But Gesualdo, and Jude, and Emma Bovary are not allowed to feel any of these feelings. As far as destiny goes, they felt no more than anybody else. And this is because they belong to the realistic world.
Gesualdo is just an ordinary man with extraordinary energy. That, of course, is the intention. But he is a Sicilian. And here lies the difficulty. Because the realistic-democratic age has dodged the dilemma of having no heroes by having every man his own hero. This is reached by what we call subjective intensity, and in this subjectively-intense every-man-his-own-hero business the Russians have carried us to the greatest lengths. The merest scrub of a pickpocket is so phenomenally aware of his own soul, that we are made to bow down before the imaginary coruscations that go on inside him. That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.
Of course your soul will coruscate, if you think it does. That’s why the Russians are so popular. No matter how much of a shabby animal you may be, you can learn from Dostoievsky and Chekhov, etc., how to have the most tender,, unique, coruscating soul on earth. And so you may be most vastly important to yourself. Which is the private aim of all men. The hero had it openly. The commonplace person has it inside himself, though outwardly he says: Of course I’m no better than anybody else! His very asserting it shows he doesn’t think it for a second. Every character in Dostoievsky or Chekhov thinks himself inwardly a nonesuch, absolutely unique.
And here you get the blank opposite, in the Sicilians. The Sicilians simply don’t have any subjective idea of themselves, or any souls. Except, of course, that funny little alter ego of a soul which can be prayed out of purgatory into paradise, and is just as objective as possible.
The Sicilian, in our sense of the word, doesn’t have any soul. He just hasn’t got our sort of subjective consciousness, the soulful idea of himself. Souls, to him, are little naked people uncomfortably hopping on hot bricks, and being allowed at last to go up to a garden where there is music and flowers and sanctimonious society, Paradise. Jesus is a man who was crucified by a lot of foreigners and villains, and who can help you against the villainous lot nowadays: as well as against witches and the rest.
The self-tortured Jesus, the self-tortured Hamlet, simply does not exist. Why should a man torture himself? Gesualdo would ask in amazement. Aren’t there scoundrels enough in the world to torture him?
Of course, I am speaking of the Sicilians of Verga’s day, fifty and sixty years ago, before the great emigration to America, and the great return, with dollars and bits of self-aware souls: at least politically self-aware.
So that in Mastro-don Gesualdo you have the very antithesis of what you get in The Brothers Karamazov. Anything more un-Rus- sian than Verga it would be hard to imagine: save Homer. Yet Verga has the same sort of pity as the Russians. And, with the Russians, he is a realist. He won’t have heroes, nor appeals to gods above nor below.
The Sicilians of today are supposed to be the nearest thing to the classic Greeks that is left to us: that is, they are the nearest descendants on earth. In Greece today there are no Greeks. The nearest thing is the Sicilian, the eastern and south-eastern Sicilian.
And if you come to think of it, Gesualdo Motta might really be a Greek in modern setting, except that he is not intellectual. But this many Greeks were not. And he has the energy, the quickness, the vividness of the Greek, the same vivid passion for wealth, the same ambition, the same lack of scruples, the same queer openness, without ever really openly committing himself. He is not a bit furtive, like an Italian. He is astute instead, far too astute and Greek to let himself be led by the nose. Yet he has a certain frankness, far more than an Italian. And far less fear than an Italian. His boldness and his queer sort of daring are Sicilian rather than Italian, so is his independent manliness.
He is Greek above all in not having any soul or any lofty ideals. The Greeks were far more bent on making an audacious, splendid impression than on fulfilling some noble purpose. They loved the splendid look of a thing, the splendid ring of words. Even tragedy was to them a grand gesture, rather than something to mope over. Peak and pine they would not, and unless some Fury pursued them to punish them for their sins, they cared not a straw for sins: their own or anyone else’s.
As for being burdened with souls, they were not such fools.
But alas, ours is the day of souls, when soul pays, and when having a soul is as important to the young as solitaire to a valetudinarian. If you don’t have feelings about your soul, what sort of person can you be?
And Gesualdo didn’t have feelings about his soul. He was remorselessly and relentlessly objective, like all people that belong to the sun. In the sun, men are objective, in the mist and snow, subjective. Subjectivity is largely a question of the thickness of your overcoat.
When you get to Ceylon, you realize that, to the swarthy Cingalese, even Buddhism is a purely objective affair. And we have managed to spiritualize it to such a subjective pitch.
Then you have the setting to the hero. The south-Sicilian setting to Mastro-don Gesualdo is perhaps nearer to the true medieval than anything else in modern literature, even barring the Sardinian medievalism of Grazia Deledda. You have the Sicily of the Bourbons, the Sicily of the kingdom of Naples. The island is incredibly poor and incredibly backward. There are practically no roads for wheeled vehicles, and consequently no wheeled vehicles, neither carts nor carriages, outside the towns. Everything is packed on asses or mules, man travels on horseback or on foot, or, if sick, in a mule- litter. The land is held by the great landowners, the peasants are almost serfs. It is as wild, as poor, and in the ducal houses of Palermo even as splendid and ostentatious as Russia.
Yet how different from Russia! Instead of the wild openness of the north, you have the shut-in, guarded watchfulness of the old Mediterranean. For centuries, the people of the Mediterranean have lived on their guard, intensely on their guard, on the watch, wary, always wary, and holding aloof. So it is even today, in the villages: aloof, holding aloof, each individual inwardly holding aloof from the others; and this in spite of the returned “Americans.”
How utterly different it is from Russia, where the people are always — in the books — expanding to one another, and pouring out tea and their souls to one another all night long. In Sicily, by nightfall, nearly every man is barricaded inside his own house. Save in the hot summer, when the night is more or less turned into day.
It all seems, to some people, dark and squalid and brutal and boring. There is no soul, no enlightenment at all. There is not one single enlightened person. If there had been, he would have departed long ago. He could not have stayed.
And for people who seek enlightenment, oh, how boring! But if you have any physical feeling for life, apart from nervous feelings such as the Russians have, nerves, nerves — if you have any appreciation for the southern way of life, then what a strange, deep fascination there is in Mastro-don Gesualdo! Perhaps the deepest nostalgia I have ever felt has been for Sicily, reading Verga. Not for England or anywhere else — for Sicily, the beautiful, that which goes deepest into the blood. It is so clear, so beautiful, so like the physical beauty of the Greek.
Yet the lives of the people all seem so squalid, so pottering, so despicable: like a crawling of beetles. And then, the moment you get outside the grey and squalid walls of the village, how wonderful in the sun, with the land lying apart. And isolated, the people too have some of the old Greek singleness, carelessness, dauntlessness. It is only when they bunch together as citizens that they are squalid. In the countryside, they are portentous and subtle, like the wanderers in the Odyssey. And their relations are all curious and immediate, objective. They are so little aware of themselves, and so much aware of their own effects.
It all depends what you are looking for. Gesualdo’s lifelong love- affair with Diodata is, according to our ideas, quite impossible. He puts no value on sentiment at all: or almost none: again a real Greek. Yet there is a strange forlorn beauty
in it, impersonal, a bit like Rachel or Rebecca. It is of the old, old world, when man is aware of his own belongings, acutely, but only very dimly aware of his own feelings. And feelings you are not aware of, you don’t have.
Gesualdo seems so potent, so full of potency. Yet nothing emerges, and he never says anything. It is the very reverse of the Russian, who talks and talks, out of impotence.
And you have a wretched, realistic kind of tragedy for the end. And you feel, perhaps the book was all about nothing, and Gesualdo wasn’t worth the labour of Verga.
But that is because we are spiritual snobs, and think, because a man can fume with “To be or not to be,” therefore he is a person to be taken account of. Poor Gesualdo had never heard of: To be or not to be, and he wouldn’t have taken any notice if he had. He lived blindly, with the impetuosity of blood and muscles, sagacity and will, and he never woke up to himself. Whether he would have been any the better for waking up to himself, who knows!
A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, by Edward D. McDonald
There doesn’t seem much excuse for me, sitting under a little cedar tree at the foot of the Rockies, looking at the pale desert disappearing westward, with hummocks of shadow rising in the stillness of incipient autumn, this morning, the near pine trees perfectly still, the sunflowers and the purple Michaelmas daisies moving for the first time, this morning, in an invisible breath of breeze, to be writing an introduction to a bibliography.
Books to me are incorporate things, voices in the air, that do not disturb the haze of autumn, and visions that don’t blot the sunflowers. What do I care for first or last editions? I have never read one of my own published works. To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding.
What do I care if “e” is somewhere upside down, or “g” comes from the wrong font? I really don’t.
And when I force myself to remember, what pleasure is there in that? The very first copy of The White Peacock that was ever sent out, I put into my mother’s hands when she was dying. She looked at the outside, and then at the title-page, and then at me, with darkening eyes. And though she loved me so much, I think she doubted whether it could be much of a book, since no one more important than I had written it. Somewhere, in the helpless privacies of her being, she had wistful respect for me. But for me in the face of the world, not much. This David would never get a stone across at Goliath. And why try? Let Goliath alone! Anyway, she was beyond reading my first immortal work. It was put aside, and I never wanted to see it again. She never saw it again.
After the funeral, my father struggled through half a page, and it might as well have been Hottentot.
“And what dun they gi’e thee for that, lad?”
“Fifty pounds, father.”
“Fifty pounds!” He was dumbfounded, and looked at me with shrewd eyes, as if I were a swindler. “Fifty pounds! An’ tha’s niver done a day’s hard work in thy life.”
I think to this day, he looks upon me as a sort of cleverish swindler, who gets money for nothing: a sort of Ernest Hooley. And my sister says, to my utter amazement: “You always were lucky!”
Somehow, it is the actual corpus and substance, the actual paper and rag volume of any of my works, that calls up these personal feelings and memories. It is the miserable tome itself which somehow delivers me to the vulgar mercies of the world. The voice inside is mine for ever. But the beastly marketable chunk of published volume is a bone which every dog presumes to pick with me.
William Heinemann published The While Peacock. I saw hint once; and then I realized what an immense favour he was doing me. As a matter of fact, he treated me quite well.
I remember at the last minute, when the book was all printed and ready to bind: some even bound: they sent me in great haste a certain page with a marked paragraph. Would I remove this paragraph, as it might be considered “objectionable,” and substitute an exactly identical number of obviously harmless words. Hastily I did so. And later, I noticed that the two pages, on one of which was the altered paragraph, were rather loose, not properly bound into the book. Only my mother’s copy had the paragraph unchanged.
I have wondered often if Heinemann’s just altered the “objectionable” bit in the first little batch of books they sent out, then left the others as first printed. Or whether they changed all but the one copy they sent me ahead.
It was my first experience of the objectionable. Later, William Heinemann said he thought Sons and Lovers one of the dirtiest books he had ever read. He refused to publish it. I should not have thought the deceased gentleman’s reading had been so circumspectly narrow.
I forget the first appearance of The Trespasser and Sons and Lovers. I always hide the fact of publication from myself as far as possible. One writes, even at this moment, to some mysterious presence in the air. If that presence were not there, and one thought of even a single solitary actual reader, the paper would remain for ever white.
But I always remember how, in a cottage by the sea, in Italy, I rewrote almost entirely that play, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, right on the proofs which Mitchell Kennerley had sent me. And he nobly forbore with me.
But then he gave me a nasty slap. He published Sons and Lovers in America, and one day, joyful, arrived a cheque for twenty pounds. Twenty pounds in those days was a little fortune: and as it was a windfall, it was handed over to Madame; the first pin-money she had seen. Alas and alack, there was an alteration in the date of the cheque, and the bank would not cash it. It was returned to Mitchell Kennerley, but that was the end of it. He never made good, and never to this day made any further payment for Sons and Lovers. Till this year of grace 1924, America has had that, my most popular book, for nothing — as far as I am concerned.
* In a letter 10 Mr. Edward Garnett, dated April 2s, 1914. Lawrence acknowledges the receip’ ot £35 trom Mr. Mitchell Kennerley. Letters of D. H. Lawrence p. 191 (American edition).
Then came the first edition of The Rainbow. I’m afraid I set my rainbow in the sky too soon, before, instead of after, the deluge. Methuen published that book, and he almost wept before the magistrate, when he was summoned for bringing out a piece of indecent literature. He said he did not know the dirty thing he had been handling, he had not read the work, his reader had misadvised him-and Peccavi! Peccavil wept the now be-knighted gentleman. Then around me arose such a fussy sort of interest, as when a really scandalous bit of scandal is being whispered about one. In print my fellow- authors kept scrupulously silent, lest a bit of the tar might stick to them. Later Arnold Bennett and May Sinclair raised a kindly protest. But John Galsworthy told me, very calmly and ex cathedra, he thought the book a failure as a work of art. They think as they please. But why not wait till I ask them, before they deliver an opinion to me? Especially as impromptu opinions by elderly authors are apt to damage him who gives as much as him who takes.
There is no more indecency or impropriety in The Rainbow than there is in this autumn morning-I, who say so, ought to know. And when I open my mouth, let no dog bark.
So much for the first edition of The Rainbow. The only copy of any of my books I ever keep is my copy of Methuen’s Rainbow. Because the American editions have all been mutilated. And this is almost my favourite among my novels: this, and Women in Love. And I should really be best pleased if it were never reprinted at all, and only those blue, condemned volumes remained extant.
Since The Rainbow, one submits to the process of publication as to a necessary evil: as souls are said to submit to the necessary evil of being born into the flesh. The wind bloweth where it listeth. And one must submit to the processes of one’s day. Personally, I have no belief in the vast public. I believe that only the winnowed few can care. But publishers, like thistle, must set innumerable seeds on the wind, knowing most will miscarry.
To the vast public, the autumn morning is only a sort of stage background against which they can display their own mechanical importance. But to some men still the trees stand up and look around at the daylight, having woven the two e
nds of darkness together into visible being and presence. And soon, they will let go the two ends of darkness again, and disappear. A flower laughs once, and having had his laugh, chuckles off into seed, and is gone. Whence? Whither? Who knows, who cares? That little laugh of achieved being is all.
So it is with books. To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone. First editions or forty-first are only the husks of it.
Yet if it amuses a man to save the husks of the flower that opened once for the first time, one can understand that too. It is like the costumes that men and women used to wear, in their youth, years ago, and which now stand up rather faded in museums. With a jolt they reassemble for us the day-to-day actuality of the bygone people, and we see the trophies once more of man’s eternal fight with inertia.
Max Havelaar, by E. D. Dekker (Multatuli, pseud.)
Max Havelaar was first published in Holland, nearly seventy years ago, and it created a furore. In Germany it was the book of the moment, even in England it had a liberal vogue. And to this day it remains vaguely in the minds of foreigners as the one Dutch classic.
I say vaguely, because many well-read people know nothing about it. Mr. Bernard Shaw, for example, confessed that he had never heard of it. Which is curious, considering the esteem in which it was held by men whom we might call the pre-Fabians, both in England and in America, sixty years ago.
But then Max Havelaar, when it appeared, was hailed as a book with a purpose. And the Anglo-Saxon mind loves to hail such books. They are so obviously in the right. The Anglo-Saxon mind also loves to forget completely, in a very short time, any book with a purpose. It is a bore, with its insistency.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1019