Life with a Capital L
Page 49
When he cried out at Douglas for shaking hands with the innkeeper because the North and the South were enemies, and when he saw the old crones who had come to cheat him out of an odd lira or two over the honey as maenads too venomous even to be flamboyant, I thought he was seeing lurid colours that were in his eye and not in the universe he looked on. Now I think he was doing justice to the seriousness of life, and had been rewarded with a deeper insight into its nature than most of us have. If one has the dislike of any proof that the universe has structure which is the mark of an incoherent mind, then one will find something very distasteful in his assumption that John Smith and Giovanni Grimaldi are not merely individuals, but are parts of two systems of life so fundamentally opposed that their minutest constituents must also be in opposition. If one has no purpose and therefore does not need to know the relationship between the forces of the mind and events in the external world, then it is as well to say that old women out for liras were simply old women out for liras, and leave it at that. But if one hopes that some day the mind shall govern life, then it is of value that one shall be shown a small instance of the sadism that makes the human being rejoice in killing, hurting, robbing its neighbour, and one shall be told that this is as horrible as war, since war also is the fruit of this sadism; and that therefore the mind must walk proudly and always armed, that it shall not be robbed of its power. There is nothing disconcerting about these or any other of Lawrence’s attitudes, if one is a true inheritor of tradition and realizes that the greatest sons of man have always recognized that the mind which is his house is ablaze and that if the fire is not put out he will perish. Then one will rejoice that our age produced one artist who had the earnestness of the patristic writers, who like them could know no peace till he had discovered what made men lust after death. He laboured under a disadvantage compared with the fathers, in his lack of a vocabulary of symbolic terms such as was given them by theology; in the allegory of the death of the soul which ends with the death of Gerald among the mountains in Women in Love, he cannot tell his story save by the clumsy creation of images that do not give up their meaning till the book has been read many times. But even these struggles are of value, since they recall to one the symbolic nature of all thought. Knowledge is but a translation of reality into terms comprehensible by the human mind, a grappling with a mystery. None undertake it with the courage of Lawrence unless they very greatly care.
His claim to our reverence and gratitude was not in the least part diminished by Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It is an appalling fact that man should speak of the functions on which depend the continued existence of his species and the tender life of the heart in words that cause shame and ugly laughter when they are spoken. When Lawrence’s pity was aroused by this wound in the side of life he did what saints do: he asked for a miracle. He laid sex and those base words for it on the salver of his art and held them up before the consciousness of the world, which was his way of approaching creation, and prayed that both might be transmuted to the highest that man could use. There are many people like myself who feel that his prayer was in vain: that those words were nothing but the expressions of hatred felt by the will to die for the will to live, and they could never be converted to anything else. But people like myself are infinitely lesser than Lawrence. The presumption is that if he did not reach the truth he at least came nearer it then we did. In any case, it was the special merit of this and all his other works, as I can see by looking back at our meeting and measuring the change in my attitude towards his characteristic traits, that in no way did he underrate the gravity of the human situation.
As I write there comes to me this week’s issue of Time and Tide, and I find in it a letter about Lawrence, from Catherine Carswell, an infrequent but gifted writer – her note on Duse in the Adelphi was one of the finest pieces of dramatic criticism I have ever read. Her letter is worth reprinting.
SIR:
The Picture of D. H. Lawrence suggested by the obituary notices of ‘competent criticse’ is of a man morose, frustrated, tortured, even a sinister failure. Perhaps this is because any other view would make his critics look rather silly. Anyhow, to those who knew him, and I knew him since 1914 as friend, hostess and guest in varying circumstances, often of the most trying kind, at home and abroad, that picture would be comic if it were not in the circumstances disgraceful.
Lawrence was as little morose as an open clematis flower, as little tortured or sinister or hysterical as a humming bird. Gay, skilful, clever at everything, furious when he felt like it but never grieved or upset, intensely amusing, without sentimentality or affectation, almost always right in his touch for the content of things or persons, he was at once the most harmonious and the most vital person I ever saw.
As to frustration, consider his achievements. In the face of formidable initial disadvantages and lifelong delicacy, poverty that lasted for three-quarters of his life and hostility that survives his death, he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did. He went all over the world, he owned a ranch, he lived in the most beautiful corners of Europe, and met whom he wanted to meet and told them that they were wrong and that he was right. He painted and made things and sang and rode. He wrote something like three dozen books, of which even the worst pages dance with life that could be mistaken for no other man’s, while the best are admitted, even by those who hate him, to be unsurpassed. Without vices, with most human virtues, the husband of one wife, scrupulously honest, this estimable citizen yet managed to keep free from the shackles of civilization and the cant of literary cliques. He would have laughed lightly and cursed venomously in passing at the solemn owls – each one secretly chained by the leg – who now conduct his inquest. To do his work and lead his life in spite of them took some doing, but he did it, and long after they are forgotten, sensitive and innocent people – if any are left – will turn Lawrence’s pages and know from them what sort of a rare man Lawrence was.
CATHERINE CARSWELL
We must ourselves be grievously defeated if we do not regard the life of D. H. Lawrence as a spiritual victory.
Notes on the Texts
The texts are taken from Phoenix (edited by Edward D. McDonald, London: Heinemann, 1936) and Phoenix II (edited by Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore, London: Heinemann, 1968). For more information and for essays not included here – with texts conforming as closely as possible to Lawrence’s intentions – readers are referred to the invaluable Cambridge University Press editions of: Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, Introductions and Reviews, Late Essays and Articles, Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays.
‘Christs in the Tirol’: written September 1912; first published in Westminster Gazette, 22 March 1913. (This is the second of three versions of the piece, the last one published as ‘The Crucifix Across the Mountains’ in Twilight in Italy.) Phoenix.
‘Review of Death in Venice by Thomas Mann’: written by June 1913; first published in Blue Review, July 1913. Phoenix.
Study of Thomas Hardy: written September–December 1914; first published in Phoenix.
‘Whistling of Birds’: written early 1917; first published in Athenaeum, 11 April 1919. Phoenix.
‘Poetry of the Present’: written August 1919; first published (as ‘Verse Free and Unfree’) in Voices, October 1919, and (as ‘Poetry of the Present’) in The Playboy, nos. 4 and 5, 1919; reprinted as the preface to US edition of New Poems (1920). Phoenix.
‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus’: written November 1921–late January 1922; first published as introduction to Memoirs of the Foreign Legion by ‘MM’. Phoenix II.
‘Indians and an Englishman’: written September–October 1922; first published in Dial, February 1923. Phoenix.
‘Taos’: written September 1922; first published in Dial, March 1923. Phoenix.
‘The Future of the Novel’
: written December 1922–January 1923; first published in Literary Digest International Book Review, April 1923 (as ‘Surgery for the Novel – Or a Bomb’). Phoenix.
‘Paris Letter’: written January 1924; first published in Laughing Horse, April 1926. Phoenix.
‘A Letter from Germany’: written February 1924; first published in New Statesman, 13 October 1934. Phoenix.
‘Pan in America’: written May–June 1924; first published in Phoenix.
‘The Bad Side of Books: Introduction to A Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence’: written 1 September 1924; first published 1925. Phoenix.
‘On Coming Home’: written end of 1924–early 1925; first published in Phoenix II.
‘Art and Morality’: written May–June 1925; first published in Calendar of Modern Letters, November 1925. Phoenix.
‘Morality and the Novel’: written May–June 1925; first published in Calendar of Modern Letters, December 1925. Phoenix.
‘The Novel’: written May–June 1925; first published in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays (1925). Phoenix II.
‘Why the Novel Matters’: written summer–end of 1925; first published in Phoenix.
‘The Novel and the Feelings’: written summer–end of 1925; first published in Phoenix.
‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’: written mid-July–mid-August 1925; first published in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Phoenix II.
‘Man Is a Hunter’: written May–June 1926; first published in Phoenix.
‘Return to Bestwood’: written mid–late October 1926; first published in Phoenix II.
‘Review of In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway’: written by February 1927; first published as part of longer round-up of recent novels in Calendar, April 1927. Phoenix.
‘Flowery Tuscany’: written February–April 1927; first published in New Criterion, October, November, December 1927. Phoenix.
‘Germans and Latins’ (or ‘Flowery Tuscany IV’): written April 1927; first published in Phoenix.
‘Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo by Giovanni Verga’: written April–May 1927; first published in Jonathan Cape’s Travellers’s Library edition of Mastro-don Gesualdo (1928). Phoenix II.
‘Why I Don’t Like Living in London’: written August 1928; first published in Evening News, 3 September 1928. Phoenix II (as ‘Dull London’).
‘Hymns in a Man’s Life’: written August 1928; first published in Evening News, 13 October 1928. Phoenix II.
‘Give Her a Pattern’: written December 1928; first published in Vanity Fair, May 1929. Phoenix II.
‘New Mexico’: written December 1928; first published in Survey Graphic, May 1931. Phoenix.
‘Myself Revealed’: written in December 1928 and partly derived from the earlier ‘Which Class I Belong To’ (written circa April 1927); first published in Sunday Dispatch, 17 February 1929. Phoenix II (as ‘Autobiographical Sketch’).
‘Introduction to These Paintings’: written December 1928–January 1929; first published in the exhibition catalogue The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence (1929). Phoenix.
‘Pornography and Obscenity’: written April 1929; first published in This Quarter, July–September 1929. Phoenix.
‘The Risen Lord’: written July 1929; first published in Everyman, 3 October 1929. Phoenix II.
‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’: written September 1929; first published in New Adelphi, June 1930. Phoenix.
‘Introduction to The Grand Inquisitor by F. M. Dostoievsky’: written by January 1930; first published by Elkin Mathews and Marrot, July 1930. Phoenix.
‘Elegy’ by Rebecca West: First published in The New Adelphi, 3 (June–August 1930) pp. 298–309; later reprinted as D. H. Lawrence (London: Secker, 1930).
THE BEGINNING
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This selection published in Penguin Books 2019
Introduction, selection and notes copyright © Geoff Dyer, 2019
‘Elegy’ reproduced by permission of the Estate of Rebecca West and Peters, Fraser and Dunlop
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ISBN: 978-0-241-34461-3
INTRODUCTION
fn1 Another example, from literature rather than life, from Europe rather than America, of how Lawrence continues to shape my perceptions: in T Singer the Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad writes that the young wife of his eponymous protagonist ‘would have liked to see him in bright red trousers’. This seems an obvious allusion to Mellors’s claim in Lady Chatterley’s Lover that men should wear ‘close red trousers’. If men wore red trousers, he tells Connie, ‘that alone would change them in a month. They’d begin to be men again, to be men!’ Singer, for his part, has ‘seen men walking around wearing bright red trousers, and that wasn’t for him. And honestly, it would have been impossible, it would have been a breach of something deep-seated in him, something he wasn’t able to breach.’ Is Solstad here using a passage from Lawrence as a way of sending a deliberate message about a failing marriage – or am I using Lawrence to decode what is merely an expression of sartorial preference on the part of Singer’s wife? (T Singer (London: Harvill Secker, 2018), pp. 120–21).
THE BAD SIDE OF BOOKS: INTRODUCTION TO A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF D. H. LAWRENCE (1924)
fn1 In a letter to Mr Edward Garnett, dated April 22, 1914, Lawrence acknowledges the receipt of £35 from Mr Mitchell Kennerley. Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 192 (American edition).
ON COMING HOME (1924–5)
fn1 Lawrence has misquoted Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The accepted reading of these first six lines of Canto VI is: ‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,/Who never to himself hath said,/This is my own, my native land!/Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,/As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,/From wandering on a foreign strand!’ Eds.
MORALITY AND THE NOVEL (1925)
fn1 As an inscription discovered in a copy of James Mason’s Fra Angelico, this paragraph was published separately under the title ‘The Universe and Me’ by the Powgen Press, New York, 1935.
INTRODUCTION TO THE GRAND INQUISITOR BY F. M. DOSTOIEVSKY (1930)
fn1 Before this preface was published in The Grand Inquisitor the name of Katherine Mansfield was substituted for that of Middleton Murry.
‘ELEGY’ BY REBECCA WEST (1930)
fn1 [Maurice Magnus.]