had author’s presentation copies to give away) – those that survive are usually attractive publications, not dull productions. There is an extraordinary variety, including those on the Ajanta Frescoes given to Ottoline Morrell, of which he writes ‘I loved them’ (2L 488); those on the Bagh Caves, inscribed to Millie Beveridge – ‘very attractive’ (6L 72); and a copy of the German verse satire Plisch und Plum given to the Wilkinsons – ‘very nice’ (144). However, for much of his life his opinion about the appearance of his own books was typically inconsistent. In ‘The Bad Side of Books’, the introduction to Edward D. McDonald’s 1925 bibliography of his work, Lawrence wrote of his lack of interest in the physical substance of a book – ‘Books to me are incorporate things . . . What do I care for first or last editions? . . . To me no book has a date, no book has a binding’ – and referred to books dismissively as ‘paper and rag’ (IR 75–6). Yet in his letter to McDonald, thanking him for his copy of the book, Lawrence wrote that he liked it ‘very much indeed: to look at and to touch’ (5L 272). We know that Lawrence kept copies of some, if not all, his books, and his letters record his pleasure with the appearance of some of them. For example, he described an edition of his poetry collection Pansies (privately printed by Charles Lahr, 1929) as ‘very nice, on vellum’ (7L 579). And he thought that the first edition of his story The Escaped Cock (The Black Sun Press, 1929) was ‘very nice’ and ‘very beautifully done’ (531, 532). As Paul Poplawski has observed in his essay on Lawrence’s complicated

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relationship with books, as expressed in ‘The Bad Side of Books’, ‘His books, it seems, have become associated with bitter memories for him and, in particular, with memories of his mother’s death’ (2010: 190). Despite this complex background, Lawrence, as an author of increasing standing, later came to influence the appearance of his books to some extent. I shall examine how he contributed personally to their design and how he involved others in the process, benefiting particularly from the enterprising editorship of Thomas Seltzer and promoting the talents of his artistic friends, culminating in expensive privately printed publications.

Lawrence’s Publishing Career During Lawrence’s lifetime over forty of his books were published, most of them in English as well as American editions. In England the books were mainly published by Heinemann, Duckworth or Martin Secker, in nearly every case with very plain dust jackets and in standard bindings with no illustrations or decorations within the text. His first novel was a notable exception: the front board of The White Peacock (Duffield & Company, 1911) is boldly embossed with a spread white peacock (Figure 21.1). But overall the impression they present is of Lawrence as a respectable and serious contributor to modern literature, an impression that Secker in particular would have been keen to foster after the prosecution of The Rainbow in 1915. In America, most of

Figure 21.1 The front board of the first edition of The White Peacock (1911), published by Duffield & Company (New York), designer unknown.

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the earlier volumes were published by Kennerley or Huebsch, and were generally similar in appearance to the English editions. The breakthrough for Lawrence, in terms both of the design and the numbers of books sold, only came in 1920 when Thomas Seltzer became his main publisher there (see Long 2015).2 In tracing the evolution of Lawrence’s involvement in the design of his books, it will be apparent that his greatest input was related to books that were not published by mainstream publishers but were privately printed in limited editions (usually because they would be difficult to publish, a feature of the later years of his life). This reflects the facts that for much of his life he was very poor and his books were not sold in sufficiently large numbers for him to have much influence on their design. He was solely dependent on his income from writing and financial assistance from friends and family. However, with the considerable growth in his success that took place in the Seltzer years, he was able to have increasing influence on Seltzer over how his books looked. This involved not just his contributions in various aspects of book design but also the participation of some of his artist friends in the design of dust jackets and provision of illustrations. That continued until 1925 when Seltzer got into financial difficulties and Alfred A. Knopf took over publication of Lawrence’s books in America. Throughout Lawrence’s writing career he found resistance from publishers to what he wanted to say. This varied from changing a few words, as happened with Heinemann and his first novel, The White Peacock (1911), to the omission of some poems from a poetry collection, as happened with Chatto & Windus and Look! We Have Come Through! (1917), to a complete rejection on the grounds the work was unpublishable, as with Methuen and Women in Love (1920) following its prosecution for publishing The Rainbow (1915). In between these extremes came Sons and Lovers (1913), where Duckworth’s reader Edward Garnett required the text to be cut by about a tenth. All these examples demonstrate how weak Lawrence’s position was in relation to the text, let alone his ability to direct the design of his books. Yet it was with Sons and Lovers that Lawrence could have had some influence on the latter and all but turned the opportunity down. There are some gaps in the story, but it is clear that Garnett asked Lawrence to design the dust jacket (or ‘wrapper’ as it was known then) with a colliery theme, including a notice (or ‘blurb’ as we would call it now), a task he described as ‘a damned nuisance’ (1L 529). He was in Italy at the time and this was the first of a number of occasions when he involved a young artist in the design of his books, in this case Ernest Collings, with whom he had been corresponding and by whose work he was impressed. The design was not accepted by Duckworth, which issued the dust jacket in two unillustrated variants, one with and one without the blurb, the text of which was probably composed by Lawrence.3 In recounting these events it is important to remember that the use of dust jackets, other than to provide protection for books from dust on the bookseller’s shelf, was in its infancy. They were not intended to be kept after the books had been sold. Lawrence’s sister Emily threw away the dust jackets that came with the presentation copies he sent to her of virtually all his books.4 Generally speaking, books produced in the UK did not have illustrated dust jackets until the 1920s, reflecting improvements in printing techniques, and Lawrence was to benefit from this significant marketing development. Over time there was an increasing interest in the appearance of a book: more attractive fonts were being used, designs on cloth bindings were becoming more elaborate, some of them pictorial, and now illustrated designs in colour were appearing on dust jackets

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too, all part of the look and feel of the book, part of the reader’s experience. The events surrounding the publication of Sons and Lovers suggest that Garnett had been trying (without success) to persuade Duckworth to bring his sales promotion methods in line with the latest innovations. The first illustrated dust jacket in Lawrence’s case was for The Rainbow; it was also arguably the most controversial. Although the blurb on it may (we cannot be certain) have been written by Lawrence, he had no other input on its design – the dust jacket was similar to Methuen’s for Conrad’s Victory (1915). It features a stylised image of a man holding a woman painted by Frank Wright, a romantic scene in a farm building having little if any connection with the content of the book, certainly none with its modernism. It would be much more fitting for the Victorian ‘potboilers’ that Lawrence despised. He described it as ‘a vile cover wrapper’ (2L 406). When he finished writing the book he wrote a letter to Viola Meynell with a drawing, which would have been a much better design for the dust jacket, featuring a harvested field, a colliery scene, factories and a town, all under a rainbow.5 In the letter he said that he was ‘off and away to find the pots of gold at its feet’ (299). The fact that he did not, because of the prosecution, was to change his approach to his market-place radically. Lawrence’s objectives were twofold: first to see in print all that he had written, not an edited or censored version of it, and second to earn a living from his writing. In February 1916 Lawrence and the composer Philip Heseltine conceived the idea of ‘a private publishing concern, by subscription, to publish any real thing that comes, for the truth’s sake, and because a real book is a most holy thing’ (2L 532). The first book they intended to publish was The Rainbow and the venture was known as ‘The Rainbow Books and Music’. This was the title of a circular that Heseltine funded to encourage support for the publication of books and musical works that ‘would either be rejected by the publisher, or else overlooked when flung into the trough before the public’ (542). Unfortunately there were only thirty replies from the 600 leaflets distributed and so Lawrence’s first attempt at private printing without recourse to publishing houses in order to gain control over the production and distribution of his work had failed. Following the suppression of The Rainbow Lawrence initially found it very difficult to get his work published, not assisted by the paper shortages of the First World War (Long 2015). However, Chatto & Windus published his poetry collection Look! We Have Come Through! in 1917. There was nothing exceptional about the design of the book, but the dust jacket was revolutionary, reproducing an avant-garde drawing by American artist Edward McKnight Kauffer, who was to become highly regarded among other things for his poster art and book illustrations. The two are combined in the distinctly modernist design of this dust jacket, showing in abstract form ‘two figures walking briskly’ (3L 184), arguably incongruous in view of the love poetry in the book, but equally reflecting some of the tensions within it. In an early endorsement of the marketing potential of dust jackets, the publishers wrote to Lawrence that ‘We believe that the cover will create some interest . . . and it struck us as likely to attract the eye to the book, which is the main purpose of a cover of this kind’ (184), and recording that Lawrence was ‘so pleased with the appearance of [his] book’ (186). Lawrence’s reputation as the author of a banned book meant that he would find it very difficult to get Women in Love published, let alone ordered by the lending libraries that purchased so many copies of books that their approval was essential for

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financial success. He felt let down by Methuen for offering no defence to its prosecution for publication of The Rainbow, and his next attempt at private publication was to offer Women in Love to Cyril Beaumont, a small-scale London publisher. Beaumont operated from Charing Cross Road and his biggest publishing project was his series of beautifully produced limited editions of new work written by modern authors, the best known being Richard Aldington’s Images of War (1919), with coloured woodcut illustrations by Paul Nash. Having no agent to promote his work at the time, Lawrence wrote to Beaumont himself in February 1918, his letter demonstrating a direct engagement with a publisher in the face of severe financial difficulties and an urgency to see what he perceived to be his best work in print: ‘though I am hopelessly hard up, yet I would dearly like to see this book in print, to have it off my hands, and safe . . . I have no qualms about the merit of the book’ (3L 212). The plan came to nothing in the absence of financial backers, but Lawrence pursued a more modest project with Beaumont: the publication of his small collection of eighteen poems, Bay (1919). He told Lady Cynthia Asquith, to whom the collection was to be dedicated, that it would be ‘hand-printed and beautiful’ (287). Lawrence had been impressed with Beaumont’s work, seeing the verse, prose and picture anthology New Paths that he published in May 1918. The anthology contained hand-coloured illustrations by American-born artist Anne Estelle Rice and according to its statement of limitation was printed on ‘finest cartridge paper’. It contained two of Lawrence’s poems, and on receipt of his copy Lawrence told Beaumont: ‘very handsome it is to look at and touch and handle – something really clean and fresh in this world of frowsty books’ (3L 263). This was the standard that Lawrence would have been expecting for his poetry collection, but the publication of Bay was beset by significant delays and errors – even one of the engravings (also by Rice) was upside down (the illustration for ‘Last Hours’ in Colour Plate 13), testing Lawrence’s patience to its limits as the extended correspondence with Beaumont testifies (for a full account see Cushman 1988 and Cushman 2009). Yet, in my opinion, it is among the best produced of Lawrence’s works. This was his first fine press book, eventually published in November 1919, limited to 200 copies with decorative paper boards incorporating a bay leaf design, with 120 copies on hand-made paper, fifty copies on cartridge paper and thirty copies printed on Japanese vellum. The latter were also signed by Lawrence (the first of ten titles that he signed), marking his first foray into the ‘Expensive Edition Business’ (Worthen 1996). It was not a happy experience: among other issues the dedication to Cynthia Asquith was missing and had to be tipped in, and Rice’s Fauvist illustrations generally do not fit the poems (these are shown in Colour Plates 11–20) – Lawrence described them as ‘pretty bad: no good at all’ (3L 366). Lawrence had mixed views about the way the poems had been presented: his letter to Beaumont on receipt of his copy uses words such as ‘charming’, ‘awfully pretty’ and ‘quite beautiful’, but was fundamentally a lengthy reprimand for the various errors (3L 465). And he only received £10 for all his efforts with the edition. Perhaps the experience would have been a happier one if Lawrence had been allowed to have some input into the process, but the bigger issue was that he did not like the illustrations. Surprisingly, in the same letter in which he scolded Beaumont he was suggesting a further collaboration, such was his attraction to the potential of this way of producing books.

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The Seltzer Years From 1920 to 1925 Seltzer was Lawrence’s publisher in America, transforming book sales there through the bold marketing that he undertook (Long 2015). This was most visible on the front of the dust jackets that were produced for most of the Lawrence titles he published, but was also implemented through the extensive use of blurb on the back, quoting as many favourable reviews about Lawrence and his books as he could reasonably fit in. The impressive designs on the front included many specially commissioned for Lawrence’s books. The Seltzer dust jackets came in three categories: those in which Lawrence had no involvement, those produced by artist friends of Lawrence with him playing a part, and those that Lawrence designed himself. Mention should also be made of Tortoises (1921), which had no dust jacket but had decorated boards (protected by a glassine wrapper) featuring an unknown artist’s copy of a Hiroshige print (Figure 21.2). Other than the fact that the design is dominated by a tortoise, it has little to do with the six tortoise poems in the book, the tortoise being suspended by a rope and looking across the water towards Mount Fuji. Lawrence’s only surviving comment on the book is that he found it ‘handsome’ (4L 157). Another Seltzer title on which Lawrence had no design input was the trade edition of Women in Love (1922). Lawrence hated its dust jacket. It was cream paper printed in red and black with a design featuring a woman’s head with streaming hair, and the

Figure 21.2 The front board of the first edition of Tortoises (1921), published by Thomas Seltzer, featuring an unknown artist’s copy of a print by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858).

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title, relative to its serious content, in an inappropriately stylised font (Figure 21.3). He described it as ‘a terrible wrapper’ (4L 335). By contrast, Lawrence was closely involved in the design of his travel book Sea and Sardinia (1921), both for the Seltzer first edition and for the Secker first English edition. The book was the product of Lawrence’s visit to Sardinia in January 1921 and his collaboration with a young artist named Jan Juta, who was to provide illustrations for the book. The plan had been for Juta and Lawrence to visit Sardinia together, making the collaboration an even closer one. Lawrence had initially been sourcing photographs for the book as well (including the opening section set in Sicily), one of which survives, as do all of Juta’s paintings used for the book illustrations (held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin). In the event, the photographs were not used and Juta visited Sardinia separately. More significantly, Juta’s paintings can best be described as stylised impressions of the island, not representations of specific places mentioned in Lawrence’s text, painted without even reading it (Cushman 2005: 290). In addition, they are only of Sardinian scenes, and significant parts of the book relate to Lawrence’s travels before and after his visit there. As the illustrations were in colour, Lawrence had to be at his most persuasive to get his publishers to pay the additional cost of having colour illustrations printed, but he appears to have been pleased with the outcome, telling Seltzer that ‘I think the pictures have come out well – only the reds a bit weary (Figure 21.4). I do hope Juta will be pleased’ (4L 157). Overall the project was a significant one, the number of colour illustrations (one used for the dust jacket as well) adding significantly

Figure 21.3 An unknown artist’s dust jacket design for Thomas Seltzer’s trade edition of Women in Love (1922).

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Figure 21.4 The dust jacket designed by Jan Juta (1895–1990) for the first edition of Sea and Sardinia (1921), published by Thomas Seltzer. to the production costs of the book, demonstrating that Lawrence had sufficient faith in a young artist to commission his work before either Secker or Seltzer had agreed the concept of colour illustrations, and showing the influence he had in the final design of the book – he even drew the map for it. Perhaps he also persuaded Secker to have a similar dust jacket for the book as Seltzer, each using one of Juta’s colour illustrations. There is a sharp contrast between the standard dust jacket that Secker was using through most of the 1920s and what Seltzer was producing during his all too brief period as Lawrence’s American publisher until 1925. There is no evidence of Lawrence trying very hard to alter Secker’s design of a cream dust jacket, generally with little on it other than the title of the volume and the name of the author on the front and a list of some of Secker’s other books on the back. Typically, the bottom of the front of the dust jacket included three or four lines about the book, mainly to draw the potential purchaser’s attention to other books by Lawrence that he may have come across, thereby attracting the purchaser to this new work. For example, the dust jacket for St. Mawr (1925) has the blurb ‘Containing two novelettes, St. Mawr and The Princess, which readers of “The Ladybird” will enjoy’. That for the latter (1923) reads ‘“The Ladybird,” Mr. Lawrence’s most recent volume of fiction, contains also two other stories, The Fox and The Captain’s Doll’. The dust jacket for The Boy in the Bush includes no blurb at all. Probably Secker’s limited boundaries were pushed the most in this series with the dust jacket for The Lost Girl (1920), where the blurb was only as adventurous as to read ‘This novel was recently awarded the Tait Black prize for the most distinguished work

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of fiction produced in 1920’. In complete contrast, most of Seltzer’s dust jackets were pictorial, the one for The Lost Girl (1921) being an exception. There is no evidence that Lawrence was involved in the design of Seltzer’s next publication of his work, Aaron’s Rod (1922). The dust jacket, printed in black and red, features a representational rendering of a flute and stylised leaves, with no indication as to who created it (Figure 21.5; contrast the Secker version in Figure 21.6). We do know that he approved of this relatively straightforward design, though, as he told Seltzer that the ‘book looks so nice’ (4L 260). He did seek to play a major role in Seltzer’s next three titles with illustrated dust jackets, The Captain’s Doll, Studies in Classic American Literature and Kangaroo, all published in 1923. Lawrence had met the artists he referred to as ‘the Danes’, Knud Merrild and Kai Gøtzsche, in late 1922. He was aware of their poor financial circumstances, and pressed Seltzer to commission Merrild to do some artwork, writing to Seltzer that Merrild was ‘a very clever designer . . . I want you to let him design my book-jackets; and do some wood-cuts for Birds Beasts – pay the ordinary price . . . he has a great sense of beauty, and is modern’ (345). Accordingly, Merrild received detailed instructions from Lawrence and submitted designs for the dust jackets for all three books, but only the one for The Captain’s Doll was accepted.6 The quirky but simple design that Seltzer chose for Studies was another printed in black and red, with the title and author’s name in a variety of letterings, and the last letter of the title dropped to the next line. The illustration appears to show an inkwell and two quill pens but is quite abstract. This contrasts with the design submitted, presumably with Lawrence’s approval, which featured a jumble of letters,

Figure 21.5 The dust jacket designed by an unknown artist for the first edition of Aaron’s Rod (1922), published by Thomas Seltzer.

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Figure 21.6 The dust jacket designed by an unknown designer for the first English edition of Aaron’s Rod (1922), published by Martin Secker. figures and other things, each with a significance to the book’s contents. Merrild’s surviving designs for Kangaroo all featured a kangaroo occupying most of the page. Again, in sharp contrast, the accepted design is of a liner leaving port, being waved off by a crowd, the lettering not dissimilar to that used in the Aaron’s Rod dust jacket, but the rest of the design is much more colourful and accomplished. Even more accomplished is the dust jacket for The Captain’s Doll, which credits Merrild as the artist on the front, in a surprisingly large script, and is dominated by a colourful interpretation of the eponymous doll (Figure 21.7; see Cushman 2003 for a full account). The circumstances surrounding the design of the dust jacket for Seltzer’s next publication for Lawrence in 1923, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, were quite different. Although, as mentioned above, Lawrence wanted Merrild to design his dust jackets generally and some illustrations for this book in particular, in the end there were no illustrations. Seltzer had his way and never adopted Lawrence’s idea of including Merrild’s illustrations in a subsequent ‘decorated edition’ either, even though Lawrence offered to pay the cost (4L 406). There was no illustrated edition until the posthumously published Cresset Press edition referred to below. Sketches by Lawrence for illustrations and dust jacket – which he described as ‘very nice’ (526) – survive, but the dust jacket design that was adopted is quite different (Kohno 2004: 61–3; Lacy 1976: 58–9). It is cream or tan paper printed in black, or black and blue (there are variants), featuring (from top to bottom) drawings of an eagle with a snake, fruit, some trees, a fish, a woman under a tree bearing fruit (clearly Eve), a dog, a bull, and further leaves and flowers (Figure 21.8). Most, if not all, of these elements are representative of what is in the book, with their iconography somewhat

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Figure 21.7 The dust jacket designed by Knud Merrild (1894–1954) for the first American edition of The Captain’s Doll (1923), published by Thomas Seltzer.

Figure 21.8 D. H. Lawrence’s dust jacket design for the first edition of Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), published by Thomas Seltzer.

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unorthodox due to its conflicting messages.7 It is quite possible that the design was influenced by some of the illustrations in Mrs Henry Jenner’s Christian Symbolism (1910) in which Lawrence found inspiration for his phoenix symbol (2L 252–3, n.5). Lawrence also enquired about cover designs for a chapbook of the section of the book entitled ‘The Evangelistic Beasts’, but it was never published (4L 123–4). Seltzer’s final publication for Lawrence in 1923 was Mastro-don Gesualdo, this time with the dust jacket designed by Gøtzsche, with his initials appearing on it. The vibrant dust jacket is printed on white paper and reproduces his painting of a man and a woman in Italian peasant clothing, with a donkey in the background and cacti in the background and the foreground (Figure 21.9). In an entirely different way it also reflects the contents of the book and also received Lawrence’s seal of approval: ‘very nice indeed’, in the same letter asking Seltzer rhetorically about his design for Birds, Beasts and Flowers ‘Isn’t my jacket nice too?’ (4L 526). The next two Lawrence titles with illustrated dust jackets were The Boy in the Bush published by Seltzer in 1924 and The Plumed Serpent published by Knopf in 1926. The dust jackets for each were in substance designed by Dorothy Brett, her name appearing on both. As with the male artists he had so far promoted, Lawrence was keen for Brett to succeed. Her memoirs record how much they painted together in New Mexico, and the logical next step was a dust jacket commission. As he wrote to Seltzer on her sending him a jacket design for The Boy in the Bush: ‘I hope you like it – I do – and that it comes well in time’ (5L 32–3), although not long after Lawrence

Figure 21.9 The dust jacket designed by Kai Gøtzsche (1886–1963) for the first edition of Mastro-don Gesualdo (1923), published by Thomas Seltzer.

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had modified it into the black and pale blue version that was used, proudly describing his work as ‘very effective’ (37). Occupying most of the area of the dust jacket is a young man (presumably Jack Grant) leaning against a squat palm tree, with a stooping kangaroo behind it, the title to the bottom left and the authors’ names to the top right.8 It is a quirky image but not well-executed (Figure 21.10). Somewhat more effective was Brett’s design for The Plumed Serpent. It is reproduced on white paper, printed in red and black, and features four Mexicans wearing large sombreros, the most prominent of them very appropriately having an image of Quetzalcoatl (similar to that appearing in the Codex Borgia) on the front of his clothing (Figure 21.11). There is not much evidence about Lawrence’s input and opinion, but there is one letter in which he said that he liked it ‘so much’ (5L 392). It is also worth mentioning here Brett’s role in the production of Secker’s only illustrated dust jacket on a Lawrence first edition, that for Mornings in Mexico (1927). As with his previous travel book, Sea and Sardinia, Lawrence was keen to see photographs with his text, but he was unable to persuade Secker to take on the additional cost in their letters between November 1926 and May 1927. From the earliest correspondence he was also keen that his drawing ‘The Corn Dance’ should be used, although Secker used a version of it on the dust jacket and not in the book as Lawrence wished (581). The drawing, showing in representational style two Pueblo Indians, a woman dancing behind a man, was executed by Lawrence initially for periodical publication, but the less accomplished version on the dust jacket is from a copy made by Brett. In either version, it is hardly eye-catching in the way Seltzer’s jackets were as marketing tools (Figure 21.12).

Figure 21.10 The dust jacket designed by Dorothy Brett (1883–1977) for the first American edition of The Boy in the Bush (1924), published by Thomas Seltzer.

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Figure 21.11 The dust jacket designed by Dorothy Brett (1883–1977) for the first American edition of The Plumed Serpent (1926), published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Figure 21.12 D. H. Lawrence’s dust jacket design for the first edition of Mornings in Mexico (1927), published by Martin Secker.

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The ‘expensive editions business’ At the time Seltzer’s publication of his work came to an end Lawrence was, through financial need, becoming more interested in the ‘expensive editions business’ (Worthen 1996). He was learning that collectors were prepared to pay premium prices for his work if it was published in limited editions, particularly if they were finely printed and designed and/or signed by him. Seltzer had himself privately printed the first edition of Women in Love in 1920 in an edition of 1,250 copies, a few of which Lawrence signed. Early examples from this period were Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (1925) published by the Centaur Press, which had published the Lawrence bibliography, David (1926) published by Secker, Sun (1926) published by Charles Lahr under his wife’s name Esther Archer, and Glad Ghosts (1926) published by Ernest Benn. Lawrence had no particular input into the design of those that we are aware of, but he did in the best-known example, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), privately printed in Florence under his direction. Lawrence found this format to be a means to getting published what the mainstream publishers would not or could not publish due to its content.9 Although (with the subsequent Paris edition) it was his most profitable undertaking, it was also his most time-consuming, completely dominating his correspondence for many months. Working with Pino Orioli, he was involved in every stage of the publication, from commissioning the Florentine firm Tipografia Giuntina to print leaflets announcing the book, as well as order forms and the book itself, to masterminding its sale and distribution. He also chose ‘the very nice paper’ (6L 401) and appears to have chosen the binding – ‘still haven’t got a cover-paper – want to find a good red – phœnix in black’ (371). There were 1,000 copies of the first edition, all signed by Lawrence. It was bound in mulberry-coloured paper boards with the phoenix he had designed printed in black on the front and the title and author’s name printed on a white label on the spine. Later in 1928 Lawrence brought out a cheap paper issue of the book, in substance the same as the first edition but in mulberry-coloured paper covers and with only 200 copies printed (Colour Plate 21). The phoenix was a symbol that Lawrence had identified with for many years and drawn rough versions of before (see above); he drew this version of it for the printer (known as the ‘Lawrence phoenix’ – see e.g. Roberts and Poplawski 2001: 138–9). Orioli had it cast for the printing process (6L 329) and it was used in other books. For example, it appears on the label affixed to the front pastedown of the 200 special copies of The Story of Doctor Manente (1929) published by Orioli, printed on handmade paper (produced by the Italian specialist paper manufacturer Binda) and signed by Lawrence. There were three further (highly significant) new titles privately printed in Lawrence’s lifetime, all in 1929: The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, Pansies and The Escaped Cock. The first was a lavishly produced oversize volume published by P. R. (‘Inky’) Stephensen’s Mandrake Press, containing reproductions of all twenty-five of the paintings listed in the catalogue of the Warren Gallery exhibition, plus ‘Summer Dawn’. The Lawrence phoenix appeared on the front cover of the book as well as on the title page, and on the back of the prospectus for the book, which proudly announced that the book was ‘beautifully printed in 18-point Garamond type. The binding in quarter Morocco.’ He provided the drawing used in the colophon (Figure 21.13), featuring a naked man and woman facing each other, in what the American poet Brewster Ghiselin described as ‘a kind of complicated electric field’ (7L 135). The second, Pansies, has a particularly complicated publication history, the first edition being produced by Secker in limited

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Figure 21.13 D. H. Lawrence’s design for the colophon in The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, published by P. R. (‘Inky’) Stephensen’s Mandrake Press (1929). edition special copies, signed by Lawrence, with red, yellow and blue decorative paper boards. But this was an expurgated edition, and Lawrence sought publication of the unexpurgated version through Charles Lahr, Stephensen’s name being used as the printer. There were ordinary copies with stiff white paper wrappers, printed in red and black on the front and special copies, most of them bound in pale blue leather flexible boards, printed in blue and stamped in gold on the front. Both versions were housed in slipcases and were signed by Lawrence. The title page included a small Lawrence phoenix, with a self-portrait frontispiece opposite (reproduced opposite 7L 291). There were also laid paper copies to be sold on the Continent, simply bound in pink stiff paper covers. Despite his contributions to the design, Lawrence opined that ‘they’ve made rather an awful book of it’ (407). Finally, The Escaped Cock was Lawrence’s second venture with Harry and Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press, the first being an unexpurgated highquality edition of Sun published in 1928, featuring as a frontispiece Lawrence’s colourful representation of a sun god (the design for which is reproduced opposite Sagar 1980: 129 – see Colour Plate 22). The Black Sun Press edition of The Escaped Cock also included watercolours by him: motifs for the beginning and the end of each half of the book and a frontispiece, probably representing the ‘man who died’ and Isis (reproduced opposite Sagar 1980: 129). The book was printed on Holland Van Gelder Zonen paper (Japanese vellum for special copies) and housed in a handsome slipcase. Sadly, Lawrence did not live to see in print one of the most attractive editions of his work, the Cresset Press Birds, Beasts and Flowers, published in 1930 and beautifully illustrated with wood engravings by Blair Hughes-Stanton, whom he knew through Frieda’s

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daughter Barby and whose work he was seeking to promote (see 7L 503; Cushman 2010). Lawrence wrote section introductions for each of the nine groups of poems, having offered a ‘new foreword, on the essential nature of poetry or something like that’, adding that ‘you must work for the limited-edition people now – it’s the only way to make money’ (457). Nor did he live to complete his most accomplished travel book, Etruscan Places, published by Secker in 1932 with twenty of the photographs that Lawrence wished to be published with the completed work (SEP xxxii–iii; ‘many photograph reproductions’, 5L 461). However, these examples demonstrate Lawrence’s variety in his contribution to book design. His brief attempt to set up ‘The Rainbow Books and Music’ was no match for the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, nor was his contribution to book design as significant or as well-known as theirs. But while the signs of Lawrence’s interest in the appearance of his books were slow to appear early in his career, they developed into active involvement in the Seltzer years, really developing in his last years with expensive limited editions. These enabled him to publish his controversial work and to sell it at prices much higher than mainstream publishers’, using much more costly production methods and modern(ist) designs: illustrations, especially in colour, fine bindings, handmade paper, all in signed, limited editions for the collectors’ market. He had achieved his objective of making money, but at the cost of his readership being limited (at least for his more controversial work) to those with deep pockets.

Notes 1. The survival of Lawrence’s Easter term 1900 form prize (held at Nottingham High School) may suggest an early attraction to beautifully bound books. Coincidentally, the large paper copies of Movements in European History (1925), clearly intended as school prizes, are also bound in blue cloth boards, stamped in gold. 2. See Long (2015), which is illustrated with copies of the covers of many of the English and American first editions of Lawrence’s books. 3. Harrison describes Lawrence’s role in the marketing of the novel in detail and reproduces his sketches for the dust jacket design (2009: 27) and the text of the blurb (29–30, also at 1L 529 n.4). The designs are also reproduced in Kohno 2004: 48 and the dust jacket for the first American edition, with an extended blurb, is reproduced in Simon Finch 2002: 6. 4. Private conversation between the author and Emily’s daughter Peggy Needham. 5. This and several other dust jackets that I shall describe are reproduced in colour in Roberts and Poplawski 2001 and/or in Simon Finch 2002. The dust jacket and the blurb are reproduced opposite Sagar 1980: 128, with the drawing reproduced opposite p. 84. 6. Merrild tells the story of the production of these sketches and Lawrence’s close involvement in it (1938: 96–8) as well as Seltzer’s response (122–3). Lacy reproduces sketches by Merrild of the dust jackets for Kangaroo (1976: 49) and Studies in Classic American Literature (59, incorrectly attributed to Lawrence). It also contains monochrome reproductions of most of Seltzer’s dust jackets for Lawrence titles. Simon Finch 2002 item 54 is a further sketch by Merrild of a dust jacket for Kangaroo. 7. For interesting interpretations of the designs see Cushman 1999: 38–9 and Hyde 1992: 144–7 (although she provides no evidence for her assertion that one design was for the Secker dust jacket). 8. Lawrence also submitted a draft design to Secker, reproduced in Kohno 2004: 84. It features a man (probably Jack) bowing to a kangaroo, and is crudely drawn, although Lawrence described it as ‘rather nice’ (5L 34). The book title appears down the left-hand side, with the authors’ names along the bottom. It is not clear why Lawrence submitted it when Secker was continuing to use his uniform dust jackets.

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9. Generally speaking, Secker and Knopf continued to publish Lawrence’s other work together with expurgated editions of his controversial work, in unspectacular formats with uniform dust jackets.

Works Cited Cushman, Keith (1988), ‘Bay: the Noncombatant as War Poet’, in The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Gamini Salgado and G. K. Das, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 18–198. Cushman, Keith (1999), ‘Lawrence’s Dust-Jackets: A Selection with Commentary’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 28:1–2, pp. 29–52. Cushman, Keith (2003), ‘Lawrence and Knud Merrild: New Materials, New Perspectives’, in D. H. Lawrence New Worlds, ed. Keith Cushman and Earl G. Ingersoll, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 68–95. Cushman, Keith (2005), ‘Lawrence, Jan Juta and Sea and Sardinia’, in D. H. Lawrence: Literature, History, Culture, ed. Michael Bell, Keith Cushman, Takeo Iida and Hiroshi Tateishi, Tokyo: Kokusho-KankoKai Press, pp. 285–315. Cushman, Keith (2009), ‘Lawrence at Bay: “Hand-Printed and Beautiful, 7/6 a Copy”’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 2:1, pp. 103–23. Cushman, Keith (2010), ‘Lawrence, Blair Hughes-Stanton and the Cresset Press Birds, Beasts and Flowers’, Études Lawrenciennes, 41, pp. 115–46. Ellis, David (1998), D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Andrew (2009), ‘Dust-jackets, Blurbs and Forewords: The Marketing of Sons and Lovers’, in New D. H. Lawrence, ed. Howard J. Booth, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 17–33. Hyde, Virginia (1992), The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence's Revisionist Typology, Pennsylvannia: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Kohno, Tetsuji (2004), The Collected Artworks of D. H. Lawrence, Tokyo: Sogensha. Lacy, G. M., ed. (1976), D. H. Lawrence Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press. Long, Jonathan (2015), ‘D. H. Lawrence and Book Publication During the Great War: A Study in Stagnation’, Études Lawrenciennes, 46. Long, Jonathan (2016), ‘Lawrence and His History Books: From Reader to Writer’, Études Lawrenciennes, 47. Merrild, Knud (1938), A Poet and Two Painters, London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd. Poplawski, Paul (2010), ‘The Front Ears of Fiction, the Backside of Books: Lawrence’s Response to A Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence (1925) by Edward McDonald’, in ‘Terra Incognita’ D. H. Lawrence at the Frontiers, ed. Virginia C. Hyde and Earl G. Ingersoll, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 183–94. Roberts, Warren and Paul Poplawski (2001), A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sagar, Keith (1980), The Life of D. H. Lawrence, London: Eyre Methuen. Simon Finch Rare Books Ltd (2002), D. H. Lawrence An Exceptional Collection of First Editions, Autograph Material, Manuscripts, Original Paintings, Photographs and Associated Items, Simon Finch Catalogue 51, Simon Finch Rare Books Ltd. Worthen, John (1991), D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worthen, John (1996), ‘D. H. Lawrence and the “Expensive Edition Business”’, in Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, ed. I. Willison, W. Gould and W. Chernaik, London: Macmillan, pp. 105–23.

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22 Sculpture Jane Costin

you know that the perfect statue is in the marble . . . But the thing is the getting it out clean. (2L 146)

Introduction

L

awrence was born into an era of turmoil regarding sculpture. From soon after the Renaissance, interest in this art began a steady decline to such an extent that, as Stanley Casson put it, ‘The sterility of the art of sculpture during the last half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century is a phenomenon almost without parallel in the history of art’ (1928: 30). In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the British ‘New Sculpture’ movement, led by Alfred Gilbert and Sir Hamo Thornycroft R. A., sought to overthrow this torpidity, and combat elitism, by working with architects to embellish buildings, their aims being to create mass-produced artworks that incorporated symbolist imagery depicting the human psyche. However, while Thornycroft was lauded for The Mower (1884), shown in Figure 22.1, and The Sower (1885–6), both portraying working-class men going about their business, the movement failed, the aims of ‘New Sculpture’ proving its downfall. Regrettably, by 1901, ‘The female nude in sculpture had become the victim once more of the cryptopornographic silliness from which the New Sculptors had rescued it in the 1880s’ (Beattie 1983: 232–3). But Casson considered that this malaise was caused not only by the subject matter, but also by the method of working; ‘the handing over of a plaster model to be “pointed” in stone by assistants’ (1928: 7). The Romans devised this mechanised, mass-production technique to satisfy their demand for Classical Greek sculpture that was made by individual sculptors working directly with their materials. But Classical Greek sculpture was both slow and costly to produce. Following the Renaissance, this ‘pointing technique’ became the dominant method used to create sculpture, and by the eighteenth century was regarded as the ‘traditional’ way to make sculpture. But Casson saw this ‘traditional’ method of making sculpture as ‘alien to the love of the material which should be in the heart of every true sculptor’. It also seems significant that the marked decline in interest in sculpture coincided with the increasingly widespread adoption of the ‘pointing technique’. General interest in sculpture was re-ignited, but only when sculpture became more exciting, and more controversial, as it did in the early decades of the twentieth century. A triumvirate of avant-garde sculptors working in England, Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, began producing work which shocked and enthralled the public. For example, the theme of Epstein’s ‘traditionally’ created sculptures for the

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Figure 22.1 Sir Hamo Thornycroft (1850–1925), The Mower (1888–90). Bronze. 58.5 x 33.0 x 18.5 cm. © Tate, London. British Medical Association building on the Strand in London (1908) prompted a public scandal that spilled into the press and drew crowds of spectators to the site, viewers being both enthralled and appalled by the nude sculptures that represented all stages of human life from birth to death.1 Epstein’s tomb for Oscar Wilde (1912) again caused a furore because of its subject matter, but also because of its revolutionary method of creation. For while these sculptors drew on inspiration from many sources including nature and ‘primitive’ sculptures from Africa, what finally set them apart was their commitment to a different way of producing sculpture – direct carving. This technique marked a return to Classical practice but one which Casson recognised as ‘the way forward’ (1928: 7). The epigraph to this chapter, describing Lawrence’s work on The Rainbow, draws on a famous statement by Michelangelo about his Classical method of working, that was revived by practitioners of direct carving. Lawrence’s long-lasting relationship with sculpture reflects this important connection between Classical and modernist ideas and shows how he, along with modernist sculptors, rejected the traditionally, mass-produced efforts of their immediate forebears.2 Lawrence’s interest in sculpture was instigated by Classical works such as the ancient Greek sculpture Laocoön and his Sons (also discussed in Susan Reid’s chapter ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ where it is shown in Figure 2.1) and Michelangelo’s David, yet his responses to these works articulate modernist sculptural ideas. His family owned Richard Garnett’s The International Library of Famous Literature (1899), which contained a photograph of Laocoön together with a 4,000-word extract from Gotthold Ephraim

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Lessing’s treatise on the work, Lawrence mentioning this sculpture in his letters (1L 136–7, 3L 64), in an essay ‘Art and the Individual’ (1908) and in Women in Love (284–5). Significantly, Lessing’s treatise was influential in shaping thinking about the relationship between the verbal and the visual, ideas which, as will be discussed, interested both Lawrence and Gill and underpin the epigraph above. Lawrence’s responses to Michelangelo’s work, in his poem ‘Michael Angelo’ (c.1911) and his essays ‘David’ and ‘Looking Down on the City’ (c.1919 or 1921), all put forward the modernist concept of sculpture as creation that, as we will see, was also advocated by Gill. But the antecedents of the epigraph demonstrate how this modernist idea reflects Classical thinking about sculpture. Indeed, Lawrence’s own limited attempts at sculpture indicate his modernist tendencies. At the end of his life, in February 1930, Lawrence asked for some clay to make some little animals (Nehls 1959: 433), which recalls his portrayal of the small modernist sculptures that Gudrun creates in Women in Love. Lawrence’s earlier attempt to make sculpture was more productive. In December 1923, as part of a group effort to depict the Garden of Eden in plasticine, Lawrence produced ‘a very red Adam’ and a ‘paler’ ‘plump little Eve’ (Carswell 1981: 197; Brett 1933: 28–9). This indicates the influence of his close friend, the avant-garde painter Mark Gertler, and his work The Creation of Eve (illustrated in Colour Plate 30), which, as will be explained, provided inspiration for Will Brangwen’s sculpture of the same name in The Rainbow. The epigraph to this chapter also makes an important statement about how Lawrence viewed his literary practice that links to modernist thinking about sculpture and the connections between words and images, ideas that can be seen in The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920). Therefore, this chapter will focus on Lawrence’s relationship with modernist sculpture and, in attempting to convey a sense of his web of sculptural connections, will outline Lawrence’s knowledge of some contemporary artistic movements that include his connections to Vorticism. Looking at Lawrence’s re-imagining of two of Mark Gertler’s paintings, The Creation of Eve and Merry-Go-Round (see Colour Plate 31), into sculptures in these novels also suggests that Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the leading Vorticist sculptor and ‘one of the most inventive, forward-looking sculptors anywhere in Europe’ (Cork 2009: 129), was a more significant influence on Women in Love than has hitherto been recognised. This chapter will also consider the idea, suggested by the epigraph, of the interrelatedness of the verbal and the visual arts, and conclude by briefly considering Lawrence’s influence on Barbara Hepworth.

Direct Carving The modernist sculpture that Epstein, Gill and Gaudier produced was rooted in Expressionism and the significance of sculptural form but was shaped by their commitment to direct carving. Their chosen material dictated what form could be created, and the process of chipping away to ‘release’ the sculpture within influenced the final form of the sculpture; one slip of the chisel could irredeemably change the work, hence Lawrence’s awareness of the necessity for ‘getting it out clean’ (2L 146). Indeed, the epigraph to this chapter indicates that Lawrence saw his work on The Rainbow as being similar to this creation of sculpture. His allusion to direct carving suggests his

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empathy with Gill’s idea of the sculptor bringing forth something living out of the material, as expressed in Gill’s account of carving his first female nude in 1909: I touched my lover’s lovely body, I insisted on seeing her completely naked . . . so my first erotic drawing was not on the back of an envelope but a week or so’s work on a decent piece of hard stone . . . Lord how exciting! – and not merely touching and seeing but actually making her. I was responsible for her very existence and her every form came straight out of my heart. A new world opened before me . . . A new alphabet – the word was made flesh. (MacCarthy 1989: 96) Aside from its obvious sexual dimension, this passage denotes Gill’s interest in the slippage between the verbal and the visual, sculpture creating a new alphabet and the word becoming flesh. Later, Gill called this the sacredness of workmanship, an idea that Lawrence endorsed in his late review of Gill’s Art Nonsense and Other Essays (c. February 1930), crediting Gill with promoting this ‘invaluable truth for humanity . . . of which Mr Gill is almost the discoverer’ (IR 357). Fiona MacCarthy observes that, in a largely negative review, these remarks pleased Gill, who admired Lawrence as an honest and courageous man (1989: 257). But much earlier, we can see similarities with Gill’s thinking – and the passion, verging on the sexual, involved in that creation – in Lawrence’s description of Will Brangwen carving his Eve in The Rainbow: With trembling passion, fine as a breath of air, he sent the chisel over her belly, her hard, unripe, small belly. She was a stiff little figure, with sharp lines, in the throes and torture and ecstasy of her creation. But he trembled as he touched her . . . He trembled with passion, at last able to create the new, sharp body of his Eve. (112–13) This shows Lawrence’s parallel ambition to, as MacCarthy puts it of Gill, ‘break through the boundaries between verbal and visual expression’ (1989: 257). Stuart Sillars suggests something similar in his discussion of Will’s carving, observing that it ‘occupies a central place in the symbolic and literal narrative dynamic of The Rainbow’ (1999: 193). Viewing this sculpture as embodying ‘the couple’s dark, intense feeling for each other and the manner in which they seek to create and destroy each other’s spirit’, Sillars considers that Will’s carving exemplifies how ‘the larger symbolic current is frozen for an instant to make it visible for those who may see it’ (200). In other words, Will’s sculpture gives a physical shape to the symbolic theme in Lawrence’s prose. Direct carving was brought to prominence by Constantin Brancusi around 1906 and, together with the mantra of truth to materials, became a defining characteristic of modernist sculptors’ work because it shaped the kinds of sculpture they were able to produce: usually simple, often highly abstract, forms that respected the material from which they are made. This distinctive style of sculpture, and the unorthodox artists who produced it, made a significant impact on public consciousness. Brancusi met Epstein in Paris in 1912 and Gaudier in London in 1913 (Cork 2010: 101, 74). Lawrence moved in various artistic circles that included Gill and Epstein. For example, Edward Marsh admired Gill’s work and purchased some pieces in 1913 and 1914. Later, in August 1920, Lawrence met Gill at Jan Juta’s house in Anticoli when Gill was

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one of the people bathing naked in the fountain there (3L 587). Lawrence’s obvious regard for Epstein’s opinion on Gertler’s painting Merry-Go-Round (2L 661) points to an earlier relationship that is not explained, but Lawrence would have had many opportunities to meet Epstein at the Café Royal, a place they both frequented when in London. In addition Epstein was initially championed by Lawrence’s friend Ezra Pound (before he became even more enthralled by Gaudier). Epstein too was a close friend of Lawrence’s good friend Gertler, another sculptor and an intimate friend of Gaudier – all of whom frequented the Café Royal. As we will see, Lawrence’s connections with these avant-garde artists are of great importance when considering the development of his thinking about sculpture.

Gertler In 1914, Gilbert Cannan introduced Lawrence to Gertler, who had met Marsh and Gaudier the previous year (Hassall 1959: 232). Gertler had recently completed his controversial painting The Creation of Eve and it is clear Lawrence saw either this painting, or an image of it, because of the striking similarities between it and his description of Will Brangwen’s carving of the same name in The Rainbow: He was carving, as he had always wanted, the Creation of Eve. It was a panel in low relief for a church. Adam lay asleep as if in suffering, and God, a dim large figure, stooped towards him, stretching forward His unveiled hand; an Eve, a small, vivid, naked female shape, was issuing like a flame towards the hand of God, from the torn side of Adam. . . . There was a bird on a bough overhead, lifting its wings for flight . . . He trembled with passion, at last able to create the new, sharp body of his Eve. (112–13) Both the painting and Lawrence’s description of the carving contrast the ‘dim[ness]’ of God, and implicit darkness of Adam’s suffering, with the brightness of Eve. In his painting, Gertler places his diminutive Eve in the centre, her light colour drawing a viewer’s gaze before taking in the much larger red-skinned Adam and dusky God set against richly coloured surroundings reminiscent of a medieval mille-fleur tapestry. In both an exotic bird perches in a tree, Lawrence’s suggestive of readiness for flight. While the inequality, here in size, between Eve and the male figures has a Biblical precedent, as discussed by Shirley Bricout in her chapter on ‘Biblical Aesthetics’, in Gertler’s painting and Lawrence’s novel this is challenged. In an episode that leads to Will destroying his sculpture, Anna criticises him for making Adam ‘as big as God’ and yet Eve is ‘so small’ and ‘like a little marionette’, thus diminishing the role that women play in creation (162). In Gertler’s painting the inequality in size and the ‘flame’ of Eve’s hair as He pulls her from Adam’s side may suggest the male control that Anna alludes to in her criticism of Will’s carving. But Gertler problematises this interpretation by the overt sexuality signified in the fork of Eve’s splayed legs and her revealed vagina at the centre of the painting. Similarly, in The Rainbow, Lawrence eroticises Eve’s sculptural image by his description of Will’s ‘trembling passion’ in creating her, which hints at the sacredness of workmanship discussed earlier and points towards the complexity of female identity and sexuality that Lawrence explores in his portrayal of Anna.

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In the summer of 1916, Gertler began talking excitedly about becoming a sculptor. In October of that year, he shocked and delighted Lawrence with a photograph of his latest painting, Merry-Go-Round, which Lawrence declared was ‘the best modern picture I have seen’ (2L 660). However, he was less enthusiastic about Gertler’s plan to make a carving of the painting, which he felt was ‘going too far – over the edge of endurance into a form of incoherent, less poignant shouting’ (661). Later, Lawrence stated more clearly that he viewed painting as ‘so much subtler than sculpture’, which he saw as ‘unsubtle’ and ‘obvious’ (3L 46), but this may also have been his attempt to dissuade an enthusiastic friend from undertaking an over-ambitious project. If so, Lawrence’s caution proved well-founded, for once Gertler began carving the stone he realised ‘it is a greater job than I thought and will take a long time’ (1965: 132–3). Sarah MacDougall observes that time was a critical factor for Gertler, sculpture usually being more time-consuming than painting and so less remunerative. Therefore, she considers that the sculpture Epstein records Gertler abandoning after ‘four or five day’s [sic] strenuous work’ was most probably this one of Merry-Go-Round (2002: 146). Indeed, as Lee M. Jenkins observes in her chapter on ‘Lawrence in Biofiction’, it would be Lawrence, not Gertler, who ‘imaginatively recast’ this painting into ‘sculpture’ as the basis of Loerke’s frieze in Women in Love. Leading Vorticist Percy Wyndham Lewis’s painting Kermesse, which Lawrence may have seen in the second number of Blast (1915), could also have contributed to his description of the frenzied characters in Loerke’s frieze (Katz-Roy 2006: 251), although J. B. Bullen suggests other possible sources (2003: 842–4). Interestingly, Lawrence’s insistence that this was going to be a granite frieze is unrealistic as a frieze would be carved in softer stone. Granite is too hard a stone to be carved intricately by hand, as both Gaudier and Henry Moore found to their cost. The granite-dominated landscape of West Penwith made a deep impression on Lawrence’s imagination while he was writing this novel (Costin 2012: 162–3). Therefore Lawrence may have overlooked granite’s properties or, as is discussed later, this could be a criticism of the Deutscher Werkbund. While Gertler abandoned his plans to make a sculpture of Merry-Go-Round, he returned to an idea that possibly first emerged in 1915, that of acrobats.3 Sarah MacDougall (private correspondence) and Susan Reid note that Gertler’s enthusiasm for sculpture was probably sparked by Gaudier’s sculpture Wrestlers, exhibited at the Allied Artists exhibition in London in July 1913 (2015: 120). Reid also observes Sarah Victoria Turner’s identification of the Edwardians’ ‘near-obsession with wrestling’ and considers that this also gives some context to Lawrence’s interest in wrestling and his chapter ‘Gladiatorial’ in Women in Love. Gaudier was introduced to wrestling in the winter of 1912–13 by Charles Wheeler and became fascinated by it; apparently he ‘revelled in the athletic physique and movements of the wrestlers’ (Silber 1996: 36), possibly seeing the sport as ‘a virile and violent form of male dance’ (Gayford 2015). Strong interest in sporting subjects and circus figures was also prevalent among many of Gaudier’s and Gertler’s contemporaries.4 But it seems that this passion for wrestling was particularly rife among the pugnacious Vorticists (Black 2007: 90), and Gaudier made several pieces exploring the theme of two wrestlers locked in combat, which he sold through the Omega Workshops (MacDougall 2002: 146). While Gertler’s idea for a sculpture of The Acrobats may have emerged in 1915, the bronze version (shown in Figure 22.2) was not cast until July 1917. Therefore, the

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Figure 22.2 Mark Gertler (1891–1939), Acrobats (1917). Bronze. 59.7 x 41.9 x 37.5 cm. © Tate, London. editors of Lawrence’s letters are mistaken when they suggest that this was the version he refers to in April 1917 (3L 109). MacDougall explains that Gertler first made a small sculpture in plasticine, probably of a single figure, which was completed by the time Frieda came to visit on 15 September 1916 (Gertler 1965: 127). Then, by 13 November of that year, Gertler had made a larger sculpture in clay of two figures,5 which prompted Lawrence’s comment, ‘Kot told me you had done your first Sculpture – The acrobats. I wonder how you like it, what you think of it’ (3L 27–8). Following this clay version, Gertler made a wooden version of The Acrobats during January 1917, which he then painted, rather as Gudrun paints her wooden sculptures (WL 94). It was this wooden sculpture (now lost) that was shown at the Sixth London Group exhibition (26 April–26 May 1917) alongside Gertler’s painting Merry-Go-Round. It was also this version which Frieda saw in March 1917 when she visited Gertler’s studio, and which Lawrence refers to in his letter of 1 April 1917: ‘I think the wrestlers interesting: but sculpture never quite satisfies me. It is not sufficiently abstracted. One resents the bulk, it frustrates the clarity of composition’ (3L 109).6 Here, Lawrence’s comments about Gertler’s realistic sculpture seem to point towards his greater appreciation of the more abstract forms created as a result of direct carving by avant-garde sculptors such as Gaudier.

Sculpture and Architecture During the time Gertler was creating his various versions of The Acrobats, Lawrence wrote to him, in December 1916, making two significant comments about sculpture.

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The first was his surprise that it was regarded as ‘the lowest of the arts’ and the other was his opinion that ‘Sculpture, it seems to me, is truly a part of architecture’ (3L 46). Here, Lawrence’s thinking seems close to that of the avant-garde sculptors Gill, Epstein and Gaudier; indeed, his second statement mirrors Gaudier’s statement about the proximity of sculpture and architecture (see also Sarah Edwards’s chapter on ‘Architecture’ for its significance in Lawrence’s work). Gaudier made his view clear in his review of the 1914 Allied Artists Exhibition, blaming critics for ignoring the fact that ‘sculpture and architecture are one and the same art’ (Pound 1974: 30). Lawrence’s letter expresses the same sentiment, which he also mirrors in Women in Love when the German sculptor Loerke states ‘Sculpture and architecture must go together. The day for irrelevant statues . . . is over. As a matter of fact sculpture is always part of an architectural conception’ (424). In Lawrence’s portrayal of Loerke, Bullen shows Lawrence’s engagement with contemporary ideas about sculpture by identifying two aesthetic principles discussed in Women in Love. The first is ‘aesthetic formalism with its separation of art and life’ as espoused by Roger Fry and Clive Bell (Bullen 2003: 842, 845). This is an important theme in the discussion between Loerke, Gudrun and Ursula about his statuette of ‘a naked girl, small, finely made, sitting on a great naked horse’, which Loerke claims is ‘quite an early thing—not mechanical . . . more popular’ (WL 429). Bullen explains how Lawrence’s detailed description of this work must have been drawn from Josef Moest’s sculpture Godiva (1906), suggesting that Lawrence had a photograph of this work and may have met Moest in Gargnano in Italy (2003: 845). The other principle is ‘concerned with the sympathetic relationship between art and the machine’ which Bullen associates with Loerke and the Deutscher Werkbund (Bullen 2003: 843–4). This movement, which Lawrence probably encountered in Germany, was derived from the British Arts and Crafts movement and tried to engender a symbiotic relationship between the arts and industry, most notably in the creation of sculpturally embellished model factories.

Futurism and Deutscher Werkbund Loerke’s pronouncement in Women in Love that ‘machinery and the acts of labour are extremely, maddeningly beautiful’ (424), as the editors of the Cambridge Edition note, is reminiscent of Futurist ideas (578). This has led many critics to associate Loerke with the Italian Futurist movement. For example, Andrew Harrison cites Scott Sanders’s work which suggests that Loerke, ‘with his love of machinery and his deification of industry, could be taken as a satirical portrait of the Futurist’ (2003: 127). Harrison quotes other critics who also suggest that Lawrence uses the character of Loerke to put forward Futurist theories of art and that he represents ‘the epitome of what Lawrence dislikes in art’. But Harrison resists the temptation to label Loerke a Futurist, pointing out, ‘even the most cursory reading of the text complicates and upsets this picture’, and he is careful to draw attention to Lawrence’s comment that Loerke ‘was not satisfied with the Futurists’ (WL 448). Instead, Harrison sides with the editors of the Cambridge Edition of Women in Love, who consider that Loerke’s aesthetic draws most heavily on the pre-war Werkbund movement (WL 578), as exemplified by Loerke’s observation ‘There is no need for our places of work to be ugly, but their ugliness ruins the work, in the end’ (424). Harrison points out that Lawrence knew a German sculptor who did ‘big reliefs for great, fine factories in Cologne’ (3L 46) and was ‘almost certainly . . . a member of

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the Werkbund circle’ (2003: 128). Bullen names this sculptor as Gerhard Marcks (2003: 844). Bullen considers that Loerke’s statements about work and ‘serving a machine’ (WL 424–5) ‘sound very much like ideas drawn from Futurism or Vorticism’ (2003: 842). But he observes that Loerke’s statement that ‘Sculpture and architecture must go together’ (WL 424) ‘slightly shifts the focus’. Therefore, like Harrison, Bullen associates Loerke with the Werkbund rather than the Futurist movement, particularly because this statement is voiced by a German sculptor (448) rather than an Italian one. Indeed, Lawrence’s time in Germany and his association with Marcks, whose work adhered to Werkbund principles (Bullen 2003: 844), does seem to be reflected in Loerke’s nationality, his work on industrial friezes and his pronouncements about improving the built industrial environment, which all indicates the sculptural attributes of architecture.

Loerke, Epstein, Gaudier and Vorticism However, while Loerke’s statement that sculpture and architecture must go together does, as Bullen suggests, shift the focus, this is not only towards the Werkbund movement. As we have seen, Loerke’s statement is the exact point that the Vorticist sculptor Gaudier made in his 1914 review and Lawrence reiterated in his 1916 letter to Gertler. These shared views provide a compelling link between Gaudier and Women in Love. Furthermore, Loerke has many of Gaudier’s attributes including animal-like characteristics, experience of extreme poverty, the ability to speak many languages and Vorticist principles. Ginette Katz-Roy also points to Lawrence’s Vorticist sympathies in her observation that his adverse criticism of Boccioni’s The Development of a Bottle through Space (STH 75–6) acts to reveal ‘how indebted Lawrence was at the time to Vorticists who accept geometry, hence the creation of autonomous forms, but refuse movement and the study of mechanical forces, hence pseudoscientific schematization’ (2006: 265). While Loerke’s plans to create a ‘great granite frieze for a great granite factory in Cologne’ (WL 423) sound typical of the Werkbund movement, the impossibility of executing this project perhaps acts to question this association. Furthermore, Loerke’s insistence on the closeness in artistic practice between sculpture and architecture gives voice to Gaudier’s – and Lawrence’s – avant-garde ideas. These new notions of sculpture challenged those established in antiquity that had been revived by the ‘New Sculpture’ movement at the end of the nineteenth century and then adopted by the Werkbund: the idea that sculpture should embellish architecture. Instead, they are drawing attention to the similarities between sculptural and architectural practice in terms of the consideration of masses, the observance of form, and the relations of planes and the effects of light on a structure, so demonstrating the architectural attributes of sculpture. This emphasis, and its fundamental importance to Vorticist sculpture, was reiterated in Gaudier’s article ‘Vortex Gaudier Brzeska’ for the 1914 edition of Wyndham Lewis’s short-lived Vorticist magazine Blast, of which Lawrence received advance information (Katz-Roy 2006: 252). This article references both domestic and wild animals in setting out Gaudier’s overview of the history of sculpture throughout the world, but begins by

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stating Vorticist sculptural principles and their connection to architecture in terms of an emphasis on masses and planes: ‘Sculptural energy is the mountain. Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation. Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes’ (Gaudier-Breszka 1914: 155). Gaudier’s principles also further distanced him, and thereby Vorticist sculpture, from the ideas of Clive Bell, who is commonly recognised as introducing the idea of significant form in his treatise Art (1914). However, Bell’s ideas rely on how ‘lines and colours combined in a particular way’ (3), whereas Epstein was more concerned with form and mass. Indeed, Pound credits Epstein with being ‘the first person who came talking about “form, not the form of anything”’ (Cork 2010: 119). In 1911, after he became friendly with Epstein, Gaudier made his first move away from Bell’s ideas by announcing that ‘form and mass rather than subject matter, colour and line must be the basis for his aesthetic philosophy’ (Silber 1996: 76). Gaudier’s adherence to these aesthetic principles is best demonstrated by his sculpture Birds Erect (1914), shown in Figure 22.3, the last large-scale work Gaudier completed before he joined the French army and was killed in the trenches in 1915. Thus it represents his most developed utterance of Vorticist sculptural aesthetics and demonstrates his concerns with the closeness of sculpture and architecture specifically in terms of masses, forms, planes and light.

Figure 22.3 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915), Birds Erect (1914). Limestone. 67.6 x 26.0 x 31.4 cm. Digital image © Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

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Birds Erect demonstrates Gaudier’s enduring interest in the animal world and can usefully be compared to Epstein’s Doves (1914–15), which was carved around the same time.7 Both are direct carved into the stone and so are easily recognisable as examples of the modernist sculpture that interested Lawrence. But there are significant differences between the two pieces in terms of intent and execution, which mark the distinctions between these two sculptors and show how Gaudier’s Vorticist sculpture, his adherence to his aesthetic philosophy, and his preoccupation with form and mass, more closely parallel Lawrence’s views on the closeness of sculpture and architecture. Epstein’s sculpture, depicting a pair of copulating birds, is more realistic and shows his interest in exploring sexuality and procreation. But Birds Erect, Gaudier’s most abstract sculpture, discards reality and concentrates on his aesthetic philosophy of form and mass. The asymmetry of this sculpture is pronounced, resulting in a tension and rhythm in the piece that strengthens and animates the work by giving it a strong upward thrust. This iconic Vorticist sculpture rewards close study in the round with an awareness of the relationship between the light and the sculpture. Birds Erect is the Vorticist sculpture that best illustrates Gaudier’s aesthetic philosophy and his – and Lawrence’s – belief in sculpture being ‘truly a part of architecture’.

Women in Love and Vorticism There is no evidence Lawrence ever met Gaudier or Epstein, although they had a strikingly large number of friends in common, moved in the same social circles and frequented the same public spaces, most notably the Café Royal, a place famous for its artistic clientele and intense, often violent, debates about contemporary art (Deghy and Waterhouse 1955: 125–6). Yet, from evidence in Women in Love, it is apparent that Lawrence had knowledge of these two sculptors’ work and ideas. Katz-Roy concludes that Lawrence ‘could not possibly have remained unaware of the passionate debates on art that were going on among avant-garde circles in London’, and she perceptively points out that in ‘Kensington, in Ford Madox Ford’s circle, Lawrence . . . had the opportunity of meeting the Vorticist sculptors Jacob Epstein . . . and Gaudier-Brzeska’ (2006: 249, 252). Katz-Roy also draws attention to other passages in Women in Love that reveal Lawrence’s knowledge of Vorticist principles, for example Gudrun’s and Loerke’s shared hatred of the Yugoslav sculptor Ivan Meštrović, who was ‘blasted’ in the Vorticist magazine Blast; Lawrence’s description of Birkin in his car reaching perfect stillness (WL 318), recalling Lewis’s definition of the Vortex; and Birkin’s individualism, echoing Pound’s statement about Vorticism being ‘a movement of individuals, for the protection of individuality’ (2006: 253–4, 258). Furthermore, Katz-Roy makes a specific link between Gaudier and Women in Love in her view that ‘the destructive mood . . . of the Halliday clique’ echoes Gaudier’s view of the war as ‘a great remedy’ (255; see also Black 2007: 96). We only know of one meeting Lawrence had with Lewis, but the event was momentous and was followed by Lawrence’s reconsideration of the direction of his fiction in his rewriting of his stories for The Prussian Officer (Kinkead-Weekes 2011: 137). Lawrence invited Arthur McLeod to lunch on 1 July 1914, but failed to attend because, as he put it, ‘Wyndham Lewis came in, and there was a heated and vivid

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discussion – you will understand’ (2L 193). Lawrence’s behaviour, the day before Blast’s distribution, indicates the significance of this exchange and a possible topic of debate. The location is unknown but was clearly a public space, possibly even the Café Royal, because, when in London, Lawrence was a regular there, as were many of his friends including Gertler and his friend Gaudier.

Women in Love, Epstein, Gaudier and Pound Women in Love is the novel that most clearly shows Lawrence’s engagement with modernist ideas of sculpture. We can see parallels with Epstein’s work and interests in Lawrence’s emphasis on ‘primitive’ African sculpture, Mark Kinkead-Weekes observing how this type of art ‘influenced the imaginative structure’ of the novel (2011: 437). Epstein was passionate about this style of sculpture, gradually acquiring a remarkable collection, which provided an inspiration for his own work. This enthusiasm was shared by Gertler and Gaudier, and also by Philip Heseltine whose own pieces are thought to have come via Epstein and provided the basis for Lawrence’s depictions of such art in this novel. Particularly as Epstein’s fame grew, ‘primitive’ African sculpture became indelibly associated with the avant-garde. In Women in Love, the admiration or possession of African sculpture denotes a character’s avant-garde credentials, as we see in the discussion between Gerald and Birkin about Halliday’s African statue (78–9). Gerald asks, ‘“Why is it art?”’ Birkin’s reply mimics the effusive language Lawrence condemned in art critics such as Bell: ‘“Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final, supreme”’ (79). However, this sculpture marks Birkin, the admirer, and Halliday, the possessor, as members of the avant-garde – unlike Gerald. Nevertheless, in Women in Love resemblances to Gaudier and his work are even more marked than those to Epstein; for example, Gudrun is described by Birkin as a sculptor of ‘animals and birds, sometimes odd small people’ (94), which hints at the work of Gaudier (Katz-Roy 2006: 252). Gaudier had a profound love of animals and primarily made small intimate sculptures, Pound regarding him as an exceptional animalist whose genius depended on his ‘abnormal sympathy with . . . all moving animal life’ (Fauchereau 1983: 16). This ‘abnormal sympathy’ seems to have been internalised by Gaudier, as many contemporaries repeatedly commented on his wary, animal-like appearance and characteristics (Silber 1996: 57). Pound first met Gaudier at the Allied Artists Exhibition in July 1913 where Gaudier had five sculptures prominently on display on the ground floor, including the painted clay version of The Wrestler (1912; now lost), which so inspired Gertler. Lawrence could have seen Gaudier’s sculptures while attending this exhibition to see some drawings by Ernest Collings (2L 69). This would have been even more probable if Lawrence was aware of the impact that Gaudier, and his work, had on their mutual friend Pound. At their pivotal meeting Pound and Gaudier immediately struck up a close friendship which lasted until Gaudier’s death, after which Pound wrote a memoir of the sculptor. Pound also began writing about sculpture: for example, his essay ‘The New Sculpture’ in The Egoist for 16 February 1914 is a defence of his two friends Epstein and Gaudier (Cork 2010: 130). Turner observes how ‘Sculpture and sculptors were clearly central to Pound’s “gang” and, more broadly, to the conception of a radical, militant avant-garde art that he was promoting on the pages of the Egoist’ (2015).

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At that first meeting, Pound immediately likened Gaudier to a wolf – ‘We wandered about the upper galleries hunting for some new work and trying to find some good amid much bad, and a young man came after us, like a well-made young wolf’(1974: 44) – an apt description, as Gaudier’s attractive, intelligent, animal-like disposition masked a volatile, unpredictable nature that positively relished initiating unprovoked violence (Barassi 2007: 90, 94). In Women in Love, Lawrence used the motif of a wolf to suggest a similar duality that he saw in human nature, showing this to be being revealed by the struggle for power in relationships. For example, Gudrun describes Gerald as ‘a young, good-humoured, smiling wolf’, but she is aware of his darker side, ‘the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper’ (WL 14). Later, in scenes that reveal a ruthless psychological battle for control in Gerald and Gudrun’s relationship, Lawrence describes how Gerald ‘walked with his queer, long wolf-steps across the bedroom’, and how ‘he was completely blind, blind as a wolf looking at her’ (413–14). This blindness signals the end of their relationship; however, it also indicates his ruthless, single-minded pursuit of his own goals, to the exclusion of other people’s sensibilities. This was also a characteristic of Gaudier that many contemporaries commented on. During the war, this enabled Gaudier to undertake dangerous missions without fear, which earned him awards for bravery. In peacetime his preoccupation with his work blinded him to others’ feelings, or even to the necessities of practical matters such as eating, sleeping or washing, Richard Aldington describing him as ‘probably the dirtiest human being I have ever known’, who ‘gave off a horrid effluvia in hot weather’ (Silber 1996: 56).

Lawrence’s Influence on Sculptors The previous discussion suggests how Lawrence’s knowledge of avant-garde sculptors influenced his work, and this chapter will conclude by briefly looking at Lawrence’s influence on some British modernist sculptors who were his near-contemporaries. Notably, Henry Moore, John Skeaping and Barbara Hepworth all expressed their appreciation of Lawrence’s work, while Moore and Skeaping also acknowledged their great debt to Gaudier (Barassi 2007: 95). However, Moore’s and Hepworth’s connections to Lawrence were particularly strong as both drew inspiration for their own sculpture from his work. Elsewhere I have explored Moore’s response to Lawrence in respect of senses of touch (Costin 2014), but new research has revealed Hepworth’s particular interest in Lawrence. Moore’s and Hepworth’s libraries included several Lawrence books, but Hepworth’s collection was far larger, extending to some thirteen volumes; the largest number by a single modernist author.8 Hepworth only kept books of particular significance for her and they acted as a source of inspiration for her work. Of these thirteen books, eleven are cheap Martin Secker editions published in the 1930s in identical red bindings and most are inscribed with her name. One is more luxurious, a Secker limited edition with the inscription: ‘Mr R Skeaping. In Appreciation of his assistance while at the Woolwich Polytechnic’. However, it is a very stained and battered copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that holds most interest (Figure 22.4). This was published by The Odyssey Press in 1933, printed in Germany, and marked ‘Not to be introduced into the British Empire or the U.S.A.’. Thus Hepworth read an early, unexpurgated, banned, copy of this novel.

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Figure 22.4 Copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover owned by Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975). Tate, London, loaned to The Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield. Photo: Jane Costin, with kind permission of Tate, London and The Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield.

Furthermore, the fading and water-staining on the book indicate that, over forty years later, it was face up on a table when she died as the result of a fire at her home, while a bookmark, inserted so that it protrudes from the bottom of the book, shows this book was not usually kept on a shelf in her library. In addition, four pages have been permanently folded up at the bottom corners, something not seen in her other Lawrence books. Notably, all these folded corners, and the strangely placed bookmark, draw attention to passages in which Lawrence is discussing senses of touch. For example, Hepworth marked the section where Connie goes to see Mellors who discovers she is naked under her petticoat: ‘“Eh! what it is to touch thee!” . . . She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living secret body . . . Far down in her she felt a new stirring, a new nakedness emerging’ (LCL 125). This indicates that, like her close friend Moore, Hepworth was particularly interested in the connections between people and between them and their world. Today, visitors are not allowed to touch Hepworth’s work, so it is easy to forget that her highly abstract sculptures were created to be touched. The lack of realism in her work withholds an easy identification between the viewer and the sculpture, which would be encouraged by evoking the sense of touch, a physical connection with the artwork. Like Moore, Hepworth carefully placed massive sculptures in her garden, which were specifically created for those particular locations in an attempt to engage

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multiple senses of touch. A viewer can explore how the sculpture touches its location, can walk around it to discover how the shifting, unfamiliar shapes touch their perception of the work, and can consider how the light touching these forms affects their response. These huge sculptures exemplify the closeness of sculpture and architecture and suggest that, like Gaudier, Hepworth saw this in terms of mass, form, the relation of planes and light on the structure. Hepworth’s copies of The Rainbow and Women in Love show she was aware of Lawrence’s discussions about sculpture; her possession of those books at her death indicates that they still provided inspiration for her work, but, in her later years, what engaged her most were Lawrence’s expressions of senses of touch in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. As this chapter outlines, Lawrence engaged with sculptors and their work and also provided inspiration for others. There is much more that could be said on this subject, but what stands out is Lawrence’s particular affinity with modernist sculptural ideas and practice, which were based on Classical ideas, and which he incorporated into his work.

Notes 1. It seems reasonable to assume Lawrence would have seen these when he walked past them with Louie Burrows in June 1909 (1L 130). They were later severely mutilated. 2. We also see this rejection in the contrast Lawrence makes on his journey through the Alps between the peasant-made crucifix which ‘startled [him] into consciousness’ and the ‘factory-made’ ones that ‘The soul ignores’ (TI 91). 3. Sarah MacDougall advises that a preparatory drawing for Acrobats was dated 1915, although it is unclear whether this was for a sculpture or a painting (private correspondence, 21 February 2019). I would like to acknowledge the generous help of Sarah MacDougall regarding Mark Gertler, in both sharing her research with me and facilitating the reproduction in this book of his painting The Creation of Eve. 4. MacDougall explains how David Bomberg and Gertler depicted various sportspersons and dancers, pointing out that ‘these subjects were not the preserve of the “Whitechapel Boys”, but a staple of the early modernists and their enthusiasm for illustrating all aspects of modern life’ (private correspondence, 21 February 2019). 5. Sarah MacDougall, private correspondence, 21 February 2019. 6. Sarah MacDougall, private correspondence, 21 February 2019. 7. Epstein’s Doves is in the Tate’s collection: < https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/epsteindoves-t01820>. 8. Hepworth’s library was on display at The Hepworth Wakefield during 2018. This has now moved to the Tate archives in London. My thanks go to the staff at The Hepworth for allowing me access to her Lawrence volumes and, in particular, to Clare Nadal for facilitating my research.

Works Cited Barassi, Sebastiano (2007), ‘A Pioneer of Avant-Garde Sculpture’, in WE the Moderns, Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, pp. 5–59. Beattie, Susan (1983), The New Sculpture, London: Yale University Press. Black, Jonathan (2007), ‘“The Moving Agent”: Henri Gaudier, Primitivism, Technology and Violence’, in WE the Moderns, Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, pp. 89–97. Brett, Dorothy (1933), Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship, London: Martin Secker.

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Bullen, J. B. (2003), ‘D. H. Lawrence and Sculpture in Women in Love’, The Burlington Magazine, 145:1209, pp. 841–6. Carswell, Catherine (1981), The Savage Pilgrimage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Casson, Stanley (1928), Some Modern Sculptors, London: Oxford University Press. Cork, Richard (2010), Wild Thing, London: Royal Academy of Arts. Costin, Jane (2012), ‘Lawrence’s “Best Adventure”: Blood-Consciousness and Cornwall’, Études Lawrenciennes, 43, pp. 151–72. Costin, Jane (2014), ‘Senses of Touch: Henry Moore, D. H. Lawrence and the First World War’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 3:3, pp. 87–109. Deghy, Guy and Keith Waterhouse (1955), Café Royal: Ninety Years of Bohemia, London: Hutchinson. Fauchereau, Serge (1983), ‘Gaudier-Brzeska: Animalist Artist’, in Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Sculptor 1891–1915, ed. Jeremy Lewison, trans. Anne Bain, Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, pp. 7–19. Gaudier-Brzeska, Henry (1981), ‘Vortex Gaudier Brzeska’, Blast 1, ed. Percy Wyndham Lewis, Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, pp. 155–8. Gayford Martin (2015), ‘Henri Gaudier-Brzeska at Kettle’s Yard Reviewed: He’s Got Rhythm’, . Gertler, Mark (1965), Mark Gertler: Selected Letters, ed. Noel Carrington, London: Rupert Hart-Davis. Harrison Andrew (2003), D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism: A Study of Influence, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hassall, Christopher (1959), Edward Marsh: A Biography, London: Longmans, Green & Co. Katz-Roy, Ginette (2006), ‘The Dialogue with the Avant-Garde in Women in Love’, in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: A Casebook, ed. David Ellis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 245–72. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark (2011), D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacCarthy, Fiona (1989), Eric Gill, London: Faber & Faber. MacDougall, Sarah (2002), Mark Gertler, London: John Murray. Nehls, Edward, ed. (1959), D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Volume Three, 1925–1930, Wisconsin, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Pound, Ezra (1974), A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska, New York: New Directions. Reid, Susan (2015), ‘From Rope-Dancer to Wrestler: The Figure of the Artist as Performer in Women in Love’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 40:1, pp. 107–27. Silber, Evelyn and David Finn (1996), Gaudier-Brzeska, London: Thames & Hudson. Sillars, Stuart (1999), ‘“Terrible and Dreadful”: Lawrence, Gertler and the Visual Imagination’, in D. H. Lawrence in Italy and England, ed. George Donaldson and Mara Kalnins, Basingstoke: MacMillan, 193–210. Turner, Sarah Victoria (2015), ‘Poetry and Literature’, in In Focus: Wrestlers 1914, cast 1965, by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, ed. Sarah Victoria Turner, London: Tate Research Publication, .

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23 Architecture Sarah Edwards

Introduction: Lawrence, Architecture and Literature

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uildings and the built environment have important social, symbolic, historical and formal roles in the range of literary genres that Lawrence experimented with in the course of his career. Although some previous critical studies have considered some of these functions, this chapter is the first sustained overview of architecture in Lawrence’s work. The decades in which Lawrence was writing, from 1908 to 1930, witnessed the development of ‘modern’ and ‘modernist’ architecture and literature. The usage of these terms in both disciplines is overlapping and divergent, both in their periodisations and in their accounts of mutual influence. In practice, ‘modern’ and ‘modernist’ architecture are frequently conflated: for example, the Austrian architect and urban planner Otto Wagner’s influential Modern Architecture (1896) summarised many of the emerging principles of what became known as ‘modernist’ style. These include a shift away from revivalist styles such as neo-classicism and Victorian Gothic, and the use of new technologies and materials (steel, glass, concrete), open space and clean geometric lines, which enabled modern ‘structuralist-functional’ living, as exemplified by Wagner’s Austrian Postal Savings Bank in Vienna (1904–6). The onset of ‘modernity’ has a number of definitions, but the term is commonly used in these contexts to refer to the cultures that emerged in the late nineteenth century, following the development of industrial capitalism and new aesthetic, political and psychological models (Spurr 2012: 3; Edwards and Charley 2011: xiii). The canon of modernist literature used to restrict itself rather narrowly to the putatively ‘high’ modernist experimentation of writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and their formal experiments in narration, such as stream-of-consciousness. However, more recent critical studies have argued for the presence of modernist experimentation in work often categorised as popular or ‘middlebrow’. Furthermore, an increasing number of scholars extend the scope of literary modernism to include wider forms of representation of the modern world, including interdisciplinary intersections such as psychic and domestic interiors, as I explore further below. Lawrence’s own writing was shaped by a range of literary and modernist influences: as well as engaging with modernist architectural trends, such as Expressionism (in The Rainbow) and Futurism (in Women in Love), he commented on less prestigious building developments that have also been re-evaluated in recent accounts of modern(ist) architecture. These included, for example, the development of ‘suburban, pseudo-cottagey’ homes (LEA 293), which were represented in his fiction alongside industrialised cities, English country houses and mining villages. In his journalism and

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letters, Lawrence engaged in discussion with contemporary commentators on the built environment, notably with Hubert de Cronin Hastings, editor of The Architectural Review. In literary criticism, Lawrence has been cited in debates about the historical and aesthetic transition points between Edwardian and Georgian fiction, and realist and modernist techniques. Critics have observed that Lawrence’s deployment of buildings indicates his continuing allegiance to realist principles. Indeed, this is particularly evident in his earlier novels and remains evident in the later fiction. Ruth Robbins has observed of Sons and Lovers (1913) that ‘Lawrence, for instance, makes use of realist methods in his descriptions of the Morels’ family life. The houses they inhabit . . . are closely described in minute detail’ (2011: 9–10). Furthermore, as she notes of the first two pages, this formal realism extends to narrative commentary on the social conditions of the miners’ dwellings in ‘the Squares’ and ‘the Bottoms’: neat front windows, little porches, little privet hedges, and dormer windows for the attics. But that was outside . . . The dwelling-room, the kitchen, was at the back of the house, facing inward between the blocks . . . So, the actual conditions of living in the Bottoms, that was so well built and that looked so nice, were quite unsavoury . . . (SL 10) In her essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), Virginia Woolf famously drew analogies between the building of houses and characters, declaring that human character changed in 1910 and criticising Edwardian novelists such as Arnold Bennett for their attention to external detail – including the houses in which characters live – instead of their inner consciousness. This approach has been challenged in modernist studies in recent years by critics who assert the importance of representing material cultures and their impact on characters’ inner and social worlds (see Spurr 2012: 31 on the parallel development of enclosed domestic spaces and the concept of the private self from the Renaissance onwards). Sons and Lovers is a predominantly realist novel, but Mrs Morel suffers acutely from ‘unsavoury’ conditions, which become conflated with the drama of her unsatisfactory marriage in ways that prefigure the modernist techniques of Lawrence’s later novels. At the end of the first chapter, Mrs Morel is locked out of her house by her drunken husband in a much-quoted scene where interior and exterior worlds ‘melt’ together: ‘and she rested with the hills and lilies and houses, all swum together in a kind of swoon’ (SL 10, 34). Literary criticism has also begun to theorise the relationships between literature, architecture and design in this period. Victoria Rosner’s concept of ‘kitchen-table modernism’, or the development of a ‘conceptual vocabulary from the lexicons of domestic architecture and interior design, elaborates a notion of psychic interiority’ and the role of literature in re-imagining the modern home for modern lifestyles (2005: 3). Rosner discusses, for example, Woolf’s Night and Day (1919), noting how the descriptions of Mary Datchet’s light and brightly-coloured London flat are reminiscent of Bloomsbury interior style, that Mary’s visual enjoyment of her home is compared to viewing an abstract picture, and that the use of visual abstraction has the effect of transforming everyday domestic objects into symbols of the pleasures of the modern city (2005: 157). A later example occurs in Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets (1936), when the heroine Olivia deduces the character of her lover’s wife by observing her ‘good modern room’, which is ‘long and empty and simple with cool luminous

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colours’ and is influenced by design trends that could be accessed by middle-class women at a modern London department store, Fortnum and Mason (2006: 176). Similarly, Lady Chatterley’s ‘room was the only gay, modern room in the house, the only spot in Wragby where her personality was at all revealed’ (LCL 24). Connie’s ‘modern’ personality and her discomfort with the aristocratic values of Wragby Hall are underlined when it is also revealed that her husband ‘Clifford had never seen it [her room]—and she asked very few people up’. Lawrence, then, uses realist detail to depict modern design trends which both reflect and shape this ‘modern’ consciousness. An overview of Lawrence’s successive treatments of one ‘modern’ building – the Crystal Palace in London (Figure 23.1) – illustrates some other functions of architecture in his works, and how these were modified over time in different genres. Built in Hyde Park by Joseph Paxton to house the Great Exhibition in 1851, this cast-iron and plate-glass structure was one of the first recognisably ‘modern’ public buildings and an embodiment of the technological innovation that the Exhibition was intended to showcase. This included its modular, prefabricated structure that allowed it to be moved to Sydenham Hill in south-east London, where Lawrence could see it from the Croydon school where he taught from 1908 to 1911. In Lawrence’s oeuvre, the Crystal Palace has a range of symbolic functions. In a letter to Blanche Jennings, written on the eve of his departure to Croydon in October 1908, he declared: 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) John Carey identifies this statement as an example of the intelligentsia’s disdain for an emerging mass culture (1992: 79; see also Gemma Moss’s chapter ‘Popular Culture’). This culture is symbolised by the ‘Cinematograph’, which, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, also represents the working people’s worship of ‘the mechanical thing’ (‘motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them’ [217]), but also by the Palace in which the cinema is located, for the Crystal Palace had become a mass cultural attraction as its neglect and decay accelerated in the Edwardian period. In his first, semi-autobiographical novel The White Peacock (1911), Lawrence reflects his own experience of living in the shadow of the Palace through the homesick protagonist Cyril. The Palace is personified as a symbol of suburban colourlessness, decay and ruin: I could never lift my eyes save to the Crystal Palace, crouching, cowering wretchedly among the yellow grey clouds, pricking up its two round towers like pillars of anxious misery. No landmark could have been more foreign to me, more depressing, than the great dilapidated palace which lay forever prostrate above us . . . (WP 260–1) During the same period, in 1909, Lawrence’s poems ‘Dreams Old and Nascent’ were published by Ford Madox Hueffer in the English Review. In ‘Old’, the poetic image of the cloud is developed when the speaker looks out of the classroom window and sees the ‘great, uplifted blue palace’ where ‘lights stir and shine’, ‘Where the glass is domed in the blue, soft air’ and

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Figure 23.1 The Crystal Palace, London, late nineteenth century. Photo: Getty Images. There lies the world, my darling, full of wonder and wistfulness and strange Recognition and greetings of half-acquaint things, as I greet the cloud Of blue palace aloft there . . . (3Poems 1666) Here, the imagery of eyes ‘uplifted’ to the ‘cloud’ that surrounds the Palace mirrors the vocabulary of The White Peacock, but the associations with light and wonder connote divine worlds, and the references to clouds may allude to the Victorian cultural critic John Ruskin and his lectures on the storm clouds of the nineteenth century (1884). Ruskin’s theories of art and architecture were an enduring influence on Lawrence. When, near the end of his life, Lawrence wrote an introduction to his Collected Poems (1928), he recalled the public recognition that his ‘Dreams Old and Nascent’ had brought him: ‘the M.P. for school-teachers said I was an ornament to the educational system. Whereupon I knew it must be the ordinary me which had made itself heard, and not the demon’ (1Poems 654). By invoking the school context, then, the poem’s depiction of the Palace becomes associated with a critique of the education (and political) system. In another poem from this late period, ‘Goethe and Pose’ (1929), the speaker says ‘When people pose as gods, they are Crystal Palace statues, / made of cement poured into a mould, around iron sticks’ (580). These lines indicate Lawrence’s knowledge of modern building techniques, as well as a critique of the mechanised products of modern culture that were exhibited at the Palace. Furthermore, as Carl Krockel writes, the Palace also symbolises Lawrence’s critique of Goethe as a symbol

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of classical, rational German culture which recurs in his works as a symbol of sterile modern culture (2007: 303). In such ways, the Palace is an overdetermined image, which was used variously by Lawrence to address social, cultural and formal issues about architecture, and its relationship to literature; another example is the cathedral, which I go on to discuss.

Reading Architecture: Cathedrals of Knowledge in The Rainbow Lawrence’s fictionalised depiction of Lincoln Cathedral has attracted the most critical debate about the functions of architecture in his works. This Gothic limestone building, whose notable decorations include two rose windows and stone carvings such as the ‘Lincoln Imp’, is another symbolic building (see Colour Plates 23 and 24). The cathedral has been read by critics as an exposition of Lawrence’s views about the functions of sacred architecture in the contemporary world. The treatment of this building also illuminates the links between architectural and literary form, structure and theme in The Rainbow. For example, the image of the circle links the cathedral – ‘whose beginning and whose end were the circle of silence’ (R 187) – with the formal structure of the novel, including two chapters entitled ‘The Widening Circle’ and the cyclical repetition of marriage, birth and death across the generations of the Brangwen family. During this period (1914–15), Lawrence was developing similar ideas in the seventh chapter of his Study of Thomas Hardy – ‘Of Being and Not-Being’ – where he theorised the development of modern art in relation to the interaction of ‘male’ and ‘female’ principles. The female principle is consistently likened to a hub, centre or axis of ‘rest’, compared to the ‘motion’ of the male. The medieval cathedral is an implicitly female symbol, an ‘art of architecture, whose essence is in utter stability’ (STH 60, 65). The gendering of architectural terms enables Lawrence to move easily between literal and figurative uses. Thus, he declares that the ‘column’ represents ‘male aspiration’, while the ‘arch’ or ‘ellipse’ signifies ‘female completeness containing this aspiration’ (72). In The Rainbow the gendering of the cathedral, and its architectural features, is more implicit. Therefore, critics have variously interpreted their meanings in light of the novel’s visionary ending, when the ‘over-arching’ rainbow spans the ‘earth’s new architecture’ (R 459). Brigitte Macadré-Nguyên, for example, claims that the cathedral represents the formation of ‘chaos into [architectural] art’ with the human couple as the ideal unit of measurement, and can be imaged as the womb, or the female body, with the woman as the threshold and the doorway to sexual and religious fulfilment. Crystal Downing (1988), on the other hand, claims that the cathedral represents the sterility of ahistorical, patriarchal religion, which most of the female characters reject, but which Will Brangwen worships. These critics have also considered the wider significance of buildings in Lawrence’s novels. Downing stated in her discussion of The Rainbow that ‘writers of fiction often construct architectural images within works to pose (as) synecdoches of the texts that contain them; characters enter edifices described within the course of the narrative’ (1988: 13). Indeed, Lawrence’s characters enter monumental religious buildings and attempt to remake their meanings for the modern world. In this respect, it is useful to draw on Kester Rattenbury’s model of the ‘conceptual’ or ‘literary architect’ in her recent study of Hardy’s architectural career, and its continuing influence on his development as a novelist. Rattenbury notes that Hardy’s novels incorporate an architectural

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perspective so as to construct fictional buildings through descriptions, and theories, of buildings, which create a distinctly modern environment (2018: 25, 231). Hardy was writing at a time when books about architecture (such as Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice) propagated the idea that it was possible to ‘read’ architecture through a combination of architectural ‘drawings, diagrams, speculation and criticism’ that these works usually contained (2018: 21–3). While Lawrence’s novels do not contain architectural drawings, or the maps found in Hardy’s novels, his characters are similarly depicted reading Ruskin, and reading the buildings that they encounter. Tony Pinkney and Stefania Michelucci note Lawrence’s use of architectural symbols and specific references to Ruskin, who celebrated the revival of Gothic architecture as an indicator of individual craftsmanship in an industrial age of machine production. This cultural context is a key influence on characterisation, when, as Michelucci emphasises, Will Brangwen is ‘imbued with a Ruskinian feeling of the spiritual élan pervading the stones of the old churches’ (2001: 184). Pinkney also argues for a ‘contemporary Northern modernism’ which is exemplified in The Rainbow, an ‘Expressionist novel’, noting that ‘the cathedral remains a resonant image in the wider Expressionist movement’ (1990: 70, 78). He also notes the influence of women in this ‘Gothic modernism’: two of the principal female characters in Lawrence’s novel represent a European, outward-looking influence – Lydia is from Berlin, Anna is Polish – and the more general association of women writers with Gothic fiction, a ‘subversive literary form’ (67). However, Pinkney does not elaborate on the association of Ursula with the ‘mock-Gothic’ of the new cathedral of knowledge, University College Nottingham, which was founded in 1881 (Figure 23.2).

Figure 23.2 University College Nottingham. Photo: Sarah Edwards.

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The educational career of Ursula has received little attention from an architectural perspective, except to contrast the university with the neighbouring colliery town and emphasise the degradation of knowledge by modern commerce. This degradation is figured largely through the college architecture: it is a ‘little apprentice-shop where one was further equipped for making money’ (R 403). Lawrence trained as a teacher at University College Nottingham and later reflects on a new ‘grand’ building at his alma mater in the 1929 poem ‘Nottingham’s new university’ (1Poems 423). The references to ‘Sir Jesse Boot’ and the description of the building – ‘cakeily’ – suggest that the speaker is referring to the white, neo-Georgian, Trent Building that was designed by Percy Richard Morley Horder as part of the 1928 University Park development. The archivist at the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections notes that Lawrence’s correspondent, Rolf Gardiner, may have sent him a description of the building and that Gardiner described the poem as ‘an excellent bit of Lawrencian buffoonery’ (Manuscripts and Special Collections). The speaker imagines that the university has been built from a pile of cash made by a famous benefactor, the Boots Company, many of whose branches were designed by Horder: they’ve built a new university for a new dispensation of knowledge. Built it most grand and cakeily out of the noble loot derived from shrewd cash-chemistry by good Sir Jesse Boot. (1Poems 423) In the pre-war setting of The Rainbow, Ursula crosses the threshold of a university that seeks to represent itself as another sacred public building, a ‘reminiscence of the wondrous, cloistral origins of education’ (399). Janice Hubbard Harris (1990) has cited Ursula as an example of the ‘modern girl’ of the Edwardian period; however, Harris, too, does not elaborate on the role of architecture in the re-figuring of this modern heroine. At University College Nottingham, another literal and figurative ‘shining’ doorway leads to: The big college built of stone, standing in the quiet street, with a rim of grass and lime-trees all so peaceful: she felt it remote, a magic-land. Its architecture was foolish, she knew from her father. Still, it was different from that of all other buildings. Its rather pretty, plaything, Gothic form was almost a style, in the dirty industrial town. (R 399) This first description of the University both feminises and infantilises the building, and Ursula’s perception has been influenced by a man’s – her father’s, rather than Ruskin’s – reading of the architecture. Ursula initially likens the mostly male academics to ‘priests of knowledge’ cloistered in a ‘hushed temple’, and this religious imagery occasionally includes ‘nuns’ (400), indicating that an ancient tradition of (celibate) female learning exists for emulation. However, the spaces of the college – the classroom, the Women’s room and the botany laboratory – are used mostly to track the developments in Ursula’s personal life, as she daydreams and reads her lover Skrebensky’s letters. Ursula privileges

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her sexual and romantic identity, and ‘continued at college, in her ordinary routine, merely as a cover to her dark, powerful under-life. The fact of herself, and with her Skrebensky, was so powerful, that she took rest in the other’ (419). The laboratory – the only remaining space in which Ursula experiences intellectual satisfaction – is finally tainted by a female intellectual, and the only individualised academic, Dr Frankstone, a ‘woman doctor of physics’ and a feminised version of Mary Shelley’s Gothic seeker of forbidden knowledge, Dr Frankenstein (R 408). Lawrence places Ursula’s recounting of Frankstone’s disillusioning words – that there is no ‘special mystery to life’, only ‘a complexity of physical and chemical activities’ – in the laboratory. Elsewhere, the college itself is likened to ‘a little, slovenly laboratory for the factory’ (403). Thus, for Ursula, the ‘spurious Gothic arches’ of this modern cathedral do not unite education and industry in the modern world; the latter dominates and subordinates the former for its own ends. However, as in the case of Lincoln Cathedral, the gendering of these concepts is overdetermined. The largely masculine spaces of academe and industry – and their intellectual and spiritual degradation – are negatively and insidiously feminised. The symbolic effects of Dr Frankstone’s and Ursula’s uninspiring scholarship, and the contamination of the college spaces by Ursula’s personal musings, extend to the architectural design. For some contemporary architectural commentators, the Gothic Revival was, similarly, a degradation of style: The Rainbow’s narrator declares only that the university’s ‘mock-Gothic’ ‘is almost a style’. ‘Mock-Gothic’ ‘could never truly be rational or pure, but remained trapped within novelty and vulgarity’ (Lepine 2014: 324). While Gothic architecture had traditionally been gendered as masculine (Davenport 1989: 225), Lawrence pointedly criticises the college’s ‘ugly’ arches, which he characterises as a female image in his study of Hardy. Thus, he implicitly feminises the ‘harshness and vulgarity’ of his Victorian Gothic university, which is contrasted with Rouen Cathedral and Ursula’s strong identification with this medieval female symbol (R 422). Despite his portrayal of Ursula’s intelligence and unconventional rejection of marriage to Skrebensky, Lawrence’s depiction of her university experience reveals a continued idealisation of the female as the unchanging, anchoring hub, rather than as a modern and rational seeker/designer of knowledge. The next section moves from modern imitation to consider Lawrence’s writing about ruin and restoration.

Among the Ruins: Landscapes and Texts Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. (LCL 5) As these opening lines of Lady Chatterley’s Lover suggest, a persistent theme in Lawrence’s oeuvre is the creation of ‘new architecture’, and ‘new little habitats’, on the physical and metaphorical ruins of past cultures. Will in The Rainbow imagines physical ruins as a trace which embodies history and memory: ‘He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it

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was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs’ (191). Will is an admirer of Ruskin, and his appreciation of a classical structure may be owing to the fact that, as David Spurr has observed, Ruskin ‘defended the aesthetic value of ruins’ (2012: 142), and, as Pinkney notes, ‘a Gothic cathedral contains its own ruins . . . savageness . . . redundance, in Ruskin’s terms . . . is a constitutive part of the aesthetic’ (1990: 72). As well as aesthetic value, ruined buildings in Lawrence’s work signify changing uses of landscape which are shaped by the layering of different cultures and the regenerative possibilities of new uses. Lawrence’s works also foreground the ways in which perceptions of ruins have been mediated by texts, such as Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, over successive centuries. Spurr claims that the architectural ruin has its textual analogy in allegory, symbolising the irreconcilable rupture with the past (2012: 144–6). As the opening quotation in this section indicates, Lawrence wants to ‘scramble over’ ruins which seem like ‘obstacles’, and ‘build up’ again, but his ruins frequently function as allegories about the destructiveness of modern culture and its attitude to the preservation, restoration and use of architectural ruins. Chapter 5 of Women in Love dwells on how the textual constructions of ruins influence perception. In this text, ‘ruin’ has a literal, metaphorical and allegorical significance. As in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the theme is signalled at the start of the chapter, when Birkin is reading a newspaper and quotes from an article: ‘there must arise a man who will give new values to things, give us new truths, a new attitude to life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness in a few years, a country in ruin’ (WL 54). Birkin’s perspective, which perceives the approaching spectacle of London as ‘the end of the world’, is juxtaposed with Gerald’s characterisation of its culture as ‘pettifogging calculating Bohemia’ and the narrator’s comment on the ‘disgrace of London’ (60). As they discuss possible sources of renewal – the love of women, a new gospel, work – Birkin declares his belief in an enduring life force, of which the human is one transient expression: “if mankind is destroyed . . . and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but just one expression of the incomprehensible.” (59) Birkin’s image of landscape anticipates his quotation from Robert Browning’s 1855 poem ‘Love Among the Ruins’ – the ‘quiet-coloured end of evening smiles’ (61) – about a rural landscape that now contains only one remaining turret from a great city. The meaning of this densely imaged literary text is not elaborated, but the ruins therein serve as another narrative perspective on, and allegory for, the ruins of modern culture. As well as the narrative of decline and fall, the overdetermined meanings of ruin, the allegorical functions of the texts and the gaze of the writer are all developed in the subsequent travel writings. In Mornings in Mexico, Lawrence reflects that local architecture, including the church and market-place, represents the cyclical nature of experience. He embodies these structures in his narrative, which is dominated by curves and centres (as in The Rainbow). By contrast, he observes of Western culture: ‘Strange that we should think in straight lines, when there are none, and talk of straight courses, when every course, sooner or later, is seen to be making the sweep round, swooping upon the centre’ (MM 219). Thus, Lawrence’s travel narrative

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begins to reflect a different way of seeing the ruins of other cultures. This culminates in Sketches of Etruscan Places, when the narrative begins with a forthright denunciation of the Roman ‘wiping out’ of Etruscan culture: ‘everything etruscan, save the tombs, has been wiped out’ (19). However, as well as serving as an allegory for colonial violence, and for the rupture between the past and present – or, as Lisa Colletta theorises in ‘The Geography of Ruins’, for how ‘the architecture and landscape embody the struggle between the intellect and the instinct’ (1999: 215) – the Etruscan ruins also contains Lawrence’s reflections on museumification. As M. Di Giovine explains, museumification can be defined as the transition from a living city to an idealised re-presentation of that city when every object or building is considered for its value as a museum artefact (2009: 261). At the start of the narrative, Lawrence signals that both his initial attraction to the cities of the dead – ‘Myself, the first time I consciously saw Etruscan things, in the museum at Perugia, I was instinctively attracted to them’ – and his experience of the tombs have been mediated by the museum: ‘So to the tombs we must go: or to the museums containing the things that have been rifled from the tombs’ (SEP 9). He goes on to generalise from the Etruscan example, declaring that Western disciplinary systems of knowledge undermine experiential learning: ‘Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists’ (171). However, at the end of the paragraph, he acknowledges the shaping powers of textual representations for reading architecture: ‘one can live one’s life, and read all the books about India or Etruria, and never read a single word about the thing that impresses one in the very first five minutes, in Benares or in an Etruscan necropolis’. Lawrence also developed his ideas about preservation and the function of museums in his writings about the ongoing ruin of the country house, as I will explore in a later section.

Domestic Architecture: City and Suburbia Lawrence focuses more intently than many modernist writers on regional and (semi-) rural landscapes, exemplifying what Howard J. Booth (2017) terms ‘non-metropolitan modernism’. However, his depictions of London provide interesting insights into his views on metropolitan and civic life. In his essays on Hardy, he uses the image of the ‘walled city’ to visualise the constraining effects of ‘the State’, ‘nation, or community or class’ on the development of human consciousness (STH 38–9). On arriving in London in 1908, he commented in a letter that the city represented the ‘pompous, magnificent capital of commercialdom’ and that this was represented in its architecture: ‘nothing Gothic or aspiring or spiritual . . . it is the noble, the divine, the Gothic that agitates and worries one – round-arched magnificent temples’ (1L 80). The medieval Gothic city is an unproblematic site of ahistorical stability and ‘divine’ peace for Ursula in The Rainbow, when she visits Rouen and London following her trials at the ‘mock-Gothic’ university college in Nottingham. Ursula rejects her transient lover, Skrebensky, when she encounters the ‘splendid absoluteness’ of Rouen’s medieval cathedral: ‘The old streets, the cathedral, the age and the monumental peace of the town took her from him. This was now the reality; this great stone cathedral slumbering there in its mass, which knew no transience’ (R 442). Ursula’s ‘soul’ ‘turns’ to the female symbol of the cathedral, ‘something she had forgotten, and wanted’, and which is conflated with this city.

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In contrast to timeless Rouen, the city of London is imaged as the locus of national destruction by the image of the vortex, deployed by Pound’s Vorticists and many Georgian and wartime novelists such as May Sinclair in The Tree of Heaven (1917). The vortex symbolises the utter obliteration of modern systems, such as modernist art and the Suffragette movement, by war: ‘In the winter 1915–1916 the spirit of the old London collapsed, the city, in some way, perished, perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors’ (K 216). The modern built environment also represents war itself. Ursula compares the destructiveness of war to new railways and bridges that are only transitory and will not become ‘mixed up’ as ruins with the landscape to bear witness to human culture. The modern city embodies a ‘mechanical’ structure that supplements the deficiencies of nature – providing ‘lights at night’ – and resists the natural process of ruin. However, these modern innovations are consistently likened to processes of natural decay in their destructive effects: Skrebensky and his fellow humans are zombie-like, ‘spectral, unliving beings’ and the lights have the ‘sinister gleam of decomposition’ (R 423). In particular, Skrebensky emphasises the modernity of the buildings and the human effects of modern building materials: ‘then the cold horror gradually soaked into him. He saw the horror of City Road, he realised the ghastly cold sordidness of the tramcar in which he sat. Cold, stark, ashen sterility had him surrounded’ (R 423). Like the Etruscans, whose buildings were made of organic wood, he ‘had lived with her in a close, living, pulsing world, where everything pulsed with rich being. Now he found himself struggling amid an ashen-dry, cold world of rigidity, dead walls and mechanical traffic, and creeping, spectre-like people.’ The repetition of the ‘horror’ echoes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), as does the spectral imagery. This malaise extends to other European capitals, in the post-war period: in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie travels from London, whose citizens are ‘spectral and blank’, to find that ‘Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its nowmechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money’ (254). Within the topography of this novel, however, the intersecting imagery of the country house, the ‘brick houses’ of the miners, and the mines blurs distinctions between them, so that ‘one could see on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village—a village which began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a long and gruesome mile’ (13). The narrator provides the accompanying industrial and social tale: ‘This is history . . . The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England’ (156). Throughout Lawrence’s novels, the mines are imagined as ‘underworlds’, or industrial cities of the dead, and the spectral imagery of war and metropolis characterises its inhabitants: ‘on the spontaneous, intuitive side dead . . . Half-corpses, all of them . . . There was something uncanny and underground about it all. It was an under-world’ (153). Similarly in The Rainbow, Ursula ‘saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed already enclosed in a coffin’ (458); in Women in Love, Gudrun says of the mine that ‘it is like a country in an underworld . . . Everything is a ghoulish replica of the real world’ (11). Lawrence’s novels refer to contemporary housing design, including ribbon and suburban development of the green belt: ‘Within a year of Connie’s last call, it had happened. There stood Shipley Hall Estate, an array of red-brick semi-detached “villas” in new streets’ (LCL 158). Several of his poems reference similar designs: in

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‘Flat Suburbs, S.W., in the Morning’, he describes ‘new red houses . . . in level rows’. In ‘Suburbs on a Hazy Day’, the ‘resolute shapes so harshly set / In hollow blocks and cubes deformed’ of the ‘stiffly shapen houses’ (1Poems 23) mirror the ‘new little habitats’ for the mine workers in The Rainbow: ‘the hard, cutting edges of the new houses . . . the triumph of horrible, amorphous angles and straight lines’ (458). Lawrence may even have been alluding to the suburban council housing of Nottingham architect Thomas Cecil Howitt, such as the Sherwood Estate. The City of Nottingham had purchased this land from the Babbington Coal Company in the early 1920s, and the new estates featured red-brick, semi-detached houses, although architectural critics note the range of house types and street configurations, and the design influence of Raymond Unwin’s Garden City movement (Scoffham 1992). From the late nineteenth century, however, many cultural commentators had criticised the poor planning, uniformity and monotony of some suburban developments. H. G. Wells in Tono-Bungay (1909), for example, had also likened suburban housing to a disease that was spreading over the English landscape, ‘miles and square miles of red-brick “homes,” like horrible scabs’ (LEA 293). Similarly, in The Rainbow, such developments are ‘the expression of corruption triumphant and unopposed’ (458). Lawrence’s essay ‘Nottinghamshire and the Mining Countryside’, for The Architectural Review (August 1930), returned to this theme. In this architectural forum (still published today), Lawrence draws successfully on social history, literary realism and life writing, in a polemical essay which argues that functional and beautiful design impacts on social and cultural well-being. In an issue on the design failures of British industrialisation and the contrasting example of Sweden, Lawrence focuses on the development of his home village, Eastwood. Using a third-person form of the life narrative, his grandfather’s, Lawrence describes a longer history of the development of these houses by ‘little local speculators’ or speculative builders focused on profit rather than design (LEA 289). He describes the ‘intimate community’ of mining men and their ‘instinct of beauty’ and, echoing the language of Ruskin and Morris, claims that this community was destroyed by the ‘ugliness’ created by ‘promoters of industry’ building ‘sordid and hideous Squares’; that if they had built ‘big, substantial houses’ and space for ‘song and dancing’ then ‘there would never have been an industrial problem’ (291–2).

The Country House and its Preservation In Lawrence’s final novel, the place of the country house in post-war England also comes under greater scrutiny. The provincial English seat of Wragby is described in the opening chapters of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as the ‘rather forlorn home of the Chatterleys’, ‘a long, low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle of the eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a place without much distinction’ (5, 13). Into this aristocratic environment comes Connie, from a ‘cultured Fabian’ and ‘rather pre-Raphaelite’ background, who ‘had been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art, and . . . in the other direction, to the Hague and Berlin, to great socialist conventions’ (6). Wragby Hall is an example of a country house that contains an eclectic mixture of architectural styles – which many architects in the early decades of the twentieth century, such as Edwin Lutyens, were willing to build. Sir Clifford resembles what Clive Aslet characterises as the type of owner

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who wanted to upgrade traditional houses with new and fashionable forms of decoration and had a ‘rather old-fashioned attitude to land ownership as a means of social advance’ (1982: 7). Although Aslet is referring to new owners, rather than landed aristocracy, his observation that marble was a favourite form of conspicuous display contextualises Constance’s visceral reaction to the cemetery near Wragby; she is not afraid of its underground inhabitants, but of the ‘ghastly white tombstones, that peculiarly loathsome whiteness of Carrara marble, detestable as false teeth, which stuck up on the hillside under Tevershall Church, and which she saw with such grim plainness from the park’ (LCL 76). The depiction of this country house in relation to changing concepts of Englishness echoes the discourses of the inter-war preservation movement, which had its roots in the foundation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings by William Morris in 1877, and the National Trust in 1923, for the ‘permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation’ of lands and tenements of beauty and historic interest (Edwards 2013: 95). Country-house owners had been afflicted by death duties, taxation and agricultural depression as well as wartime tragedies, such as Clifford’s wounding. Many estates were rented to the National Trust, whereby owners would live in part of the building and another part might house a museum. There – as with the Etruscans – objects were detached from their everyday uses and displayed for visual consumption: the narrator of Lady Chatterley’s Lover observes that ‘The stately homes of England make good photographs, and create the illusion of a connection with the Elizabethans’ (156). Other houses were sold, destroyed or stripped of their valuable interiors and left as ruined shells, a fate which befell Sutton Scarsdale, in nearby Chesterfield, in 1920. At the same time, the aims and objects of preservation were hotly debated. Vita Sackville-West – who sold some of Knole’s interiors to the National Trust in 1928 – said in a letter to her husband that ‘it was all very well for the National Trust to preserve the old beauties of England, but what about the new beauties . . . new roads and avenues’ (quoted in Edwards 2013: 97). Clifford and Connie Chatterley draw on this language. Clifford says of the wood, which he names as another part of his ‘property’: “we’ve preserved it. But for us, it would go: it would be gone already, like the rest of the forest. One must preserve some of the old England!” “Must one!” said Connie. “If it has to be preserved, and preserved against the new England? It’s sad, I know.” “If some of the old England isn’t preserved, there’ll be no England at all,” said Clifford. “And we who have this kind of property, and the feeling for it, must preserve it.” (LCL 43) This discussion reaches its climax in Chapter Eleven, which echoes the title of Lawrence’s wartime short story – ‘England, my England! But which is my England?’ (LCL 156). In the short story, Crockham, the town in which the doomed soldier and his wife reside, also seems to belong to an ahistorical ‘old England’ – ‘Egbert and she were caught there, caught out of the world’ (EME 11); while ‘the timbered cottage with its slopping, cloak-like roof was old and forgotten. It belonged to the old England of hamlets and yeomen.’ They are propelled into historical time by the war, like the complacent couple in Cicely Hamilton’s William, an Englishman (1920). Connie takes a scenic car-ride to view the post-war landscape, in a grim inversion of the tourist

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gaze, and the narrative voice shifts between her responses and the polemic of the impersonal narrator. Although Georgian and neo-Georgian structures, such as Women in Love’s country house, Breadalby, and Nottingham University’s Trent Building, are generally symbols of sterile rationalism or imitation, in this context the classical style is valorised, nostalgically, when it will leave no trace, no ruin: ‘Fritchley, a perfect old Georgian mansion, was even now, as Connie passed in the car, being demolished. It was in perfect repair: till the war, the Weatherleys had lived in style there. But now it was too big, too expensive’ (LCL 156). Similarly, when Connie visits Shipley House, which has also been ordered for demolition, it is personified as ‘a very pleasant stucco building from the middle of the eighteenth century . . . the hall stood serenely spread out, winking its Georgian panes as if cheerfully’ (157). However, in contrast to the nostalgic tone of these passages, Lawrence’s Architectural Review essay on the Nottinghamshire mining countryside concludes with his criticism of the ‘silly little individualism’ of ‘my own little home’ (whether country house or miner’s cottage), which he links to a lack of civic community. Another essay for the magazine, titled ‘Pictures on the Wall (dead pictures on the wall)’, outlined the role of art and decoration in the solution to this problem.

Art, Architecture and Industry Clifford collected very modern pictures—at very moderate prices. (LCL 147) When Connie searches the ‘Wragby lumber rooms’, which are filled with pictures and ‘grotesque furniture’ that have been collected and ‘preserved’ by the family ‘through the generations’, she is horrified both by their lack of taste and by the objects’ lack of use, resolving to one day ‘clear it all’. In Chapter Eleven, then, the preservation debate reappears in relation to the role of interior design – and, more specifically, the role of art – in remaking the country house and in shaping the modernity of its occupants. Several of Lawrence’s works use modern European interior design to positively mark social development and, therefore, draw on mid-1920s trends, such as brocade and Italian antique furniture (Aslet 1982: 281). In The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930) Yvette is ‘thrilled by the Eastwoods’, who live in a ‘small modern house’, and its interior is carefully detailed: ‘strange curving cupboards inlaid with mother of pearl, tortoiseshell, ebony, heaven knows what; strange tall flamboyant chairs, from Italy, with seagreen brocade’ (52). Lawrence’s correspondence with Hubert de Cronin Hastings, editor of The Architectural Review, led to an article for the magazine which expounded his views on the relationships between art, design and architecture. The Review described itself as a ‘Magazine of Architecture and Decoration’ and functioned as a forum for some of the ongoing debates between contemporary architects, artists, designers and writers, or an example of what Rosner describes as the ‘interarts foundation of modernist literary aesthetics’ (2005: 11). For example, the August 1930 edition of The Architectural Review included articles by Lawrence, editor and publisher Noel Carrington (whose authored works included Design in the Home [1933]), journalist and architecture critic Philip Morton Shand, and author and musician Baron Povel Ramel. The February 1930 issue was the second in a series on ‘Modern Decoration’, and

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in ‘Pictures on the Wall (dead pictures on the wall)’ Lawrence declares that a home should change and develop alongside its owner, and that ‘the change should be more rapid in the more decorative scheme of the room’ (LEA 257–8). In focusing on the role of paintings in interior design, and the need for ‘modern works of art’, he challenges ‘the tedious dictum that a picture should be part of the architectural whole, built in the room . . . a picture is decoration, not architecture’ (260). Decoration, however, played a key role in creating and re-creating a modern home and consciousness: he declares that if people ‘burn all insignificant pictures, frames as well, how much more freely should we breathe indoors’. The reference to frames indicates the wide scope of arts and design that were being re-evaluated at this period; Rosner notes that the picture frame had been re-designed in the preceding decades, by artists including Whistler. The frame was a ‘bridge’ between the applied and decorative arts, and both divided the painting from and connected it to the home, transforming the painting itself into a decorative object (Rosner 2005: 22, 48). In this essay, Lawrence briefly makes modern painting an ‘arch’ that unites the fine arts with the decorative and architectural. In Women in Love (1920), the role of the arts in bridging, or forming the arch between, architecture and industry is foregrounded. However, the much-discussed vision that ends The Rainbow – of a ‘new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away’ (459) – has not been realised in the later novel. When Gudrun meets the artist Loerke, who is commissioned to create a wall frieze for a factory in Cologne (as also discussed here in Jane Costin’s chapter on ‘Sculpture’), Loerke explains that the frieze is an integral part of the architecture of the factory: The day for irrelevant statues, as for wall pictures, is over. As a matter of fact sculpture is always part of an architectural conception. And since churches are all museum stuff, since industry is our business, now, then let us make our places of industry our art—our factory-area our Parthenon—ecco! (424) As well as anticipating Lawrence’s criticisms of museumification and of ‘dead pictures on the wall’, Loerke’s exhortation in this passage to ‘make our places of industry our art’ has several connotations. It echoes the Victorian municipal idealism of industrial cities such as Birmingham and Glasgow, whose art schools and Venetian Gothic buildings were deeply influenced by the works of William Morris and John Ruskin; in 1881, the inscription stone of Birmingham’s Art Gallery was inscribed with the words ‘By the gains of Industry we promote Art’. However, Loerke’s frieze of a fair shows workers ‘fulfilling the counterpart of labour—the machine works him, instead of he the machine’ and therefore implies that the machine has become the new God. In this discourse, art and the artist are reduced to the reproduction of capitalist industrial labour and, as the frieze is an integral part of the ‘architectural conception’, it represents the status of artwork as ‘sordid property’, like the factory and the dead pictures that are preserved in homes.

Conclusion Lawrence’s buildings are overdetermined, or used to serve multiple purposes, in his oeuvre. He commented on a wide range of architectures, from sacred to suburban, and employed a range of generic forms in which to do so. Thus, by reading across his works, we can both observe the development of his thinking and the ways in which the

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cathedral, university, country house or suburban home is mined for many meanings, and subjected to multiple perspectives in different textual forms. He was an important cultural commentator on architecture, and both his literal and symbolic analyses of buildings and the built environment illuminate his views on a range of other issues, from the effect of female participation in higher education to the inter-war preservation debate. His work on architecture also informs our understandings of his interventions in the arts, and his role in shaping interdisciplinary debates in architecture, the arts and literature, and in the changing definitions of these terms in the twentieth century.

Works Cited Aslet, Clive (1982), The Last Country Houses, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Booth, Howard J. (2017), ‘Non-Metropolitan Modernism: E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and William Faulkner’, in The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. Vincent Sherry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 700–16. Carey, John (1992), The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, London: Faber & Faber. Charley, Jonathan and Sarah Edwards (2011), ‘Preface’, in Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture, Modernity, ed. Sarah Edwards and Jonathan Charley, London: Routledge. Colletta, Lisa (1999), ‘The Geography of Ruins: John Fowles’s Daniel Martin and the Travel Narratives of D. H. Lawrence’, in John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape, ed. J. R. Aubrey, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 212–29. Davenport, Hester (1989), ‘A Gothic Ruin and a Grecian House: Tennyson’s The Princess and Mid-Victorian Architectural Theory’, Victorian Studies, 32:2, pp. 209–30. Di Giovine, M. (2009), The Heritage-scape, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Downing, Crystal (1988), ‘Architecture as Synecdoche: A Poetics of Trace’, Pacific Coast Philology, 23:1–2, pp. 13–21. Edwards, Sarah (2013), ‘“Permanent Preservation for the Benefit of the Nation”: The Country House, Preservation and Nostalgia in Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’, in Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, ed. T. Clewell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 93–110. Girouard, Mark (1980), Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History, London: Penguin. Harris, Janice H. (1990), ‘Lawrence and the Edwardian Feminists’, in The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Michael Squires and Keith Cushman, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 62–76. Krockel, Carl (2007), D. H. Lawrence and Germany: The Politics of Influence, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Lehmann, Rosamond (2006), The Weather in the Streets, London: Virago Modern Classics. Lepine, Ayla (2014), ‘The Persistence of Medievalism: Kenneth Clark and the Gothic Revival’, Architectural History, 57, pp. 323–56. Macadré-Nguyên, Brigitte (2006), ‘Sacred Geometry or Ordering Chaos into Art in The Rainbow’, Études Lawrenciennes, 34, pp. 41–57. Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham; Michelucci, Stefania (2001), ‘Laying the Ghost: D. H. Lawrence’s Fight with Ruskin’, in Ruskin and Modernism, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 181–93. Michelucci, Stefania (2002), Space and Place in the Works of D. H. Lawrence, London: McFarland. Pinkney, Tony (1990), D. H. Lawrence, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

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Rattenbury, Kester (2018), Thomas Hardy, Architect: The Wessex Project, London: Lund Humphries. Robbins, Ruth (2011), ‘Long Shadow: Victorian Themes and Forms in the Edwardian Provincial Novel – Arnold Bennett and D. H. Lawrence’, Victoriographies, 1:1, pp. 1–13. Rosner, Victoria (2005), Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, New York: Columbia University Press. Ernie Scoffham (1992), A Vision of the City: The Architecture of T. C. Howitt, Nottingham: Nottinghamshire County Council. Spurr, David (2012), Architecture and Modern Literature, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

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24 Clothing and Jewellery Judith Ruderman

Introduction

I

t is ironic that an author infamous for having his characters shed their clothes actually paid a great deal of close attention to what they are wearing. Clothing and jewellery figure prominently in Lawrence’s writings, where they serve as more than mere window dressing. He admired them as art forms, yet, as with so many of his opinions, those on fashion were mixed and sometimes contradictory. His depictions of a character’s attire, especially that of a woman, are frequently lavish, as if the author revelled in their description; but if the wearer is deemed deficient in any way, an undercurrent of disapproval compromises that attraction. At the same time, Lawrence’s concentration on his characters’ apparel has provoked speculation about his own sexual identity. These complexities of Lawrence’s attention to fashion are instructively discussed in tandem with other preoccupations of his: among them, his appraisals of colour and the body, and his observations about the relations between the sexes and the values of modern society. Frieda Lawrence, in responding to her Christmas present of a sachet from Lawrence’s contact at his agent’s office, remarked, ‘Your little cloth gave us both so much pleasure, you know Lawrence (rare bird among men in that,) sees such things’ (6L 252). Here she notes her husband’s eyes on the gift’s appealing fabric, rather than his nose attached to its fragrant contents. That Lawrence saw such details is evidenced throughout his early novel Sons and Lovers, for example. Mrs Morel does not just stroke her apron: she strokes ‘the black sateen of her apron’ (251). Her son Paul is ever observant of the attire of the women in his life. Miriam wears ‘a new net blouse, that she thought became her. It had a high collar with a tiny ruff . . . making her, she thought, look wonderfully a woman and dignified . . . He would notice her new blouse’ (255–6). And notice it he does, with an artist’s eye: ‘Later, she saw him remark her new blouse, saw that the artist approved, but it won from him not a spark of warmth’ (256).

Colour Paul Morel reserves his steadiest sparks of warmth for his mother, who is always dressed in black from head to toe with perhaps a bit of white here and there for a special occasion, like her daughter’s wedding (SL 284). An unappreciative observer might call her a drab little woman (the adjective used is ‘subdued’ [17]), but she is one of the ‘naturally exquisite people’ (151), elegant in her simplicity and in a class by herself. Lawrence was typically drawn to colourful clothing, however. Confirmation of

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his pleasure in clothing as an art form is most often found in his attraction to colour, and in the connection between the colours in his paintings and those in the fabrics he lovingly describes in detail. He suggests this connection in a letter to his mother-inlaw from Sicily, in November 1921, in which descriptions of Frieda’s garments and Lawrence’s paintings are intertwined because the writer makes no transition from one subject to the other: [Frieda] has got three pieces of Sicilian cloth . . . spun there and dyed and woven. They make, like all peasants, only chequered designs: like plaid. One is chequered light-green and magenta and yellow, and a little dark blue, the other is rose-violet and brown with white stripes, and the last one chequered violet and linden-blossom green. The one is already finished – the seamstress brought it yesterday. Lovely, very lovely – and old-fashioned as eternity. She also had fine new white shoes made from good white leather. These came today. I have painted two pictures – the one round, like a plate, in a golden frame – all round like a round mirror. It is four plump nice blonde females who have been bathing in a green pool, and are suddenly frightened, and flee. The other is a Masaccio copy, very colourful, three kings and Mary . . . (4L 121) Creating colourful visual art was a lifelong preoccupation for Lawrence. To Helen Corke, in 1909, he explained that ‘Suddenly, in a world full of tones and tints and shadows I see a colour and it vibrates on my retina. I dip a brush in it and say, “See, that’s the colour!”’ (1L 129). When a volume of Lawrence’s paintings of the 1920s was at proof stage, he commented to a fellow artist that the publisher ‘sent a proof in colour of that picture – Accident in a Mine – Not bad, but oh, it loses a lot’ (7L 157). As with his painting, so with his clothes. A few days after wishing that the reproductions of his paintings were more vivid, he told his Italian friend Pino Orioli that he wanted ‘a blue coat like the one I got in Via Tornabuoni last summer – this is all faded – and I like it so much’ (159). Years earlier, Cynthia Asquith had sent him a jersey for Christmas, of a bright, beautiful colour that, buttoned under a coat, made him look like ‘an orange breasted robin in the spring-time’ (2L 503). There was nothing ‘faded’ about D. H. Lawrence. Even with handkerchiefs he favoured ‘coloured ones so much better’ (7L 187). When starting out as an author gaining some traction with the London literati, he had responded to Violet Hunt’s invitation to her club with the rather sheepish acceptance of an arriviste: ‘I’ll come . . . if you’ll promise that it’s not swelly. I’m as shabby as a married curate’ (1L 227). Off to Italy with Frieda soon after – not quite married and certainly no curate – he was delighted by the prospect of more elegant attire; as he wrote to his sister Ada in 1912, ‘the idea of a smoking jacket is quite gorgeous – only let it be of some delightful colour – purple or crimson or cornflower blue – nothing dull and uninteresting’ (454). There was nothing ‘dull’ about Lawrence’s prose style, either. In 1908, when he was ‘painting for dear life, and enjoying [him]self immensely’, he expressed his love of colour and linked it to his mode of writing: he complained about Alice Dax, who had read the manuscript of ‘Laetitia’ (an early version of his first novel, The White Peacock) and presumably criticised its style: ‘she is wrong – she is no judge of style – she likes style as she likes not people – well-bred, accurate, carefully attired – she dresses herself in grey costumes – she is like the whole world, she likes things “superior”’ (1L 88). In his late

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essay ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, written at the time of the imbroglios around Lady Chatterley’s Lover and his colourful, erotic paintings, Lawrence equates the ‘grey ones’ with outmoded attitudes, especially concerning the body and sex (LEA 249).

The Body Linking vibrant colour with vitality, Lawrence admonished Blanche Jennings that she was a ‘pale person’ whom he wished were ‘Hedonistic. – nice and red-corpusculary [sic] – sanguine’ (1L 119). He gave similar advice to Ernest Collings in response to Collings’s drawings: ‘I am sure, too, this is your time for colour. You have got it in your blood . . . You are more interested in it at present than in line, I think. That is because it is more passionate, voluptuous’ (2L 69). In Sons and Lovers Lawrence symbolically knits colour to passion in his association of Clara with blood-red flowers, contrasted with Miriam’s connection to virginal off-white. His statement of credo in this period explicitly connects blood and body: ‘My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect . . . what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true’ (1L 503). Relatedly, to Rachel Annand Taylor, who had sent him her book of verse, he complained that the poems were too intellectual and compared them to clothes that do not show off the body (1L 185); the next month he wrote again to explain: ‘As for the clothes simile which I foisted on your verse, surely it is an ancient one enough – “He garments his whimsical soul in verse fastidious –” – and for myself, I know it is always hard to get my verse cut close to the palpitating form of the experience’ (187). An essential aspect of Paul’s appreciation of Clara’s attire in Sons and Lovers is the fact that her clothes are cut close to her form: ‘Her costume of dark cloth fitted so beautifully over her breast and shoulders’ (SL 363); ‘He could see her figure inside the frock’ (375). Clara’s sexually alluring stockings in her bedroom contrast with the elastic stockings that she constructs at Jordan’s surgical supply factory, which connote the body’s debility. In ‘Introduction to these Paintings’, Lawrence denigrates ‘bourgeois’ painters like Hogarth and Reynolds, in whose works ‘The coat is really more important than the man’, and praises Titian and other artists in whose works ‘the people are there inside their clothes all right, and the clothes are imbued with the life of [the] individual, the gleam of the warm procreative body comes through all the time’. Modern people, in contrast, ‘are nothing inside their garments’ (LEA 193–4). That Lawrence himself wore clothes several sizes too big for him in his later years, as existing photographs disclose, also makes a statement about the body, for such photos are graphic illustrations of the wearer’s weight loss and encroaching death from tuberculosis. Lawrence sadly became ‘nothing inside [his] garments’ near the end.

Clothing, Sex and Sexual Politics Women in Love has always garnered the most attention as regards Lawrence’s depictions of clothing. An anonymous reviewer of the novel in the Saturday Westminster Gazette for 2 July 1921 remarked, ‘Clothes play parts of their own in the tale. “Enter a purple gown, green stockings, and amber necklace” would do for a stage direction’ (quoted in Draper 1970: 166–7). The comment was not meant to be flattering; the author goes on to complain that although the sisters have ‘innumerable pairs of

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stockings, which they change several times in a chapter’, they are indistinguishable as people. Years later, the critic Angela Carter, in her interpretation of Lawrence as a closeted homosexual, also lumped the sisters together in her statement that they ‘habitually come onto the page dragging Vogue captions behind them’. At the conclusion of her essay, Carter qualifies that assertion: Ursula ‘starts off just as ostentatiously dressed as Gudrun but descriptions of her apparel tail off’ because of Birkin’s domination (1982: 163, 168). In reality, on the second page of the novel, where Gudrun’s attire is elaborately described (WL 8), Ursula’s dress remains unremarked; this contrast, pre-dating Ursula’s liaison with Birkin, serves as an immediate signpost to the singular role that Gudrun’s clothing will play in Women in Love. Lawrence devotes a great deal of ink to what Gudrun is wearing at several points in the novel. He records her attire fully (Ursula’s minimally) at Breadalby, where Gudrun is in ‘a good get-up, at once fashionable and individual’ (WL 83). In ‘Water-Party’, Lawrence allocates a paragraph to Gudrun’s costume, which makes her look ‘remarkable, like a painting from the Salon’ (155). At the Pompadour Café in London, Lawrence cannot let Gudrun simply walk out boldly with Birkin’s letter, appropriated from the sneering bohemian crowd; it takes another paragraph to do full justice to her fashionable attire and the ‘slow, fashionable indifference’ with which she saunters to the door, all eyes on her. She walks ‘in her measured fashion’, a phrase suggesting not only her unhurried pace – the ‘deliberate, cold movement of a woman who is welldressed and contemptuous in her soul’ – but also how others are thereby compelled to take the measure of her (384–5). In her overall demeanour Gudrun displays herself as measured and composed as well, with her look of ‘confidence and diffidence’ and her ‘mask-like, expressionless face’ (WL 8, 9). She intimidates the people in the provincial hometown of Beldover because of her ‘perfect sang froid and exclusive bareness of manner’ (8). Her clothing, which reflects her artfulness and individuality, demands attention. As she passes among the townspeople on the way to the Crich wedding she is ‘aware of her grassgreen stockings, her large, grass-green velour hat, her full, soft coat, of a strong blue colour’ (12). In Austria, she comes down to dinner in one of her daringly idiosyncratic get-ups: ‘She was really brilliantly beautiful, and everybody noticed her’ (394). At the water-party her father is not pleased by her flamboyant outfit, ‘But Gudrun looked handsome and brilliant, and she wore her clothes in pure defiance’ (156). Gerald Crich is annoyed that she has dressed ‘in startling colours, like a macaw’, in his house of mourning; more, he feels ‘the challenge in her very attire—she challenged the whole world’ (239). One item of clothing in particular poses a challenge to conventional mores: those ‘innumerable pairs’ of stockings. As Carter puts it, ‘Stockings, stockings, stockings everywhere’ (1982: 163). Gerald seems particularly ‘disconcerted’ by Gudrun’s colourful stockings (WL 237), for which we are told she is ‘notorious’ (436). Although Ursula delights in them as well – ‘One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings’, she says (437), and she sports canary yellow stockings at one point (114) – these intimate items are gifts from Gudrun. Jane Garrity, in her essay ‘Sartorial Modernity: Fashion, Gender, and Sexuality in Modernism’, comments on how ‘female nonconformity is noticeably staged through dress’ in this novel, particularly with regard to Gudrun and her emerald-green stockings, ‘a color that at the time was considered controversial and contrary to English conventions of good taste’ (2014: 270).

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Garrity relates an anecdote about how a worker in the Bloomsbury Group’s Omega Workshops requested emerald-green silk of Liberty’s department store in 1914, only to receive the indignant reply of the shop assistant: ‘“Emerald, Madam, is a colour we never stock.”’ As Garrity explains, ‘Gudrun’s confrontational color choices must be read within this larger context of fashion history’, because the silk stockings worn by most English women of the period were black, white, beige and grey. Gudrun is more transgressive than her sister in both attire and outlook. Attentive to the latest trends in art, she introduces reproductions of Picasso into the Brangwen home (WL 255). Gerald Crich confuses Gudrun’s own artwork, her carvings at Hermione’s manor, with the ‘savage [African] carving’ that he and Birkin had earlier seen in Halliday’s London flat (94); he will eventually find, after Ursula’s tempering presence has been removed from the scene late in the novel, that Gudrun has become ‘stark and elemental’ (441), as much so as those African carvings. Elizabeth Sheehan, in Modernism à la Mode, links Gudrun’s attire with her violent relationship with Gerald, and with the Futurists’ ideal of ‘bellicose’ clothing (2018: 93). Although Lawrence may not have read that movement’s manifestos on dress, Gudrun’s highly provocative clothes express her challenge towards social norms. How different the Gudrun of Women in Love is from her minor role in The Rainbow, where she wears ‘soft, easy clothing, and hats which [fall] by themselves into a careless grace’ (401). There is nothing soft and easy about Gudrun in the sequel. One vibrant dress with a colour resembling the ‘sheen on an insect’ relates her to her new love interest, the bisexual artist Loerke, whom Gerald labels a ‘noxious insect’, ‘little vermin’ (WL 448, 454), seemingly with the author’s blessing. Lawrence’s references to insects in this period connote for him something obscene and unnatural, namely homosexuality (2L 320–1), complicating this particular description of Gudrun’s nonconformity in dress and suggesting a masking of his own homoerotic desires. Carter asserts that Lawrence uses ‘stockings as censorship’ in Women in Love: although he has a fetish for women’s clothing, he cannot openly reveal it; instead, he covers women’s legs and puts ‘Woman’ down by making her excessively fixated on stockings – ‘monstrous old hypocrite that he is’ (1982: 164). Carter does not refer to Sons and Lovers, but an incident in that novel supports her view of the author. For surely it is significant that Paul Morel realises he must have sex with Clara when he puts on the stockings she has left lying about in her bedroom (381); in this case the link between the two actions does not serve to denigrate women, but it does imply that sex with a woman may well be compensation and cover for the author’s repressed homosexual impulses. Hugh Stevens finds those urges as well in The Plumed Serpent, where the trousers of the Mexican men, in addition to outright male naked flesh, are homoerotic focuses for the Western gaze that imagines the legs hidden beneath. That the gaze is from a woman, the protagonist Kate Leslie, is for Stevens also a cover, for an author in drag (2000: 227, 232–3). In a study of women’s clothing as depicted in works by modernist female writers, Hope Hodgkins takes a moment to engage with Women in Love, and especially the sisters’ stockings. ‘Of the famous high-modernist men’, Hodgkins states, ‘only D. H. Lawrence, in line with his personal interests in design and sexuality, endeavored to take dress beyond gender stereotypes’ (2016: 4). As a rule, a reader of modernist works encounters ‘abbreviated, corralled clothing details in male-authored fiction’, whereas Lawrence ‘describes female dress in Women in Love with detailed interest’. Yet for

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Hodgkins the key word above is ‘endeavored’, for she concludes, somewhat simplistically, that ultimately Lawrence fails to take the female characters beyond an ‘infantile’ delight in clothing that renders them little more than enchanting, and thereby boxes them into stereotypes after all (35–6). For Carter, as we have seen, Lawrence’s delight in female clothing more compellingly reveals his own gender identity confusions. Gudrun’s defiance of provincialism is a trait shared by her creator, but in the final analysis Lawrence cannot maintain his often sympathetic treatment of her dramatic dress and nonconformity; rather, the weight of the novel countenances the views and actions of the less flamboyant (though feisty) Ursula, who is ultimately open to marriage as she and her sister, in the opening pages, were not. The perspective that Lawrence would go only so far with the idea of what we today call women’s liberation is a common and deserved view. The attire of many modern women of the 1920s especially offended him, as his comment on one young woman’s boyish dress indicates: ‘To me it is just repulsive’; he wrote that he preferred women to be women, ‘and a bit charming!’ (5L 583). Gudrun may dress like a woman, and on occasion be more than a bit charming, but she is for Lawrence uncomfortably dangerous. An early story revised extensively for inclusion in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories in 1914 provides a comparison point to Women in Love, revealing, by means of another pair of stockings, sexual tensions below the surface and a concomitant need to tame an unconventional woman. In ‘The White Stocking’, young Elsie, on her way to her employer’s Christmas party, puts one of her white stockings in her pocket instead of her white handkerchief. After it falls out at the party, and her boss, Sam Adams, picks it up, she lets him keep it. Indeed, the three dances between Elsie and Sam are fraught with sexual desire on both sides (as also discussed by Susan Jones in her chapter on ‘Dance’). Elsie tries to tamp her urges down by turning with some relief to the company of her fiancé, Ted Whiston, whom she soon marries. But Adams sends her one stocking, and jewellery, each of the two years after the marriage, on Valentine’s Day, a fact that she keeps secret at first. Eventually she shows off the stockings to her husband, exposing her ‘pretty legs’ (the phrase repeated for emphasis [PO 159–60]). Calling his wife a trollop, Whiston smacks her hard in the face, and her blood is staunched by that symbol of purity, her white handkerchief. With this shocking violence, the sexual tension is released, presumably by both figures; the wild wife is tamed and the balance restored, at least in terms of the story. Women in Love presents an alternative version of this theme. Gerald Crich is unable to tame his unconventional woman, choosing to give up the fight; unlike Ted Whiston with Elsie, Gerald’s violence towards Gudrun ultimately turns inward and leads to his suicide.

Fashion and Fashioning Hermione Roddice is another sartorially nonconforming woman in Women in Love, whose colourful, ‘almost macabre’ clothes, as well as her haughty mien, figure her as ‘entrenched in her class superiority’ (159). In real life, Lawrence was fascinated by the accoutrements of Lady Ottoline Morrell, the model for Hermione; as he enthused in a letter of 1915, ‘The Ottoline has hundreds of exquisite rags, heaps of coloured clothes and things, like an Eastern bazaar. One can dress up splendidly’ (2L 465). But Ottoline’s ‘world of make-belief’, as Lawrence calls it in that letter, becomes in Hermione a cover-up for inner deficiencies. Although Gudrun has her own share of

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deficiencies, her style is praised as ‘at once fashionable and individual’ (WL 83). Lawrence disparages haute couture, or gives an affectionate, slightly mocking nod to it, in Frieda’s assertions that her dress creations are ‘better than Paquin’, the Parisian fashion designer (5L 622). What is in vogue is not important to him. Vogue, instituted in New York in 1892 as a ‘social gazette for a Eurocentric elite’ (the magazine’s name itself was French), purchased by Condé Nast in 1909 and inaugurated in England in 1916, was the most significant and influential publication for high fashion in Lawrence’s time. In September 1916 the British Vogue confidently declared, ‘The best-dressed women choose their wardrobes by one infallible rule: if it’s in Vogue, it’s smart’ (David 2006: 13, 14, 15). Although Lawrence, like other modernists, published in Vogue, being ‘smart’ in the Vogue sense was anathema to him: he termed ‘smart’ clothes ‘the vanity of the ego’ (5L 294). It is a dubious compliment when Lawrence, in his attentive, even admiring, descriptions of the chic outfits of Victoria Callcott in Kangaroo, remarks that ‘she looked like a magazine cover’ (35): the cover of Vogue, after all, is what the Brangwen sisters find half-burnt in the Brangwen fireplace, a detail that Lawrence took pains to insert when revising the manuscript (WL 569). Frieda’s clothing would never have graced a fashion magazine cover and did not originate in a London bespoke tailor’s shop or Parisian designer’s atelier. Rather, Lawrence’s letters remark on the domestic production of clothing from available cloth, whether in reference to Frieda’s construction of her dresses, coats and hats (5L 622), or to the hand-knit socks sent to him by his mother-in-law, which matched his trousers (6L 34). He was a materialist in the literal sense of valuing materials for the creation of clothing that was fashionable in two senses, if not stereotypically ‘in fashion’. He as well as his wife made Frieda’s attire, including ‘a hat, a sort of Russian toque – out of bits of fur – so she looks very nice’ (2L 454). In ‘Education of the People’ (1920), Lawrence prescribes a new system in which boys are taught cobbling ‘in the hopes that before long a man will make his own boots to his own fancy . . . And the same with his trousers’ (RDP 152). As Sheehan notes of this passage, to wear boots made by machine is ‘a form of subjecting oneself to the standardizing “machine” of modern society’ (2018: 108). ‘If I could’, says Lawrence in this treatise, ‘I would make my own boots and my own trousers and coats.’ The importance of such endeavours lies in the rationale: ‘I am myself, and I don’t want to be rigged out as a poor specimen of Mr Everyman’ (RDP 151). Lawrence’s fictional characters also use their creativity in fabric design and sometimes the production of dress, in distinction from the mechanical methods of the factory. In The Rainbow, Will Brangwen is art and handicraft instructor for the county of Nottinghamshire. In Sons and Lovers, in the section on Jordan’s, Lawrence dwells on the manufacture by spiral machine of elastic surgical stockings that, in their sameness, blandness and utility, in addition to their suggestion of physical weakness, offer a stark contrast to the Brangwen sisters’ stockings in Women in Love. Clara Dawes and her mother wind lace onto cards, in ‘sweated’ labour, as a means to the end of economic survival (SL 303). Mrs Morel and her neighbours also do lace-making piecework at home, but in Mrs Morel’s case we do get a sense of satisfaction in the goods she creates, including shirts and children’s clothing. Yet it is her son Paul, working in Jordan’s by day but painting pictures and designing fabrics by night, who is the true fabric artist – his painting on canvas and his designing on cloth are of a piece in that sense. Much later, in 1928, Lawrence told Beatrice Campbell that he remembered how she

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had scolded him ‘for making Paul in Sons and Lovers paint dress-lengths. I agree, after many years – it would be rather boring. I did a picture of the Boccaccio story of the nuns and the gardener – much more fun than batik’ (6L 283). By this time, Lawrence’s joy in painting had supplanted that in creating fabric design. But in his earlier days he was very like Paul Morel, for whom ‘The applied arts interested him very much’ (SL 345). Indeed, when Paul notices that Clara has on a new frock, he boasts, ‘I could design you a dress’ (347). The Plumed Serpent offers perhaps the most vivid examples of fabric design and the clothing made from it as applied arts. The work of the weavers of Quetzalcoatl, in Lawrence’s resurrection of the dark gods of Mexico, is described in detail, the exquisiteness of their creations originating in ‘the pure colours of the lustrous wool [that] looked mystical, the cardinal scarlet, the pure silky white, the lovely blue, and the black’ (PS 322). Every item of clothing is made by hand, including sashes, sarapes and sandals (171, 173–4). Ramón’s artists are at work in many other media as well, including crafting metalwork or carving a head of their leader out of wood (171). Lawrence once said, ‘One has to be so terribly religious, to be an artist’ (1L 519), and this novel seems to proclaim the obverse, too, that one has to be terribly artistic to be religious. Sheehan does not address The Plumed Serpent in her discussion of Lawrence and clothing, but her remark about Mellors’s touting the regenerative effects of red trousers and jackets, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, applies to this novel as well: Lawrence ‘considers how the right kind of garments might inspire social and political change, in part by reconnecting bodies to the vital forces and flows that Lawrence associates with “blood-consciousness”’ (2018: 87). Cipriano’s hand-picked men for Don Ramón’s army discard their ‘ignominious drab uniform’ and adopt the dress of the followers of this new religion (PS 366). All Mexicans are urged by Ramón, the leader, to renounce their ‘American suit of clothes’ (360). Lawrence uses rejected forms of clothing in these instances and others both in their literal sense and to figuratively connote an alien, materialistic way of life that is not intrinsic to the country’s culture. Kate Leslie’s acceptance of Ramón’s Mexican wife is symbolised by her giving Teresa a bright fabric to complement her dark skin, and helping her to make a dress out of it. Teresa, for her part, feels ‘a little repugnance for her: for the foreign white woman . . . All these well-dressed, beautiful women from America or England, Europe, they all kept their souls for themselves, in a sort of purse, as it were’ (PS 411). Cipriano has already informed Kate that the Navajo women leave a small place in their woven blankets, so the soul is not trapped: ‘I think England has woven her soul into her fabrics, into all the things she has made . . . So now all her soul is in her goods, and nowhere else’ (234). The novel’s ending is ambiguous, but whatever Kate’s ultimate decision about staying in Mexico or returning to her familiar life in England, she has come to realise that she does not want to be like her ‘friends’ (the qualifying quotation marks are the narrator’s, hence the protagonist’s), who, as they age, remain ‘grey-ribbed grimalkins, dressed in elegant clothes, the grimalkin howl even passing into their smart chatter’ (438). In Style and the Single Girl, Hodgkins comments that ‘just as literary art complicates single words, so stylish dress may be seen as an artistic sharpening of clothing’s natural rhetoric’ (2016: xv). The clothes metaphor that Lawrence used to characterise his ideal of literary art pertains in this context: as he wrote to the poet Jean Stafford in 1922, ‘I think the greatest achievement is when pure speech goes straight into poetry,

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without having to put on Sunday clothes’, which he equated not with style but with ‘affectations and showing off’ (4L 185–6). In The Plumed Serpent, the Sunday clothes of church-going Christians are replaced by fashions designed to praise the gods rather than the wearers; and the liturgy of traditional clergy, delivered in cloistered buildings, is rejected in favour of the poems of the religion of Quetzalcoatl, delivered orally to followers in the open air.

Jewellery In Women in Love, the value that Ursula and Gudrun ascribe to their variously coloured stockings is captured in their term for them: ‘the jewels’ (436). Years earlier, Lawrence had described the tones in the painting he created for his Aunt Ada: ‘It is the most exquisite jewel twilight you ever saw: jacinth, and topaz and amethyst’ (1L 263). Jewel tones of paintings and stockings were actualised in the jewellery with which he adorned the characters populating his fiction. For example, Birkin gives Ursula three beautiful rings, one each of opal, sapphire and topaz, as tokens of a pledge to her: ‘They gave her such pleasure, as they lay, the three circles, with their knotted jewels . . . They were very beautiful to her eyes—not as ornament, or wealth, but as tiny fragments of loveliness’ (WL 304). In Sons and Lovers, at Miriam’s grandmother’s cottage for tea, Paul holds forth ‘on the love of ornament—the cottage parlour moved him thereto—and its connection with aesthetics’ (343). His thoughts on that connection are left unstated, but because the cottage and also the homes of the Leivers and Morels are described as pretty and cosy, containing chintz sofa covers, a bowl of coloured leaves, prints on the wall, or even a stuffed owl, one surmises that it is ornamentation for the purpose of showing off that is to be avoided (71, 224, 229, 332). The aesthetic qualities of jewellery, as depicted by Lawrence in many venues, argue that ornaments can indeed be fragments of loveliness. ‘The Wedding Ring’ was an early title for what became The Rainbow, and rings are found throughout the final version. However, plain gold bands, numerous as they are (Lydia even wears two at once), are outshone in this novel by brilliant stones. Baron Skrebensky gives the young Anna some of his late wife’s Russian jewellery, but it is Anna’s daughter Ursula to whose body most of the jewellery references will adhere. When she is a child, her father, Will, ties bits of cotton on her ears with varied-coloured beads: ‘So you’re wearing your best golden and pearl ear-rings today?’ he asks; and little Ursula responds that she has been to see the queen (R 199). Ursula’s Uncle Tom provides her with gifts that include ‘a little necklace of rough stones, amethyst and opal and brilliants and garnet’ (225–6). Later, at age sixteen, she rebels against the Sunday church lessons about giving to the poor: ‘Did she want to do that? Did she want to sell her pearl-backed brush and mirror, her silver candlestick, her pendant, her lovely little necklace, and go dressed in drab like the . . . unlovely, uncombed Wherrys, who were “the poor” to her? She did not.’ She imagines, rather, that she should be Lady Ursula and bestow a shilling on a cottager’s child in a gesture of noblesse oblige (264–5). Eventually she will give that prized necklace to a poor couple living on the canal. They name their newborn baby Ursula in her honour, to signify their deference to a woman of the upper class, and by doing so they facilitate Ursula’s grand gesture; as the donor to her namesake, she bestows and yet symbolically retains at the same time.

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The pendant that Ursula cannot imagine giving up had come from her father. Will Brangwen has several jobs over the course of the novel, one of them as a lace designer, but only to earn a living, not for the art or beauty of that craft (R 387). However, he eventually finds a true calling: [He] took up jewellery, read Benvenuto Cellini, pored over reproductions of ornament, and began to make pendants in silver and pearl and matrix. The first things he did, in his start of discovery, were really beautiful. Those later were more imitative. But, starting with his wife, he made a pendant each for all his women folk. Then he made rings and bracelets. (330–1) Lawrence liked to provide jewellery for his womenfolk, whether female friends or his wife. In 1916, from his Cornwall cottage, he sent a rose quartz stone to Dollie Radford and rather apologetically explained, ‘I think it is rather a lovely stone . . . true crystal of the inner earth, and rosy at that. So forgive its lack of value.’ He went on to write that ‘the sea has been deep blue, like lapis lazuli, with lovely coloured shadowings, grey and lilac, just like lapis lazuli. If I were a man with money, I should have bought you a necklace of lapis lazuli today, a necklace with small lovely beads . . . [I]t was just your necklace. But I am a man without money’ (2L 585). Yet several months later he did send her a ‘pendant of lapis lazuli, and this little chain, with great joy’; he considered the stone to be ‘her own true blue . . . I feel that the bit of blue smooth stone really belongs to you’ (3L 59). Lapis lazuli clearly held a special attraction for Lawrence, most memorably in its use as a weapon for Hermione Roddice to bash Birkin over the head with in Women in Love (105). In 1914, when writing The Rainbow, he wrote to his close friend Koteliansky to ask him to purchase for Frieda a necklace that he had seen in a second-hand jeweller’s shop, and even drew a picture to help Kot recognise it: ‘lapis lazuli set in little white enamel clasps’; when it arrived, Lawrence remarked on how ‘pretty’ it was (2L 228, 229). Other stones are prominently set in the novels. The character in The Plumed Serpent modelled on Frieda, Kate Leslie, wears jade and crystal around her neck to ornament her ‘simple gown with a black velvet top and a loose skirt of delicate brocaded chiffon, of a glimmering green and yellow and black . . . It was a gift she had, of looking like an Ossianic goddess, a certain feminine strength and softness glowing in the very material of her dress. But she was never “smart”’ (PS, 60). (As ever, ‘smart’ denotes accordance with standardised definitions of fashion.) When Kate and her lover Cipriano – whose eyes are described as ‘black jewels’ (67) – later marry, they exchange gifts of necklaces to symbolise their union as a meeting-ground of opposites, which is the essence of the religion of Quetzalcoatl (331). In The Plumed Serpent Lawrence pays loving attention to jewels as they relate to other practitioners of that religion as well. The ritual attire of the followers includes a turquoise ornament on the forehead of the drummer; and the ceremonial function of turquoise is matched by that of jade. In 1925, Witter Bynner sent Frieda a jade necklace from China, and she made a green linen dress to go with it (5L 259). The novel that Lawrence was revising at this time features jade in the opening scenes, in a discussion of the stone by the guests of Don Ramón (PS 44–5). Although jade is not always green (a point on which Kate insists), Lawrence needs to provide her with a jade green hat while she wanders among Don Ramón’s weavers (320) – for green is the colour of

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Malintzi, the goddess she will come to embody (Aztec rather than Ossian) when wearing a green dress that is becoming in two senses (330). As the waters of the religion of Quetzalcoatl will revivify the dead Mexican landscape, so Kate, as suggested by her green dress, will also be refreshed and renewed.

Fashion as Self-Expression In his late essay ‘Pictures on the Wall’ (1929), Lawrence explicitly relates the ‘interior decoration’ of art hung in homes to the exterior decoration on/of the human body. He uses a clothes analogy to drive home the point that pictures should be changed regularly rather than be subjected to the inertia of the resident, which would be ‘death to any freshness in the home’: A woman might as well say: I’ve worn this hat for a year, so I may as well go on wearing it for a few more years.—A house, a home, is only a greater garment, and just as we feel we must renew our clothes and have fresh ones, so we should renew our homes and make them in keeping. Spring-cleaning isn’t enough. Why do fashions in clothes change? Because, really, we ourselves change, in the slow metamorphosis of time. If we imagine ourselves now in the clothes we wore six years ago, we shall see that it is impossible. We are, in some way, different persons now, and our clothes express our different personality. (LEA 257) Fashion for Lawrence is best adopted as a hallmark of transformation and revitalisation: not for the sake of impressing others, but, rather, for expressing the self at any given moment in time. Of the modern woman enamoured of fashion he sneers, in ‘Education of the People’: She wants to look ultra-smart and chic beyond words. And so she knows that if she can set all women bitterly asking “Isn’t her dress Paquin?” or “Surely it’s Poiret,” or Lucile or Chéruit or somebody very Parisian, why, she’s done it. She wants to create an effect: not the effect of being just herself, her one and only self, as a flower in all its spots and frills is its own candid self. (RDP 152) Lawrence wished to express just himself, his ‘one and only self’. Cecile Lambert reports that in 1919 Lawrence told her he ‘hated orthodox clothes and dressed in the blue coat and odd things because he liked to create attention’ (Nehls 1957: 505). Frieda’s daughter Barby, to whom Lawrence gave advice about proper techniques for sewing garments, and what colours would work well together, relates that in his own attire he did not mind ‘a bit of vanity’ (Nehls 1959: 139). True, almost all of the extant photographs of Lawrence show him in conventional dress; a departure from that norm, a 1915 photo taken at Lady Ottoline’s manor house in the period of Women in Love, portrays the author in a velveteen or corduroy jacket. Of the latter, David Ellis comments that the rarity of such photographs indicates that ‘the “Artist” role was one Lawrence adopted only intermittently, was never comfortable with, and abandoned completely after the war. But that he should occasionally have seen it as an option is important.’ I find Ellis’s subsequent thought more compelling: that no single image can be used to illustrate ‘Lawrence’s true being’ (1992: 163). Lawrence’s

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pronouncements about colour and unorthodoxy in clothing, both before and after the war, along with his own colourful garb as described in his letters, suggest that aspects of his ‘true being’ are missing from the bulk of the photographs at our disposal. As a ‘rare bird’ among men, as Frieda called him, and among male modernist authors, as several literary critics assert, Lawrence appreciated fashion, but with caveats and contradictions. That Lawrence’s attitudes towards this subject are complex and evocative only highlights how they are intricately woven into the fabric of the life and art of a very complicated man.

Works Cited Carter, Angela (1982), ‘Lawrence as Closet-Queen’, in Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings, London: Virago, pp. 161–8. David, Alison Matthew (2006), ‘Vogue’s New World: American Fashionability and the Politics of Style’, Fashion Theory, 10:1–2, pp. 13–38. Draper, Ronald, ed. (1970), D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, New York: Barnes & Noble. Ellis, David (1992), ‘Images of D. H. Lawrence: On the Use of Photographs in Biography’, in The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke, London: Reaktion, pp. 155–72. Garrity, Jane (2014), ‘Sartorial Modernity: Fashion, Gender, and Sexuality in Modernism’, in A Companion to British Literature, Volume IV: Victorian and Twentieth-Century Literature 1837–2000, ed. Robert DeMaria Jr, Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher, Chichester: WileyBlackwell, pp. 260–79. Hodgkins, Hope Howell (2016), Style and the Single Girl: How Modern Women Re-Dressed the Novel 1922–1977, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Nehls, Edward, ed. (1957), D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Volume One, 1885–1919, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Nehls, Edward, ed. (1959), D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Volume Three, 1925–1930, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Sheehan, Elizabeth (2018), Modernism à la Mode: Fashion and the Ends of Literature, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Stevens, Hugh (2000), ‘The Plumed Serpent and the Erotics of Primitive Masculinity’, in Modernist Sexualities, ed. Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 219–38.

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Part III Lawrence in Others’ Art

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25 Lawrence in Biofiction Lee M. Jenkins

Introduction

L

awrence responded to his portrayal as Mark Rampion in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928) by writing the poem ‘I am in a novel—’. ‘I refuse to be Rampioned’, he declared in a letter (6L 617). But Lawrence’s notoriety as a man and as a writer made him ripe for representation in biographical fiction, and Huxley’s is only the best known of the many novelistic pen portraits made of Lawrence by those who knew him and those who didn’t. According to Maurice Beebe, ‘No author since Byron has been depicted in fiction more than D. H. Lawrence’ (1988: 295). These depictions are not distributed evenly over time, however: the cluster of portraits of Lawrence produced by his contemporaries between 1916 and 1936 would be superseded, in the post-war decades, by the Lawrentian type that embodies Lawrence’s ideas and ideas of Lawrence: proof in itself of Lawrence’s staying power in the popular and literary imagination. A second wave of biofiction from the 1990s to the present has been given theoretical traction (see Lackey 2017), but may be explained, too, by the framing and allure of the modernist era as a historical period: late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Lawrence biofictions are also historical novels. This chapter considers how early and more recent biofictional representations and their aesthetics reflect and reflect upon Lawrence’s own aesthetic and legacy.

Pen Portraits of the Artist: Gilbert Cannan and Aldous Huxley Lawrence made his biofictional debut in Gilbert Cannan’s Mendel: A Story of Youth (1916), a Künstlerroman in which the eponymous character is modelled on their mutual artist friend, Mark Gertler (also discussed in Andrew Harrison’s chapter ‘Historiography and Life Writing’). James Logan, Mendel’s friend and fellow painter, is a compound of Lawrence and John Currie, Gertler’s contemporary at the Slade School of Fine Art (1908–12). Where Mendel himself is a pen portrait of the artist as a visual artist, Logan – a painter who ‘talks like a book’ (Cannan 1916: 174) – prefigures Huxley’s Rampion, who is both a writer and a painter. Like Gertler, Lawrence disparaged Mendel, telling their mutual friend S. S. Koteliansky that ‘It is, as Gertler says, journalism: statement, without creation . . . very sickening’ (3L 35). Mendel may not meet Lawrence’s criteria for best biofictional practice, but the interchange between the verbal and visual arts in Cannan’s novel bears comparison nonetheless with that of The Rainbow and Women in Love, situating early biofictions of Lawrence, like Lawrence’s own fiction of the 1910s, in the inter-arts aesthetic of 1910s modernism,

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and of the Bloomsbury set with which Cannan, Lawrence and Gertler were all for a period associated. That interchange between the verbal and visual arts is replicated in the intermedial nexus between Lawrence, Cannan and Gertler.1 Will Brangwen’s wood carving in The Rainbow (1915) is a remediation of Gertler’s painting The Creation of Eve (1914; Plate 30), and Women in Love (1920), which Lawrence was writing in the year Mendel was published, reproduces Cannan’s novel’s description of an African carving.2 Women in Love also repurposes Gertler’s 1916 painting Merry-Go-Round (Plate 31). Responding in a letter to a photograph of Merry-Go-Round, Lawrence assures Gertler that ‘I won’t say what I, as man of words and ideas, read in the picture’ before saying that what he reads – or hears – in it is nothing less than ‘the final and great death-cry of this epoch’ (2L 660–1). Lawrence tells Gertler that he is ‘trying to imagine what this picture will be like, in sculpture’, as Gertler had envisioned, but, as Jane Costin notes in her chapter on ‘Sculpture’, it would be Lawrence himself, not Gertler, who would recast Merry-Go-Round ‘in sculpture’ when he incorporated Gertler’s painting into Loerke’s frieze in Women in Love. Lawrence, who modelled Loerke in part at least on Gertler, may also have read the trios of carousel riders in Gertler’s ‘terrible and dreadful picture’ as a painterly equivalent of the triangular relationships of Women in Love (2L 660). In Cannan’s novel, Mendel comments on the triangle formed by ‘himself, Logan and Oliver [Nelly Oliver, Logan’s lover], three people’ (1916: 427). Logan must choose between Mendel and Nelly, and his choice of Mendel results in murder and suicide. Clearly, the model for Logan here is Currie (who had murdered his mistress and model, Dolly Henry, before taking his own life), but Cannan nonetheless channels his animus against Frieda Lawrence through Mendel’s intense ‘dislike’ for Nelly (286). Stripping his Frieda of her aristocratic birthright, Cannan gives her the bare lineaments of Lawrence’s working-class background instead – Nelly is a northern shopgirl turned artist’s model (unsurprisingly, Frieda said that she ‘was sorry that Gilbert made [her] quite so horrid – so vulgar’ [3L 52]). Mendel thus sets up the binary between pro- and anti-Frieda representations that obtains in subsequent biofictions and in biographies of Lawrence, Cannan clearly declaring for the latter camp. Cannan also triggers other biofictional tropes of Lawrence: as a gifted mimic, for instance, and as a master of invective, as in the following rant: ‘“These clods, these hods, these glue-faced ticks have no more sap in them than a withered tree”’ (Cannan 1916: 219). Logan is also spokesman for a doctrine of male supremacy which, as a henpecked closet homosexual, he comically fails to put into practice. Mendel nonetheless sees himself as a ‘pigmy’ in comparison to Logan, who – ‘like a figure of Blake, immense, looming prophetic’ – is a ‘great man’ (176–7, 162). The Lawrence figure, Kingham, in the title story of Aldous Huxley’s collection Two or Three Graces (1926), is likewise a great man, as his name suggests. J. G. Kingham shares with D. H. Lawrence a red beard and a ‘pair of initials’, albeit that, again like Lawrence, he is ‘called by his surname’ (Huxley 1926: 143). Kingham is a writer who shares Lawrence’s ‘trick’ ‘in writing as well as in speech, to get hold of a word and, if he liked the sound of it, work it to death’: ‘“I think there’s something really devilish about the women of this generation,” he said to me, in his intense, emphatic way . . . “Something devilish”, he repeated, “really devilish”’ (119). The working-class Kingham is ‘morbidly sensitive to anything that might be interpreted as a reference to his origin’, yet ‘made a habit of telling all his acquaintances,

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sooner or later, what he thought of them – which was invariably disagreeable’ (Huxley 1926: 10, 125). Unsurprisingly, no one was ‘merely indifferent’ to Kingham: ‘Either they detested him . . . or else they loved him’ (128). Grace, who is married to John Peddley, loves Kingham, and, in a practice session for the extended ‘musicalization of fiction’ in Point Counter Point (2004: 384), Huxley uses musical terminology to differentiate Grace’s ‘tedious’ husband from her ‘passional’ lover; Peddley is da capo to Kingham’s molto agitato (1926: 40, 131, 195). The Grace–Peddley–Kingham trio is a riff on Frieda’s marriage to Ernest Weekley and affair with Lawrence, but the most compelling relationship in the novella is that between Kingham and the narrator, who is ‘forced to the conclusion that I myself was in some manner in love with him’: In his presence I felt that my being expanded. There was suddenly, so to speak, a high tide within me; along dry, sand-silted desolate channels of my being life strongly, sparklingly flowed. And Kingham was the moon that drew it up across the desert. (128–9) His narrator pre-empts Huxley’s own, albeit qualified, paean to Lawrence in 1932, in the Introduction to his The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. ‘To be with him was to find oneself transported to one of the frontiers of human consciousness’, Huxley writes: ‘in Lawrence there was a continuously springing fountain of vitality’ (1950: 27–8). ‘Two or Three Graces’ begins a decades-long engagement with Lawrence which, contradicting Lawrence’s judgement that ‘Aldous’ admiration [for me] is only skin deep’ (6L 617), follows and would shape the arc of Huxley’s own oeuvre, from the satirical biofictions of the 1920s to his later novels of ideas. Indeed, John the Savage in Brave New World (1932) has been read as a satire on, if not a fully realised pen portrait of, Lawrence, indicating the extent to which Huxley’s interaction with him has impacted the popular perception of Lawrence (Snyder 2007).3 The Huxley–Lawrence relationship is played out in Point Counter Point (1928) in that between the autobiofictional Philip Quarles, who is a ‘Zoologist of fiction’, and Mark Rampion (Huxley 2004: 114). Like Cannan’s Logan, Rampion – ‘the most boring character in the book’ and ‘a gas-bag’ in Lawrence’s estimation (6L 601) – is a Blakean writer and painter who ‘prophesied class wars [and] the final catastrophic crumbling of our already dreadfully unsteady society’ (412). Quarles acknowledges that the ‘chief difference’ between them ‘is that [Rampion’s] opinions are lived and mine, in the main, only thought’. ‘The problem for me’, Quarles realises, ‘is to transform a detached intellectual scepticism into a way of harmonious all-round living’, and he concedes that ‘The rush to books’ is because people ‘want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life’ (416, 419). The extracts from Quarles’s notebook in Point Counter Point are Huxley’s metafictional speculations on ‘books’ and on ‘life’, and on the relationship between the two in biofiction: ‘Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting – at least to me.’ Putting the novelist into the novel ‘also justifies experiment’, Quarles continues, and asks: But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second? And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there’s a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another Quaker holding another box of oats, on which etc., etc. (385)

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Where Quarles speculates on a ‘Quaker Oats effect’ of infinite regress, Huxley points and counterpoints ‘one novelist’, Lawrence, with another, himself.4 A ‘scientific Puck’, Quarles contests Rampion’s rejection of scientists and all their works, pre-empting Huxley’s later remarks on Lawrence’s ‘fantastically unreasonable’ dislike of science (Huxley 2004: 114; 1950: 11). ‘“What with their quantum theory, wave mechanics, relativity and all the rest of it, they do really seem to have got a little way outside humanity. Well, what the devil’s the good of that?”’, Rampion asks, to which Quarles replies that ‘“the good may be some astonishing practical discovery, like the secret of disintegrating the atom and the liberation of endless supplies of energy” ’ (2004: 524). In his late Lawrence biofiction The Genius and the Goddess (1955), Huxley converts Lawrence’s aversion into a vocation for science: the Lawrence character in this novella, Henry Maartens, another ‘great man’, is an atomic physicist and Nobel Laureate, the author not of novels but of a treatise titled From Boole to Wittgenstein (1998: 23). The Huxley figure in this late novella, John Rivers, is amanuensis to the eponymous Genius and lover of the Goddess, Katy Maartens, who, ‘fair-haired, laughing, broadshouldered and deep-bosomed, a splendid Valkyrie’ and ‘a Wagnerian heroine’, is clearly modelled on Frieda (12). The Frieda-figure in Point Counter Point, Mary Rampion, is warmly described as a ‘big golden woman’ with a penchant for throwing plates at the head of the ‘thin, fierce, indomitable little man’ who is her husband; in contrast to the melodramatic and mutually assured destruction of Logan and Nelly in Cannan’s Mendel, Huxley asserts of the Rampions that ‘Each separately was good; but together, as a couple, they were better still’ (2004: 123). Huxley declares, then, for the pro-Frieda (and pro-Frieda-and-Lawrence) camp, reserving his animus for John Middleton Murry, who appears in Point Counter Point as Denis Burlap. Rampion, who is impatient with Burlap’s ‘beloved-disciple attitude’, ‘liked baiting the fellow, making him look like a forgiving Christian martyr’ (272). Fittingly, Burlap, whose very name suggests sackcloth and ashes, is writing a study of St Francis and the Modern Psyche, Huxley’s surrogate for Murry’s The Life of Jesus (1926).

Biofiction and the Biographical Record: Richard Aldington, H. D., Helen Corke Huxley and Lawrence had met in 1915 through their common acquaintance, Ottoline Morrell, whose Oxfordshire estate, Garsington Manor, was a haven for Huxley and the Bloomsbury set during the First World War. Like ‘Breadalby’ in Women in Love, ‘Gattenden’ in Point Counter Point is Garsington revisited; a working-class ‘prodigy’, Rampion sees himself, and is seen (through overtly Lawrentian signifiers) as, a ‘trespasser’ at Gattenden, ‘poaching’ ‘the view’ (Huxley 2004: 131, 128). Lawrence’s closer affiliation in the latter years of the war was with ‘another Bloomsbury set’, that of the American-born poet and novelist H. D. and her then husband Richard Aldington, poet, novelist and, later, Lawrence’s biographer (H. D. 1984: 185). Following their expulsion from Cornwall in the autumn of 1917, the Lawrences found temporary refuge in H. D.’s rooms at 44 Mecklenburgh Square; the Jewish-American translator and novelist John Cournos lodged upstairs. All these Mecklenburgh Square writers were associated with the Imagist movement in poetry, and as novelists and writers of

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biofiction, all would revert to ‘the Mecklenburg[h] [sic] Square days’ of 1917 (3L 728). Cournos’s Miranda Masters (1926), Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929) and H. D.’s Bid Me to Live (1960) comprise a closely interrelated cluster of biofictional representations of Lawrence which may be read as responses to Lawrence’s satirical pen portraits of them in Aaron’s Rod (1922).5 Aldington’s Death of a Hero presents a caricature of Lawrence as Comrade Bobbe. A ‘sandy-haired, narrow-chested little man with spiteful blue eyes and a malevolent class-hatred’, Bobbe is editor of ‘a Socialist weekly which was subsidized by a demented eugenist [sic] and a vegetarian Theosophist’ (Aldington 1984: 124, 110). As Aldington’s biographer suggests: Just as Aldington appears to have taken his notion of the nation’s blood-guiltiness for the war from Lawrence’s ideas, so he may have derived [the] satirical portrayals of figures in the pretentious London literary milieu [in Death of a Hero] from Lawrence’s gallery of portraits in Aaron’s Rod. Certainly, his picture of Comrade Bobbe is adequate revenge. (Doyle 1989: 132) Complicating that picture, however, ‘D. H. Lawrence’ himself is also referenced in Aldington’s novel in the context of the ‘persecution’ to which Lawrence was subjected in the war years, the traumatic period to which Lawrence returns in the autobiografictional ‘The Nightmare’ chapter of Kangaroo (1923). Aldington’s narrator pays homage to Lawrence as ‘probably the greatest living English novelist, and a man of whom – in spite of his failings – England should be proud’ (1984: 224), that ‘probably’ indicating the qualified admiration which is reiterated in the title of Aldington’s biography of Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius, But . . . (1950). By contrast, the Lawrence figure in Cournos’s Miranda Masters, Richard Ramsden – a poet ‘whose beautiful, passionate verses were shocking England by their frank pagan sensuality’ (1926: 175) – is conspicuous by his absence, appearing only offstage in what may be tit-for-tat for Lawrence’s exclusion of Cournos from Aaron’s Rod (1922). Gombarov, Cournos’s close fictional proxy, warns Miranda, who is modelled on H. D., against Ramsden, who is likened to ‘a yellow flame – bright, hard, clear, terrible, cruel’: ‘Everything he touches falls to ashes in the contact’ (175, 176). H. D., who had read Miranda Masters on its publication, may have remembered Gombarov’s warning when she named her own fictional alter ego in Bid Me to Live Julia Ashton. Julia fears that ‘she was to be used, a little heap of fire-wood, brushwood, to feed the flame of Rico [Lawrence]’ (H. D. 1984: 88). H. D. borrows the name ‘Rico’ from Lawrence’s novella St. Mawr (1925), in which Rico is the husband of the Americanborn heroine, Lou Witt; H. D. saw herself in Lou, who, like Julia in Bid Me to Live, is one of Lawrence’s lost girls, a Persephone-figure. Rico ‘had called her Persephone’, Julia remembers, and she in turn calls him ‘Dis of the under-world, the husband of Persephone. Yes, he was her husband.’ A chthonic couple, Rico and Julia also form ‘a perfect triangle’ with Rafe (Aldington), Julia’s ‘actual’, if errant, husband (141, 78). H. D.’s autobiofictional Julia revises Lawrence’s biofictional representation of her as Julia Cunningham in Aaron’s Rod: as Julia tells Rico, ‘your puppets do not always dance to your pipe’ (1984: 164). In Kangaroo, Lawrence would pay passing tribute to H. D. as ‘one of the poetesses whose poetry . . . [is to be] feared and wondered over’ (248). But in Aaron’s Rod, in a cruel distortion of the sequence of events that ended

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the Aldington marriage, the H. D. figure is represented not as a writer in her own right but as a wilful woman and adulteress. In her biofictional representation of him in Bid Me to Live, H. D. wrests back the authority of authorship, reinstating her own writerly identity, and collapsing Lawrence’s binary ‘man-is-man, woman-is-woman’ ‘sex-fixations’. H. D.’s Julia exposes the double standards in Rico’s charge that the female poet who has the temerity to speak in the voice of Orpheus is ‘trespassing’ on masculine identity, and, by extension, on the male domain of literature itself (62, 176). It is Lawrence who trespasses on female experience in Helen Corke’s Neutral Ground, written in 1918 and published in 1933. Corke, like H. D., rescripts Lawrence’s biofictional version of her (in his 1912 novel The Trespasser). Lawrence was a third party to the doomed relationships of both women, and both H. D. and Corke would write after and in reply to his accounts of the end of their respective affairs with Aldington and Herbert Baldwin Macartney. Corke and Lawrence were fellow schoolteachers when they met in Croydon in 1908; in the following year, Corke’s relationship with her married music teacher ended with Macartney’s suicide. Lawrence had drawn – with Corke’s permission – on her 1909 ‘Freshwater Diary’ for The Trespasser, and in Neutral Ground, Corke reappropriates both her own life writing and Lawrence’s fictional remediation of her affair. In Neutral Ground, Derrick Hamilton, the (D. H.) Lawrence figure, apologises to Ellis (Corke), for intruding on her privacy, explaining that ‘I’ve an insatiable interest in people – I can’t help myself’. When she tells him ‘you shouldn’t trespass!’, Derrick retorts ‘that the folk who spoil the countryside with “Trespassers will be prosecuted” notice boards are unjustifiable’. Still, Ellis ‘reserve[s] the right of building a wall round my garden’ (Corke 1966: 198). Corke had granted Lawrence access to her inner self in the form of her diary, but Neutral Ground calls in question nonetheless the legitimacy of turning private lives into public property, making her biofiction, like Huxley’s and H. D.’s, a self-reflexive meditation on the aesthetics and ethics of biofiction itself. But if Derrick is a trespasser, he is also Ellis’s saviour. As ‘Life’s Ambassador’, he makes ‘his self-appointed task’ that of ‘bringing her back to life’, of raising the Ellis whom Derrick calls ‘Persephone!’ from the underworld she inhabits with her dead ‘Domine’: the Lawrence figure here is not Dis, but the agent of Persephone’s resurrection (260, 196, 285). In return, Corke’s fine novel is the sole biofiction which brings back to life the young adult Lawrence of the Croydon years.

Resurrections: Osbert Sitwell, Keith Winter, H. G. Wells Published in 1933 but completed in 1918, Neutral Ground stands apart from the cluster of biofictional representations which appeared in the decade after Lawrence’s death in March 1930. Biofictions of the 1930s either represent the dying Lawrence, as in Kay Boyle’s short story ‘Rest Cure’ (1931), or bring the dead Lawrence back to life, as in H. D.’s Pilate’s Wife (2000), which, written in 1934, is a revision of Lawrence’s own posthumously published resurrection fable, The Man Who Died (1931).6 Like the 1930s biographies to which they are closely related and even directly respond, biofictional representations of Lawrence in novels by Osbert Sitwell, Keith Winter and H. G. Wells perpetuate but also debunk the ‘Lawrence Legend’ (Beebe 1988: 295). Sitwell’s Miracle on Sinai is, as its subtitle states, ‘A Satirical Novel’: notwithstanding Sitwell’s disclaimer that ‘None of the characters in Miracle on Sinai exist, have existed, or ever will exist’ (1933: n. p.), the character of T. L. Enfelon (whose last name means

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‘to infuriate’, in Greek) is clearly a caricature of D. H. Lawrence, initials and all. Sitwell, who advertised that he would write verse portraits to order, may have been motivated to write this novelistic pen portrait as a quid pro quo for what his sister, Edith, believed to have been Lawrence’s requisition of the Sitwell estate, Renishaw Hall, for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Enfelon, or T. L. ‘as his disciples called him’, is a guest at the Aaron Palace Hotel, the name of which is a nod to the title of Lawrence’s novel Aaron’s Rod, on the slopes of Mt Sinai. Enfelon takes a ‘pathetic’ pride in his beard, which, like the initials, is a common identifier in Lawrence biofictions, and ‘loved to pose as the son of a collier’, when, in reality he is the son of an Arnoldian ‘clergyman-schoolmaster’ who ‘now lived in Surbiton’ (Sitwell 1933: 29–30, 330). Enfelon, ‘the chief apostle of force, or, as he loved to call it, guts, in literature’, is, in person, ‘a weak, weedy, bearded man, stooping and emaciated’, who travels with his aunt (30). Notwithstanding that Enfelon has not cut the maternal – or materteral – apron-strings, his credo is that ‘The maleprinciple must be dominant, upheld against the female-principle which had obtained so formidable and sinister a hold upon civilisation’. Enfelon, who has danced naked with Congolese tribes, has made it his anti-Christian mission to convert ‘white men’ to his ‘grotesque and humorless cult of dark gods’ (32). Despite Enfelon’s ‘Cultural Mumbo-Jumbo’, ‘beauty still crept like a miasma into his books, every one of them’ (Sitwell 1933: 218). ‘Almost alone of his generation’, moreover, Enfelon ‘comprehended the importance of religion’ (35). It is on the summit of Mt Sinai, when a ‘New Decalogue’ – ‘two stone tablets of the Law’ – tumble out of a ‘little, trailing cloud of glory’, that Enfelon realises he is ‘a prophet in the old biblical sense’ (279, 261, 318). Lloyd Carruthers, who is modelled on Murry and is ‘horribly, adhesively loyal’ to Enfelon, is vindicated in his discipleship when the new Commandments constitute ‘an almost exact summary of [Enfelon’s] own teaching’: Enfelon parses the Second Commandment as ‘Thou shalt not be repressed’ and another as ‘Thou shalt bow down before Dark Gods and worship Them’ (319, 327–8). But the miracle on Sinai means ‘All things to all men’, and other recipients of the Revelation find in the tablets confirmation of their own beliefs; the industrial magnate Lord Pridian, for example, reads one Commandment as a divine injunction to ‘Buy British’ (303, 357). The tablets crumble into dust, however, and, during a Jihad of sorts led by the shady ‘Shereef’, the miracle on Sinai is followed by a natural apocalypse, a sandstorm which engulfs the Aaron Palace Hotel and all its residents (372). T. L. Enfelon’s death, we are told, roused many literary men – more especially those who had for years been steadily endeavouring, through the medium of the columns of the weekly literary reviews, to kill his writings and deprive him of a livelihood – to an unparalleled fury . . . Public subscriptions were raised to secure for the nation a miner’s cottage in his memory. (379) Sitwell’s biofictional representation is a satire on Lawrence, the Lawrence Legend and the hypocrisy of the British literary establishment, which, having persecuted him in life, puts the dead writer on a pedestal. That charge of hypocrisy is levelled again in Keith Winter’s Impassioned Pygmies (1936). True to biofictional type, the Lawrence figure, E. L. Marius, is identifiable by his initials and his beard. Marius, who ‘had lived in many parts of the world, had

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been in turn schoolmaster, cowboy and writer’. ‘First denounced as a menace to world morality and later acclaimed by many as a modern saint’, Marius is ‘the literary legend and mystery man of the decade’ (Winter 1936: 1, 78). Marius had been ‘Interned during the war as a pro-German, and later hounded from the country as a moral monstrosity’, so ‘it was not altogether surprising that his patriotism had been dimmed. He did not understand that in England the murder of genius was only a precautionary measure taken to ensure a posthumous canonization’ (14). Winter, like Sitwell, brings the dead Lawrence back to life only to kill him off again, albeit that Marius dies (this time of natural causes) not in the desert, but in Lawrence’s version of the Promised Land, the ever-elusive island colony he called Rananim. Winter’s ‘island story’ is set on the fictional Mediterranean isle of Miramar, the final way station of the restless but now terminally-ill pilgrim, Marius, for whom ‘the savage quest had become a tragic getaway’ (160, 16).7 Marius’s second wife, Helga, is ‘a big, fair Norwegian woman’ who ‘knew something that not one of the disciples would ever know. She knew how to be the wife of Marius’ (7). These disciples – or, recalling Cannan’s Mendel, ‘pygmies’ – and not the larger-than-life Marius, form the collective target of Winter’s satire: ‘Within three years of Marius’ death’, we are told, ‘five biographies had been published’ (2). Of the disciples, Hilda and Robert are possibly pen portraits of H. D. and Aldington. Robert is described as a ‘faun’, recalling Aldington’s pet name and persona in his poem ‘The Faun Captured’, while Hilda may be a composite of H. D. (Hilda writes of her love for Marius as ‘a dark, frustrated flame’ [12, 21]), and – given Winter’s near-allusion to her biography of Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage (1932) – Catherine Carswell. The worst offender and the ‘quickest disciple’, however, is Lewis, who, with his ‘“late-for-the-Last-Supper” air’, is a stand-in for Murry. Lewis’s biography, Marius of Miramar, ‘completed within a few weeks of Marius’ death’ (1, 3), is the biofictional proxy for Murry’s Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence (1931). The year after its publication, Murry’s biography would be dismissed as a ‘curious essay in destructive hagiography’ by Huxley in his Introduction to The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: ‘In them’, Huxley says of the letters, ‘Lawrence has written his life and painted his own portrait’ (Lawrence had also painted a portrait of Murry, in the posthumously published squib The Life of J. Middleton Murry by J. C. [1930]) (1950: 6, 29).8 Of Lewis’s portrait of Marius, Winter says: In Marius of Miramar, [Lewis] did not make the mistake so frequently made by biographers, he did not attempt to whitewash his hero . . . What his critics completely failed to understand was that Lewis had suffered acutely during the writing of Marius of Miramar and that the exceptionally high sales of that provocative book only served to increase his suffering. One other point: Who was the hero of this much discussed biography? It will be remembered that the martyr’s crown, which in the early chapters is resting in apparent content upon the head of Marius, is, by the middle of the book, hovering uncertainly in midair, while in the last chapter of all we witness its triumphant descent on the head of Lewis. There is no doubt that in Marius of Miramar Lewis attempted something entirely new in literary technique. (1936: 119) Winter’s novel demonstrates both the close connection and the contrast, in Lawrence’s reception in the 1930s, between the adjacent genres of biography and biofiction. Where

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the biographies travestied in Winter’s novel peddle competing fabrications of the biographical facts, biofiction, in translating life into art, may have the higher truth-value. Like Winter’s Impassioned Pygmies, H. G. Wells’s Brynhilde (1937) is a self-reflexive satire on literary identity and celebrity. Here the biofictional representation of Lawrence is secondary to that of Frieda, who, as the model for the eponymous Brynhilde, is, like the Frieda figure in Huxley’s The Genius and the Goddess, a Valkyrie. Brynhilde is married to Rowland Palace; loosely based on Ernest Weekley, Palace is a ‘gentleman of letters’ who worries about the opinions of undergraduates and insists that the writer owes ‘a good personality’ to his readers ‘just as he owes them a good style’ (Wells 1937: 15, 28). The Lawrence character and seemingly authentic anti-type to Palace is Alfred Bunter, a ‘new man’ on the literary scene who ‘has a sort of rude vigour’ and ‘a tremendous vitality’ (Wells 1937: 56, 58). Bunter and Brynhilde meet at a weekend party at Lord Valliant Chevrell’s country house, where, as in Huxley’s description of Mark Rampion at Gattenden, Bunter is ‘The Stranger’, ‘out of key with the party’ (95). Bunter plays Pluto in a game of charades, albeit that paradoxically, his attraction, for Brynhilde, is that in life he doesn’t play a part. On reading Bunter’s first novel, The Cramped Village, Brynhilde, like Lawrence’s Constance Chatterley, looks at herself naked in the mirror and thinks ‘He doesn’t care how things look; he wants to know what things they are’ (122). But Bunter subsequently confesses that his identity is ‘assumed’: his real name is David Lewis, and like that of Sitwell’s Enfelon, Bunter’s working-class background is bogus. A junior partner in a firm of house agents in Cardiff, Lewis is a First World War veteran and the father of a war baby. He is married, not to the baby’s mother, but to the dominating ‘Freda’, from whom he escapes by faking his own death. Brynhilde compares Lewis’s emergence into his new life as Bunter to a ‘chick struggling out of an egg’, a Lawrentian image of resurrection or ‘Being born again’ as explored in the posthumously published novella The Escaped Cock (190, 219; VG 242). Lawrence’s friend Earl Brewster would recall that on Easter Sunday, in Volterra in Italy, he and Lawrence had seen ‘a toy white rooster escaping from an egg. I remarked that it suggested a title – ‘“The Escaped Cock” – a story of the Resurrection’ (xxv). Bunter’s story ‘made her feel incubatory’, and, again like Constance Chatterley, Brynhilde becomes pregnant with her lover’s child, her ‘new half-mystical self-devotion to the physical rebirth of our world’ trumping what Wells tells us are the ‘ultimately successful attempts of Mr Alfred Bunter to re-materialize himself as almost the only bearded British author’ (223, 273). Wells’s is a satire on the legend of literary personality in the construction of which the Lawrence figure is deemed complicit.

Lawrence’s Afterlives: Helen Dunmore, Anthony Paccito, Annabel Abbs In later fiction, representations of Lawrence himself tend to cede to the Lawrentian Type – whether working-class anti-hero in the post-war fiction of Angry Young Men like David Storey and Alan Sillitoe or, after the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960, Priest of Love whose phallic gospel is resisted or recapitulated in novels by A. S. Byatt and E. L. James. As Peter Preston remarks, ‘Lawrence’s life and literary career’ have been used as ‘paradigms of class and educational mobility, of the exiled artist, of sexual

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freedom’ (2003: 29). Lawrence has a more attenuated although still potent afterlife in novels in which allusions to his fiction operate as metonymies for Lawrentian aesthetics or sexual politics: the three student-protagonists in Angus Wilson’s As If by Magic (1973), for example, are avid readers of Lawrence who superimpose the ‘Birkin–Ursula–Gerald tripling’ in Women in Love on their own triangular relationship or ‘trilemma’ (189, 200). The precursor to Wilson’s novel is Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (1936), in which the protagonist, Anthony Beavis, drawing on Lawrence’s allotropic theory of character in fiction, invokes Lawrence as ‘one of the most powerful personality-smashers . . . there are no “characters” in his books’ (101). Laura Savu’s point that recent author fictions ‘return not only to the words on the page but also to the personality behind them’ proves problematic in Lawrence’s case (2009: 23). C. K. Stead’s Mansfield (2004), a biofiction of Katherine Mansfield in which Lawrence, with his ‘startlingly red’ beard, appears in a supporting role, is a metabiofictional meditation on Mansfield’s creation of ‘characters’ who are ‘based on real people’ but who ‘became separate from their originals in real life, became independent’ (2004: 64, 47). Yet the creation of D. H. Lawrence as a character in recent biofiction is dependent both on the biographical original and on Lawrence’s own fiction and biofiction. In Zennor in Darkness (1993), for instance, Helen Dunmore draws extensively on ‘The Nightmare’ chapter of Kangaroo for her biofictional representation of Lawrence in Cornwall in 1916–17. The main protagonist of Dunmore’s novel is the fictional Clare Coyne. A painter and an outsider in her Cornish community, the red-haired Clare identifies with Lawrence, another artist and outsider, who, with his ‘bright red’ beard, represents the personal and aesthetic ‘freedom’ and new life which Clare herself will embody by the end of the novel (Dunmore 1994: 54, 59). In a letter to Lawrence, Clare, who is expecting her dead soldier-lover’s child, tells him ‘“I am hoping to make my living as you do, by my own work . . . My own drawings”’ (310). Dunmore’s novel reproduces the intermediality of earlier Lawrence biofictions – Clare’s drawing of Lawrence is a portrait within Dunmore’s own pen portrait of him – while her immensely empathic Lawrence reprises the role of Life’s Ambassador played by the Lawrence figure in Corke’s Neutral Ground. Anthony Paccito’s A Sense of Ancient Gods (2018) picks up the Persephone myth deployed by Corke and H. D. in their biofictional representations of Lawrence, and by Lawrence himself in The Lost Girl. Set, like the latter stages of Lawrence’s novel, in the Abruzzo region of Italy, Paccito’s biofiction, like Winter’s, concerns Lawrence’s postwar quest for a Rananim or ‘Promised Land’ (Paccito 2018: 85). En route to Compton Mackenzie in Capri in 1919, Lawrence finds a makeshift and temporary ‘Rananim of the Rejected Ones’ (84) when he and Frieda, on a visit to former artist’s model Orazio Cervi, find themselves in a landscape steeped in the mythological spirit of place. Like many Lawrence biofictions, Paccito’s novel draws attention to Lawrence’s knack for ‘imitations’ (38), foregrounding his gift as a mimic within the novel’s broader mimicry of Lawrence himself (a gift also described by John Worthen in his chapter on ‘Performance’). Paccito’s Lawrence defends a propensity for ‘caricature’ in his pen portraits (220), a tendency which Paccito resists in his own picture of Lawrence (likewise Dunmore, whose Clare is aware that she must not ‘turn [her] drawing [of Lawrence] into a caricature’ [1994: 61]). Paccito, as Neil Roberts notes, ‘is perhaps “channeling” Lawrence’, but his novel is not ‘pastiche’ and is not ‘derivative’ (2018: 223). Rather, Paccito’s ‘greatest triumph is the portrait of Lawrence himself’, which ‘captures Lawrence’s gift of instant yet unintrusive

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intimacy, his mercurial humour, his attentiveness, his attunement to the atmosphere and historical resonance of a place’. Paccito’s Lawrence is a ‘lost man’ who will find himself again in the composition of The Lost Girl (2018: 225). Part Four of Annabel Abbs’s Frieda, also published in 2018, takes its epigraph from The Lost Girl: ‘The mighty question arises upon us. What is one’s own real self? It certainly is not what we think we are and ought to be’ (2018: 109). This is the question that is asked, and answered in a variety of ways, in Lawrence biofictions. Abbs’s novel, however, is the ‘story of Frieda’, a recuperation of Frieda as Lawrence’s collaborator and co-author: ‘She loved the feeling of collaboration . . . She’d already rewritten great tracts of his novel [Sons and Lovers]’ (367, 275). Abbs presents the novel as her ‘story of Frieda as a mother’ (367), but more compelling than this story is that concerning Frieda’s relationship with psychologist Otto Gross, whose ‘theory of personality types’ Abbs applies to the introverted Lawrence and extrovert Frieda. ‘With Otto’, we are told, Frieda had ‘reclaimed herself’ from her identity as Mrs Ernest Weekley, ‘only to forfeit it as Mrs Lawrence, as a multitude of fictional characters, palimpsests of herself, dredged from Lorenzo’s imagination’ (361, 354). But if Abbs critiques Lawrence’s biofictional practice, she also replicates it. Abbs, who acknowledges that her novel was ‘often inspired by Lawrence’s own writings’, layers Lawrence’s representations of her over her Frieda (368). For example, Frieda is presented as the prototype for Constance Chatterley when, on an early tryst in Sherwood Forest, Lawrence threads violets through her pubic hair. Frieda’s life-experience is once again represented in the terms of his art, this time the poem ‘Figs’ from Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), when Lawrence’s ‘gaze – straight, guileless, blue – seemed to bore into her’, giving Frieda ‘that strangely thrilling sensation of being split open, like a fig’. Gross tells Frieda that hers is a ‘genius for living, for inspiring men to greatness’ (201, 156), yet Abbs’s Frieda is less a Kulturträger than a paper doll, qualifying the feminist recuperation of the author’s wife. Nonetheless, bookending the biofictions considered in this chapter, Abbs does redeem Frieda and her genius for living from the ‘monstrous vitality’ which Cannan had ascribed to the Frieda figure over a century earlier in Mendel (1916: 348). Abbs’s novel, like Paccito’s, testifies to Lawrence’s remarkable longevity in biofiction.9

Conclusion Lawrence was himself instrumental in the twentieth-century instantiation of biofiction, a genre hybrid between biography and the novel: as Preston notes, ‘in conscripting Lawrence for their own purposes his fellow writers are echoing his [own] regular practice’ in producing biofictional versions of himself – Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers, for example, and Rupert Birkin in Women in Love – and of his friends and acquaintances (1985: 59). The ‘cry about “putting people” in to his books, popularized by Norman Douglas’ inevitably invited a biofictional backlash on the part of contemporaries who would repay Lawrence in kind for his pen – or poison pen – portraits of them (Aldington 1950: 19). However, biofictional representations of Lawrence span a spectrum of modes from satire to homage, and are subtended by reflections on the relationship between literature and lived experience, as well as on Lawrence’s own aesthetic, legacy and cultural capital. In his multiple lives – and, after the death of the author, afterlives – ‘Lawrence’ survives in biofiction as a signifier of the inseparability of life and art.

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Notes 1. I would like to thank Shirley Bricout, Jane Costin, Keith Cushman, Lewis Davies, Andrew Harrison, Jonathan Long, Susan Reid and Chris Williams for suggesting several of the creative and critical sources discussed in this chapter. Lawrence had met Gertler (and Compton Mackenzie) through Gilbert and Mary Cannan in 1914, when he and Frieda were living at The Triangle in Bellingdon, near the Cannans’ converted windmill at Cholesbury, represented in Gertler’s Gilbert Cannan at His Mill (1916). The Cannans at their mill make a cameo appearance in Mackenzie’s The South Wind of Love (1942) as the Rodneys, and the Lawrences as Daniel and Hildegaarde Raynor. Mackenzie had earlier threatened litigation over Lawrence’s ‘skit’ on him as ‘Lord of the Isles’ in the story ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ (1927) (3L 594). On Lawrence, Cannan and Gertler, see Hoberman (2012). 2. Gertler had acquired a Benin head in 1915, which would feature in several of his later still lifes. 3. Susan Reid (2014) has shown that Huxley is still engaging Lawrence – although not in a biofictional mode – as late as his final novel Island (1962). 4. Quaker Oats are a property of Lawrence’s fiction, too, in Mr Noon (1984). 5. On the Mecklenburgh Square novels, see Jenkins (2019). 6. The scenario of Boyle’s story anticipates that of biodramas like Tennessee Williams’s I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (1951) and Lewis Davies’s Sex and Power at the Beau Rivage (2006). 7. Winter’s Marius may allude to Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885); the last pagan and a visitor to Etruscan tombs, Pater’s Marius, like Winter’s, embarks on a pilgrimage which ends in his death. 8. See Roberts and Poplawski 2001: 183–4. Murry had used Lawrence’s self-portrait as the frontispiece for Son of Woman. 9. This Companion was going to press as John Worthen’s vibrant Young Frieda (2019) appeared, which he describes as a double-fiction of first-person memoirs by Ernest Weekley and Frieda Lawrence. The first published review was by Neil Roberts (2019).

Works Cited Abbs, Annabel (2018), Frieda, London: Two Roads. Aldington, Richard (1950), D. H. Lawrence 1885–1930: An Appreciation, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Aldington, Richard (1984), Death of a Hero, London: Hogarth Press. Beebe, Maurice (1988), ‘Lawrence as Fictional Character’, in The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Studies, ed. Gamini Salgado and G. K. Das, Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, pp. 295–310. Cannan, Gilbert (1916), Mendel: A Story of Youth, New York: George H. Doran Company. Corke, Helen (1966), Neutral Ground: A Chronicle, London: Arthur Barker. Cournos, John (1926), Miranda Masters, New York: Knopf. Doyle, Charles (1989), Richard Aldington: An Autobiography, London: Macmillan. Dunmore, Helen (1994), Zennor in Darkness, Harmondsworth: Penguin. H. D. (1984), Bid Me to Live, London: Virago. Hoberman, Ruth (2012), ‘Making Life into Art: The Three-Way Conversation of Gilbert Cannan, Mark Gertler, and D. H. Lawrence’, in Reading Texts, Reading Lives: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism, ed. Helen Maxson and Daniel Morris, Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, pp. 31–49. Huxley, Aldous (1926), Two or Three Graces, London: Chatto & Windus. Huxley, Aldous, ed. (1950), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Huxley, Aldous (1998), The Genius and the Goddess, London: Vintage. Huxley, Aldous (2004), Point Counter Point, London: Vintage. Jenkins, Lee M. (2019), ‘“Another Bloomsbury Set”: Lawrence, London and Life-Writing’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 5:2, pp. 125–41. Lackey, Michael, ed. (2017), Biographical Fiction: A Reader, London: Bloomsbury. Paccito, Anthony (2018), A Sense of Ancient Gods, London: Wine Jar Press. Preston, Peter (1985), ‘Critical Characters: Discussing Fiction in Lawrence’s Fiction’, Études Lawrenciennes, 29, pp. 53–73. Preston, Peter (2003), ‘“I Am in a Novel”: Lawrence in Recent British Fiction’, in D. H. Lawrence: New Worlds, ed. Keith Cushman and Earl G. Ingersoll, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 25–49. Reid, Susan (2014), ‘Experiments in Entropy: Sun, Sea, Sex and Science in Novels by Huxley, Lawrence and McEwan’, Aldous Huxley Annual, 14, pp. 241–54. Roberts, Neil (2018), Review of Anthony Paccito, A Sense of Ancient Gods, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 5:1, pp. 221–4. Roberts, Neil (2019), Review of John Worthen, Young Frieda, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 5:2, pp. 185–8. Roberts, Warren and Paul Poplawski, eds (2001), A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Savu, Laura (2009), Postmodern Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Sitwell, Osbert (1933), Miracle on Sinai, London: Duckworth. Snyder, Carey (2007), “‘When the Indian Was in Vogue”: D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Ethnological Tourism in the Southwest’, Modern Fiction Studies 53:4, pp. 662–98. Stead, C. K. (2004), Mansfield: A Novel, London: Vintage. Wells, H. G. (1937), Brynhilde, London: Methuen. Winter, Keith (1936), Impassioned Pygmies, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company. Worthen, John (2019), Young Frieda, London: Jetstone.

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26 Lawrence Set to Music Bethan Jones

Introduction

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omposers have been inspired by Lawrence for over a hundred years, assimilating his works – and indeed his life story – into their music. In the Appendix to her recently published monograph D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism (2019), Susan Reid presents the results of her initial search for music of this kind, and the list is staggering. There are over fifty items, from Peter Warlock’s (lost) ‘Red o’er the Moon’ in 1914 to Howard Skempton’s ‘Man and Bat’ in 2017, testifying to the way numerous composers have glimpsed rich possibilities for the creative fusion of literary and musical forms. Despite the extent of her findings, Reid emphasises the provisionality of this research: inevitably the list will expand considerably over forthcoming decades as unknown works are unearthed, and new ones are composed. The list also contains a disproportionately large number of very recent settings, simply because these are easier to identify and locate. Some composers listed, such as Benjamin Britten and Arnold Cooke, are highly renowned with long-established reputations, while other names are less familiar. It is also important to emphasise that the composers mentioned here have adopted a wide range of approaches to their task. Many works are firmly located within the classical tradition of ‘art song’, in which a composition based on a literary text is (usually) scored for solo voice with piano and intended for concert performance. Yet other Lawrence settings broaden the scope of this definition, using multiple singers and/or instrumentalists; crossing borders between genres and styles; exploiting digital resources and other technological innovations; and even drawing on text as inspiration for a purely instrumental work. Before explicitly addressing these numerous strategies, I will explore musical attributes within a number of Lawrence poems which have been selected by composers for musical setting, focusing on sound, silence, rhythm, repetition and movement. I will then discuss selected compositions in which an isolated Lawrence poem has been set to music. Next I will analyse settings in which several poems from within one specific collection by Lawrence have been brought together within a song cycle, before moving on to discuss settings in which poems from a range of Lawrence’s verse-books have been selected. The following section focuses on settings in which Lawrence’s poetry is brought into conjunction with verse by other writers, such as A. E. Housman, Alfred Tennyson and Isaac Rosenberg. This chapter primarily considers poetry setting, but the concluding part will touch on instances where Lawrence’s prose works and plays have inspired diverse musical arrangements. This study is the first to make use of Reid’s research as a springboard for detailed investigation of the relationship between words and music in this context.

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The Soundscapes of Lawrence’s Poetry The following composers have selected individual poems by Lawrence – from across his entire poetic oeuvre – to set to music: Arthur Walter Kramer – ‘Green’, 1916 James McAuley – ‘Green’, late 1940s Christopher Rathbone – ‘Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers’, 1966 Will Ogdon – ‘River Roses’, 1969 Herbert Elwell – ‘Service of All the Dead’, 1971 Andrew Downes – ‘Piano’, 1985; ‘Butterfly’, 2014 John Joubert – ‘Autumn Rain’, 1985 Hans Gefors – ‘Whales weep not!’, 1987 David Matthews – ‘The Ship of Death’, 1988–9 Gary Bachlund – ‘To women, as far as I’m concerned’, 1991 Evan Hause – ‘The Ship of Death’, 1993–6 Howard Skempton – ‘Man and Bat’, 2017 (Reid 2019: 221–7) My contention here is that these composers, among others, have responded to specific aspects of the poems that make them especially suitable for setting: these include the dichotomies of sound/silence and motion/stasis, rhythmic impetus, repetition, humour and pathos, as well as a more explicit engagement with musical tropes and ‘sound effects’. The soundscape of chosen poems will therefore be explored in some detail before I proceed to consider the musical settings themselves. In ‘River Roses’ the narrator is ‘wandering and singing’ with a companion and later hears frogs singing by the riverside (1Poems 175–6). An antithesis is evident in this poem as the ‘ringing’ of ‘pale-green glacier water’ which ‘filled the evening’ accompanies (and perhaps obscures) the whispering of the narrator and their companion, who are made fearful by alienation. The ringing, resonant glacial water might also be contrasted with the ‘soundless, ungurgling flood’ evoked in ‘The Ship of Death’, which encompasses, in its portrayal of oblivion, a ‘deep and lovely quiet’ (632, 630). Song is foregrounded in ‘Service of All the Dead’ (an early version of ‘Giorno dei Morti’) where ‘chaunting choristers’ process along rows of cypress trees to the graves where mourners (most poignantly a father and a mother) lament those they have lost (188–9). In ‘Autumn Rain’ the narrator ‘hear[s] again / like echoes even / that softly pace // heaven’s muffled floor, / the winds that tread / out all the grain // of tears’ (221). This nature poem is symbolically resonant: men slain at war are portrayed as sheaves being winnowed ‘on the floor of heaven’, while the leaves and rain fall onto the narrator’s face and the ground. The echoes here are tentative and muted, in keeping with the drizzling rain and the autumnal character of the stanzas. In this poem the muffling of sound remains constant, whereas ‘Piano’ begins with music being played softly but later bursts into more strident and voluminous sound. Composers have also chosen poems (both serious and comic) where Lawrence debunks false utterance and advocates silence as a preferable alternative. ‘To women, as far as I’m concerned’ contains the line ‘The feelings I don’t have, I won’t say I have’ (1Poems 435), indicating that refraining from speech may be beneficial in preserving one’s integrity. It is arguable, then, that some songwriters have responded to a poetic

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interplay between sound and silence, finding ways to reflect such tensions in their musical settings. Where sound is present in a poem it can be emulated or encompassed in the vocal or instrumental line; where absent, it can be creatively supplied or represented through rests or gaps in the music. ‘Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers’ is a poem that commands us to listen. In so doing it provides us with an example of a poem whose soundscape is foregrounded in a way that can both facilitate and problematise the act of setting it to music. Its wonderfully audacious and playful rhetoric is inseparable from its musical rhythms and repetitions. These features are evident from the beginning and highlighted by the reiterated command to pay attention to the sound effects created by the poem: ‘Hark! Hark! / The dogs do bark! / It’s the socialists come to town’ (1Poems 266). These lines (varied in later iterations) function as a chorus while the ‘rags’ and ‘tags’ curiously absent from the socialists’ attire become motifs scattered through the poem. Yet while repetition enhances irony and derision here, elsewhere in the poem it enhances a wistful tone: ‘Alas, salvia and hibiscus flowers. / Salvia and hibiscus flowers. // Listen again. / Salvia and hibiscus flowers’ (267). In contrast to the strident ‘Hark!’ the injunction to ‘Listen again’ is gentle and earnest. Through this emphasis on an auditory act of attention, we are made to feel that the sound of the flowers’ names is as important as their vivid colours. Lawrence’s late poems, including ‘Whales weep not!’, ‘Butterfly’ and ‘The Ship of Death’, illustrate how repetition may be used for incantatory effect. For instance, the motion of coupling whales is captured in the phrases ‘And they rock, and they rock’ (1Poems 607), while a similar rhythmic pattern occurs in ‘it is warm, it is warm’ from ‘Butterfly’ (610). ‘The Ship of Death’ contains (and repeats) the poignant line ‘We are dying, we are dying’ (631), with growing urgency. Like ‘Salvia and Hibiscus Flowers’ this late poem is lengthy and contains a unifying ‘chorus’ – ‘O build your ship of death’. Yet its gentle sea-rhythm contrasts with the harsh juxtapositions, rage-fuelled momentum and jagged satirical edges (offset by moments of beauty and calm) of the earlier poem. Many of the chosen Lawrence poems convey movement, whether measured, sporadic or even explosive. ‘Man and Bat’ stands out as the real ‘motion’ poem among those discussed here. This poem vividly portrays the erratic, circular flight of the frightened creature: ‘Round and round and round / In an impure haste / Fumbling, a beast in air, / . . . / About my room!’ (1Poems 296). The repetitions used throughout this long poem work brilliantly in conveying the frenzied movement of the bat and its growing exhaustion as it staggers and falls. To borrow appropriate musical terms, this is a poem of accelerando and rallentando, contrasting rapid movement with faltering flight and immobility.

Setting a Single Lawrence Poem The above section has focused on the ‘verbal music’ of Lawrence’s poetry; this section moves on to explore the effects achieved by supplementing or replacing these word-sounds with music.1 The composer Michael Tippett has argued that the ‘music of music’, created when a poem becomes literal song, destroys the ‘verbal music’ previously achieved through the text’s specific combination of words (1989: 32). It is principally the melodic line of a song that lingers in memory, while harmony and texture convey the pervasive mood. Yet it is more productive to think in terms of

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creative synthesis than to focus on the process of loss through which the poem forfeits its unique and distinctive sound. Such synthesis is undeniably at work when a composer sets his or her own words and the two are conceived together. Lawrence himself composed the vocal line for ten short songs intended to accompany performances of his play David (discussed in Susan Reid’s chapter on ‘Music’), with an indication of the required accompaniment on pipe, tambourine and tom-tom drum (see Jones 2012: 157–61). Even when (more typically) a different composer creates the music, and even when this compositional process is chronologically displaced from the poem’s composition by many years, the interpretative act of attention may have highly positive results. A musical, rather than critical or scholarly, engagement with a poem (or sequence of poems) can exist as a truly creative fusion of related art forms: one that changes with every performance and acquires the ‘living’ freshness Lawrence associated with ‘poetry of the present’ (Lawrence 1992: 266–70). Peter Warlock’s lost setting ‘Red o’er the moon’ (1914) exemplifies a strategy in which an individual poem is chosen as the basis for a song. All the poems discussed in the section above have been selected for this purpose, and the rich diversity of these poems is echoed in the style and instrumentation of the musical settings they have inspired. Decisions reflect each composer’s interpretation of the poetry but may also be dictated by practical considerations such as available resources, funding and (if applicable) the terms of their commission. For instance, the Cantamus Girls Choir (based in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire) has commissioned a number of Lawrence settings, thus providing a large (and highly proficient) body of young female singers for subsequent performances.2 A popular choice is the simple ‘art song’ combination of voice and piano, exemplified in Gary Bachlund’s setting of ‘To women, as far as I’m concerned’ (using tenor voice). For the poem ‘Piano’, Andrew Downes chooses a soprano supplemented by other high voices and a piano. Will Ogdon’s setting of ‘River Roses’ is still relatively small-scale but more unusual in employing flute and double bass to accompany the soprano voice. Hans Gefors uses a mixed voice choir singing a capella for his setting of ‘Whales Weep Not!’, while John Joubert combines choir and piano for ‘Autumn Rain’ (commissioned by Cantamus). Two of the most substantial works – in terms of duration and the musical forces involved – have been based on sustained narrative poems. Christopher Rathbone’s ‘Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers’ is a Cantata for tenor and bass soloists, treble choir, six wind soloists, strings and percussion. Evan Hause’s ‘The Ship of Death’ – the composer’s ‘Symphony no. 1’ – uses dramatic soprano, contralto, tenor, baritone, large chorus and orchestra. ‘Piano’, as the most explicitly musical of all these poems, has attracted much attention among composers. It is about retrospect and nostalgia: the way in which listening to music for voice and piano in the present poignantly evokes the narrator’s childhood experience of sitting beneath the piano at home ‘And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings’ (1Poems 108). The inherently musical theme and character of the poem creates a wealth of opportunities for musical appropriation. This is exemplified in the highly expressive recent setting by Andrew Downes, which has been creatively animated by Paula Downes and broadcast on YouTube (Downes 2016). The music harks back to the foundations of vocal polyphony in medieval times, using plainchant to suggest retrospect and time past. There is no obvious tonal centre (though major and minor intervals do occur): instead, the vocal lines (often in unison octaves or a fourth or fifth apart) tend to converge onto a single note. Chorale-like

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textures are employed, particularly at the point where hymns are being sung in the ‘cosy parlour’ (1Poems 108). At the opening, both low and high piano chords are struck and then sustained: left to merge and resonate. The high chords are played percussively, as though marking clock-time, in keeping with the poem’s theme. The setting begins with a single, soprano voice but introduces a second, high voice at the first mention of ‘child’ (suggesting the coexistence of the narrator in the past and present). Further vocal lines are introduced expressively at significant moments, such as the reference to the ‘insidious mastery of song’. The piano bursts into prominence at ‘clamour’ and ‘great black piano appassionato’, creating textural and dynamic contrast while wrenching us out of the past and back to the poem’s present time and place. The shifting, extended tonalities ultimately create a sense of irresolution, evident in the single, unaccompanied note that brings the song to a close. Downes’s setting of ‘Piano’ has been chosen here as an effective, readily available work that treats the poem in isolation and that also indicates the multi-media possibilities available to composers and their collaborators in the twenty-first century. In subsections below I will briefly consider musical versions of ‘Piano’ by William Neil and Phillip Rhodes, in which the poem is integrated into longer sequences, evidencing a different approach. Herbert Elwell’s setting of ‘Service of All the Dead’ and Gary Bachlund’s setting of ‘To women, as far as I’m concerned’ are based on less commonly chosen Lawrence poems. The composers have responded to strikingly different types of poem and the resulting compositions contrast utterly. ‘Service of All the Dead’ is a sombre processional poem in which villagers, priests and choristers move slowly towards a place of collective mourning: And all along the path to the cemetery The round dark heads of men crowd silently, And black-scarved faces of women-folk, wistfully Watch at the banner of death, and the mystery. . . . (1Poems 189) This poem contains a subtle dynamic contrast: the singing of the choristers conflicts with the ‘silence’ of the respectful villagers. Interestingly, Elwell resists the kind of plodding rhythm that is traditionally used for processional music. There are hints of a pulse here, but momentum is generated to a greater extent by the fluent, melodic vocal line at the points where the choristers move between the cypress avenues. Rather than mimicking the progressing footsteps through a conventional musical gesture, Elwell appears to convey the feeling experienced by the mourners. The minor chords emphasise darkness and grief while the octave leap up to ‘mystery’, accompanied by an outburst on piano, situates this concept at the heart of the musical interpretation. ‘To woman, as far as I’m concerned’ employs repetition for ironic and humorous effect, progressing through shifting, modulating phrases: The feelings I don’t have I don’t have. The feelings I don’t have, I won’t say I have. The feelings you say you have, you don’t have. The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have. The feelings people ought to have, they never have. . . . (1Poems 435)

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The message is unequivocal, bluntly asserted through the accumulating negatives (‘don’t have’, ‘won’t say’, ‘never have’). Bachlund (1991) describes his highly subjective response to the poem as follows: The setting begins simply, and the alternation between the 6/8 and 3/4 ‘feeling’ – a perfectly normal hemiola3 – in this instance beats out a theme meant to underscore obstinacy. The vocal line rises to the negation of ‘feelings’ which women . . . assure men they have, when they know full well they do not . . . Lawrence has created a wonderful poem to capture it all for a solo singer. It is meant to be interpreted aggressively. There is certainly justification for an aggressive interpretation of this kind, yet there is also absurdity and playful humour within the poem’s stubborn rhetoric and convoluted ‘argument’. Bachlund’s version therefore highlights the way in which musical setting may alter both musical and non-musical aspects of the poem. This setting serves as an example of the way the ‘music of music’ (as Tippett puts it) can replace the ‘music of poetry’ when the composition has been provoked by a strongly personal reading. Many settings of individual Lawrence poems are not readily available. Some have never been performed; others have received rare performances but have never been recorded. Some are available as musical scores but have not appeared on CD. However, more recent settings are being made available online or on CD. One example is Howard Skempton’s setting of ‘Man and Bat’, which aims to ‘reflect the rich, varied, and at times frenetic narrative of the text’ (2017: n.p.). This work received its world première in July 2017 in Sheffield and was released by First Hand Records in the autumn of 2019, along with other works including The Moon is Flashing (which includes a setting of Lawrence’s ‘Snake’, FHR 2019).

Setting Multiple Lawrence Poems: New Sounds and Sequences For a song cycle, a composer must decide whether to select poems by a single author or to combine poems by different ones. Schumann and Schubert (the two great lieder composers of the nineteenth century) most commonly used texts by a single author, though they did at times adopt the alternative strategy. In the twentieth century, Benjamin Britten combined poems by a range of authors in his Serenade for tenor, horn and strings (opus 31) and Nocturne (opus 60). Yet he also composed Winter Words (opus 52) using a series of poems by Thomas Hardy only, and the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (opus 22). A further distinction that can be made is between those composers who have chosen poems by Lawrence from a specific verse-book and those who have ‘mixed and matched’ across the author’s numerous collections. The former are decidedly in the minority, yet there are at least two notable examples that will be discussed here. In addition to setting ‘Autumn Rain’ (discussed above), John Joubert has used five poems from Look! We Have Come Through! in a song cycle for baritone and string orchestra called The Instant Moment (opus 110). The sequence is as follows: 1. ‘Bei Hennef’; 2. ‘Loggerheads’; 3. ‘“And oh—that the man I am might cease to be—”’; 4. ‘December Night’; 5. ‘Moonrise’. As the title suggests, the poems represent a series of snapshots from within the evolving relationship portrayed. The composer does not adopt a sequential group from within Look!, but selects poems scattered through the collection, thus creating new juxtapositions and a new trajectory for the story.

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The opening poem – ‘Bei Hennef’ – is gentle, evocative and poignant, offering a quiet celebration of love that is ‘whole like the twilight’ and possesses the balance emulated in the lines ‘You are the call and I am the answer / You are the wish, and I the fulfilment, / You are the night, and I the day’ (1Poems 164). Nonetheless, the allusions to a state that is ‘almost bliss’, alongside ‘perfect enough’ and ‘What more—?’ (my emphasis), culminate in the more explicitly bleak line ‘Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!’. This bleakness is captured in Joubert’s setting, with its prominent lower strings and shifting tonalities. Initially there is a sense of calm achieved through birdcall motifs that reflect the ‘twittering’ of the river, but these develop into aggressive string attacks for the line ‘Troubles, anxieties and pains’. There is also a decidedly turbulent, ironic, dark quality to the music even when the words convey the balance in ‘call’/‘answer’, ‘wish’/‘fulfilment’ and ‘night’/‘day’. In the sequence created within this song cycle the puzzling awareness of compromised happiness leads neatly into ‘Loggerheads’, which intensifies the suffering through accusation, insecurity and bitterness: ‘Have a real stock-taking / Of my manly breast;/ Find out if I’m sound or bankrupt, / Or a poor thing at best’ (193). This poem concludes with resigned exasperation: an assertion that although despair might be the ‘portion’ of the couple, ‘I don’t care’. The music here is strident and disjointed, using pizzicato, tremolo and stabbing chords to convey the discord within the relationship. As this poem segues into the next (‘“And oh—that the man I am might cease to be—”’), the bitterness mutates into a nihilistic desire for utter, obliterating darkness: darkness that is distinct from grey sleep and aching death. Like the much later poem ‘Phoenix’, it conceives of ‘obliterati[on]’ as the precursor to profound change (1Poems 165). The imagery of this poem is interestingly reminiscent of ‘Autumn Rain’. Rather like the downward movement of wet, black leaves, here the darkness falls (and rises) ‘with muffled sound’. Yet the descent is intensified through the alliterative phrase ‘hurling heavily down’ in keeping with the apocalyptic tenor of the poem (166). The falling motion is reflected by Joubert in descending glissando figures and downward leaps. There are also rapid and dramatic crescendos early on while the low register and extended tonality are used to convey the impression of intensifying darkness. The next juxtaposition works through contrast in terms of the poetic imagery. ‘December Night’ returns to peace and harmony tentatively achieved in ‘Bei Hennef’: ‘The wine is warm in the hearth; / The flickers come and go. / I will warm your limbs with kisses / Until they glow’ (1Poems 193). The darkness of the preceding poem is counterbalanced by the images of heat and light, while the shedding of outdoor clothes prior to drawing closer to the hearth reflects comfort. Joubert’s warm sonorities (reminiscent of Messiaen) create a setting that is gentler and quieter than the preceding songs, using repetition to highlight the most intimate descriptions. There is still evidence of dissonance, but the song resolves onto a major chord at the close, emphasising peace and resolution. Interestingly, the final poem in the sequence – ‘Moonrise’ – moves away from such harmony to a more impersonal or abstract setting, yet it serves as an appropriate conclusion to this cycle due to its rhetorically positive conclusion: . . . we are sure That beauty is a thing beyond the grave, That perfect, bright experience never falls To nothingness, and time will dim the moon

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Sooner than our full consummation here In this odd life will tarnish or pass away. (1Poems 155) However, it is arguable that through describing life as ‘odd’ and ending the poem with words associated with loss or decay, even this poem celebrating eternal love possesses a hint of the ambiguity underlying the entire collection (see Jones 2006: 137–52). The musical version emphasises the beauty of the moon through its prolonged upward trajectories, climbing out of the low registers of the previous songs, and through the vibrancy of its oscillating wave motif. It ends with a long string coda settling on a serene major chord, fading out – yet there is also dissonance present. Combined, the words and music testify to the oscillations characteristic of Look!, resisting sentimentality and revealing the shifting, turbulent, unsettled dynamic of human relationships. The American composer William Neil’s more recent work Where there is no Autumn (2012) achieves an analogous coherence through selecting poems from one collection: namely Birds, Beasts and Flowers. This work has an interesting and unusual compositional history. Having produced one substantial setting of Lawrence’s poetry (discussed below), Neil intended to write a piece involving narrator, clarinet and digital acoustics. His plans crystallised after initial contact (followed by extensive correspondence) with Nick Ceramella, John Worthen and Bethan Jones prior to an International D. H. Lawrence Symposium at Gargnano in September 2012. This symposium furnished the opportunity to rehearse and perform Neil’s work for the first time, to a combined audience of Lawrence scholars and local inhabitants of the Italian region. Neil’s composition derives its title from a letter written by Lawrence in 1924 – ‘I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn’t crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce’ (5L 143) – and the settings reflect the composer’s fascination with Lawrence’s quest for the Italian sun. As indicated above, Neil had decided on the composition of his ensemble before selecting specific Lawrence poems, aiming to create a ‘rich spectrum of sonorities that orchestrate the spoken word with the full dynamic capabilities of the clarinet and piano’ (Neil website b). Although many poems from Birds, Beasts and Flowers were suggested and considered, Neil ultimately decided upon the sequence ‘Southern Night’, ‘Peach’, ‘Pomegranate’ and ‘Tropic’, for which the chosen voice and instruments would be particularly apposite. The group for the premiere was to consist of narrator (John Worthen), clarinet (Bethan Jones), piano (William Neil) and digital acoustics. The poetry is spoken rather than sung, and the role of the pre-recorded digital track is explained as follows: The acoustic sounds are cued from the composer’s laptop and are really compositions in themselves inspired by the images that Lawrence evokes in his poems. Neil has composed and recorded music that he created on the Kawai grand piano in his studio that were then sculpted and processed to create the desired sonic elements that make the complete mosaic of the live performance. (Neil website b) The digitally generated sounds are extremely evocative: an example is the sustained dissonant notes early on in ‘Southern Night’ emulating the persistent whine as ‘The mosquitos are biting tonight’ (1Poems 254). Concurrently, a rising figure on clarinet and piano accompanies the reiterated injunction to the red moon to ‘Come up’ (Musical Example 26.1).

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Musical Example 26.1 Extract from William Neil, ‘Southern Night’. In the manner of the opening solo in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, the clarinettist is required to bend the ascending notes so they blur into one another, creating a glissando effect. This is just one illustration of Neil’s expressive use of the chosen instruments throughout these settings. ‘Peach’ features a version of the previous ‘mosquito motif’ that lasts even longer than before, accompanied in places by scurrying bursts of ascending or descending clarinet and piano phrases (often played together but occasionally alternating). The quirkiness of the poem’s close – ‘And because I say so, you would like to throw something at me // Here, you can have my peach stone’ (1Poems 232) – is captured in the abrupt staccato flurry that ends the setting. ‘Pomegranate’ makes use of trills, grace notes, wide intervals, dynamic contrast and rapid changes in character. For the lines ‘Abhorrent, green, slippery city / Whose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes’ (231), the digital acoustics distort, waxing and waning in pitch, while ‘dense foliage’ is reflected in a thick sonic texture. The first reference to ‘fissure’ catalyses a change in piano technique, with the player manipulating the strings from within the body of the piano. This creates a harsher edge to the sound (reminiscent of a harpsichord) and generates a feeling of incongruity when combined with the gently moving, relatively harmonious acoustic-piano timbre at the close. ‘Tropic’ begins with a sustained octave chord and ‘combines three manifestations of a rhythm that correspond to Lawrence’s reference to the “horizontal rolling of water” with two rising themes in the clarinet that evoke the “flood of black heat”’ (Neil website b). The pulsing rhythmic drive of this setting is also evident in the accompaniment of the repeated term ‘rock’, while the unsettled harmony creates a sinister feeling of tension and unease. The sequence as a whole is extremely effective in evoking the atmosphere of the poems and illustrates the way in which innovative performance techniques can enhance the impact of a text-setting.

Variations on a Theme: Spanning Multiple Lawrence Collections For the setting analysed above, Neil (like Joubert) chooses poems from the same versebook by Lawrence. However, in his earlier song cycle – The Waters are Shaking the Moon – he selects twelve poems from among a number of collections, ranging across phases of Lawrence’s artistic career. This song cycle, for mezzo soprano and piano, is thus the most extended composition of those considered here, comprising settings

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of: 1. ‘The Hostile Sun’; 2. ‘Twilight’; 3. ‘Mystery’; 4. ‘Love Message’; 5. ‘Piano’; 6. ‘Tease’; 7. ‘Reach Over’; 8. ‘There is Rain in Me’; 9. ‘Baby Songs’; 10. ‘Shades’; 11. ‘A White Blossom’; 12. ‘To A Certain Young Lady’. Neil has explained that the cycle is holistically conceived, with the relationship theme providing unification and also scope for contrast and variation (Neil website a). For instance, the flippant, exasperating, needling tone of ‘Tease’ with its repetition of ‘Maybe yes, and maybe no’ (1Poems 61) is counterbalanced by the serene, poised image of the ‘tiny moon’ in ‘A White Blossom’ (36), symbolising the integrity of an early love that cannot be tainted. There are recurrent patterns of imagery throughout the cycle – notably those associated with moons, suns and rain. Yet the juxtapositions and oscillations in tone and style facilitate – and indeed require – a highly expressive, versatile performance by the soprano vocalist. Neil can be situated among a number of composers who have combined poems from different collections by Lawrence in their song cycles. In many cases, the poems appear to have been chosen for thematic reasons. A recurrent fascination with Lawrence’s sun imagery is discernible. Notably, in 1958 the Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe produced a setting entitled Sun in which he sets the poems ‘Sun in me’, ‘Tropic’ and ‘Desire goes down into the sea—’. In 1965 he followed this with Sun Music for brass and strings, about which he commented: ‘Lawrence . . . and also the Mexican sun, the Australian sun and my own sun are ever present in it’ (quoted in Richards 2014: 41). Fiona Richards considers the extent and profundity of this influence in her article about Lawrence and Peter Sculthorpe (2014: 33–50). It is interesting to note that ‘Tropic’, like ‘River Roses’, ‘Green’, ‘A White Blossom’, ‘Piano’ and ‘December Night’, has been chosen by more than one composer for setting: a tribute, perhaps, to its vivid imagery, sonic resonance and dramatic impact. In 1960, Vittorio Rieti selected the four poems ‘Aware’, ‘Thomas Earp’, ‘December Night’ and ‘Quite Forsaken’ for inclusion in a composition simply entitled Four Lawrence Songs. In 1966 Dennis Riley wrote his Cantata I – a setting of the two Lawrence poems ‘Those that go searching for love’ and ‘The End, the Beginning’ – for the innovative combination of mezzo soprano, tenor saxophone, vibraphone, ’cello and piano. Anthony Burgess’s Man Who Has Come Through (1985) – scored for tenor, flute, oboe, ’cello and piano – derives its title from a chosen poem within Look! but combines this poem with others from different collections, including verse written as late as 1929. The resulting sequence is: Optional prelude and/or postlude; 1. ‘End of Another Home Holiday’; 2. ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’; 3. ‘Snake’; 4. ‘Bavarian Gentians’. This work is discussed at length by Susan Reid in her ‘Afterword: Anthony Burgess’s D. H. Lawrence Suite’ (2019: 214–19). During the same year (the centenary of Lawrence’s birth), the British composer Nigel Osborne wrote For a Moment, setting five Lawrence poems in the following order: 1. ‘The Dawn Verse’; 2. ‘For a Moment’; 3. ‘Tarantella’; 4. ‘What is man without an income?—’; 5. ‘The Drained Cup’. This work (commissioned and performed by Cantamus) was written for female choir, ’cello and Kandyan drum. ‘[The Dawn Verse]’ is a short atmospheric poem of farewell and welcome, from Lawrence’s novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), containing imagery of the dark dividing and the sun coming up. In his setting of this poem, Osborne interestingly merges Western and non-Western music traditions through combining primitive African drumming rhythms with simple plainchant. The late poem ‘For a Moment’ dramatises instances in which people in

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their spontaneous, instinctive moments acquire attributes of multifarious gods (1Poems 579–80). The song is much longer than any of the others in this cycle and is highly evocative. (I have analysed this music in depth and detail in Jones 2012: 153–74.) Like Andrew Downes’s ‘Piano’, this setting harks back to very early constructions of harmony and uses cantus firmus: a polyphonic strategy common in church music of the twelfth century. The poem chosen to follow this is ‘Tarantella’, in which the narrator dances on rocks in the company of the sea and the moon, mocking a troubled, isolated observer and wanting to be part of the sea’s ‘fiery coldness’ (1Poems 92–3). In accordance with tradition there are six quaver beats to the bar, and the movement conveys the vigour and speedy pace of the dance. Next comes ‘What is man without an income?—’, an ironic, repetitive poem about joblessness and worthlessness in society’s terms. A comic effect is achieved through the repetitions in ‘Dole dole dole / hole hole hole / and soul soul soul’ (473), but these rhymes also contribute to the overall impression of stagnation. There is a strong feeling of inertia here in stark contrast with the previous song. The cycle concludes with ‘The Drained Cup’, which also employs repetition and is about stasis: this time within a relationship. The poem furnishes a new musical opportunity and challenge as it is written using the Nottinghamshire accent and dialect. The composer here employs the troubled-sounding ‘devil’s interval’ (an augmented fourth leap), which is exposed as the song is sung in unison without instrumental accompaniment. The combination of uncomfortable interval and thinned-out texture at the end of the sequence offers resistance to any sense of closure or climax. Two other noteworthy settings of Lawrence are by Hugh Wood and Geoff Palmer, both composed in 1998. Wood’s D. H. Lawrence Songs: For High Voice and Piano (opus 14) uses the following five poems: 1. ‘Dog-Tired’; 2. ‘Gloire de Dijon’; 3. ‘Kisses in the Train’; 4. ‘River Roses’; 5. ‘Roses on the Breakfast Table’. Palmer’s title – Snatches of Lovely Oblivion – more explicitly indicates a thematic premise and the work is written for chamber choir with string quartet. It comprises the following poems: 1. ‘Shadows’; 2. ‘Dog-Tired’; 3. ‘Trust’; 4. ‘A White Blossom’ and ‘Piano’, with the last two poem-settings occurring simultaneously. Both composers set ‘Dog-Tired’: a poem of weariness and yearning for the peace that might stem from human touch. While Wood starts with this poem, Palmer precedes it with ‘Shadows’, explicitly about the quest for oblivion and thus closely connected. Many of the chosen poems are about love but – as with Neil’s The Waters are Shaking the Moon – they do not deal exclusively with romantic entanglements, as ‘Piano’ reveals. The poem combinations and juxtapositions within the song cycles considered above clearly differ, as do the musical styles, techniques and ensembles employed by the composers. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify a common concern with human relationships, intimacy and the natural world (particularly the sun and moon). The poetry is treated sensitively and inventively in these musical works, resulting in a creative transformation of words into sounds.

New Strands and Stories: Combining Lawrence with Other Poets The first known instance of a song cycle setting Lawrence alongside other poets appears to have met with limited success. In 1933–4, Elizabeth Lutyens composed her Four Songs for tenor and piano in which two poems by Lawrence – ‘Thief in the Night’ and ‘Nonentity’ – were preceded by ‘Stanzas’ by Emily Brontë and succeeded by Shakespeare’s

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‘Feste’s Song’. Unfortunately, a review in the Times dismissed this work as ‘incompletely incubated and inconsequential’ (23 July 1934, quoted in Reid 2019: 222). Subsequently, however, composers have been more convincing in creating a musical composition through yoking disparate poets together in a musically coherent sequence. Lawrence has been situated among poets as diverse as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Mary Coleridge, Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, John Davidson, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Yetza Gillespie, A. E. Housman, Chris Newman, Isaac Rosenberg, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sacheverell Sitwell, Howard Skempton, Alfred Tennyson and Douglas Worth. In a majority of cases, Lawrence is combined with established and highly renowned poets, but other strategies are also evident. In Phillip Rhodes’s Visions of Remembrance (1979), the second poem, entitled ‘Grown-up relatives’, was written by the composer’s young daughter, Anna-Jean Rhodes. The ‘Epilogue’ is based on a short snatch of poetry by Phillip Rhodes himself, though growing out of the Lawrence poem that precedes it. In The Moon is Flashing (2008), Howard Skempton begins the song cycle with his own poem from which the work derives its title. When reflecting on the choice and ordering of the texts it appears that the sequences are rarely chronological. Instead, the chosen poems tend to adhere to a common theme or series of related images, as exemplified by Arnold Cooke’s Nocturnes: A cycle of five songs for soprano, horn, and piano (1963). The sequence for this setting runs as follows: 1. ‘The Moon’ by Shelley; 2. ‘Returning, We Hear the Larks’ by Rosenberg; 3. ‘River Roses’ by Lawrence; 4. ‘The Owl’ by Tennyson; 5. ‘Boat Song’ by Davidson. Even from a glance at the titles, it is easy to recognise the nature theme that binds these poems together; with closer analysis it is possible to identify further synchronicities, particularly between the first three texts. In the initial setting, which conflates two poems by Shelley – ‘The Waning Moon’ and ‘To the Moon’ – the moon is portrayed as a ‘dying lady, lean and pale’, roving restlessly according to the ‘feeble wanderings of her fading brain’ (1977: 124). Cooke’s music here is unsettled and shifting: at the opening the horn and voice arc upwards but the melodic trajectory is punctuated by slight drops in pitch. The composer also makes use of wide interval leaps (down to ‘insane’ and up to ‘fearful’), while – by contrast – the phrase ‘shapeless mass’ is rendered by repeated same-pitch notes. The following poem by Rosenberg opens with a comparable bleakness, in which the darkness – through which ‘anguished limbs’ must be dragged – harbours a ‘sinister threat’ (1977: 80). The music for the opening is faster than the previous setting – more rhythmic and dramatic, using extended tonality – though the poem’s dragging image is conveyed through the horn echoing the soprano’s notes but with a slight delay. The horn is also muted on words like ‘dangerous’. The mood of the poem switches abruptly with the contrastingly joyful intervention of lark-song, reflected musically through a heraldic horn call over a high tremolo in piano. Nonetheless, this burst of joy is associated towards the end with naive, tainted dreams, unrecognised danger and ‘kisses where a serpent hides’, resulting in a residual unease (evident in the music’s return to the opening material). Appropriately, the Lawrence poem that follows also ends with a serpentine image: ‘Let it be as the snake disposes / Here in this simmering marsh’ (1Poems 176), while Rosenberg’s ‘ringing’ of larks also develops neatly into Lawrence’s ‘ringing’ of the river. This poem is given a pastoral, melodyand-accompaniment setting in which the horn initially adds texture but then mimics the singing of the frogs and provides a literally muted threat for ‘glimmering / Fear’.

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Ultimately, in both poems the bright promise of reverberating sound is overshadowed by a sense of menace and uncertainty. Tennyson’s ‘Song—The Owl’ is a very different poem, emphasising the way in which the ‘sinister dark’ has been superseded by dawning light. It might be seen as particularly appropriate for musical setting due to the ‘chorus’ effect achieved through rhyming couplets and verbatim repetitions of rhythmic, sonically resonant lines such as ‘Twice or thrice his roundelay, / Twice or thrice his roundelay’ (referring to a cockerel crowing; Tennyson 1975: 8). Like Shelley’s moon, the owl is ‘Alone’ while ‘warming his five wits’, but here this aloneness is not perceived as a negative, alienated condition. The music here is busy and rapid with melismatic figures in the voice; the horn is at times muted and also provides a recurrent owl call. This setting ends with a tonal flourish. With the final poem of the sequence, however, moonlight replaces the rising sun, illuminating ‘sea-pinks’, ‘inborne spray’ and ‘tawny sands’. The ‘whirring sea’ of Tennyson’s poem pre-empts the sea-motion of ‘Boat Song’ (‘The Boat is Chafing’ from ‘Scaramouche in Naxos’, Davidson 1995: 14), which conveys an urgent desire to depart and is infused with the energy of a vessel that is ‘plunging deeper into night / To reach a land unknown’. In the setting the piano provides a gently rippling, meandering wave motif and even the act of ‘Plunging deeper’ feels paradoxically peaceful and harmonious. However, the final lone, fading note on the horn leaves us with an ending tinged with irresolution. Later song cycles yoke poems together in order to tell their own story, creating music that unifies and connects the individual pieces. A further example is provided by the German composer Ruth Scönthal, who (as well as setting Whitman) wrote Seven Songs of Love and Sorrow for soprano and piano (1977), including Lawrence’s ‘Poor bit of a wench!—’. In 1979, Phillip Rhodes composed Visions of Remembrance, for two sopranos and twelve instruments, concluding the cycle with ‘Piano’, followed by his own Epilogue. (I have previously discussed the settings of ‘Piano’ by Rhodes and Neil in detail: see Jones 2012 167–71.) Joanne Forman’s Nottingham Spleen (1988) includes four poems from Pansies. In the twenty-first century, The Moon is Flashing by Howard Skempton, Three Partsongs by Phillip Cooke, Skies Now are Skies by David Matthews and ‘Are They Shadows’ and Other Songs by Richard Hundley have all included settings of poems by Lawrence alongside different writers. Also, in recent years, new possibilities have opened up for appropriating Lawrence’s poetry and exposing his work to wider audiences within both classical and popular domains. Helen Grime, with her orchestral composition Near Midnight (2013), inspired by Lawrence’s ‘Weeknight Service’ and premièred at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, has shown how the ‘spirit’ of a Lawrence poem can be conveyed through non-referential sounds. The following year, Nick Mulvey’s song ‘Cucurucu’ (adapting ‘Piano’) reached number 26 in the UK Singles Chart.

Musical Responses to Lawrence’s Prose, Plays and Life While a majority of composers who engage with Lawrence adopt his poetry for their own purposes, there are also musical works based on his prose (both fictional and non-fictional) and his plays. In 1958 Peter Sculthorpe composed The Fifth Continent, a radiophonic work for speaker, orchestra and recorded sound (didjeridoo and wind),

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in which he uses quotations from Kangaroo and structures a narrative around Lawrence’s time in Australia (Richards 2014: 42). Lawrence’s travel writing inspired Peggy Glanville-Hicks’s Etruscan Concerto (1954) and Thea Musgrave’s The Last Twilight (1980), while in 2017 Fabio Furio staged a theatrical performance of text from Sea and Sardinia with videos and narration supplementing music for bandoneon, violin, piano and double bass. The 1941 radio adaptation of ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ used incidental music by Benjamin Britten: the best-known composer to have responded to Lawrence through music. His score for this film is relatively sparse but highly evocative and very varied. The story’s young protagonist, Paul, feels that his house is whispering when his parents are short of money: Britten reflects the whispering through discordant music, rising melodic lines and the use of tremolos, trills, clashes and distorted brass sounds. Conversely, more tonal, lyrical, minor melodies denote Paul’s unhappiness, his mother’s coldness and – ultimately – the boy’s futile death. Subsequent theatrical adaptations of this story include a chamber opera by Andrew McBirnie with libretto by Bethan Jones (McBirnie 2002) and an opera by Gareth Williams with libretto by Anna Chatterton in 2016 (Reid 2019: 227). Lawrence’s life has itself provided composers with the impetus for creative composition. This is evident as early as 1932 in Adolph Weiss’s unfinished Sketches for David (an opera in rhythmic declaration about Lawrence), and as recently as 2017 in Glyn Bailey’s musical Lorenzo and Lady C. (Bailey website), which received the New Orleans Marquee Theatre Award for Best Original Musical.4 It is heartening to consider the proliferation of musical compositions based on Lawrence within the new millennium: works that engage with, extend and challenge a long tradition of literary text-setting.

Notes 1. The musical analysis here has been carried out principally through an aural response to recordings of these compositions rather than an analysis of the printed scores. 2. Cantamus is internationally renowned, having won twenty-nine first prizes in choral festivals and eight Grand Prix, including BBC Choir of the Year, Choir of the World (Llangollen Eisteddfod) and World Choir Olympics (Bremen 2004 and Xiamen 2006). Thirty-two overseas tours have been undertaken, including Malaysia, Japan, China, Israel, USA, Canada and, most recently, Riva del Garda in Italy: see . 3. A musical figure in which two groups of three notes are replaced by three groups of two notes, conveying the effect of a shift between triple and duple metre. 4. This musical has also appeared under its previous titles Lawrence – the Musical and Scandalous!.

Works Cited Bachlund, Gary (1991)‚ ‘To Women As Far As I’m Concerned’, . Bailey, Glyn (n.d.), Lorenzo and Lady C., . Davidson, John (1996), ‘The Boat is Chafing’, from ‘Scaramouche in Naxos’, in Selected Poems and Prose of John Davidson, ed. John Sloan, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 14. Downes, Andrew (2016), ‘An Animation of “Piano” by Paula Downes’, .

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FHR (First Hand Records) (2019), . Jones, Bethan (2006), ‘Poems on the Brink: Psychological and Structural Borderlines in Look! We Have Come Through!’, Études Lawrenciennes, 33, pp. 137–52. Jones, Bethan (2012), ‘D. H. Lawrence and the “Insidious Mastery of Song”’, D. H. Lawrence Studies (published by the D. H. Lawrence Society of Korea), 20:2, pp. 153–74. Lawrence, D. H. (1992), ‘Poetry of the Present’, in Selected Poems, ed. Mara Kalnins, London: Dent, pp. 266–70. McBirnie, Andrew (2002), The Rocking-Horse Winner, libretto by Bethan Jones, special feature on The Rocking-Horse Winner, Home Vision Entertainment, 2002, with libretto also printed in the accompanying booklet. Neil, William (website a), The Waters Are Shaking the Moon, . Neil, William (website b), Where There Is No Autumn, . Reid, Susan (2019), D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Richards, Fiona (2014), ‘“The Streaming of the Sun and the Flowing of the Stars”: D. H. Lawrence and Peter Sculthorpe’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 3:3, pp. 33–50. Rosenberg, Isaac (1977), The Collected Poems, London: Chatto & Windus. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1977), ‘To the Moon’, in Selected Poems, ed. Timothy Webb, London: Dent; Shelley, Percy Bysshe (n. d.) ‘The Waning Moon’ at . Skempton, Howard (2017), ‘Description’, in ‘Man and Bat’, Oxford: Oxford University Press: . Tennyson, Alfred (1975), Poems and Plays, ed. Herbert Warren, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tippett, Michael (1989), ‘Thoughts on Word Setting’, Contemporary Music Review, 5, pp. 29–32.

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27 Lawrence and Twenty-First-Century Film Louis K. Greiff

Introduction: Facts and Figures

D

. H. Lawrence announced his distaste for film in his poetry (‘When I went to the film—’ [1Poems 385]) and in his painting (Close-Up [Kiss]). For this he has been repaid with an avalanche of screen adaptations. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists sixty-eight films (including adaptations for television), of which fifty-eight were released in the twentieth century and ten in the twenty-first. Three additional films were omitted from the IMDb list – Pharaoh’s Heart (2002), The Rocking Horse Winner (2010) and Lady Luck (2013), all adaptations of the same short story, ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’. Seventy-one films devoted to a single author is, by any standard, a remarkable number. Among Lawrence’s peers this compares to fifty-four for James Joyce, forty-one for Aldous Huxley, and seventeen each for Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster (and fifty-six for Thomas Hardy). This chapter concentrates on twenty-first-century adaptations, partly because these have had relatively little written on them, and it is one aim of this Companion to describe Lawrence’s ongoing reception and current relevance.1 This century has also seen a new boldness in adaptations of his works. Beginning with Michael Almereyda’s 1997 The Rocking Horse Winner, filmmakers have started to take far more liberties with the textual surface (setting in time and place, plot and the overt personalities of the characters); the notable exceptions to this trend are Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley et l’homme des bois and Mark Partridge’s Odour of Chrysanthemums. In the Almereyda film, for example, Bassett becomes ‘Joe’, a Hispanic gardener, which suggests that Latinos are now California’s and perhaps America’s equivalent of England’s domestic class. It is also the case that the escalating cost of making feature films has led to a greater emphasis on short forms. Of the thirteen Lawrence films of this millennium, only one (Ferran’s 2006 Lady Chatterley) was released to motion picture theatres. With the exception of one biographical film, Armand Attard’s Inside the Mind of Mr D. H. Lawrence (2013), all other recent releases have been short films of short stories. The earliest of these, Sara Pratter’s Pharaoh’s Heart and Partridge’s Odour of Chrysanthemums (both 2002), were available on VHS tape and/or DVD, but have not been distributed commercially. The rest appeared and still appear on a medium entirely new to Lawrence filming, the online website – particularly Vimeo (a site dedicated to film) and YouTube (where numerous amateur Lawrence adaptations, in addition to the professional films mentioned in this chapter, may also be found). Bob Calabritto’s The Rocking Horse Winner (2010) can be found on YouTube, as can two Lawrence films by Travis Mills, You Touched Me and The White Stocking (both 2014). Several

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of the remaining films can be found on Vimeo, although some with restricted viewing. Mills’s third Lawrence film, The Blind Man (2011),2 can be accessed, but Jo Lewis’s Lady Luck (2013) and Monica Tidwell’s Rawdon’s Roof (2014) can be accessed only with a private link and password. Such films may be shown at film festivals, but then exist purely online (an exception is Almereyda’s 1997 The Rocking Horse Winner, which was included with the DVD of the first The Rocking Horse Winner, of 1949). All those available can be viewed free; they are not commercial ventures, and are generally made by younger directors on a tight budget. In the 2011 The Blind Man and the 2014 The White Stocking, director Travis Mills is also one of the cast. The resultant emphasis on short stories stands in counterpoint to the fact that, in this century, Lawrence’s novels have been adapted only to television (the BBC made Sons and Lovers in 2003, Women in Love in 2011 and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 2015) or large screen (Ferran’s Lady Chatterley et l’homme des bois). Another new development of the present century is the greater involvement of women. Of the past century’s fifty-eight Lawrence films, among over thirty directors only two were women: Valerie Hanson (Fanny and Annie, 1975) and Katie Mitchell (The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, 1995). In the current century, as of 2020, five out of twelve Lawrence directors have been women. This shift is partly reflective of an improvement in the position of women in film and society more generally, but also of a turn to Lawrence on the part of women, who make up half of the contributors, as well as both the editors, of this Companion. The shift has been reflected in the attitudes of the films themselves (Ferran’s Lady Chatterley et l’homme des bois is still more heavily focused on Connie’s experience than is the novel itself), including those not by women (Mills’s 2014 The White Stocking meta-cinematically satirises the director’s marginalisation of the cast’s sole actress). What follows is a discussion of five twenty-first-century Lawrence film adaptations: Briton Mark Partridge’s Odour of Chrysanthemums (2002, 30 minutes), American Bob Calabritto’s The Rocking Horse Winner (2010, 11 minutes), American Travis Mills’s The Blind Man (2011, 17 minutes) and The White Stocking (2014, 10 minutes), and Frenchwoman Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley et l’homme des bois (2006, 161 minutes). The choice of these films was based on their quality, and a desire to exhibit a range of relationships with Lawrence’s texts. The value of fidelity in film adaptation is a question that threads its way, deliberately, through the commentary. Four of the five films under study will be discussed as paired counterparts. Two of them are the work of the same director. The other two appear unrelated but are, in fact, juxtaposed because of the radically contrasting strategies they adopt to filming Lawrence. The last film, Ferran’s, is the longest of the five and will be discussed singly. The chapter’s final section will place twenty-first-century film adaptation of Lawrence in the context of the entire project, now over seventy years old.

Imitation and Re-creation: Mark Partridge’s Odour of Chrysanthemums (2002) and Bob Calabritto’s The Rocking Horse Winner (2010) Lawrence’s final version of his story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1914) is a multilayered tragedy (he reworked its first version, from 1909, into the 1910 play The

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Widowing of Mrs Holroyd). It looks ahead to Arthur Miller’s 1950s tragedies of the common man and also looks back to ancient Greek tragedy and Aristotle’s Poetics (see also Jeremy Tambling’s comparison of this story with The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd in his chapter on ‘Drama and the Dramatic’). Partridge’s film both preserves and enhances these attributes. Lawrence gives his main character a queen’s name and describes her as ‘a tall woman of imperious mien’ (PO 182). Partridge’s Elizabeth, played superbly by Geraldine O’Rawe, allows us to see this directly; she has dignity, elegance and strength, despite being one among hundreds of coal miners’ wives. In keeping with most extant Greek tragedies, and with Aristotle’s Poetics, both Lawrence’s story and Partridge’s film maintain unity of time and action. Also in accord with Aristotle’s view of ‘spectacle’ as an inferior means of arousing the tragic emotions (1958: 26–7), the ‘spectacle’ of Walter’s entrapment and death by suffocation is not overtly represented in either text or film. The event is described to Elizabeth and Walter’s mother by a young miner, and we see Walter only after the fatal accident in the innocent dignity of his death. The most basic layer of tragedy presented by both Lawrence’s story and Partridge’s film is Walter Bates’s death and the immediate circumstances surrounding it. Walter is a good yet severely flawed man who makes a fatal mistake. He is also a good, albeit stubborn, miner who refuses to abandon a job once begun; Poetics states that the tragic figure should be ‘good’ (Aristotle 1958: 29–30). Walter’s mistake is compounded when he dismisses his fellow miners, Rigley and Bower. They become complicit in the tragedy by allowing him to work alone, leaving the mine for home or perhaps for a pint or two of ale. A deeper tragic layer concerns Elizabeth, the central figure of both the story and the film. Lawrence and Partridge implicitly juxtapose Walter’s physical death with Elizabeth’s spiritual annihilation. In an internal monologue near the story’s end, Elizabeth realises that, despite years of marriage, Walter has remained a stranger to her. In shock, she also feels estranged from herself and from her unborn baby: ‘“Who am I? What have I been doing?”’ and ‘The child was like ice in her womb’ (PO 198). Lawrence’s extended internal monologue would challenge Mark Partridge or any director endeavouring to film it. Voiceover comes to mind, but it is artificial and awkward. Partridge’s solution is to have Elizabeth talk to herself, voicing aloud her most tortured thoughts and feelings. This also might seem artificial and awkward, yet it is not, partly because of Geraldine O’Rawe’s fine acting, but also because Partridge’s Elizabeth may well talk to herself given her husband’s prolonged absences at work or in a pub. At one point in Lawrence’s monologue Elizabeth asks herself ‘“What wrong have I done?”’ (198). This is a question that a tragic figure might well ask herself. The easy answer is that she married Walter Bates. The more complete answer is that she married the ‘“good lad”’ (192) his mother describes as having ‘“the heartiest laugh”’ (197). This was before he became the man Elizabeth does not know, transformed by years of mining coal into a failed husband and father consumed by drink. The story’s larger tragedy contextualises the personal tragedies and can be described as communal. Midlands society has turned away from its age-old rural way of life and embraced modern industrialism. Walter’s death, sealed off from earth, water, and air, serves as a synecdoche for this exchange. The story’s opening paragraph describes the progress of a ‘small locomotive engine, Number 4’ (PO 181). No locomotive engine appears in Partridge’s film, probably for monetary reasons as Jason Mark Ward

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observes (2016: 66). We see only the railway tracks, so close to the Bates’ cottage that Elizabeth might easily touch a passing train from behind her garden fence. Partridge, however, depends more on sounds than on images to represent industrial omnipresence on screen. We hear mine trains chuffing and whistling throughout the film. Even when stillness surrounds the cottage, a ticking clock can be heard, reminding us of time’s linear advance and of the omnipresence of mechanical devices. The film’s very first sound, heard even before its first image appears, is the mine whistle announcing the end of Walter’s shift. The sound repeats itself in the film’s penultimate scene, silencing the cries of birds as Elizabeth stands outside her cottage. The whistle interrupts her moment of peace, calling the men back to work for the dawn shift. Lawrence’s story does not offer hope for the future, as is evident from its closing paragraph: ‘They covered him with a sheet and left him lying, with his face bound . . . She knew she submitted to life, which was her immediate master. But from death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear and shame’ (PO 199). By contrast Partridge’s film, like many traditional tragedies, conveys a cathartic sense of uplift and resolution at the very end. Its penultimate outdoor scene allows Elizabeth a momentary breath of fresh air, both literally and spiritually. When she returns to the cottage for the film’s final scene, the room is dark, yet a bright fire burns in the hearth, and the light of a new day shines through the window. The missing locomotive engine Number 4 and more hopeful ending of the film reveal that Partridge is willing to depart from Lawrence’s text in certain particulars. Overall, however, he provides a faithful imitation of the story and notably not of the corresponding play, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. This choice of genres suggests that fiction, and Lawrence’s fiction specifically, is more open to cinematic rendering than writing intended for the stage. Lawrence’s cinematic fiction will be discussed further in the concluding section of this chapter. Where Mark Partridge preserves most of Lawrence’s textual surface, Bob Calabritto renders it almost unrecognisable, retaining just the bare bones of ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’: a rocking horse and toy whip used by someone capable of predicting winners of races not yet run. The film begins with images of New York City at dawn. Some prefigure topics that will come to the foreground later on – a church steeple silhouetted against a brilliant sunrise, for example, or a wall topped with razor wire near one of the East River’s massive bridges, which together suggest the contrast between passage and blockage. A similar cityscape later in the film shows an elevated train passing the dome of a church: another juxtaposition, this time between spiritual peace and the ongoing rush of New Yorkers. The introductory city scenes close with Calabritto’s camera panning upward at the protagonist’s shabby apartment building. Many of its windows are fitted with identical dish antennas revealing a preoccupation with television that will play out as the film continues. After a momentary blackout, a technique Calabritto employs to demarcate scenes, his camera displays the meagre interior of the protagonist’s apartment. We see a bearded man in a chair watching a television set, its picture scrambled and white noise the only sound. But for a cat, the man lives alone. Played by Calabritto, he remains nameless and never speaks during the film. We see him stand and open his refrigerator, which is nearly empty. He then picks up a small whip and approaches the rocking horse. After kneeling and placing his head against the horse’s head in an attitude of prayer, the man mounts, his feet far too large for the stirrups, and begins vigorously

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rocking. His sure and deliberate actions suggest that he has done this many times. The rocking creates an imaginary horse race, seemingly televised – full screen, in muted colour, and with the track announcer’s voice heard loud and clear. Imagination’s video proves more reliable than the broken television in the man’s apartment. It exacts a price, however, from the clairvoyant rider. Like Paul in Lawrence’s story, Calabritto’s man is spent both physically and spiritually by the end of the race, sweat-covered as the winner, Mr Red Rock, is announced. In the next scene, the man leaves his building and rides the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. His destination is an off-track betting parlour where he bets on the winning horse and watches the race again on live television and in real rather than psychic time. After the race, he departs from the parlour counting his winnings and walks the Manhattan streets, entirely ignored by the crowd. Here the viewer might notice that it is winter in New York, with everyone warmly clothed except the man, who wears a light raincoat and hat. During his walk, he passes three beggars, probably all homeless, each worse off than the one before. The first sits in a wheelchair playing a trumpet. Hardly breaking stride, the man gives him money, but gets no thanks. The second beggar reclines on the sidewalk, his upper body propped against a building. He reaches up to accept the man’s gift but does not otherwise respond. The third street person is the most abject, an old man asleep on the pavement with his back against a building. The man gives him money, and after a slight pause removes his own raincoat and awkwardly wraps it around the beggar’s shoulders and back. Luke the Evangelist quotes John the Baptist as saying: ‘He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none’ (Luke 3: 11). Since the protagonist wears only a raincoat in January, it is doubtful that he owns anything else (as the man studies his racing form, the date is clearly visible: ‘January 27, 2010’). On the way home, he stops to buy milk and two cans of tuna, probably for his cat. He enters his apartment, feeds the cat, and returns to his original position, in a chair watching a television set that offers nothing to see or hear. In Lawrence’s story, the adult characters are hungry for money, perhaps even the gardener Bassett, who is the best of them. The child, Paul, is not interested in money and may be too young to understand its worth. Nonetheless, he wants something of great value in return for his winnings – his mother’s love and attention. If Lawrence’s text is a condemnation of greed and its deadly results, Calabritto’s film is a celebration of generosity that seeks nothing in return. His film and Lawrence’s text are, therefore, opposed yet united, like two sides of the same coin. Taken together, these two films – one of which preserves textual surface and the other of which obliterates it – succeed as original works of art and as visual renderings of Lawrence’s works.

Contemporising Lawrence: Travis Mills’s The White Stocking (2014) and The Blind Man (2011) By ‘contemporising’ I mean something beyond advancing Lawrence’s setting to time present, which both Calabritto and Mills do. I mean instead a filmmaker’s major alteration of a text in order to foreground an issue more critical today than during Lawrence’s lifetime. As Mills’s The White Stocking opens, viewers will assume they are watching an adaptation of Lawrence’s story, updated to time present and taking place in the United States. The dark acting space appears to be a rehearsal studio. The actor playing Ted

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(Frank Gonzales) is asleep on the floor, since there is no furniture other than a table and chair. The actor playing Elsie (Amber Michelle) is picking out a dress, but since there are no props the dress is invisible as are the kettle she puts on the fire, the fire itself, and the white stocking she receives anonymously as a Valentine’s Day gift. As in Lawrence’s story, a jealous argument ensues between husband and wife. It escalates until the moment Ted in Lawrence’s text explodes in anger saying ‘“You’d go off with a nigger for a packet of chocolate”’ (PO 148). In the film, the actor playing Ted begins a modified version of this line, but finds he cannot finish it: ‘Yeah, you would go out with that.’ He tries again, but then drops the role and speaks in his own voice: ‘“Yeah, you would” . . . arrgh, I can’t say the fucking line.’ The line itself is never spoken in the film. Just as Frank refuses to say ‘the N word’, the camera turns and we see a threeperson film crew along with the two actors. Viewers suddenly realise that they are not watching a film of ‘The White Stocking’ but a film about filming it. An intervention has occurred replacing film adaptation with a contemporary treatment of prejudice and racist language, perhaps implicitly referencing Lawrence’s own biases. The director (Mills playing himself) argues with his lead actor, insisting that the line is important and must be spoken. He asks his film crew, one of whom is African American, if they have a problem with the line, and both reply that they do not. At this point Frank, the lead actor, agrees, albeit angrily, to say the line. Cast and crew ready themselves to resume shooting, and the film suddenly ends – in medias res and before the end of part one of Lawrence’s three-part story. The film explores a separate but related issue despite being a scant ten minutes long. During the discussion of racist language, the cast and crew, particularly the director, repeatedly marginalise the only woman in the room, Amber Michelle, who plays Elsie. While Mills calls his lead actor and both crew members by name, Michelle’s name is never spoken. When Mills asks the crew if they have a problem with the line, he leaves Michelle out of the discussion. When she asks to speak during the argument between Mills and Gonzales, Mills refuses her request. Michelle joins the two men despite this and attempts to mediate, suggesting that the line can be modified to be less blatantly racist. Mills vetoes her suggestion by telling her to shut up. The presence of misogyny in Mills’s film may again be an oblique reference to Lawrence’s complex and often disturbing treatment of women in life and in literature. More to the point, however, this issue and how it is depicted on film reveal that our deepest prejudices are, like Mills’s furniture and props, those we cannot see. Unlike The White Stocking, Mills’s The Blind Man follows Lawrence’s text to the end. This adaptation also updates the story to recent times and takes place in the United States. Mills changes the names of Lawrence’s characters in ‘The Blind Man’ to become Americanised versions of the originals. Isabel Pervin becomes Izzie (Jess Weaver), Bertie Reid becomes Bennie (Michael Coleman) and Maurice Pervin becomes Martin (Travis Mills, uncredited). Unlike Maurice, whose blindness and disfiguring scar are visible, Martin wears an unclean rag as a blindfold. He also wears a torn military T-shirt, suggesting that his wound and resulting blindness occurred during one of America’s Middle Eastern wars. Paralleling Lawrence’s story, Bennie is an old friend of Izzie’s about to pay the couple a visit. The film adaptation implies that Bennie and Izzie are former lovers and that Martin is aware of their relationship. This departs from Lawrence’s story since Bertie Reid is so cerebral that all his relations with women are sexless.

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Both Lawrence’s Maurice and Mills’s Martin are casualties of war, but otherwise they differ. Maurice has found peace in blindness, enjoying the dark but richly tactile world of his barn, his animals and his manual work. Martin, however, remains agitated and behaves strangely throughout the film. Early on we see him struggling to build a horseshoe pit, then pitching horseshoes despite being sightless. When Izzie insists that he wash himself before dinner, Martin showers to the beautiful sounds of monks in chorus, which creates the implication of baptism and is the first hopeful moment in the film. Nonetheless, Martin still wears his ragged blindfold as the water pours down upon him. At dinnertime, he sits at a picnic table in his desert-like back garden rather than joining Izzie and Bennie inside, and eats a plain piece of meat that he has divided into three parts. Izzie and Bennie join him, but only Bennie partakes of the strange meal. During this scene, the viewer may notice that Martin has cleaned up but still wears military clothing. He has traded the torn T-shirt for full-length combat fatigues with his name-tag and unit insignia removed. The Velcro patches that held them in place, however, are clearly visible. The background song accompanying this ritual-like eating scene is in Arabic, again referencing America’s most recent wars. The film’s climactic ending follows Lawrence’s text closely, except for its final moment. As in the story, Izzie becomes worried about her husband when he stays in his shed later than usual. Bennie goes out to find him, and the dialogue between the two men is similar to Lawrence’s: Martin: We don’t know each other, do we? Bennie: I guess not. Martin: Can I touch you? Bennie: All right. Martin then explores Bennie’s chest and face with his hands, but does not grasp his head or announce a new and intense relationship between them as in the story. Instead he says: ‘We’re going to become friends, aren’t we? The three of us. Bennie, will you take the blindfold off?’ As Bennie begins to untie Martin’s blindfold, the camera shifts from a shot of the two men facing one another to Martin’s point of view. Thus the viewer first sees only a black screen. As the blindfold is removed, however, the viewer sees it coming off from Martin’s perspective, then sees Bennie looking directly at him. The surprising realisation within this ending is that Martin is not physically blind, like Lawrence’s Maurice, but mentally and spiritually maimed by war. It is not that he cannot see but that, up until now, he did not wish to see because he has seen too much already. A still publicity photo that never appears in the film makes this explicit: we see Martin in his combat fatigues with an American flag behind him. He is wearing his blindfold, and his hands appear to be tied behind his back. This image suggests that Martin has experienced captivity as well as combat. Of the four films discussed so far, this one has the most hopeful ending. If Martin is willing to shed his blindfold with Bennie’s help, he may have begun to put the war behind him and to move forward into the peace of normal life. As to Mills’s two films in relation to Lawrence, they are inspired by his texts but at the same time appropriate them to contemporary concerns: conflicts about race and gender, and the effects of contemporary war (soldiers suffering critical injuries not of the body but of the mind and spirit, and bringing the war home with them once they

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return). Mills’s Martin is still on guard, in uniform, patrolling his desert-like back garden, preferring a blindfold to seeing reminders of what he has experienced. As the comparison of Partridge’s and Calabritto’s films suggested, the quality of an adaptation seems a function neither of surface fidelity nor of departure from it.

Streamlining Lawrence: Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley et l’homme des bois (2006) Ferran’s film is not an adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Lawrence’s third and final version of the novel, but of the second version, previously known as John Thomas and Lady Jane. This is the longest of Lawrence’s three Lady Chatterley texts, and as such is the least constrainable to the limits of a feature film. My heading ‘Streamlining Lawrence’ refers to Ferran’s major means of departing from the text – less by alteration than by omission. Her film’s ‘preface’, prior to the initial credits, exemplifies this and also provides a covert preview of what lies ahead. We see Connie (Marina Hands) standing at Wragby’s front entrance saying goodbye to an older man. He kisses her on both cheeks, climbs into his car and drives off. Film viewers familiar with the text might realise that the older man is Connie’s father (Bernard Verley), departing after a visit to Wragby during which he has spoken to both Connie and Clifford about his daughter’s confined existence and resulting decline. The film’s opening scene, in medias res, is puzzling, however, since it leaves viewers unfamiliar with the text in the dark about the man’s identity and what has taken place in its opening chapters. After Connie’s father leaves, Ferran’s camera pans across a striking scene – trees mostly green but displaying early autumn colours, a stream winding through the landscape and tall mountains in the background. Connie looks at the scene wistfully, then turns and walks back into her stately but fortress-like home. Other erasures in Ferran’s film include Connie’s encounter with Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) and his daughter in bitter conflict over a dead cat. The film, in fact, never indicates that Parkin has a child. A later episode in which Parkin dismantles and burns a framed photograph of himself and Bertha Coutts as newly-weds is also deleted. The portrait appears briefly during a scene at Parkin’s cottage, but remains on the wall undisturbed. A final example of deletion (among many others) is Connie’s trip to Sheffield. Parkin’s hosts, Bill and Lillian Tewson, are omitted, as is the lovers’ parting scene in the countryside near Underwood. Thus both Lawrence’s beginning and ending chapters are missing from Ferran’s film. Noting these examples of erasure as an adaptation strategy is not intended as criticism. In fact they parallel, but do not precisely duplicate, Lawrence’s own strategy of streamlining The Second Lady Chatterley to create Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence also drops the Sheffield/Underwood ending along with a great deal of polemic in the second version, delivered to the reader in the author’s own voice, in favour of an ending with a letter by Mellors. While some of Lawrence’s secondary characters are dropped from the film, most of them remain, although reduced in prominence – a less Draconian method of streamlining. At Wragby’s only social gathering several guests are present, including Clifford’s friends Harry Winterslow (Jean Baptiste Montagut) and Tommy Dukes (Sava Lolov), both named in the final credits but not in the film. Dukes is in uniform and has little to say, unlike his textual counterpart. Instead, once

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the men separate from the women, Clifford (Hippolyte Girardot) dominates the conversation, which turns to war and soon reveals his heartless core beneath an ever-suave and gentlemanly surface. Clifford’s first remarks are in praise of German machinery, specifically their deadly guns. He goes on to describe the death of a friend, Wallace, not with grief or compassion, but as if he were relating an odd and even amusing incident. First, he says he felt hot water splashing against his neck (Wallace’s blood). Then he describes seeing Wallace run by headless, like a freshly-killed chicken in a barnyard. Ferran’s Clifford never changes from this ugly beginning to the end of the film. Lawrence’s Clifford, on the other hand, evolves during the second version of the novel and far more during the final version. A visible marker of Clifford’s stasis on screen is the unvaried formality of his dress – dark suit and tie for all occasions, indoors or out, even during his disastrous ride into the woods. Late in the film Clifford appears similarly dressed, but now in white. The colour has changed with the season, but also serves to welcome Connie home from vacation and, more importantly, to celebrate Clifford’s mastery of ‘walking’ with crutches in a grotesque parody of resurrection. Clifford’s most intimate friend, Mrs Bolton (Helene Alexandridis), an intelligent, manipulative and complex woman in both the second and the final texts, is reduced to a two-dimensional figure on screen. While she attends to Clifford’s physical needs, she never becomes emotionally involved with him for purposes of control. She never gossips about Tevershall, nor does she share intimate details of her marriage to Ted Bolton with Connie as she does in the novel. The main purpose of Ferran’s streamlining of Lawrence’s text is to concentrate on two central love affairs, the first between Connie Chatterley and Oliver Parkin, and the second between Connie and nature. The first story is purely Lawrentian. The second is also Lawrentian but partly Wordsworthian in the implied worship of nature. The second story is if anything more central to the film than the first. The relationship between Connie and Parkin begins when she inadvertently sees him washing himself. The film follows the text exactly, up to the point when Connie sees Parkin naked from the waist up. In every sense departing from the text, Marina Hands’s Connie runs away at full speed far into the woods. When she stops, she is completely winded and must rest to regain her breath and her composure. This change to the text is critical in suggesting that Connie is not simply shocked at seeing a partly naked man, but, more significantly, fleeing from her own suppressed desires and needs. As lovers Connie and Parkin make a fascinating couple on screen, partly because in appearance they are opposites. Playing Connie, Hands combines her delicate beauty with an enduring impression of innocence. Parkin, by contrast, is older (than her and than in the text), rough-edged and husky. In robustness he is unlike Lawrence’s Parkin, who is physically fragile as a result of the war and recurring bouts of pneumonia. Also, Coulloc’h, playing Parkin, is not handsome in the leading-man style, but large-featured and rugged, bearing some resemblance to Marlon Brando in mid-career. Beyond his appearance, the film’s Parkin is a man of few words, spoken, however, in simple, standard French. Thus his dialect, and the reasons Parkin speaks it in place of standard English, are streamlined out of the film. The developing attraction between Parkin and Connie is expressed on screen primarily through the gazes and movements of the two characters rather than through language. Altogether there are seven erotic scenes in the film, each more explicit than the one before. In the third scene, after Connie visits Mrs Flint, the lovers achieve

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orgasm together. In the fifth scene the audience sees genitalia directly for the first and only time as Connie asks Parkin to remove his shirt to expose his erect penis. In the seventh and final love scene, Connie and Parkin dance naked together and then make love during an intense rainstorm. This scene is climactic not only sexually but in relation to Connie’s developing passion for nature. Ferran’s full film title declares that Parkin is the man of the woods and has been this man long before meeting Connie. Their developing love affair is at the same time a process of her conversion from an urbane and cultured Lady into Parkin’s female counterpart – the woman of the woods. The film contains at least fourteen scenes devoted to nature, many of them free of human presence, and some with Connie alone. These are organised around the four elements of earth, air, fire and, especially, water. A memorable earth scene, taken directly from the text, shows Connie and Parkin together in the woods at night. Connie wonders about the noises she hears, and Parkin explains that the trees are rubbing against one another sounding as if ‘“they was talking”’ (FLC, second version, 428). Ferran’s camera often points at the sky, most memorably when a large hawk, wings extended, soars through the air above the treetops. Fires burn at Parkin’s cottage and at the hut where he and Connie first became lovers. During a later scene at the hut, Connie builds the fire herself, first chopping heavy logs, then carrying them indoors to set them ablaze. Such actions would be forbidden at Wragby. Water figures in Ferran’s film more prominently than the first three elements combined. Several scenes relating to earth reveal flowers in the woods dripping with water or picked by Connie to decorate Parkin’s cottage or to enliven Wragby, her husband’s ornate but morbid estate. At Wragby Connie drinks water after being startled awake by a nightmare. She drinks a second time in the woods from a metal cup left at the stream for that purpose. Later, when she returns to the stream, she drinks again but now with her bare hands. Still later, at the hut, Connie and Parkin share a pitcher of water together. After one of Connie’s visits to the hut, she returns home formally dressed and is caught in a powerful rainstorm. Rather than being upset by her unexpected soaking, she gazes at the sky and smiles. All such examples anticipate the culminating scene of Connie and Parkin dancing and making love in a downpour. This marks Connie’s rebirth and baptism as the woman of the woods. As in Lawrence’s novel, when the lovers return to the hut after the storm they decorate each other’s bodies with flowers and leaves. They also fashion crowns of leaves for one another and wear them in a dual coronation, at least for the moment, as nature’s royal couple. Like Lawrence’s novel, Ferran’s film ends with nothing resolved. In the novel Parkin has left Wragby for Sheffield, thereby trading organic activity for mechanical labour. His new job at a steel works injures him badly, both physically and spiritually. In the film, the lovers part at Wragby, with Parkin attempting to reconcile his lifelong need to be alone with his love for Connie. Amid the irresolution and sadness of separation, however, both novel and film close on a note of hope. In the novel Connie asks Parkin, ‘“You’ll come to me if I can’t bear it?”’ The novel then ends simply with the words ‘“Yes,” he said’ (FLC 570). The film’s ending is almost identical. Connie asks ‘You’ll come to me if I can’t bear it any more?’, Parkin answers ‘Yes’, and the screen goes dark.3 These mirror-image endings recall the ending of that very different novel, James Joyce’s Ulysses, with Molly Bloom’s affirmation and celebration of life: ‘Yes!’ (1992: 777).

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D. H. Lawrence and Cinematic Inspiration Seventy-one Lawrence film adaptations were released between 1949 and 2018. This concluding section will consider why Lawrence’s writings have been an inspiration to filmmakers for nearly seventy years. This inspiration is, ironically, a reversal of Lawrence’s dislike of film, as proclaimed in his prose (‘The Theatre’ and The Lost Girl as discussed by Gemma Moss in her chapter on ‘Popular Culture’), poetry and painting. Some Lawrence commentators (e.g. Morris 1996: 602) have speculated that his views about film would have been far more positive had he lived to experience its artistic and technical development. This possibility can never be determined, but since Lawrence was a man who enjoyed his own anger, I wouldn’t bet on it. Few questions beginning with ‘why’ can be answered with a single reason, and so it is with Lawrence and his long film reception. What may come to mind first is the incomplete truth that Lawrence was a writer of erotic literature, something of universal interest to filmmakers. This would account for the seven serious Lady Chatterley adaptations along with numerous soft and hardcore spin-offs including such titles as Young Lady Chatterley I and II (1977, 1985), Lady Chatterley’s Passions (1995) and (indicative of the novel’s geographical reach) Lady Chatterley in Tokyo (1977). A less evident reason for filmmakers’ interest is that at certain periods of modern and contemporary cultural history Lawrence’s writing becomes relevant or, more precisely, prophetic. One such period was the counterculture era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During that time three Lawrence films were released, propelled by the impression that his work anticipated and celebrated counterculture values and actions – sexual revolution, alternative lifestyles, and social and anti-war protest. These films were Mark Rydell’s The Fox (1967), Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969) and Christopher Miles’s The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970). A viewer watching any one of them and recalling the counterculture years would perceive the relationship at once. A second cluster of Lawrence films appeared between 1997 and 2013, all of them adaptations of ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’. They include Calabritto’s 2010 film discussed above, along with Almereyda’s The Rocking Horse Winner (1997), Pratter’s Pharaoh’s Heart (2002) and Lewis’s Lady Luck (2013). All four films are updated to the present, with Lewis’s adaptation set in England and the rest in the United States. All four radiate the social and economic dysfunction, avarice and uncertainty that characterised the turn of the millennium and continue today. In this sense Lawrence proves to be pertinent and capable of intuiting what lay in wait beyond his lifetime. The major reason filmmakers have gravitated towards Lawrence and his work is probably the most obvious. His writing contains numerous cinematic elements that anticipate approaches and techniques in filmmaking developed long after his death. While Lawrence’s texts can be both discursive and didactic, for example, sooner or later they blossom into vivid and compelling scenes reminiscent of recent cinema at its very best. The swing scene in Sons and Lovers provides an early example of Lawrence as a cinematic writer malgré lui. The inescapable contrast between Miriam’s timidity and Paul’s abandon while swinging expresses their deeply opposed natures and predicts their failure as lovers: He was swinging through the air, every bit of him swinging, like a bird that swoops for joy of movement. And he looked down at her. Her crimson cap hung over

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her dark curls, her beautiful warm face, so still in a kind of brooding, was lifted towards him. (SL 181) Like a camera lens, Lawrence’s elevated perspective reveals what Paul sees as he swings: his own ecstatic motion, the sight of Miriam below him, her cap, her brooding face, and her reverential gaze. A very different but equally cinematic scene comes as a surprise late in The Rainbow when Ursula Brangwen finds herself trapped by a herd of horses. The encounter ends as abruptly and unexpectedly as it began: Then suddenly, in a flame of agony, she darted, seized the rugged knots of the oak-tree and began to climb . . . She struggled in a great effort till she hung on the bough . . . The horses were loosening their knot, stirring, trying to realise. She was working her way round to the other side of the tree. As they started to canter towards her, she fell in a heap on the other side of the hedge. (453) Here again, Lawrence inspires his readers to see the action from her perspective. Ursula’s fall aborts her unborn child, and is the only event in the scene overtly related to the rest of the novel. Beyond this, the sequence plays out like a supernatural experience or a dream narrative, and could be effectively filmed as such. Many more examples of vividly visual, perspectival writing come to mind from Lawrence’s later novels: Gerald on his horse at a railway crossing with Gudrun and Ursula looking on in Women in Love, or Clifford Chatterley destroying his own wildflowers under the wheels of a motorised chair. Rather than extend this discussion, however, I will conclude with the words of contemporary Lawrence filmmaker Monica Tidwell. Having directed a fine short film of ‘Rawdon’s Roof’ (2014), she is at present working on a feature-length film of St. Mawr, never previously filmed to my knowledge. In an email exchange with her, I asked why, among so many short stories by Lawrence, she chose to film ‘Rawdon’s Roof’. Her reply provides an apt conclusion to this chapter: I was gifted a first edition (and signed) copy of the book [‘Rawdon’s Roof’] some years ago. I could almost say the book chose to be filmed. Soon after completing the short film based on Guy de Maupassant’s Aubord du Lit (A Bedtime Story), I came across the book on the shelf and decided to reread it after so many years. As I was reading, it came in visuals . . . The land between the houses, Janet’s walk in the rain, the poker game declaration of ‘no woman . . .’ etc. So I started writing the screenplay. (Tidwell 2018)

Notes 1. For my own account of the first fifty years of adaptation see Greiff 2001. 2. The end credits for The Blind Man list Travis Mills for ‘Action’ and Jason Cowan for ‘Camera’. This has caused some sources to cite Jason Cowan incorrectly as the film’s director. In fact, Travis Mills is the director and Jason Cowan is the cinematographer. 3. Translations from the French are my own.

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Works Cited Aristotle (1958), ‘The Poetics’, in On Poetry and Style, ed. G. M. A. Grube, Indianapolis/New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. The Blind Man, film, directed by Travis Mills, USA, Running Wild Films, 2011, available at . Greiff, Louis K. (2001), D. H. Lawrence: Fifty Years on Film, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Joyce, James (1992), Ulysses, London: Minerva. Lady Chatterley et l’homme des bois, film, directed by Pascale Ferran, France, Maia Films-ARTE France-Saga Films, 2006. Morris, Nigel (1996), ‘Lawrence’s Response to Film’, in D. H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion, ed. Paul Poplawski, London: Greenwood Press, pp. 591–603. Odour of Chrysanthemums, film, directed by Mark Partridge, United Kingdom: Jack Russell Productions, 2002. The Rocking Horse Winner, film, directed by Bob Calabritto, USA: Palindrome Pictures and Cassflix Productions, 2010. Tidwell, Monica (2018), Unpublished email to the author, 20 June. Ward, Jason Mark (2016), The Forgotten Adaptations of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories, Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill Rodopi. The White Stocking, film, directed by Travis Mills, USA, Running Wild Films, 2014, available at . You Touched Me, film, directed by Travis Mills, United States Running Wild Films, 2014, available at .

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28 D. H. Lawrence: Icon Catherine Brown

Introduction: Deification

I

n or around January 1926 Dorothy Brett painted a double portrait of Lawrence as Pan and Christ: The picture is of a crucifixion. The pale yellow Christ hangs on the Cross, against an orange sunset. With that final spurt of strength before death, he is staring at the vision of the figure in front of him. His eyes are visionary, his figure tense and aware. Before him, straddled across a rock, half-curious, half-smiling, is the figure of Pan, holding up a bunch of grapes to the dying Christ: a dark, reddish-gold figure with horns and hoofs. The heads of Pan and of Christ are both your head. Behind lies the sea. (Brett 1933: 275)

The painting reproduced as Plate 36, however, is not the one. ‘Alas, that the laughter and criticism of others made me cut the picture up in a rage!’ (Brett 1933: 275). Lawrence had condoled with her when the Brewsters ‘snubbed your Jesus’ (5L 390). But when Brett showed him the painting in her hotel room on Capri in March 1926 (Ellis 1998: 291): You look at it in astonishment; then you laugh and say quickly: ‘It’s a good idea, but it’s much too like me—much too like.’ ‘I know,’ I reply, ‘but I took the heads half from you and half from John the Baptist.’ ‘It’s too like me,’ you repeat abruptly. ‘You will have to change it.’ . . . ‘It is you,’ I say. ‘Perhaps,’ you answer grimly. (Brett 1933: 275) Brett adds ‘some day I will paint it again’. This day came thirty years later in 1963, when she named it after Lawrence’s 1927–8 novella ‘The Man Who Died’ (Hignett 1984: 208–9). In this the resurrected Christ forms a sexual relationship while ‘the alltolerant Pan watched’ (VG 151); by the time the painting was resurrected, apparently in near-identical form,1 Lawrence was also a man who had died, yet was, in more ethereal ways than The Man Who Died, living on. He had remained an important part of Brett’s life over the intervening decades, not least because she continued to live on his former ranch where she came to be visited by ‘A constant stream of scholars, writers and Ph.D. students’ with a ‘belief that the glory

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that had been reflected on Dorothy Brett would be transferred to them’ (Hignett 1984: 264; 9). Three years before she revived her painting, the British unbanning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover had stoked still more of the facile Lawrentian idolatry she professed to deplore (214). She clearly considered her own work of iconisation of 1926/63 to stand distinct. Yet her choices of icons were obvious ones. Numerous features of Lawrence suggested contemporary understandings of each or both gods, to her as to many, in Lawrence’s lifetime, the 1960s and since. Christ-like he preached an idiosyncratic vision of salvation both parabolically and explicitly, denounced hypocrisy and materialism, prioritised content over form and soul over intellect, liked children and communal living, prophesied destruction, was poor and physically weak, died in pain and believed in a kind of resurrection. Yet he was not humble, non-resistant, humourless or asexual. Panlike he could also be a satiric outsider, was deeply connected to nature, and believed in the importance of sex and in man as an animal. His physical and behavioural resemblances to Christ were remarked by numerous contemporaries: several accounts of Lawrence’s December 1923 dinner at the Café Royal liken it to a Last Supper, with Lawrence as Christ and John Middleton Murry as Judas (Nehls 1958: 295–304; Ellis 1998: 148). But he could also suggest Pan; Brett recalls watching him sleeping on Capri: ‘As I watch you . . . A leopard skin, a mass of flowers and leaves wrap themselves round you. Out of your thick hair, two small horns poke their sharp points; the slender cloven hoofs lie entangled in weeds’ (1933: 286). The two gods are mutually antagonistic, according to the ancient story that ‘At the beginning of the Christian era, voices were heard off the coasts of Greece, out to sea, on the Mediterranean, wailing: ‘“Pan is dead! Great Pan is dead!”’ (MM 155). Pan was therefore often identified with Satan, with whose conventional representation his own shares horns and hooves. The Christ–Pan opposition is rendered the more striking, however, by their similarities: bearded (‘the beard’ is a strong Lawrentian indicator in biofiction, as Lee M. Jenkins relates in her chapter on ‘Lawrence in Biofiction’), slender, déclassé outsiders who live close to nature and die young. Consequently, not only could Lawrence be represented as either Pan or Christ, but many of his aspects – for example as a preacher of sexual honesty or a bohemian rebel – could be aligned with either, or both. Brett’s Christ resembles none of those described in ‘Christs in the Tyrol’ (1913); he does not stare ‘stubbornly’ like a ‘Bavarian peasant’ (TI 43), nor is he in ‘bitter despair’ (44). He more resembles one of the ‘others’ which Lawrence speculated might also have existed on the cross: ‘one who looked at them and thought: “I might be among you . . . But I am not, I am here. And so——”.’ Lawrence closed his essay: ‘And I suppose we [presumably the English] have carved no Christs, afraid lest they should be too like men, too like ourselves’ (47). In Brett’s case, in painting Lawrence, she found herself painting gods. Pan’s gesture is ambiguously one of teasing and goodwill in offering physical joy (represented by the grape, in contrast to Mark’s myrrh [15.23], Matthew’s gall [27.34] and John’s vinegar [19.29]). In ‘The Man Who Died’ Christ as it were accepts Pan’s proffered grapes and so becomes him – a Roman overseer calls him ‘the goat’ (VG 162) – but in the painting each god has his own, separate validity; each has his own flowers.2 Although Christ is bound, and Pan is almost centred, Christ’s height is greater, the sun amplifies his halo, and his flowers give their whiteness to Pan’s horns and cover his quiescent phallus.

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Certainly the relationship is more balanced than in the painting which Lawrence started the year after seeing Brett’s. He described ‘Fauns and Nymphs’ (Colour Plate 4) as ‘a nice canvas of sun-nymphs laughing at the Crucifixion – but I had to paint out the Crucifixion’ (Sagar 2003: 47). Here the triumph of the Pan-like is so total as to obliterate the crucifixion even beyond the reach of its mockery. Like Nietzsche’s, Lawrence’s obsession with Christ was one as rival and corrector, and by Pan Lawrence understood what Christ had failed to value or understand. Nonetheless, if one considers Lawrence’s writings more broadly, a range of relationships between the Pan-like and Christ-like emerge. Some are uncomfortable, and resemble the combination which Lawrence attributes to the Murry avatar in his 1924 story ‘The Last Laugh’: ‘he seemed like a satanic young priest . . . A sort of faun on the Cross, with all the malice of the complication’ (WWRA 123). Others, however, evoke the separateness-with-connection, and difference-without-agonism, which Brett’s painting depicted – notably ‘The Overtone’, in which the young woman Elsa desires both Christ and Pan, because ‘I am a nymph and a woman, and Pan is for me, and Christ is for me . . . To Pan I am nymph, to Christ I am woman. And Pan is in the darkness, and Christ in the pale light’ (SM 16). This chapter will use these relations in Lawrence’s writing as a context in which to understand why and how he has so often been treated not only as an icon but as a deity. This is not to deny a Lawrentian quiddity irreducible to either god or to any relationship between them; a concentration on the Christ/Pan axis tends to obscure Lawrence’s political interests, for example. Nonetheless, it has often been remarked that Lawrence is contradictory, and has been deified. I suggest that Brett’s double portrait suggests a way of linking the two. It is first worth mentioning, however, the relationship between iconisation and deification. ‘Icon’ expanded its meaning from a visual depiction (especially of divinity) to ‘A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol’ or one ‘considered worthy of admiration or respect’ in the early 1950s (OED draft addition 2001). This was just in time for the take-off in Lawrence’s standing as an icon metonymic of successful working-class men (Baldick 2001: 263), and as a thinker ‘considered worthy of admiration or respect’ (as he was represented by F. R. Leavis [1955]). It is with the latter sense of ‘icon’, which refers to the signified rather than the signifier (‘icon’ tout court, rather than ‘icon of’) that this chapter is principally concerned. Even within his lifetime Lawrence became sufficiently famous as to be visually recognisable (generating, and thanks to, ‘icons’ in the pictorial sense). He himself strongly satirised the appetite for such stardom, notably in Clifford Chatterley’s worship of ‘success: the bitch-goddess!’ (LCL 50). He also criticised the deification of others, including Christ (‘I cannot believe in a church of Christ’; RDP 385) and authors (notably Dostoevsky). As we shall see, however, he himself did much to invite such a response. As early as 1932, his German advocate Wilhelm Emanuel Süskind wrote that ‘in Lawrence we have the unique case of a modern writer who, even outside his own language community and solely as a writer, had formed groups of devoted disciples’ (quoted in Jansohn and Mehl 2007: 2). The chapter will focus on the first four decades of his reception history, until the ‘groups of devoted disciples’ began to significantly dwindle. More recent developments, however, will be considered in the last section.

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Lawrence as Christ Brett’s own memoir of Lawrence is, in Keith Cushman’s words, ‘the most adoring’ of those produced in the 1930s (2010: 125). Its present-tense second-person address recalls a Protestant’s personal, conversational relationship with the risen Christ, while the memories recounted frequently present Lawrence in a Christ-like aspect. He enters the Café Royal ‘like a God, the Lord of us all, the light streaming down on your dark, gold hair’ (Brett 1933: 20). If her painted and pen portraits of Lawrence figure him as ‘D. H. Lawrence Superstar’, then her love for him, with its uncertain sexual element, anticipates the song of Mary Magdalene in the 1972 musical Jesus Christ Superstar: ‘I don’t know how to love him’. In Son of Woman, of two years before, Murry’s presentation of Lawrence as ‘the anti-type of the man who is from the beginning, and will be to the end, his veritable hero – Jesus Christ’ (1931: 14) relied on their similarities as much as their differences: ‘only Jesus can judge Lawrence, because he loved as Lawrence did’; ‘if he was crucified, as he surely was, it was for us that he was crucified’ (55). Indeed, his understanding of Christ seems to have been as much influenced by his knowledge of Lawrence as the reverse; according to his 1926 biography of Jesus: Man of Genius, ‘Jesus taught Life itself – not how to live – but Life’ (xiii); he valorised ‘something infinitely precious’, which ‘sometimes’ he called ‘Life itself’ (7). Catherine Carswell, in her prompt defence of Lawrence from this attack, cast Murry as Judas, and therefore, implicitly, Lawrence as Christ (1981: 48). Aldous Huxley called Son of Woman a ‘curious essay in destructive hagiography’, yet the noun as well as the adjective is apt (1937: 332). Murry presents Lawrence too as a ‘thing of wonder’ who gives ‘birth’ to ‘spirit and love’ ‘in men’ (1931: 389). He not only presents Lawrence, like Christ, as a man without humour, but treats him in an entirely serious spirit, and never mocks. In his 1937 essay on Lawrence, Huxley spliced Matthew Arnold’s 1873 definition of God (as ‘the enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness’ [1893: 43]) with Lawrence’s own vocabulary to say that, for Lawrence, ‘sex is something not ourselves that makes for – not righteousness . . . for life, for divineness, for union with the mystery’ (1937: 334). Leavis then recapitulated the phrase ‘that makes for’ in asserting that Lawrence ‘has an unfailingly sure sense of the difference between that which makes for life and that which makes against it’ (1955: 311). He also recycled the terms with which Murry had described both Christ and Lawrence: ‘a man with the clairvoyance and honesty of genius’ (110); a centre ‘of radiant potency – of life that irradiates people in whom the creativity is less powerful’ (1976: 152). With reason, Chris Baldick asserted that by the 1950s Leavis had ‘assumed the role of St Paul’ to Lawrence’s Christ (2001: 259). On the cusp of the next decade, during the British Lady Chatterley trial, several defence witnesses argued for the novel’s compatibility with Christian morality, of which some attributed this to Lawrence’s nonconformist background. Defence QC Gerald Gardiner said that ‘this book was a passionately sincere book of a moralist in the Puritan tradition’, and implied that, like Christ, Lawrence had suffered injustice at his death from which a subsequent religion (which a proper study of ‘what it [Lady Chatterley’s Lover] really is’ would permit) would rescue him (quoted in Hyde 1990: 279). The Bishop of Woolwich Dr John Robinson, one of four Anglican clergymen who appeared

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for the defence, averred that it was a book which ‘Christians ought to read’ since it depicted sex as ‘something sacred, in a real sense as an act of Holy Communion’ (128, 127). The soubriquet for Lawrence as an icon of the sexual revolution, ‘Priest of Love’, drew on Lawrence’s own Christian vocabulary in a self-description on Christmas Day 1912, even while the term ‘Love’ turned euphemistically in the direction of Pan (1L 493). The contrast between Lawrence’s posthumous deification and his previous vilification drew some satiric notice, as Jenkins notes in the context of her chapter on biofiction: ‘in England the murder of genius was only a precautionary measure taken to ensure a posthumous canonization’ (Winter 1936: 14). Yet Leavis drew an important line: ‘I view with the gravest distrust the prospect of Lawrence’s being adopted for expository appreciation as almost a Christian by writers whose religious complexion is congenial to Mr Eliot’ (1955: 311), recognising that ‘the insight, the wisdom . . . that Lawrence brings’ (15) diverged importantly from Christ’s own. The distance may be measured particularly clearly in those of Lawrence’s writings which treat the pagan god, Pan, which for Lawrence represented the necessary corrective to Christ – writings which in turn inspired alternative responses to Lawrence.

Lawrence as Pan ‘The Last Laugh’ (1924) gives its eponymous laugh to what is strongly implied to be Pan; this being kills the story’s Murry character but vivifies the story’s Brett avatar (well might she paint Pan positively two years later). The being’s conflict with Christianity is direct; his wind wrecks a Hampstead church, plays its organ like ‘Pan-pipes’ and sends its altar cloth flying into the trees with which Pan is so strongly associated (WWRA 131). This is Pan as Antichrist – a satiric, laughing, revitalising and potentially dangerous outsider. Several such aspects of Lawrence were valorised by critics whose thought had some overlap with fascism (Howard J. Booth in his chapter on ‘Politics and Art’ dismisses the idea that Lawrence can himself be described as fascist). In 1941 the German Karl Arns praised him as ‘a rebel against English prudishness, intellectualism, bourgeoisie, the machine, democracy and Christianity’ (quoted in Jansohn and Mehl 2007: 51). Some of the same qualities were also valued by the working-class men, entering universities for the first time in large numbers in the 1950s, who took Lawrence as an icon of proletarian masculinity. As Raymond Williams observed, ‘If there was one person everybody wanted to be after the war, to the point of caricature, it was Lawrence’ (1977: 126); the Lawrence beards which they affected were arguably closer in spirit to Pan’s than Christ’s (the former more pointed, therefore more both goat-like and Satanic). The latter had been a provincial carpenter’s son who had conquered the world, but the former had a capacity for mockery, and for violating goddesses, which suited the Angry Young Men’s particular form of anger. Colin Clarke’s 1969 River of Dissolution explored Lawrence’s inward understanding of degeneration as an explicit counter to Leavis’s interpretation: ‘The Satanic Lawrence, or the Lawrence who finds beauty in the phosphorescence of decay, will be sought in vain in the pages of D. H. Lawrence: Novelist’ (xiv). Lawrence’s embodiment of the Hampstead Pan’s laughing, puckish aspect in his brilliant acts of mimicry (described by John Worthen in his chapter on ‘Performance’) was acknowledged by several works of biofiction, but recognition of the laughter in Lawrence’s works themselves was slower to develop. In 1955 Leavis complained about

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the ‘absurd’ ‘view that he lacks a sense of humour’ (13). This view declined particularly after the publication of the complete text of Mr Noon in 1984, and the exploration of Lawrence and Comedy in a 2010 collection of essays (Eggert and Worthen). As recognition of Lawrence’s senses of humour has risen, so too has an apprehension of his resemblance to certain of his own conceptions of Pan, as explored by John Turner in that collection (70–88). Two different conceptions of Pan are expounded in Lawrence’s ‘Pan in America’ (1924), of which the thesis is that Pan did not actually die ‘At the beginning of the Christian era’, but became ‘old and grey-bearded and goat-legged, and his passion was degraded with the lust of senility’ until he became ‘Old Nick . . . who is responsible for all our wickednesses, but especially our sensual excesses’ (MM 156). The original ‘great god Pan’ is a greater being, however, and Lawrence found him to be most honoured and alive among ‘the Indians’ who are most in contact with the universe (164). St. Mawr draws out this distinction when Lou tells Dean Vyner that he looks like Pan: ‘But I’m afraid it’s not the face of the Great God Pan. Isn’t it rather the Great Goat Pan!’ (SM 64). ‘Pan’ comes from ‘pasturer’ but Lawrence, like many, associated it with ‘all’ (VG 279). Several early critics of Lawrence praised Lawrence’s sense of connection to the living universe, and of these a few named Pan. J. C. Squire, in his 1928 review of the Collected Poems, said that ‘Mr. Lawrence might almost have been possessed by Pan’ (301). Yet the ‘goat-legged old father of satyrs’ has been the form of Pan most invoked, implicitly or explicitly, by those who made the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover an icon of the sexual revolution (SM 64). Not only is Lady Chatterley’s Lover in many countries the one work by Lawrence which most people can name, in France ‘as elsewhere in the world, the general public is certainly more familiar with the name of Lady Chatterley than with its creator’s’ (Katz-Roy 2007: 107). After the publicity caused by the Italian (1947), American (1959) and UK (1960) Lady Chatterley trials there was a flurry of translations of the novel into European languages (Jansohn and Mehl 2007: xxxi–xxxiii). It was widely received as celebrating freedom regarding love and pornography, in a manner still further removed from that novel’s desiderata than is the facile, sensationalist ‘jazzing’ which is condemned in its representation of Venice (LCL 259). This response persisted despite the disappointment of some of those who approach the book in such a spirit, as Lawrence saw happening in his own lifetime (310). In 1965 Tom Lehrer asked in a song entitled ‘Smut’: ‘Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately? / I’ve got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley.’ Two years later Philip Larkin struck a similar note by announcing that ‘Sexual intercourse began’ only after ‘the end of the Chatterley ban’ (2003: 146). In perestroika and post-Soviet Russia, where new translations appeared in 1989 and 2000, the novel was (mis-)aligned with the strenuously – if inaccurately – Westernising pornification of society that pertained to that period (Jansohn and Mehl 2007: xxxviii, xli). More recently, ‘goat-legged’ humour generated The Mirror headline of 16 December 2005 concerning the new Ann Summers ‘Lady Chatterley’ lingerie range: ‘Who nicked Lady Chatterley’s Knickers?’. In more straightforward pornographic mode are the photo-illustrated, heavily abridged versions of the novel, such as that of Roger Baker (1990). The relationship between the Christ-like and the Pan-like, which often emerges in responses to Lawrence, is that the former relates to form whereas the latter relates to content. Huxley perceived that he ‘could never forget, as most of us almost continuously

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forget, the dark presence of otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of man’s conscious mind’, but in preaching this, Lawrence inevitably resembled Christ, since Christ but not Pan was a preacher (1937: 333). This is the theological manifestation of the crucial Lawrentian paradox of consciously extolling the virtues of unconsciousness. A similar tension exists in the shrine that Frieda and her third husband Antonio Ravagli built in 1935 for Lawrence’s ashes at Taos. Its form was more that of a chapel than a temple; Pan tended to be worshipped outdoors, and this supposedly contained the ‘shrine’ of Lawrence’s ashes; but the extent of the appropriateness of this resemblance, alongside the frisson of heterodoxy created by the substitution of Lawrence’s phoenix for the cross, fits with the tension between the two gods which existed in Lawrence’s life, and which the scattering of Lawrence’s ashes on the mountainside (Brett’s favoured option) would not have acknowledged (Hignett 1984: 225).

Icons Unlike Brett, Lawrence never clearly represented himself as Pan, but did give his face to Christ, as in his May 1927 painting Resurrection (Colour Plate 5). Created at the same time as Part 1 of ‘The Man Who Died’, this shows a Christ who, although his eyes are still dim with death, appears physically robust enough to satisfy a Priestess of Isis in due course. Indeed, wherever Lawrence’s face is to be found in his paintings it tops a body more puissant than his own. Lawrence’s painting therefore performs a similar critique of Christ as does his story (arguing that Christ over-sacrificed himself at the expense of his body, which increases in strength and potency over the course of the story). Brett’s 1925 Portrait of D. H. Lawrence with Halo (Colour Plate 33) also splices Lawrence with an unorthodox vision of Christ (as her double portrait of the following year, which displaces Lawrence’s critique of Christ onto Pan, does not). More than in Resurrection, the Lawrentian and the Christ-like exist in powerful dialogue with each other. The narrowed, slightly stylised eyes, as in an Orthodox icon, gaze with pain to the viewer’s right, indeterminately at the state of the world and at his own fate. His halo is formed by a moon in near-total eclipse; soon he will be left in darkness, save for the star that burns prominently over his left shoulder, perhaps suggesting rebirth through its allusion to the Nativity. He is dressed, as Ellis notes that Lawrence rarely was, as ‘the artist’, in a navy shirt and black smoking jacket (1992: 163). Brett is therefore conflating the godlike and the artistic, but conceiving of both in their toughest aspects. The similarity of the three-quarter profile, colour of hair and shape of beard to that of the Christ of the following year’s double-portrait with Pan emphasises the contrasts. Assertively clothed rather than semi-naked, composed rather than startled, potent rather than crucified, and in the present rather than the past, this Lawrence clearly matches Christ’s capacity for grief, but has a different set of solutions for the modern world. By contrast, several oft-reproduced photographs taken near the end of Lawrence’s life evoke more traditional images of Christ. Whenever he was photographed to a standard sufficiently high to invite reproduction, he tended to be alone and serious; in traditional iconography (from ancient Greece, and throughout the history of Christian art) often Pan, but rarely Christ, smiles. Publicity photographs did not demand smiling but did require a few seconds’ pause (in 1928 the society photographer Robert H. Davis demanded of him six), which cannot capture a sincere smile (Ellis 1992: 166). Catherine

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Carswell, who managed to ‘take a snapshot’ of a laughing Lawrence in Florence in 1921, said that ‘I am very glad to have the picture now. It is, I think, a misfortune that by far the most of the photographs and portraits of Lawrence show him as thoughtful – either fiercely or sufferingly so’ (1932: 167). In 1928 Robert H. Davis made a number of such photographic portraits at Pino Orioli’s bookshop in Florence. One was used on the dustjacket of Last Poems (1932) and Volume III of the Edward Nehls biography; it was photographs such as these that Geoff Dyer had in mind when he commented that ‘The closer he came to die’ (when ‘It was possible to discern in him the profile of his approaching death’), ‘the more he looked like D. H. Lawrence’ (1998: 37). But the studio photograph taken in June 1929 by Ernesto Guardia (Colour Plate 34) for the frontispiece of Pansies – also chosen by Aldous Huxley for his 1932 selection of Lawrence’s letters, and for the back of many Penguin paperbacks in the 1950s and ’60s – contains no hint of the crucifixion. The eyes are mild, loving and understanding, the lips are pressed gently in thought, and the white light which illumines his cheek and forehead is at one with his clerically-white collar. An almost equally famous photograph (Colour Plate 35) taken at the same sitting shows him gazing, far-seeing and straight before him, with a slight smile of joyful anticipation. He is lit both behind and in front and, for all the obtrusively quotidian nature of his jacket, shirt and tie, he could be gazing at heaven. As far as I am aware, only Brett’s double portrait represents Lawrence as literally goat-legged, and no portrait from his lifetime represents him as metaphorically so, ‘the Great Goat Pan!’ (SM 64). Perhaps the closest is a 1923 three-quarter profile in chalk by Edmond Xavier Kapp (Colour Plate 32) in which he looks indeterminately at and through the viewer; his mouth is curved in a bow, he keeps his own counsel, but he has the appearance of having many things up his sleeve. All is raffish curves: the curly fringe, archly raised brows, proletarian nose, bowed mouth, and beard which in its curliness and length is pointedly that of Pan not Christ. Here were have the strongest smile in a contemporary – perhaps any – non-photographic picture of Lawrence, underlining both the satiric and satyric sense which placed him on the side of Pan. A few photographs, however, more strongly conjure the ‘power to blast’ of Pan the revolutionary outsider (MM 156). One is the much-reproduced 1915 studio portrait of Lawrence in a hat looking over his left shoulder.3 The stance is that of a sceptical, slightly hostile assessor of what is going on, confident in his immaculate suit, faintly gangsterish trilby and strongly bearded chin. Half of his face is in shadow; he is not entirely knowable. He is reckoning up a fight that he has on his hands. This was selected by me for the 2017 14th International D. H. Lawrence Conference poster in order to invite consideration of Lawrence as a somewhat dangerous denizen of London (as is the Pan of ‘The Last Laugh’) rather than a Christ-like provincial shepherd. Similar considerations may have influenced the choice of same image for the cover of Tom Paulin’s 2017 Faber selection of Lawrence’s poems. Still more threatening are the studio photographs requested by Lawrence’s American publisher Thomas Seltzer in August 1923, in which Lawrence has crossed arms, sunken cheeks, lowered brows, and eyes that fling challenge at the camera. His conventional dress is as though worn in defiance and, as Brett imagined when they were on Capri, one can almost imagine horns emerging through the hair. There exists one portrait which presents him as Pan-like in the most sinister sense, an etching (of which there are several versions) by Frederick Carter made around

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1930.4 His beard is pressed on his chest, his eyes look malevolently and panoptically in two different directions, and his lips are compressed into a frown-cum-grin. This Lawrence is plotting serious mischief with great concentration. But the majority of unflattering portraits of Lawrence suggest no deity whatsoever. When these are used to illustrate unflattering commentaries on Lawrence, the fact that they are not the ‘iconic’ images gives the very choice an iconoclastic frisson. For example, Mabel Dodge Luhan chose a 1924 Mexico City studio portrait for the frontispiece of her relatively unadoring 1932 memoirs. His back is to the wall, he looks down and to the side apparently in fear, and he has nothing to offer. Murry reiterated his purported taking of Lawrence at his own word in Son of Woman by using Lawrence’s 1929 self-portrait as his frontispiece (which had also been used in the first edition of Pansies). Well might Lawrence have said of this picture ‘Alas, drawing my own face is unpleasant to me’ (Sagar 2003: 83). The face is concave with worry, there is a slight but crazed squint, and the mouth is part-open in consternation. The tie ridiculously suggests an extension of the beard, but also, with its heavy knot, suggests a noose worn prior to an execution. Several informal photographs, however, simply present Lawrence at peace with his circumambient universe, and therefore in touch with what Lawrence understands by ‘the Pan-mystery’ (MM 162). Brett’s memoir is illustrated by eight photographs taken in New Mexico, of which all show him outdoors, and three of which feature animals: a horse on whom he sits (96), a cat whom he holds (256) and a cow whom he milks (225). In the last of these his head is buried in the curve of Susan the cow’s right flank; his stance is of utter concentration as he doubtless feels ‘the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cow[s] beat into the pulse of [his] hands’ (R 10), and he seems as if he could be ‘still within the allness of Pan’ (MM 158).

Iconoclasm One consequence of Lawrence’s deification has been that many of the attacks on him have addressed deified versions of him. This is what I shall here call iconoclasm, since the denigration is not so much of the signified author as of the signifying icon (though in the denigrators’ minds the two are conflated). Such attacks tend to fall into two categories – those which accuse Lawrence of resembling Christ or Pan, and those which accuse him of failing to resemble them, thus respectively condemning him by negative association with, and critiquing his alleged pretensions in relation to, these gods. Lawrence was aware that he was ridiculed for his Christ-like aspects. In the year after he was painted as Christ in Brett’s double portrait, a photograph was taken of him wearing what appears to be a paper bishop’s mitre; his face expresses uncertain enjoyment at the joke.5 In Women in Love he converted a real incident of an acquaintance’s parodic recitation of his poems in the Café Royal into a recitation of (Lawrence avatar) Birkin’s letters. The parodist’s friends respond: ‘It almost supersedes the Bible –’; ‘He thinks he is the Saviour of man’ (WL 383–4). One can hear in the last the tone of the high priest: ‘he made himself the Son of God’ (John 19: 7). Certainly Lawrence was trying to supersede the Bible; he said that with The Rainbow he wanted to create a ‘kind of Bible for the English people’ (Worthen 1981: 21). But it is not clear that Women in Love’s mockers would mock any the less were his writing to supersede the Bible, which is presumably to them also an object of ridicule. To resemble Christ

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in his preaching may be for such critics as much a criticism of Christ for resembling Lawrence as the reverse. By contrast, when Prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones ridiculed the Bishop of Woolwich’s defence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s Puritanism – by quoting the passage in which Connie thinks ‘“Beauty! What beauty! . . . the strange weight of the balls between his legs!” . . . That again, I assume, you say is puritanical? . . . Answer: Indeed, yes’ (Hyde 1990: 324–5) – he was ridiculing the idea of Lawrence’s compatibility with Christianity, with no prejudice to the latter. (Murry, as we have noted, also found Lawrence wanting in comparison with Christ, but unlike Griffith-Jones took the comparison seriously [1931: 54, 351, 372]). Some people have been put off Lawrence by the religiosity of his followers, considering him to have been inappropriately deified. The novelist and editor Sigurd Hoel explained in 1930 why he would not publish Lawrence in the prestigious Yellow Series for Norwegian publisher Gyldendal as follows: it is difficult to evaluate his contribution without taking into account the congregation with which he surrounded himself . . . vying with each other to praise, celebrate, embrace and adorn the master, the Messiah of the new dispensation. If the mixed fragrance of erotic perfume and the sweat of angst which is exuded from this circle is meant to be the scent of a new spring, then anybody would hastily pray for other seasons. (quoted in Fjågesund 2007: 247) Wayne C. Booth, in his archly-titled ‘Confessions of a Lukewarm Lawrentian’, raises an eyebrow at Lawrentian idolatry even while he describes his rediscovery of its causes: ‘I find myself now returned from my un-Lawrentian prodigalities to confess my sins and to ask forgiveness’ (1990: 9). One also imagines that the laughter with which Brett acknowledges her double portrait was received was similarly directed at its idolatry (1933: 275). Just as some have condemned misguided worship of Lawrence as Christ-like, others have done the same for his worship as a lustful Pan. In 1957 Günter Blöcker wrote that ‘No author of the last fifty years has . . . found more false disciples than he’, but added in 1960 that ‘it is the logic of fame that ties the poet’s name to his most questionable product’ (quoted in Jansohn and Mehl 2007: 57–8). According to Alfred Andersch in 1968, for many German intellectuals Lawrence is no more than the author of a kitschy novel [Lady Chatterley’s Lover] . . . owing to that trivial judgment, Lawrence’s masterworks are at present not obtainable in German bookshops, and people laugh at you when you maintain that the author of Sons and Lovers is an author of absolute greatness. (59–60) Contrariwise, others have attacked Lawrence for failing to live up to Pan. Some have found in him under-acknowledged homosexual instincts, either because these entail a divergence from the full-blooded heterosexuality which they present him as valorising, or because he puritanically and conventionally denies the full range of his sexual experience, and therefore the amplitude of Pan in himself. Hugh Steven’s chapter on ‘Queer Aesthetics’ contains elements of both analyses.

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Such attacks contrast with those which condemn him for resembling Pan as, I have argued above, Frederick Carter’s 1930 sketch does. The John Bull reviewer of Lady Chatterley’s Lover did not intend the soubriquet ‘this bearded satyr’ as a compliment (1928: 279). Such reactions pertained more in England than other European countries, however. In inter-war Germany it was understood that Lawrence was ‘opposed in conventional England more than in Germany for his alleged obsession with sex’ (Jansohn and Mehl 2007: 40). Further east, the Pan-like Lawrence was criticised from a Stalinist rather than a Christian viewpoint. Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky, who slightly knew Lawrence from his time in London in the 1920s, criticised him in his 1934 Intelligentsia of Great Britain for seeing himself as ‘more primitive and so more healthy than the bourgeoisie’; ‘It is no better than the reverse of the medal, a decadent bourgeois attraction to animal coarseness’: It is one of the ‘heights’ of a very wide front of the literature of the upper intelligentsia produced by writers who have rejected society, lost faith in capitalist progress, and turned to the worship of what they consider to be the sempiternal phallic deity. (1935: 121–2) Back in capitalist England a quarter-century later, Griffith-Jones, in his opening speech at the Chatterley trial, told the jury that the prosecution will invite you to say that [the novel] does tend, certainly that it may tend, to induce lustful thoughts in the minds of those who read it . . . It commends, and indeed it sets out to commend, sensuality almost as a virtue. (Hyde 1990: 17) Mirsky’s and Griffith-Jones’s critiques were re-framed in feminist terms by Kate Millett in her 1970 Sexual Politics: ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a quasi-religious tract recounting the salvation of one modern woman . . . through the offices of the author’s personal cult, “the mystery of the phallus”’ (1971: 238). Like Huxley, but from a critical standpoint, she identifies in Lady Chatterley’s Lover Christ-like form but Pan-like content: a description of Mellors’s penis is ‘the novel’s very holy of holies – a transfiguration scene with atmospheric clouds and lighting, and a Pentecostal sunbeam’. She names ‘the god Pan, incarnated in Mellors’ (242), and like Murry criticises Lawrence for failing to resemble Christ; in Aaron’s Rod she identifies the ‘attack on Christianity’ with ‘a need to debunk any system with egalitarian potentialities, sexual or social’ (277).

Conclusion: Resurrection Yet Lawrence-as-deity has been more damaged by marginalisation than by explicit attack. The plunge in Lawrence’s stature and fame from the 1970s brings to mind the broken crucifix which he saw in the Alps in 1912, rhetorical arms swinging aimlessly in the wind, unheeded (TI 46–7). In part it has been the case that, as Margaret Drabble noted, ‘the mood of the 80s and 90s has been so hard-edged, so deterministdefeatist in some ways, so merciless in others and above all cynical – a world in which D. H. Lawrence does not fit’ (quoted Preston 2003: 30). That is, just as belief in the

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divinity of Christ has waned since Lawrence’s time (and interest in Pan has fallen from its Edwardian neo-pagan peak)6, belief in Lawrence’s quasi-divine aspect – and even interest in attacking it – has diminished in what in the West has been a less religious age. In parallel, and paradoxically, his divinity has been obscured by such acceptance as his ideas have achieved; several of the desiderata of Lady Chatterley’s Lover have been achieved, not least through the fact of its unbanning. During the 1985 centenary celebrations, Émile Delavenay said that ‘Even though the prophet, the guru, is already dated, the poet, the novelist, the short story writer, transcends the boundaries of his period’ (Katz-Roy 2007: 128). In doing so he was sending people back to the complexity of texts which disrupt any deification of Lawrence as Christ or Pan. In the same year the journal Études Lawrenciennes, and in the following year the annual and currently extant Lawrence conference at the University of Nanterre, were established in order to foster precisely such study. Michael Bell exemplifies a contemporary reverent but non-deifying approach in implying that Lawrence should be taken as an index in the American philosopher C. S. Peirce’s sense of the word. Peirce (1839–1914) made a distinction between an ‘index’, which points to a referent elsewhere (as signposts do), and an ‘icon’ (which share features with the represented other, as maps do) (Savan 1993: 442). In my Introduction I stated that this chapter was concerned mainly with Lawrence as a self-referential ‘icon’ tout court, rather than as an icon of anything. An alternative approach is to take him as an index, which encourages us to look elsewhere: Many are now educated confidently to look down on Lawrence as a thinker, and in a sense that is right. For no more than with Nietzsche would it be appropriate to look up to him in a spirit of discipleship. But any looking down should be a matter of questioning the ground on which one stands and the wholeness with which one thinks. (Bell 2007: 168) In his 1924 essay ‘On Being Religious’ Lawrence figured the ‘Holy Ghost’ as a barking hound on the track of the now-elusive God, and encouraged his readers to accept ‘God’s own good fun’ in following the hound on the scent (RDP 192–3). Lawrence in his writings pursues this chase. His readers can either take him as their Holy Ghost, or alternatively – as many now find easier – follow his example rather than his trajectory, and listen out for the barking of their own Holy Ghost in the wilderness. Yet although explicit, unembarrassed deification has now largely been abandoned, passionate appreciation and awe persist, sometimes under the protective guard of ostensible iconoclasm. Geoff Dyer is famed as an iconoclast of the deified Lawrence and of Leavis’s Lawrentian canon: ‘As for Women in Love, I read it in my teens and, as far as I am concerned, it can stay read . . . If we’re being utterly frank, I don’t want to re-read any novels by Lawrence’ (1997: 104–5). The 1998 front cover of Out of Sheer Rage (Colour Plate 37) parodically represents Lawrence as Pan (adding cartoonic Pan-horns to the 1929 Guardia photo, Colour Plate 34). In a spirit of iconoclasm it ostensibly performs its failure to be the intended ‘homage to the writer who had made me want to become a writer’ (2), collapsing instead into the witty autobiography of that failure. Yet the book’s original subtitle ‘In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence’ not only acknowledges the depression into which that failure apparently threw the author, but

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the greater stature of his subject, about whom striking aperçus erupt without warning throughout the narrative. Dyer does not go as far in his explicit defence of Lawrence as Tony Hoagland, who in his poem of the same year confesses: On two occasions in the past twelve months I have failed, when someone at a party Spoke of him with a dismissive scorn, To stand up for D. H. Lawrence. (1998: 31) Rather, his admiration emerges as though backwards, in response and resistance to decades of less complicated admiration. Yet the book’s ultimate centre is Lawrence’s ‘Bejahung’ (Dyer 1997: 112) – ‘saying yes’, or, as Aldous Huxley put it, ‘For Lawrence . . . it was as though he were newly re-born from a mortal illness every day of his life. What these convalescent eyes saw [a world unfathomably beautiful and mysterious] his most casual speech would reveal’ (1937: 350). Dyer ends his book: ‘The world over, from Taos to Taormina . . . the best we can do is to try to make some progress with our studies of D. H. Lawrence’ (1997: 232). Out of Sheer Rage has a visual counterpart in Hunt Emerson’s 2016 cartoon (with Kevin Jackson’s script) ‘D. H. Lawrence – Zombie Hunter’ (Colour Plate 38). Here Lawrence is stylised with a black, cutlass-sharp beard, eyes crazed with anger, protruding ears and a brawny, sabre-wielding arm. As the prefatory note puts it: Lawrence was the original Mr Angry – the Basil Fawlty of literary modernism. You name it, he was probably driven nuts by it . . . In this comic Lawrence’s ‘savage pilgrimage’ from nation to nation becomes a one-man war against the zombification of the human race. (n.p.) This shrewd caricature undermines deification of Lawrence even while endowing Lawrence with (cartoonic) superhuman powers. Like Dyer’s book, this cartoon story manages to convey much perception and admiration, and concludes by asking, in relation to his proto-environmentalism, ‘Perhaps it’s time to take him seriously again?’ (n.p.). Certainly, ecocriticism has of late begun to recognise in Lawrence a major figure, as was evident at the 2019 Paris Nanterre conference entitled ‘Lawrence and the Anticipation of the Ecocritical Turn’. In stressing Lawrence’s intimate connectedness with the living universe, his participation in what he would call the Pan mystery is implicitly, if not always explicitly, acknowledged. Dorothy Brett’s much-ridiculed painting of 1926, therefore, depicted an important dynamic not only of Lawrence’s thought but of his reception, as by 1963 she may have been able to perceive. As recently as 2009–13 Glyn Bailey’s Broadway-style Lawrence: The Musical in part rehearsed a banalised Pan in its comic concentration on ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover / I’ve read it from cover to cover’, and in part a Christ-like Lawrence, who affirms the closing song’s claim by the very fact of its performance: ‘I will rise like the Phoenix . . . I’ll never die again.’ As this chapter has hoped to show, understanding Lawrence as either Christ-like or Pan-like involves denying parts of him. His story ‘The Overtone’, more than any of his other works, indicates the necessity of acknowledging both:

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“Pan is in the darkness, and Christ in the pale light. “And night shall never be day, and day shall never be night. “But side by side they shall go, day and night, night and day, for ever apart, for ever together. “Pan and Christ, Christ and Pan . . .” (SM 16) Moreover, denying either in Lawrence can lead to misdirected deification, or irrelevant iconoclasm. Although deification is now relatively out of cultural and critical vogue, so too is the aggressively deconstructive high theory which Dyer’s book and Hoagland’s poem deplore (1997: 100; 1998: 31), while passionate and joyful admiration – if more of Lawrence as index than as icon – persists. The name of the international online Lawrentian discussion group ‘Rananim’ balances modest irony (it is far from what Lawrence had hoped for under the name) with the good faith that helping each other with our ‘studies of D. H. Lawrence’ is the closest we can come to his hopes. Many of his readers, who would resist any idea of deification, continue to feel, as Catherine Carswell did in 1932, that ‘His emblem, the phoenix, has not played him false. If it be true of any man it is true of him, what he said himself – “the dead don’t die. They look on and help”’ (292).

Acknowledgement With thanks to Sue Reid for her wise and generous guidance on this chapter, as on the whole process of editing this Companion.

Notes 1. Brett had saved the original faces, and the only discrepancy between the description of her 1926 version and its successor is that in the latter’s background there is nothing resembling ‘the tower of Quattro Venti’ (1933: 275). 2. Christ’s have yucca filamentosa leaves and giant lily-of-the-valley heads; Pan’s resemble chrysanthemums. None of these would be flowering when the mountains are snowcapped on the Amalfi coast, reinforcing the scene’s splicing together of different historical times (Lane-Fox 2019). 3. Elliott and Fry’s 1915 photograph of Lawrence may be seen at: . 4. One of Frederick Carter’s several c.1930 etchings of Lawrence may be seen at: . 5. The photograph of Lawrence in a paper bishop’s mitre was taken in 1927 at Millicent Beveridge’s Villa la Massa near Florence. 6. Consider, for example, ‘the Neo-Pagans’, the group surrounding Rupert Brooke in Cambridge before the First World War, or the fact that Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 The Wind in the Willows includes an encounter of its animal characters with Pan (Edwards 2017, section ‘The Golden Age in Edwardian Literature’).

Works Cited Arnold, Matthew (1893), Literature and Dogma, London: Smith, Elder, & Co. Baker, Roger, ed. (1990), D. H. Lawrence ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, n.p.: Loveline Publishing Limited.

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Baldick, Chris (2001), ‘Post-mortem: Lawrence’s Critical and Cultural legacy’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 253–70. Bell, Michael (2007), Open Secrets: Literature, Education and Authority from J-J. Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Booth, Wayne C. (1990), ‘Confessions of a Lukewarm Lawrentian’, in The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Michael Squires and Keith Cushman, Madison, WI and London: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 3–8. Brett, Dorothy (1933), Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship, London: Martin Secker. Carswell, Catherine (1981), The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, Colin (1969), River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence and English Romanticism, London: Routledge. Cushman, Keith (2010), ‘Indians, an Englishman, and an Englishwoman: Lawrence’s and Dorothy Brett’s Representations of Indian Ceremonial Dancing’, in ‘Terra Incognita’: D. H. Lawrence at the Frontiers, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde and Earl G. Ingersoll, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 112–30. Dyer, Geoff (1998), Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence, London: Abacus. Edwards, Sarah (2017), ‘Chapter 1: Dawn of the New Age: Edwardian and Neo-Edwardian Summer’, in Edwardian Culture: Beyond the Garden Party, ed. Samuel Shaw, Sarah Shaw and Naomi Carle, London: Routledge. Ebook. Eggert, Paul and John Worthen, eds (2010), Lawrence and Comedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis, David (1992), ‘Images of D. H. Lawrence: On the Use of Photographs in Biography’, in The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke, London: Reaktion, pp. 155–72. Ellis, David (1998), D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Emerson, Hunt and Kevin Jackson (2016), ‘D. H. Lawrence: Zombie Hunter’, in Dawn of the Unread, Nottingham: UNESCO City of Literature and Spokesman. Fjågesund, Peter (2007), ‘In Hamsun’s Shadow: The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Norway’, in The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Europe, ed. Christa Janssohn and Dieter Mehl, London: Continuum, pp. 244–54. Hoagland, Tony (1998), ‘Lawrence’, in Donkey Gospel, Minneapolis: Graywolf, p. 31. Huxley, Aldous (1937), ‘D. H. Lawrence’, in Stories, Essays & Poems, by Aldous Huxley, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, pp. 331–52. Hyde, H. Montgomery, ed. (1990), The Lady Chatterley’s Lover Trial, London: Bodley Head. Janssohn, Christa and Dieter Mehl, eds (2007), The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Europe, London: Continuum. John Bull (1928), Review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. P. Draper, London: Routledge, 1970, pp. 278–80. Katz-Roy, Ginette (2007), ‘D. H. Lawrence in France: A Literary Giant with Feet of Clay’, in The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Europe, ed. Christa Janssohn and Dieter Mehl, London: Continuum, pp. 107–37. Lane-Fox, Robin (2019), Emails to the author, 4–5 August. Larkin, Philip (2003), Collected Poems, London, Faber & Faber. Leavis, F. R. (1976), Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence, London: Chatto & Windus. Leavis, F. R. (1985), D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, London: Peregrine. Luhan, Mabel Dodge (1932), Lorenzo in Taos, London: Martin Secker, 1933. Millett, Kate (1971), Sexual Politics, London: Virago.

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Mirsky, D. S. (1935), The Intelligentsia of Great Britain, trans. Alec Brown, London: Victor Gollancz. Murry, John Middleton (1926), Jesus: Man of Genius, New York and London: Harper. Murry, John Middleton (1931), Son of Woman, London: Jonathan Cape. Nehls, Edward (1958), D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Volume 2, 1919–1925, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Preston, Peter (2003), ‘“I Am in a Novel”: Lawrence in Recent British Fiction’, in D. H. Lawrence: New Worlds, ed. Keith Cushman and Earl G. Ingersoll, London: Associated University Press, pp. 25–49. Sagar, Keith (2003), D. H. Lawrence’s Paintings, London: Chaucer Press. Savan, David (1883), ‘Peirce, C(harles) S(anders)’, in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irena R. Makaryk, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993, pp. 441–2. Squire, J. C. (1928), Review of D. H. Lawrence Collected Poems, in D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. P. Draper, London: Routledge, 1970, pp. 299–302. Williams, Raymond (1979), ‘The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence’, in Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London: NLB, pp. 243–70. Winter, Keith (1936), Impassioned Pygmies, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company. Worthen, John, ed. (1981), The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Notes on Contributors

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. His books include D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (1992), Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (1997) and Open Secrets: Literature, Education and Authority from J-J. Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee (2007). Shirley Bricout is affiliated to the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, EMMA (France). She is the author of Politics and the Bible in D. H. Lawrence’s Leadership Novels (2015) and of the dictionary entry on Lawrence in La Bible dans les littératures du monde (2016). A regular contributor to academic journals, she has also guestedited a special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English devoted to Lawrence. Howard J. Booth is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. He is the co-editor of Modernism and Empire (2000), the editor of New D. H. Lawrence (2009) and The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling (2011), and the author of over twenty articles and book chapters on D. H. Lawrence. He is the General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Fiction of E. M. Forster, for which he is editing Maurice. Catherine Brown is Head of English and Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the New College of the Humanities, London, and a vice-president of the D. H. Lawrence Society of Great Britain. She is the author of The Art of Comparison: How Novels and Critics Compare (2011) and of articles on Lawrence, George Eliot, Henry James and Tolstoy, and is the co-editor of The Reception of George Eliot in Europe (2015). Peter Childs is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newman University, Birmingham, UK. He has edited or written over twenty books on subjects ranging from contemporary British culture to post-colonial theory, including Modernism: The

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New Critical Idiom (2000), Modernism and the Post-Colonial (2007) and Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels (2013). Jane Costin, an independent scholar based in the UK, is the Reviews Editor of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, for which she also guest-edited a special number on ‘Lawrence and Cornwall’ in 2017 and a general issue in 2018. Her recent publications include book chapters on Lawrence and articles in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies and Études Lawrenciennes (both accessible as online journals). Keith Cushman is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has published more than forty essays and seven books about Lawrence, including D. H. Lawrence at Work: The Emergence of the ‘Prussian Officer’ Stories (1978) and an edition of the Memoir of Maurice Magnus (1987). He is a recipient of the Harry T. Moore Award for Lifetime Contributions to D. H. Lawrence Studies. Sarah Edwards is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. Her publications include Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture, Modernity (2011, with Jonathan Charley), Nostalgia in the Twenty-First Century (special issue of Consumption, Markets and Culture, 2014, with Kathy Hamilton et al.), and recent essays in Women’s History Review, Women’s Writing and The Routledge Research Companion on Architecture, Literature and the City (2018). She is commencing a Leverhulme project on libraries as transformative spaces. Paul Eggert is Professor Emeritus at Loyola University Chicago and the University of New South Wales, and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He edited The Boy in the Bush (1990) and Twilight in Italy (1994) in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence and, with John Worthen, co-edited the collection Lawrence and Comedy (1996). His latest book is The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History (2019). Louis K. Greiff is Professor Emeritus of English at Alfred University, New York. He is the author of D. H. Lawrence: Fifty Years on Film (2001). His writing also appears in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers’: A Casebook (2005), The Norton Critical Edition of ‘Heart of Darkness’ (2006) and D. H. Lawrence in Context (2018). Andrew Harrison is Associate Professor of English Literature and Director of the D. H. Lawrence Research Centre at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on Lawrence. He is the author of The Life of D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Biography (2016) and editor of D. H. Lawrence in Context (2018). Lee M. Jenkins is Professor of English at University College Cork. An associate editor of the D. H. Lawrence Review, she is the author of The American Lawrence (2015),

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The Language of Caribbean Poetry (2004) and Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order (1999). She is the editor, with Alex Davis, of three Cambridge University Press collections, most recently A History of Modernist Poetry (2015). Bethan Jones is a Senior Lecturer in modern and contemporary literature at the University of Hull, UK. Her monograph The Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence: Shaping a Late Style (2010) received a biennial prize from the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America. For the Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence, she co-edited The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories (2006) and assisted Christopher Pollnitz with The Poems (2013). Susan Jones is Professor of English Literature and Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Her publications include Conrad and Women (1999) and Literature, Modernism, and Dance (2013), and she is currently completing a book on Samuel Beckett and choreography. Holly A. Laird is Frances W. O’Hornett Professor of Literature at the University of Tulsa and current co-editor of Contemporary Women’s Writing. She is the author of Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence (1988) and Women Coauthors (2000). A regular contributor to Lawrence publications, she is also guest editor of poetry numbers of the D. H. Lawrence Review (40:2, 2015) and the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (5:3, 2020). Jonathan Long is a solicitor practising in Suffolk, specialising in agricultural law. A Lawrence enthusiast for over forty years, he has published articles in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, D. H. Lawrence Review and Études Lawrenciennes. Stefania Michelucci is Professor of English Studies at the University of Genoa, Italy. Her publications include Space and Place in the Works of D. H. Lawrence (2002), The Poetry of Thom Gunn: A Critical Study (2009) and, with Ian Duncan and Luisa Villa, The British Aristocracy in Popular Culture (2020). She has also translated many works, including the new bilingual edition of D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox. Gemma Moss is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City University. Her monograph, Music and Literary Modernism: James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Townsend Warner, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. She is the editor of Where Angels Fear to Tread for The Cambridge Edition of the Fiction of E. M. Forster, forthcoming in 2024. Julianne Newmark teaches at the University of New Mexico and has been an Officer of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America since 2005. She has written many articles and book chapters focusing on D. H. Lawrence’s New Mexico and Mexico writings. Her book, The Pluralist Imagination from East to West in American Literature (2015), features a chapter on Lawrence and Willa Cather.

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Susan Reid is the Editor of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies. Her published work includes her monograph D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism (2019) and, as coeditor, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011) and Katherine Mansfield Studies (2010–12). In 2014 she received a biennial prize from the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America for her first article on Lawrence and music. Judith Ruderman, currently visiting scholar of English at Duke University, retired as vice provost and adjunct professor. She has published five books of literary criticism, including D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother: The Search for a Patriarchal Ideal of Leadership (1984) and Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews (2014). A long-time member of the editorial board of the D. H. Lawrence Review, Ruderman was the first female president of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America. In 2017 she received the Harry T. Moore Award for Lifetime Contributions to D. H. Lawrence Studies. Vincent Sherry is the Howard Nemerov Professor in the Humanities and Professor and Chair in the Department of English at Washington University in St Louis. His books include Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993), Joyce’s ULYSSES (1995), The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003) and Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (2015). He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (2005) and the Cambridge History of Modernism (2017). He is currently writing A Literary History of The European War of 1914–1918. Hugh Stevens is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London. His publications include Henry James and Sexuality (1998), Modernist Sexualities (2000) and The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing (2011). Jeremy Tambling, formerly Professor of Literature at Manchester, and Professor of Comparative Literature, Hong Kong, now teaches at SWPS University, Warsaw, and writes on literature and critical theory. He is currently editing The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis. David Trotter is an emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy and co-editor of the Open Humanities Press book series ‘Technographies’. He has written widely about nineteenth- and twentiethcentury literature and culture, and about aspects of cinema. Lawrence is discussed in two recent books: Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (2013) and The Literature of Connection: Signal, Medium, Interface, 1850–1950 (2020). Jeff Wallace is Professor Emeritus in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University. He is the author of D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (2005) and Beginning Modernism (2011). His most recent work includes essays on technologies of the self in Lawrence, and on ‘the death of interest’ in Lawrence and Geoff Dyer.

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John Worthen was once an academic but is now a biographer. He was responsible for D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912 (1991) and, more recently, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (2005) and Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician (2007). He also wrote a group biography, The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & the Wordsworths in 1802 (2001); William Wordsworth: A Critical Biography (2014) and Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography (2019); a speculative narrative, Shelley Drowns (2019); and Young Frieda (2019), a double-fiction of first-person memoirs by Ernest Weekley and Frieda Lawrence.

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Index

Note: Titles of works by D. H. Lawrence are as given in the Cambridge Edition of the Works Abbs, Annabel, 395 Abensour, Miguel, 136, 142 Adorno, Theodor W., 7, 25, 141–2, 147–50, 154–5, 258–60, 262–3, 286 Aestheticism, 20, 204, 208 Africa, 57–9, 61, 67, 106 African arts, 57–8, 67, 74, 339, 349, 375, 386, 407 Aga Khan, 318–19 Aiken, Conrad, 204 Aldington, Richard, 59, 78, 113, 235, 237, 239, 241, 324, 350, 388–90, 392, 395 Death of a Hero, 389 Allied Artists Exhibition, 343, 345, 349 Almereyda, Michael, 413–14, 423 Alps, 4, 30, 49–50, 58, 214, 224, 268, 279, 282, 352n, 436 America (USA), 11–12, 14, 17, 40, 52–4, 56, 58, 61, 68, 71–2, 150, 227, 253, 274, 285, 315, 321–2, 325, 378, 413, 418–19 Andersch, Alfred, 435 Anderson, Perry, 135–6, 142 animism, 62, 72, 93, 253 Anthropocene, 162 Architectural Review, The, 355, 365, 367 Ardis, Ann, 150, 264 Arnold, Armin, 81 Arnold, Matthew, 90, 429, 391 Arns, Karl, 430 Artaud, Antonin, 246 Arts and Crafts movement, 345

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 447

Asquith, Cynthia, 234, 239, 324, 372 Attard, Armand, 413 Ausdruckstanz, 277–82 Austen, Jane, 15, 262 Australia, 46, 56, 59, 80, 200, 226–8, 407, 411 Babbitt, Irving, 23, 26, 30 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 257, 259 Bachlund, Gary, 399, 401–3, 411 Bailey, Glyn Lawrence: The Musical, 411, 438 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 86, 264 Bakst, Léon, 29, 283 Ballets Russes, 3, 24, 28–9, 266, 269, 274, 282–6 L’Après-midi d’un faune 283–5, 287n; see also Debussy Parade, 284 The Rite of Spring 163, 269, 285–6; see also Stravinsky Balzac, Honoré de, 12, 233 Barcelona, 316 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 110, 409 Bastien-Lepage, Jules Pauvre Fauvette, 294, 307–8 Bataille, Georges, 250 Baudelaire, Charles, 28, 48–50, 211 Bavaria, 54, 216, 407, 427 BBC (British Broadcasting Company), 169, 411n, 414 Beardsall, George, 90 Beardsley, Aubrey, 28, 49

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448

index

Beaumont, Cyril, 183, 324 Beauvoir, Simone de, 135 Beerbohm, Max, 262 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 25, 213, 257, 259 Bell, Clive, 3, 21, 315, 345, 347, 349 Art, 315, 347 Bell, Kenneth, 106 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 132, 141 Benn, Ernest, 334 Bennett, Arnold, 202, 355 Benthamism, 161 Bernhardt, Sarah, 232, 246 Beveridge, Millicent, 320, 439n Bible Biblical parallelism, 92–3, 97, 205 Books of 2 Chronicles, 92 Exodus, 94–5, 123 Ezekiel, 98, 101n Genesis, 93–5 Isaiah, 92 Job, 81, 92, 93, 94 John, 90, 427 Luke, 417 Mark, 427 Matthew, 96–8, 427 Psalms, 91–3, 98, 269 Revelation, 6, 91, 93, 98–100, 101n Ruth, 28, 96, 282 1 Samuel, 92–3 King James Authorized Version, 90–4, 101n, 252 American Standard Version, 93 Revised Version, 93, 214 New Testament, 95, 310 Old Testament, 91–6, 252, 282, 308 Tyndale, 94 Vulgate, 94 Biblical figures Adam and Eve, 91, 95, 237, 318, 340, 342 David, 93, 96, 252, 271, 279, 284; see also D. H. Lawrence / Plays / David Jesus, 91, 96–7, 101, 114, 216, 224, 268, 302, 309–10, 388, 426–39 John the Baptist, 417, 426 Jonathan, 252–3, 271 Joseph, 309 Judas, 427, 429 Judith and Holofernes, 236, 282–3 Lilith, 95 Mary Magdalene, 429

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 448

Mary mother of Jesus, 208, 255, 308–9, 372 Moses, 123, 236 Naomi, 30, 96, 282 Noah, 93, 94, 244 Orpah, 282 Paul, 429 Pharaoh, 236 Ruth, 28, 96, 282 Samuel, 93, 271 Satan, 427 Saul, 93, 252–3, 269, 271 Bildungsroman, 43, 45, 109, 196 Birkin, Joseph, 137, 139 Bizet, Georges Carmen, 263 Blackmore, R. D., 107, 247–8, 253 Black Sun Press, 188, 320, 335 Blake, William, 36, 161, 208, 386–7 Blast, 343, 346, 348–9 Blatchford, Robert, 91, 136, 210 Blavatsky, Helena, 91 Bloch, Ernst, 141–2 Blöcker, Günter, 435 blood consciousness, 34, 58, 130–1, 281, 287 Bloomsbury Group, 21, 79, 282, 315–16, 355, 375, 386, 388 Boccioni, Umberto, 346 Bomberg, David, 352n Boot, Jesse, 360 Booth, Wayne C., 435 Borg, Michael, 112 Botticelli, Sandro, 291, 308–10 Mystic Nativity, 291, 308 Bottomley, Horatio, 131 Boyle, Kay, 390, 396n Brahms, Johannes, 213, 257–8 Brancusi, Constantin, 341 Brecht, Bertolt, 32–3, 141, 256 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 32, 141 Brett, Dorothy, 3, 227, 233, 238–9, 241, 299, 302, 306, 316, 331–3, 426–30, 432–5, 438–9, 439n Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ, 302, 426–8 Portrait of D. H. Lawrence with Halo, 299, 432 Brewster, Achsah and Earl, 233, 235, 238, 426 British Communist Party, 135 Britten, Benjamin, 398, 403, 411

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index Brontë, Emily, 408 Brooke, Rupert, 213, 234, 439n Browning, Robert, 208, 362, 409 Bunin, Ivan, 79, 87n Bunyan, John, 139 Burgess, Anthony, 266, 272, 407 Burns, Robert, 110, 113–14, 208 Burrow, Trigant, 152, 154 Burrows, Louie, 77–8, 192, 258, 306, 352n Bury, J. B., 103–4, 107, 109 Busch, Wilhelm Plish und Plum, 320 Butler, Judith, 122–5 Byatt, A. S., 393 Bynner, Witter, 32, 130, 380 Byron, George Gordon, 80, 385 Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges, 152 Caesar, Julius, 106–7 Café Royal, 342, 348–9, 427, 429, 434 Calabritto, Bob The Rocking Horse Winner, 413, 414, 417–18, 420, 423 Campbell, Beatrice, 377 Campbell, John, 91 Cannan, Gilbert, 114, 342, 385–8, 392, 395, 396n Mendel: A Story of Youth, 114, 385–6, 388 Cannan, Mary, 112, 396n Canova, Antonio The Three Graces, 29 Cantamus Girls Choir, 401, 407, 411n capitalism, 132, 134, 139, 147, 160–1, 249, 354, 368, 436 Capri, 235, 238, 394, 426–7, 433 Carlyle, Thomas, 135, 161–2 Carswell, Catherine, 112, 113, 214, 233, 258, 268, 392, 429, 433, 439 Carter, Angela, 374–6 Carter, Frederick, 99, 239, 433, 436, 439n Casson, Stanley, 338, 339 Caudwell, Christopher, 132 Cecchetti, Giovanni, 81 Cellini, Benvenuto, 380 censorship, 119, 146, 153–4, 156–7, 375 Centaur Press, 334 Cervi, Orazio, 394 Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 56, 80–1, 241 Cézanne, Paul, 3–4, 57, 86, 195, 200, 293, 312–13, 315–16, 319 Still Life with Fruit Dish, 293

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 449

449

Chambers, David, 236, 257 Chambers, E. K., 246 Chambers, Jessie, 22, 79, 107, 232, 234, 236, 240, 245, 246, 257, 305–7 Chambers, May, 234, 305 Chatterton, Anna, 411 Chatto & Windus (publisher), 322–3 Chekhov, Anton, 202, 245 Chéruit, Louise, 381 China, 53, 61, 380, 411 Chopin, Frédéric, 257–8 Christianity, 6, 34, 54, 59, 62, 79, 85–6, 91, 93, 96–7, 99–101, 136, 226, 246, 249, 253, 255, 308, 309–10, 312, 331, 379, 388, 391, 429–32, 435–6; see also Bible and hymns cinema, 2, 146–51, 155, 247, 263, 356, 414, 416, 423–4 Clarke, Colin, 40, 51, 430 Clayton, Douglas, 222 Cocteau, Jean, 284, 287 Coleridge, Mary, 409 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 166–7 Collier, John, 233 colonialism, 52, 73, 74, 166, 228, 363 Collings, Ernest, 192, 197, 322, 349, 373 Collins, Vere, 104 comedy, 15, 49, 108, 232–5, 244–5, 252, 267, 386, 399, 408, 431, 438 Communism, 131–2, 134–5 Congregationalism, 90, 91, 97, 205, 213 Conrad, Joseph, 227, 323 Heart of Darkness, 364 Cooke, Arnold Nocturnes. A cycle of five songs for soprano, horn, and piano, 398, 409–10 Cooke, Phillip, 410 Cooper, James Fenimore, 107, 127 Cooper, Scott, 52 Cooper, Thomas, 258 Corelli, Arcangelo, 260 Corke, Helen, 215, 372, 388, 394, 396n Neutral Ground, 390 Cornford, F. M., 246 Cornwall, 237, 240, 380, 388, 394 Correggio, Antonio da, 308–9 Cournos, John Miranda Masters, 388–9 Covent Garden Opera, 259 Cowan, Jason, 424n Craig, Edward Gordon, 280, 287

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450

index

Crane, Hart, 409 Crawford, Grace, 257–8 Cresset Press, 329, 335 Crichton, Kyle, 234 Crookes, William, 167, 171 Crosby, Caresse, 335 Crosby, Harry, 101, 210, 316, 335 Croydon, 104, 163–4, 306–8, 356, 390 Crystal Palace, 356–7 Cubism, 313 cummings, e. e., 409 Cunninghame Graham, R. B., 77, 142n Currie, John, 385, 386 Cusk, Rachel, 36–7 Dalcroze, Émile Jaques-, 241, 277–8; see also Eurhythmics Daly, Macdonald, 138, 201, 203 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 28, 80, 86, 131, 245 Dante Alighieri, 43, 49, 208 Darwinism, 44, 61 Davidson, John, 409, 411 Davies, Lewis, 396n Davies, Rhys, 236 Davis, Robert H., 432–3 Dax, Alice, 95, 372 Debussy, Claude, 257; see also Ballets Russes Decadence, 4, 28–9, 39–41, 43–5, 47–51, 57, 436 Degeneration, 4, 44–5, 50–1, 79, 108, 430 Delavenay, Émile, 137, 437 Deledda, Grazia, 77, 86 Deleuze, Gilles, 131, 316, 319 Dent, Edward, 118 Deutscher Werkbund, 343, 345–6 Diaghilev, Sergei, 28, 282, 286; see also Ballets Russes Dickens, Charles, 245 Dickinson, Emily, 409 Diderot, Denis, 119 direct carving, 339–41, 344 Döblin, Alfred, 47 Dos Passos, John, 132, 150 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 14–15, 199, 252, 428 Crime and Punishment, 195 Douglas, Alfred, 209 Douglas, Norman, 112–13, 395 Downes, Andrew, 399, 401–2, 408, 411 Dowson, Ernest, 208 D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, 246 Drabble, Margaret, 436 Dracula (legend), 50

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 450

Duckworth, Gerald (publisher), 321–3 Dumas, Alexandre (fils) La Dame aux Camélias 232, 246 Duncan, Isadora, 274, 278 Duncan, Robert, 17 Dunmore, Helen Zennor in Darkness, 393–4, 396n Dürer, Albrecht, 308 Dyer, Geoff, 133, 433 Out of Sheer Rage, 303, 437–9 Eagleton, Terry, 8, 131–4 Eastwood, 1, 7, 97, 137–9, 244, 258, 306–8, 320, 365 Eco, Umberto, 86, 132, 136 ecology, 8, 131–2, 162 Egoist, The, 215, 349 Egypt, 53, 59 electricity, 163–70 El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos), 312 Eliot, George, 16 Eliot, T. S., 3, 12, 13, 15, 20, 22n, 26, 76, 79, 90, 110, 161, 258, 284, 409, 430 Sweeney Agonistes, 262 The Waste Land, 76, 246 Elwell, Herbert, 399, 402 Emerson, Hunt and Kevin Jackson ‘D. H. Lawrence – Zombie Hunter’, 304, 438 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 67, 304, 438 Englishness, 54–5, 66, 68, 258, 366 English Review, The, 66, 192, 213, 225, 264, 356 Enlightenment, 14, 42, 61, 96, 147, 310, 312 Epstein, Jacob, 3, 338–43, 345–9, 352n Doves, 348, 352n ethnography, 71, 285 Etruscans, 59, 62, 86, 314, 364, 366; see also D. H. Lawrence / Non-fiction / Sketches of Etruscan Places eugenics, 61, 131, 142n Eurhythmics, 277–8 Expressionism, 3, 23–4, 277–80, 340, 354, 359 Fabianism, 134, 365 Fanon, Frantz, 135 Fantin-Latour, Henri, 312 Farr, Florence, 234–5 fascism, 131–3, 142, 430 Fauvism, 324 Fellaheen, 78

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index femininity, 63, 120, 122, 124, 262, 380 feminism, 95, 132, 280, 395, 436 Ferran, Pascale Lady Chatterley et l’homme des bois, 413–4, 420–2 Fielding, Henry, 16 First World War, 3, 7, 13, 23, 24, 28, 40, 45–7, 49–51, 54, 56, 66, 78–9, 82, 108, 109, 131, 135, 137–8, 145–6, 154, 163, 166, 210–11, 224–5, 232, 239, 242, 265, 311, 323, 348, 350, 364, 366–7, 381–2, 388–9, 393 Fitzgerald, Penelope, 232, 234 Flaubert, Gustave, 4, 12, 14, 191–2, 198, 202, 213 Madame Bovary, 14, 198 Florence, 59, 112, 140, 240, 305, 334, 365, 433, 439n Villa Mirenda, 233, 305 folk dances, 66–7 folklore, 79, 124, 246 folk music, 66, 240, 257, 266 Ford, Ford Madox see Hueffer, Ford Madox Forman, Joanne, 410 Forster, E. M., 118, 257, 413 Howards End, 307 Maurice, 117–18 A Room with a View, 63n, 262 Where Angels Fear to Tread, 63n Fortnightly Review, The, 167 Foucault, Michel, 117, 128, 220 Frankfurt School, 7, 141, 147, 155, 157; see also Adorno, T. W. Frazer, James George, 62, 96, 246 The Golden Bough, 91 Freikörperkultur, 279; see also Körperkultur / Nacktkultur Freud, Siegmund, 14, 123, 154, 213, 251, 256, 275 Fry, Roger, 3, 314–16, 319, 345 Cézanne: A Study of His Development, 315 Fuller, Loïe, 263, 274 Furio, Fabio, 411 Futurism, 24, 163, 171, 193, 345–6, 354 Galsworthy, John, 198–9, 202–3, 245 Gardiner, Gerald, 429 Gardiner, Rolf, 63, 130, 241, 360 Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, 105 Gargnano, 68, 71, 345, 405

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 451

451

Garnett, David, 207, 217, 234, 236, 239, 282–3 Garnett, Edward, 81, 108–9, 119, 192–3, 196, 198, 202–3, 250, 283, 322 Garnett, Richard, 25, 339 Garsington Manor, 48, 310, 388; see also Morrell, Ottoline Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 3, 110, 338, 340, 347–8 Birds Erect, 347–8 Gauguin, Paul, 57 Gefors, Hans, 399, 401 General Strike (1926), 137–8 Georgian Poetry, 206, 210, 213 Gerhardt, Paul, 213 Germany, 6, 7, 25, 31, 47, 50, 55, 103, 106, 107, 131, 160, 167, 211–12, 242, 257, 266–7, 278, 281, 345–6, 350, 358, 436 German language, 78–9, 236, 266 Gershwin, George, 406 Gertler, Mark, 3, 114, 296–7, 310–11, 314, 316, 340, 342–4, 346, 349, 352n, 385–6, 396n Acrobats, 343–4, 352n The Creation of Eve, 296, 340, 342, 352n Merry-Go-Round, 297, 310, 340, 343, 343–4, 386 Ghiselin, Brewster, 318, 334 Gilbert, Alfred, 338 Gilkin, Iwan, 211 Gill, Eric, 3, 245, 338, 340–1, 345 Gillespie, Yetza, 409 Giotto di Bondone, 312 Gissing, George, 80 Glanville-Hicks, Peggy, 411 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 278 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 80, 357 Gordon, Jan, 316 Gorky, Maxim, 79, 87n Gothic architecture, 354, 358–63, 368 ‘mock-Gothic’, 359, 361, 363 Gøtzsche, Kai, 328, 331 Graeser, Wolfgang, 280–2, 287 Grahame, Kenneth, 439n gramophone, 161, 257, 258 Gramophone (magazine), 257 Grant, Duncan, 313 Granville-Barker, Harley, 245, 396n Gray, Cecil, 237, 258 Gray, Simon, 247, 256 Grazzini, A. F., 78

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452 Greece, ancient Biblical texts, 95, 97–8 drama, 29, 415 Euripides, 246 Sophocles, 246, 248 Antigone, 248 Oedipus Rex, 212, 246, 248 mythology Adonis, 215, 237 Agamemnon, 212 Aphrodite, 48 Eurydice, 214 Medea, 212 Orestes, 247 Orpheus, 214, 278, 390 Osiris, 216 Pan, 8, 47, 302, 426–8, 430–9 Persephone, 214, 216, 389–90, 394 Pluto, 214, 393 people, 13, 62 philosophy Aristotle, 415 Empedocles, 222 Heraclitus, 166–7, 222 Plato, 57 Plutarch, 106 Pythagoras, 30 poetry Homer, 81 sculpture, 13, 338–9 Greece, modern Greek dance, 274, 277, 284 Greenberg, Clement, 26 Greenblatt, Stephen, 205 Greiffenhagen, Maurice An Idyll, 173, 306 Grey, Zane, 194 Griffith-Jones, Mervyn, 435–6 Grime, Helen, 410 Gross, Otto, 395 Grusin, Richard, 65, 67, 69, 71, 74 Guardia, Ernesto, 300–1, 433 Guest, Stephen, 216 Gyldendal, Yellow Series, 287, 435 Haeckel, Ernst, 111 Haggs Farm, 232, 234, 236, 240, 257 Hamilton, Cicely, 366 Handel, G. F., 257, 271 Hanslick, Eduard On the Musically Beautiful, 25, 30 Hanson, Valerie, 414

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 452

index Hardy, Thomas, 4, 12, 21, 54, 199, 210, 212–13, 222, 246, 254, 308–9, 311, 358–9, 361, 363, 403, 413 Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 167 Harrison, Austin, 225 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 246 Hastings, Hubert de Groning, 355, 367 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 245 Hause, Evan, 399, 401 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 129 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 204, 207, 213–17, 237, 239, 243, 388–90, 392, 394, 396n Bid Me to Live, 214–15, 237, 389–90 Pilate’s Wife, 390 Hebrew (language), 90–3, 95, 100–1 Hegel, G. W. F., 248, 256 Heidegger, Martin, 162, 279 Heinemann, William (publisher), 243, 256, 321–2 Hemingway, Ernest, 49 Hepworth, Barbara, 340, 350–2 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 281 Hertz, Heinrich, 167 Heseltine, Philip (Peter Warlock), 232, 258, 323, 349, 398, 401 heterosexuality, 7, 116–24, 126–8, 130, 435 Hewlett, Maurice, 308 Hiroshige, Utagawa, 325 Hoagland, Tony, 438–9 Hoel, Sigurd, 435 Hogarth Press, 79, 336 Hogarth, William, 373 homoeroticism, 118, 120, 127–8, 139, 211, 375 homosexuality, 7, 50, 116–20, 122, 124–6, 128, 374–5, 386, 435 Hope, Anthony, 107 Hopkin, Sallie, 95 Hopkin, Willie, 7, 137–8, 306 Horder, Percy Richard Morley, 360 Horkheimer, Max, 147 Housman, A. E., 398, 409 A Shropshire Lad, 209–11 Howitt, Thomas Cecil, 365 Huebsch, Benjamin (publisher), 322 Hueffer, Ford Madox (also Ford), 13, 192, 197, 202, 207, 213, 217, 308, 348, 356 Hughes-Stanton, Blair, 335 Hull, Edith Maude The Sheik, 194

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index Hume, David, 61, 63n Hundley, Richard, 410 Hunt, Violet, 207, 372 Huxley, Aldous, 2, 78, 127, 257, 385–8, 390, 392–4, 396n, 413, 429, 431, 433, 436, 438 Brave New World, 387 Eyeless in Gaza, 394 Genius and Goddess, 388 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 387, 292 Point Counter Point, 385, 387–8 ‘Two or Three Graces’, 386–7 Huxley, Maria, 127, 305, 316 Huyssen, Andreas, 145, 147–8, 150 Hyde, Virginia Crosswhite, 72, 91, 94, 201, 203 hymns, 1, 32, 34, 36, 98–9, 204, 205, 213, 240, 257, 260–1, 269, 271, 402 Ibsen, Henrik, 213, 245–6, 248, 254, 256 Ghosts, 54, 58, 80, 86, 157n, 246 Imagism, 204, 213–15, 388 India, 125, 238, 363 Italy, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63n, 65, 67–8, 70, 73–4, 79–80, 82, 85, 87, 112, 131, 140, 157n, 160, 214, 222–4, 247, 257, 264, 276, 322, 367, 372, 393, 394, 411n Italian language, 77–8, 81–6, 87n, 113 James, E. L., 393 James, Henry, 119 James, William, 67, 71 jazz, 141, 147, 161, 274, 312 Jenner, Katharine (Mrs Henry), 331 Jennings, Blanche, 106, 209, 306, 356, 373 Jeschke, Claudia, 284, 287 Jewish people, 62, 79, 92, 268 John Bull, 131, 436 Johnson, Willard (Spud), 234, 238, 317 Joubert, John, 399, 401, 406 The Instant Moment, 403–4 Joyce, James, 2–4, 12, 15, 20, 76, 79, 86, 90, 110, 194, 354, 413 Ulysses, 12, 22, 194, 212, 262, 422 Juta, Jan, 326–7, 341 Kandinsky, Wassily, 24, 26–8, 37 Composition VII, 27 On the Spiritual in Art, 24 Kant, Emmanuel, 18–19, 22, 61, 63n

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 453

453

Kapp, Edmond Xavier Portrait of D. H. Lawrence, 298, 433 Kauffer, Edward McKnight, 323 Keats, John, 17, 20, 216–17 Kennedy-Fraser, Marjory, 258 Songs of the Hebrides, 240, 257, 258 Kennerley, Mitchell (publisher), 322 Kimberley and Eastwood Advertiser, The, 137 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, 109, 229n, 240, 274–5, 285, 349 Kippenberg, Anton, 56 Kleist, Heinrich von, 280 Knopf, Alfred A. (publisher), 322, 331, 333, 337n Knox, Robert, 53 Körperkultur, 277, 279–280, 287 Nacktkultur, 279–80 Koteliansky, S. S., 77, 79, 87n, 92, 314–15, 380, 385 Kouyoumdjian, Dikran, 232 Kra (publisher), 110–11 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 117 Kramer, Arthur Walter, 399 Krenkow, Fritz, 78 Laclos, Choderlos de, 16 Lady Chatterley’s Lover trials, 157, 393, 429, 431, 436 Lahr, Charles, 320, 334–5 Lambert, Cecile, 381 Langer, Suzanne, 276, 287 Laocoön and his Sons, 25–7, 160, 339 Larkin, Philip, 431 Latour, Bruno, 65 Laughing Horse, 227 Lawrence, Ada, 206, 258, 306, 316–17, 372, 379 Lawrence, D. H. Music Music for David, 1, 32–3, 232, 257, 262, 266, 269–71, 284, 401 Song 2 ‘Lu-lu-a-li-lu-lu-lu!’, 270–1 Non-fiction Apocalypse, 59, 62, 90–2, 98–100, 233 ‘A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”’, 116 ‘Art and the Individual’, 1, 22, 340 ‘Art and Morality’, 193–5, 199–200, 311–13 ‘Au Revoir U.S.A.’, 227 ‘[Autobiographical Fragment]’, 23, 137

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454

index

Lawrence (Cont.) ‘The Bad Side of Books’, 320–1 ‘Biographical Note to Mastro-don Gesualdo’, 81 ‘Books’, 320, 387 ‘Chaos in Poetry’, 100–1, 205, 210 ‘Christs in the Tyrol’, 427 ‘The Crown’, 199, 226 ‘The Crucifix Across the Mountains’, 224 ‘The Dance’, 68, 70–1, 73, 231, 276 ‘The Dance of the Sprouting Corn’, 231, 246 ‘David’, 340 ‘Democracy’, 24, 133 ‘Education of the People’, 146, 377, 381 Fantasia of the Unconscious, 22n, 59, 146, 149, 155, 166, 275 ‘The Future of the Novel’, 61, 193–5, 201 ‘Getting On’, 111 ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’, 6, 65–6, 70–4, 231, 240, 246, 285 ‘Indians and Entertainment’, 231, 240, 246, 258, 286 ‘Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo’, 80 ‘Introduction to Pictures’, 148 ‘Introduction to these Paintings’, 57, 310, 315–16, 373 ‘Introductory Note to Mastro-don Gesualdo’, 80 ‘Just Back from the Snake Dance’, 231, 240 ‘The Lemon Gardens’, 222–3 ‘Letter from Germany’, 7, 131 The Life of J. Middleton Murry By J. C., 110, 114 ‘Looking Down on the City’, 340 ‘Making Pictures’, 127, 306, 216 ‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus’, 5, 110, 112–13 ‘Morality and the Novel’, 6, 53, 193–5, 200, 202, 312 Mornings in Mexico, 58, 71, 285, 332–3, 362 Movements in European History, 6, 103, 105–8, 114, 131, 138, 336n ‘Myself Revealed (Autobiographical Sketch)’, 111 ‘Note on Giovanni Verga’, 80

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 454

‘Nottinghamshire and the Mining Countryside’, 365 ‘The Novel’, 193–5, 197–9, 202, 252 ‘The Novel and the Feelings’, 193, 196, 260–1 ‘On Being Religious’, 437 ‘On Coming Home’, 227 ‘Pan in America’, 431 Phoenix, 193 ‘Pictures on the Wall’, 307, 381 ‘Poetry of the Present’, 17, 20, 216, 401 ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, 7, 121, 145–6, 148–9, 151–7, 373 ‘The Proper Study’, 228 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, 166, 168–9 Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, 13, 22, 24, 146, 193, 199, 227, 334, 428 ‘The Return Journey’, 222 ‘[Return to Bestwood]’, 111, 138 ‘Review of Contemporary German Poetry’, 211 ‘Review of German Books’, 31 ‘Review of Pedro de Valdivia: Conqueror of Chile by R. B. Cunninghame Graham’, 77, 142n ‘Review of The World of William Clissold, by H. G. Wells’, 236 Sea and Sardinia, 55, 131, 166, 231, 326–7, 332, 411 Sketches of Etruscan Places, 6, 58, 86, 107, 336, 363 ‘The Spinner and the Monks’, 6, 65, 68–73 ‘The Spirit of Place’, 52, 253 Studies in Classic American Literature, 11–12, 52–3, 60–1, 82, 86, 122, 127–8, 130, 132, 166, 195, 199, 206, 210, 227, 253, 311, 328, 336n Study of Thomas Hardy, 4, 21, 54, 199, 210, 222, 254, 308–10, 312, 346, 358, 363 ‘Surgery for the Novel – or a Bomb’, 193 ‘The Theatre’, 80, 86, 223, 231, 245, 247, 252–3, 423 ‘Translator’s Preface to Cavalleria Rusticana’, 81

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index Twilight in Italy, 54–5, 63n, 68, 70, 73, 80, 222, 224, 231, 245 ‘Which Class I Belong To’, 111 ‘Why I don’t like living in London’, 148 ‘Why the Novel Matters’, 193, 196, 199, 201 Novellas The Captain’s Doll, 242, 327–30 The Fox, 116, 121–4, 243, 327, 423 The Ladybird, 327 The Man Who Died (The Escaped Cock), 216, 320, 334–5, 390, 393, 426–7, 432 St. Mawr, 7, 60, 146, 151–3, 155–6, 233, 327, 389, 424, 431 Novels Aaron’s Rod, 4, 7, 96, 126, 129–30, 138–40, 142, 154, 197, 201, 203, 233, 239, 241, 257, 259–61, 265, 328–9, 389, 391, 436 The Boy in the Bush, 90, 130, 215, 226, 231, 327, 331–2 ‘Burns Novel’, 110 ‘Elsa Culverwell’, 157n The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, 233, 420, 436 The First ‘Women in Love’, 222, 224 ‘The Insurrection of Miss Houghton’, 157n Kangaroo, 46, 92, 97, 130, 198, 201, 227–8, 231, 242, 265, 328–9, 336n, 377, 389, 394, 411 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 7, 21, 35, 82, 84, 116, 126, 137–8, 145–6, 153, 157, 161, 170–1, 187, 197, 233, 244, 276, 317, 334, 350–2, 356, 361–2, 364–6, 373, 378, 391, 413–14, 420, 423, 427, 429, 431, 435–9 The Lost Girl, 2–4, 145–51, 153, 155–6, 161, 231, 242, 257, 262–5, 269, 327–8, 394–5, 423 Mr Noon, 3–4, 130, 138, 257, 262, 264–9, 277, 279–83, 396n, 431 The Plumed Serpent, 4–6, 24, 32–5, 37, 60, 62, 63n, 91, 93, 97–9, 125, 130, 194, 197–8, 201, 228, 232, 240–1, 266, 269, 281, 284–7, 331–3, 375, 378–80, 407

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 455

455 Quetzalcoatl, 228, 285, 286 The Rainbow, 2–4, 7, 14–15, 17, 39–41, 44–51, 57, 94–5, 97, 109, 111, 119, 134, 136, 138, 145, 149, 153, 157, 160, 164–6, 170–1, 191, 193, 196–9, 201, 226, 229n, 232–3, 246, 250, 252, 257, 260–1, 275–6, 279–80, 283, 321–4, 339–42, 352, 354, 358–65, 368, 375, 377, 379–80, 385–6, 424, 434 ‘The Sisters’, 39 Sons and Lovers, 2, 20, 39, 84, 90, 91, 109, 111, 114, 133, 191–3, 196, 198–200, 226, 244, 247, 250, 261, 307, 322–3, 355, 371, 373, 375, 377–9, 395, 414, 423, 435 The Trespasser, 24, 28, 192, 215, 241, 390 ‘The Wedding Ring’, 39, 179 The White Peacock, 4, 118, 126, 192, 231, 257, 262–3, 266, 275–6, 321–2, 356–7, 372 ‘The Wilful Woman’, 110 Women in Love, 2–6, 14, 17, 24–6, 28, 31–7, 39–41, 46–7, 50, 55, 57–8, 60, 63, 66–7, 77, 96, 101, 108–9, 114, 119–20, 125–7, 133–4, 136, 138, 145, 155, 161–3, 167, 191, 193, 196–8, 201–2, 222–3, 226, 229n, 232, 240–3, 249–50, 262, 277–84, 322–6, 334, 340, 343, 345–6, 348–50, 352, 354, 362, 364, 367–8, 373–7, 379–81, 385–6, 388, 394–5, 414, 423–4, 434, 437 Paintings Accident in a Mine, 372 Boccaccio Story, 175, 317, 378 Close-Up (Kiss), 413 Contadini, 180, 317–19 Dance-Sketch, 179, 317–18 Family on a Verandah, 178 Fauns and Nymphs, 176, 428 A Holy Family, 174, 316 North Sea, 181 The Rape of the Sabine Women, 127, 317 Resurrection, 177, 432 Self-Portrait, 396n, 434 Spring, 127, 182 Summer Dawn, 334

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456

index

Lawrence (Cont.) Plays Altitude, 232, 244 A Collier’s Friday Night, 111, 244–5, 247, 249 The Daughter-in-Law, 232, 234, 244–5, 248–50, 307 David, 1, 32–3, 93, 232, 233, 242, 244, 252–4, 257, 262, 266–71, 284, 334, 401 The Fight for Barbara, 232, 244, 249 The Married Man, 244 The Merry-go-Round, 244, 247–9 Noah’s Flood, 244 Touch and Go, 138–9, 232, 244–5, 248–50 The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, 232, 244, 247–8, 253, 256, 415 Poems ‘All of Roses’, 214 ‘All of Us’, 78 ‘Almond Blossom’, 216 ‘“And oh—that the man I am might cease to be—”’, 403–4 ‘The Argonauts’, 100 ‘Autumn Rain’, 399, 401, 403–4 ‘Aware’, 215, 407 ‘Baby Songs’, 407 ‘Bare Almond Trees’, 169, 171 ‘Bavarian Gentians’, 216, 407 Bay, 183–6, 324 ‘Bei Hennef’, 403–4 Birds, Beasts and Flowers, 138, 166, 207, 214–15, 269, 329–31, 335, 395, 405 ‘Butterfly’, 399, 400 ‘Campions’, 208–9 ‘Cherry Robbers’, 211 Collected Poems, 207, 209, 217, 357, 431 ‘Dark Satanic Mills’, 161 ‘The Dawn Verse’, 407 ‘December Night’, 403–4, 407 ‘Departure’, 161 ‘Desire goes down into the sea—’, 407 ‘Dies Irae’, 24, 35 ‘Dog-Tired’, 408 ‘The Drained Cup’, 407–8 ‘Dreams Old and Nascent’, 356–7 ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’, 211 ‘End of Another Home Holiday’, 407 ‘The English are so nice!’, 242 ‘Figs’, 395

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 456

‘Flat Suburbs, S.W., in the Morning’, 365 ‘For the heroes are dipped in Scarlet’, 100 ‘For a moment’, 407 ‘Giorno dei Morti’, 399 ‘Gloire de Dijon’, 214, 408 ‘Goethe and Pose’, 357 ‘Green’, 211, 214, 399, 407 ‘Guelder Roses’, 208 ‘Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers’, 138, 399–401 ‘The Hostile Sun’, 407 ‘Hymn to Priapus’, 214–15 ‘I am in a novel—’, 385 ‘I know a noble Englishman’ [Untitled], 224 ‘Invocation to the Moon’, 99–100 ‘Kisses in the Train’, 408 ‘Last Hours’, 183, 324 Last Poems, 99–100, 161, 207, 433 ‘Let us be men—’, 161 ‘A Life History in Harmonies and Discords’, 110–11 ‘Listen to the band!’, 271 ‘Loggerheads’, 403–4 Look! We Have Come Through!, 208, 214–15, 322–3, 403 ‘Love Message’, 407 ‘Man and Bat’, 398–400, 403 ‘Masses and Classes’, 160 ‘Medlars and Sorb-apples’, 214 ‘Michael Angelo’, 340 ‘Moonrise’, 403–4 ‘Mosquito’, 269 ‘Movements’, 105, 108, 205 ‘Mystery’, 402, 407 ‘Nemesis’, 35 Nettles, 99, 160, 207, 271 ‘Nonentity’, 408 ‘Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!’, 17 ‘Nottingham’s new university’, 360 ‘Old song’, 36 ‘One Woman to All Women’, 215 ‘The oxford voice’, 242 ‘A Pang of Reminiscence’, 215 Pansies, 6, 21, 25, 26, 35–6, 99, 146, 153, 161, 207, 217, 320, 334, 410, 433, 434 ‘Peach’, 141, 405–6 ‘Piano’, 6, 240, 259, 399, 401–2, 407–8, 410

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index ‘Pomegranate’, 405–6 ‘Poor bit of a wench!—’, 410 ‘Purple Anemones’, 214 ‘Quite Forsaken’, 407 ‘Reach Over’, 407 ‘Red Geranium and Godly Mignonette’, 99 ‘Red o’er the Moon’, 398, 401 ‘River Roses’, 214, 399, 401, 407–9 ‘Roses on the Breakfast Table’, 214, 408 ‘Service of All the Dead’, 399, 402 ‘Shades’, 407 ‘Shadows’, 408 ‘She Looks Back’, 215 ‘The Ship of Death’, 207, 399–401 ‘Sicilian Cyclamens’, 216 ‘Snake’, 403, 407 ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’, 407 ‘Southern Night’, 405–6 ‘Star Sentinel’, 79 ‘Suburbs on a Hazy Day’, 365 ‘Sun in me’, 407 ‘Tarantella’, 407–8 ‘Tease’, 211, 407 ‘There is rain in me—’, 407 ‘Thief in the Night’, 408 ‘Thomas Earp’, 407 ‘To a Certain Young Lady’, 407 Tortoises, 325 ‘To women, as far as I’m concerned’, 399, 401–2 ‘Tropic’, 405–7 ‘Trust’, 36, 408 ‘Twilight’, 247, 407 ‘Two, there are two words only’, 232 ‘Weeknight Service’, 410 ‘Whales weep not!’, 399–401 ‘What is a man to do?’, 160 ‘What is man without an income?—’, 407–8 ‘When I read Shakespeare—’, 217 ‘When I went to the film—’, 413 ‘A White Blossom’, 215, 407–8 ‘A Youth Mowing’, 164 Short stories ‘The Blind Man’, 224–5, 233, 418–20 ‘The Blue Moccasins’, 233 ‘The Border Line’, 228 ‘England, My England’, 46, 54, 66–7, 366

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 457

457

England, My England and Other Stories, 166, 225 ‘Fanny and Annie’, 414 ‘The Flying-Fish’, 233 ‘Glad Ghosts’, 334 ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’, 16 ‘The Last Laugh’, 428, 430, 433 ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’, 396n ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, 225, 229, 414–16 ‘The Overtone’, 428, 438 ‘A Prelude’, 231 ‘The Princess’, 60 ‘The Prussian Officer’, 120–1 The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, 229n, 250, 348, 376 ‘Rawdon’s Roof’, 424 ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, 6, 411, 413–14, 416–17, 423 ‘Samson and Delilah’, 16 ‘Sun’, 188, 334–5 ‘Tickets Please’, 151 ‘The White Stocking’, 231, 275, 277, 286, 376, 417–18 ‘The Witch à la Mode’, 163–5, 168, 171 ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, 60, 284–7 ‘You Touched Me’, 413 Translations ‘All of Us’, 78 All Things Are Possible, Lev Shestov, 79 Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories, Giovanni Verga, 77, 80–1, 85 ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’, Ivan Bunin, 79, 87n Little Novels of Sicily, Giovanni Verga, 77, 80, 85, 87n Mastro-don Gesualdo, Giovanni Verga, 77, 80–5, 87n, 331 Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev, Maxim Gorky, 79, 87n The Story of Doctor Manente, A. F. Grazzini, 78, 334 Lawrence, Frieda, 24, 35, 54, 78–80, 92, 112, 114, 196, 202, 207–8, 214, 215, 224, 226, 227, 232–3, 235–40, 244, 258, 267, 278, 282, 306, 308, 336, 344, 371–2, 377, 380–2, 386–8, 393–6, 396n, 432 Leavis, F. R., 20, 81, 133–4, 161–2, 244, 246–7, 250–2, 428–30, 437

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458 Lefebvre, Henri Rhythmanalysis, 261–3, 268–71 Lehmann, Rosamond, 355 Lehrer, Tom, 431 leitmotif, 31–2, 79, 85; see also Wagner, Richard lesbianism, 119, 123–4, 128 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 23, 25, 34, 340 Lewis, Jo, 414 Lewis, Percy Wyndham, 76, 343, 346, 348; see also Blast Lewis, Sinclair Babbitt, 194 Liberty (department store), 375 Liliencron, Detlev von, 213 Linati, Carlo, 81, 203 Lincoln Cathedral, 289–90, 358, 361 Lloyd, Marie, 258 Lodge, Oliver, 167 London, 163, 192, 207, 227, 228, 234–5, 237, 245, 246, 282–3, 307, 314, 324, 339, 341–4, 348–9, 355–6, 362–4, 372, 374, 375, 377, 389, 433, 436 London Group Exhibition, 344 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 107 Lowell, Amy, 204, 213–15 Lucile [Lucy Christiana], 381 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 58, 72, 114, 232, 237–9, 434 Luhan, Tony, 237–8 Lukács, Georg, 133 Lungarno Series, 78 Lutyens, Edwin, 365 Lutyens, Elizabeth, 408 Luxemburg, Rosa, 47 Macartney, Herbert Baldwin, 390 McAuley, James, 399 McBirnie, Andrew, 411 MacCarthy, Fiona, 341 McDonald, Edward D., 320 MacDougall, Sarah, 343, 352 Mackenzie, Compton, 257, 394, 396n McLeod, Arthur, 348 Magnelli, Alberto, 313 Magnus, Maurice, 5, 110, 112–13 Mahler, Gustav, 28, 31, 141–2 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 274, 287 Malta, 112 Mandrake Press, 174, 315, 334–5

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 458

index Mann, Thomas, 14, 28, 31, 47, 78, 198 Mansfield, Katherine, 87n, 396n Marcks, Gerhard, 346 Marcuse, Herbert, 141 Maritain, Jacques, 310 Marsh, Edward, 213, 215, 234, 341 Marx, Karl, 47, 139 Marxism, 86, 132–3, 135–6, 139, 142 Masaccio (Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone), 372 masculinity, 12, 83, 120, 122–3, 361, 390 mass culture, 147–50, 154, 157, 356 masturbation, 151, 153, 157 Matthews, David, 399, 410 Maugham, Somerset, 202 Maxwell, James Clerk, 167 Mayer, Elizabeth, 81 Mecklenburgh Square, 388, 396n mediation theory, 65–75 Mendelssohn, Felix, 266 Meredith, George, 212 Merrild, Knud, 328–30, 336n Messiaen, Olivier, 404 Meštrović, Ivan, 348 Methuen (publisher), 322–4 Mexico, 33, 58–60, 62, 93, 98, 125, 227–8, 282, 285–6, 362, 378, 434 Meynell, Viola, 323 Michelangelo, 339–40, 403 middlebrow literature, 225, 354 Milan, 140 Miles, Christopher, 423 Miller, Arthur, 256, 415 Millett, Kate, 436 Mills, Travis, The Blind Man, 414, 418–20, 424n The White Stocking, 413, 414, 417–18 miners’ strikes, 7, 137–8, 140, 248–51 Minnesingers, 258, 266 Mitchell, Katie, 414 Mockel, Albert, 211 Moest, Josef, 345 Moffatt, James, 91–2, 101 Mommsen, Theodor, 6, 107 Moore, G. E., 109 Moore, Harry T., 314 Moore, Henry, 57, 343, 350 Mordkin, Mikhail, 283 Morrell, Ottoline, 28, 48, 107, 197, 211, 238, 282–3, 310, 320, 376, 381, 388

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index Morris, William, 66, 134, 136, 142, 365–6, 368, 396n, 423 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 257, 259, 262 Mulvey, Nick, 410 Murray, Gilbert, 246–7, 256 Murry, John Middleton, 72, 110, 114, 233, 388, 391–2, 396n, 427–30, 434–6 The Life of Jesus, 114, 388 Son of Woman, 392, 429, 434 museum studies, 27, 57, 59, 363 Musgrave, Thea, 411 music hall, 3, 147, 257–8, 262–5, 267–9, 271–2 Mussolini, Benito, 87n mythopoiea, 11, 39–40, 45, 47, 52, 59, 62, 72, 79, 82–3, 109, 207, 214–16, 247, 394 Nash, Paul, 324 National Gallery, 291–2, 295, 308 nationalism, 42, 46, 56–7 National Trust, 366 Native Americans, 6, 33–4, 60, 66, 71, 74, 93, 240–1, 263, 265, 269, 271, 277 Naturalism, 39, 81, 83, 164, 250, 314 Needham, Peggy, 336n Neil, William, 402, 405–8, 410 The Waters are Shaking the Moon, 406–7 Where There is No Autumn, 405–6 Neo-Pagans, 437, 439n Neville, George, 258 New Criticism, 209, 221 New Left Review, 133, 135 New Mexico, 52, 65, 67, 71–2, 93, 227, 231, 240–1, 244, 265, 269, 286, 306, 331, 434 New Statesman, 131 New Woman, 214 New York, 226–7, 314, 377, 416–17 Newman, Chris, 409 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 13, 25, 29–31, 33, 35, 37, 45, 131, 246, 256, 262, 277, 280, 428, 437 The Birth of Tragedy, 13, 25, 246, 277 Apollonian, 13, 29, 140, 250, 254, 271 Dionysian, 13, 29–30, 140, 246, 252–4, 262, 271 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 28, 282–7 Nitzsch, Karl, 98 North, Joseph, 18, 22

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 459

459

Nottingham, 28, 111, 173, 224, 232, 234, 246, 270, 304, 306–7, 318–19, 336n, 359–60, 363, 365, 367, 410 Obscene Publications Act, 145 O’Casey, Sean, 245 Ogdon, Will, 399, 401 Olson, Charles, 17 Omega Workshops, 343, 375 O’Rawe, Geraldine, 415 Orioli, Pino, 77–8, 334, 372, 433 Osborne, Nigel, 407 Paccito, Anthony A Sense of Ancient Gods, 393–5 Paganism, 6, 59, 62, 91, 98–100, 247, 389, 396n. 430; see also Neo-Pagans Palestine, 78 Pallotino, Massimo, 86 Palmer, Geoffrey, 408 Paquin, Jeanne, 377, 381 Paris, 145, 287, 334, 341, 364–5, 438 Partridge, Mark, 413–16, 420 Pascal, Blaise, 21 Pater, Walter, 260, 272, 396n Patmore, Brigit, 234–6, 238 Paulin, Tom, 433 Pavlova, Anna, 28, 282–3, 285 Payne, Ben Iden, 250 Pearn, Nancy, 198 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 220, 229, 437 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 260 Perrottet, Suzanne, 278 Persevalli, Enrico, 247 phallic marriage, 116, 122 phoenix (Lawrence’s symbol), 187, 331, 334–5, 432, 439 Picasso, Pablo, 29, 58, 375 Pinker, J. B., 78, 145, 225 Poiret, Paul, 381 Poland, 3, 41–2, 359 Pollnitz, Christopher, 35, 79, 205–6, 208, 214–15 polyphony, 83–4, 401, 408 posthumanism, 171 Pound, Ezra, 3, 12, 17, 20, 26, 30, 76, 110, 204, 207, 208, 209–10, 213, 234–5, 258, 342, 347, 348, 349–50, 364 Pratter, Sara, 413, 423 Pre-Raphaelitism, 4, 49, 204, 208, 365

25/09/20 3:39 PM

460

index

Primitivism, 6, 57–8, 60, 62, 63n, 66–7, 71, 94, 132, 231, 264, 284–7, 315, 339, 349, 352, 407, 436 Proust, Marcel, 4, 47, 194, 202 Pryse, John, 91, 99 psychoanalysis, 166, 168–9, 274–5, 277 Purnell, Idella, 234 queerness, 7, 30, 113, 116–19, 121–5, 127–8, 197, 225, 239, 350, 435 Radford, Dollie, 214, 380 radicalism (English political), 134–9 radio (wireless), 157, 161, 169–70 Rainbow Books and Music, 323, 336n Rainey, Lawrence, 2, 204 Rananim, 7, 79, 129, 137, 142, 392, 394, 439 Raphael, 309 The Madonna and Child, 292 Rathbone, Christopher, 399, 401 Rauh, Ida, 233–4, 237, 239 Ravagli, Antonio, 432 Read, Herbert, 314, 317, 319 Reade, Charles, 107 reader-response criticism, 217, 219–20, 277, 392, 428, 438 realism (aesthetic), 109, 133–4, 148–50, 196, 213, 226, 244, 250, 252, 261, 266, 308–9, 312, 351, 355, 365 Reid, Robert, 91 Renaissance, Italian, 78, 106, 306, 308–9, 316, 338, 355 Renan, Ernest, 91 Revolutions (European), 40, 42–3, 46–7 1848–52 uprisings, 23–4, 40 Bolshevik (1917), 313 French (1789), 13, 43 Polish uprisings (nineteenth-century), 3, 42 Reynolds, Joshua, 276, 373 Rhodes, Phillip, 402, 409–10 Rhys, Ernest and Grace, 233 rhythm bodily, 167, 241, 261, 269–71 dance, 73, 240, 276, 278–82, 284–6; see also Eurhythmics musical, 31, 33, 62, 162, 269–71, 398–400 of nature, 62, 262, 268–9 of place, 262, 265, 268–9 poetic, 205–7, 210

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 460

prose, 39, 41, 77–8, 82, 92, 101, 109, 198, 260–1 universal, 35–6, 199, 272 Rice, Anne Estelle Illustrations for Bay, 183–6, 324 Richards, I. A., 18, 259 Richardson, Dorothy, 4, 194 Richardson, Samuel, 16 Ricoeur, Paul, 98 Rieti, Vittorio, 407 Rigveda, 45 Riley, Dennis, 407 ritual dance, 269, 274, 277, 282–3, 285–6, 380, 419 drama, 33–4, 244, 246–8, 250–1, 253–4 Robinson, John, 429 Roerich, Nicholas, 285–6 Romans, 59, 62, 107, 338 Venus (goddess), 237 Romanticism, 3–4, 12–14, 23–6, 31, 36, 39–51, 80, 131, 136, 142, 166–7, 209, 264, 267, 281, 323, 361, 408 Rosenberg, Isaac, 398, 409 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 49, 208 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18–19, 43 Royal Academy of Arts, 307–8 Ruskin, John, 80, 134–5, 357, 359–60, 362, 365, 368 Russell, Bertrand, 131, 196, 222, 251 Russell, Ken, 278, 423 Russia, 53, 63, 79, 131, 245, 265, 431 Russolo, Luigi, 163 Rutter, Frank, 317 Ryddell, Mark, 423 Sackville-West, Vita, 110, 366 Sagar, Keith, 201, 310–11, 314, 317–19, 335 Salvation Army, 207, 269 same-sex desire, 7, 116–17, 121, 125, 127 Sanders, Scott, 220, 229, 345 Santa Fe, 71, 227 Sardinia, 55–6, 131, 166, 231, 326–7, 332, 411 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 135 Saturday Westminster Gazette, 373 Savu, Laura, 394 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 257, 259–60 Il Pompeo, 258 Schäfer, Heinrich, 78

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index Schiller, Friedrich, 13–14, 18–22, 25, 280 Schlegel, Friedrich, 23, 25, 307 Schlemmer, Oskar, 280 Schoenberg, Arnold, 31–2 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 260 Schrenk-Notzing, Albert Freiherr von, 117–18, 120 Schubert, Franz, 213, 257, 403 Schumann, Robert, 213, 258, 403 Scönthal, Ruth, 410 Scriabin, Alexander, 259 Scrutiny, 91, 246, 250, 256, 365 Sculthorpe, Peter, 407, 410 Secker, Martin, 93, 112, 269, 321, 326–9, 332–4, 336n, 337n, 350 Second World War, 87n, 130–3, 135 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 122, 128 Seltzer, Thomas, 321–2, 325–8, 330–2, 433 Serov, Alexandr, 283 Shakespeare, William, 80, 107, 217, 247, 256, 408 As You Like It, 246, 247 Corialanus, 246 Hamlet, 80, 217, 223, 232, 245, 247, 252–3, 256 King Lear, 252 Macbeth, 19, 217, 232, 251 Othello, 238 The Tempest, 246 Shaw, George Bernard, 107, 235, 245 Man and Superman, 245 Shelley, Mary, 361 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 12, 17, 20, 42–3, 51, 80, 216–17, 409–10 Sherwood Forest, 395 Shestov, Lev, 53, 63n, 79 Sicily, 55–6, 77, 80, 85, 87, 106, 112, 169, 326, 372 Siddal, Elizabeth, 49 Signature, The, 49, 129, 204–5, 257–8, 266 Sillars, Stuart, 341 Sillitoe, Alan, 393 Sinclair, May, 364 Sitwell, Osbert Miracle on Sinai, 390–2 Sitwell, Sacheverell, 409 Skeaping, John, 350 Skempton, Howard, 398–9, 403, 409–10 Skinner, Mollie, 90, 130, 215, 226, 228 Slade Art School, 314, 316, 385 Snyder, Carl, 167, 387

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 461

461

socialism, 47, 131–2, 135–8, 141, 306, 316, 365 soundscape (literary), 399–400, 163–6 Soviet Union, 134–5 Spartacus movement, 47 Spectator, The, 31, 93, 241–2, 246 spirit of place, 53–4, 59, 61–3, 86, 394 Squire, J. C., 431 Stafford, Jean, 378 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 95, 335 Starr, Meredith, 193 Stead, C. K., 394 Steele, Bruce, 193, 225 Stein, Gertrude, 212, 272 Stephen, Leslie, 110 Stephensen, P. R., 316–17, 334–5 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 107 Stewart, Jack, 24, 68, 309, 317, 319 Stieglitz, Alfred, 314, 317 Storey, David, 393 Stork, C. W., 149 Strachey, Lytton, 109–10, 256 Eminent Victorians, 109, 113 Strauss, Richard, 257, 259 Stravinsky, Igor, 163, 257, 259, 269, 285–6; see also Ballets Russes Strettel, Alma, 87n Strindberg, August, 245, 248 suffrage (women’s), 44, 364 Süskind, Wilhelm Emanuel, 428 Sussman, Herbert, 152–3 Svyatopolk-Mirsky, Dmitry, 436 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 208, 233 Switzerland, 24, 54 Sword, Helen, 214 Symbolism, 164–5, 204, 207, 209, 249, 251–2, 254, 331 Symons, Arthur, 262 Synge, J. M., 203, 212, 245 Riders to the Sea, 253 syphilis, 315 Tacitus, 106 Taormina, 112, 169–70, 235, 438 Taos, 58, 71–2, 237, 240, 243–4, 311, 432, 438 Taylor, Rachel Annand, 171, 208, 214, 373 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 257 television, 157, 232, 413, 414, 416–7 Tennyson, Alfred, 107, 164, 207–8, 217, 398, 409–10 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 262

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462

index

theatre, 33, 62, 86, 147, 149–51, 157n, 206, 232, 238, 242, 245–7, 250, 264, 278, 282, 284–5, 287 theosophy, 95, 389 Thompson, E. P., 134–6 Thoreau, Henry David, 67 Thornycroft, Hamo The Mower, 338–9 The Sower, 338 Thurlby, Mabel, 206 Tippett, Michael, 400, 403 Titian, 312, 373 Titus, Edward, 145 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12 Toepfer, Karl, 279–81 Tolstoy, Leo, 12, 195, 199 War and Peace, 195 tragedy, 29, 30, 43, 47, 80, 111, 123, 133, 209, 215, 216, 222–4, 238, 245, 246, 249, 253–5, 268, 414–15, 361, 392 transport aeroplane, 163, 356 London Underground, 223 motor car, 163, 356 ship, 163, 223 train, 163, 196, 198, 223, 227, 240, 408, 415–16 tram, 163–4, 356 travel writing, 20, 33, 54–5, 58, 66, 71, 76, 80, 86, 201, 222–4, 326, 336, 362, 411 Trevelyan, G. M., 104, 109 Trevelyan, R. C., 104 Trotter, Philip, 318 Turgenev, Ivan, 77 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 52 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 312 Tylor, E. B., 60 Tzara, Tristan, 58 University College Nottingham, 111, 234, 359–60 Unwin, Raymond, 365 utilitarianism, 134 utopianism, 7, 23, 35, 129, 134–9, 141–2 Van Gogh, Vincent, 195, 248, 312–13 Sunflowers, 295 Vasey, Lindeth, 267 Verdi, Giuseppe, 257 Aïda, 259

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 462

Rigoletto, 245 Verga, Giovanni, 12, 76–7, 80–7; see also D. H. Lawrence / Translations Verhaeren, Émile, 211 Verlaine, Paul, 28, 211 violence (fictional), 34, 109, 121, 130, 139, 202, 241–2, 247–50, 274, 280, 350, 363, 376 Vogue, 374, 377 Volterra, Italy, 393 Vorticism, 110, 310, 340, 346–8 Wagner, Otto, 354 Wagner, Richard, 3–4, 23–6, 28–34, 36–7, 257, 263, 266–7 Artwork of the Future, 25, 26, 30, 33 Parsifal, 24–5, 33–4 Der Ring des Nibelungen, 25 Götterdämmerung, 24, 34 Das Rheingold, 267 Siegfried, 28, 30 Die Walküre, 34 Tannhäuser, 28, 263 Tristan und Isolde, 25, 28, 31 Warlock, Peter see Philip Heseltine Warren, Dorothy, 314 Warren Gallery, 317–18, 334 Weekley, Barbara, 235, 336, 381 Weekley, Ernest, 202, 308, 387, 393, 395–6 Weill, Kurt, 141 Weiss, Adolf, 411 Wells, H. G., 28, 108, 134, 202, 236, 365, 390, 393 Brynhilde, 393 Tono-Bungay, 365 West, Alick, 134 Weston, Jessie, 246 Westphal, Carlo, 117 Wheeler, Charles, 343 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 368 White, Jack, 237 Whitman, Walt, 17, 127–8, 199–200, 204–8, 214, 216–17, 269, 410 Wigman, Mary, 278, 280 Wilde, Oscar, 28, 117, 339 Wilkinson family, 235, 320 Williams, Gareth, 411 Williams, Raymond, 133–4, 136, 161, 245, 256, 430 Williams, Rowan, 310, 319 Grace and Necessity, 310 Williams, Tennessee, 396n

25/09/20 3:39 PM

index Wilson, Angus, 394 Wilson, Edmund, 20 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 13 Winter, Keith Impassioned Pygmies, 390–1 Wolf, Hugo, 213 Wood, Hugh, 408 Woolf, Leonard, 79, 87n Woolf, Virginia, 2, 12, 79, 109–10, 212, 257, 275–6, 354–5, 413 Flush, 110 ‘Modern Fiction’, 212 ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 355 ‘The New Biography’, 109 Night and Day, 355 Orlando, 110 The Voyage Out, 276

6511_Brown and Reid.indd 463

463

Wordsworth, William, 421 Worth, Douglas, 409 Wright, Frank, 323 Yeats, W. B, 12, 20, 204, 207, 209, 234–5, 243, 245 The Wanderings of Oisin, 235 Yorke, Arabella, 237 Young, Francis Brett, 235 Zambaldi, Silvio, 245 Žižek, Slavoj, 24 Zola, Émile, 250

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6511_Brown and Reid.indd 464

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