EVEN YET IT CAN'T BE TOLD--THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT D. H. LAWRENCE
About twenty years ago a brilliant, unbalanced, young Austrian Jew
wrote a book, “Sex and Character,” whose purpose was to show that woman
had played a greater rôle in the world than her possessions warranted,
that she was inherently devoid of morality, and that men should cease
to procreate. In the autumn of 1903 its author, Otto Weininger, then
twenty-three years old, shot and killed himself in the house in Vienna
in which Beethoven had died. The author's awful theme and his tragic
end caused the book to be widely read and even more widely discussed.
Amongst those impressed by it was a boy of humble but uncommon
parents, bred in the coal-fields of mid-England where he had led a
strenuous life struggling with the sex question, contending with the
stream of consciousness as it became swollen with the tributaries of
puberty--“Oh, stream of hell which undermined my adolescence.” While
still a youth he felt the influence of another Austrian mystic of the
same faith, Sigmund Freud, who maintains that the unconscious is the
real man, that its energiser and director is the libido, and that
the conscious is the artificed, the engendered man whose tenant and
executive is the ego. By day and by night this exceptionally gifted and
burdened boy took his grist to these two mystic millers. To comfort
himself, to keep up his courage in the dark on his journeys to the mill
and from it, he read the Bible, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Robert
Browning, and the prose of Thomas Hardy. From the Old Testament he got
an unsurpassed capacity for narrative and metaphor, while the “grey
poet” whetted his appetite for worship and exaltation of the human
body. Well might he say of Whitman, as Dante said of Virgil:
“Tu sè'lo mio maestro e il mio autore
Tu sè'solo colui, da cui io tòlsi
Lo bèllo stile che m'à fatto onore.”
Thus D. H. Lawrence, like Jeshurun, waxed fat and kicked, forsook
God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his Salvation.
And he began to pour forth his protest in a series of books, each a
little more lawless than its predecessor, culminating in “The Rainbow.”
The book was suppressed by the Government of his own country, but
the censors of our “free country,” who pronounced “Jurgen” a book
prejudicial to public morals, allowed “The Rainbow” to be published
here. Perhaps that is the reason “Jurgen” has been published in England
without molest. After that, when Mr. Lawrence wished to circulate his
contributions to world-purification and progress, which many call
pornography, he resorted to the camouflage of “published privately for
subscribers only.”
My information is that Mr. Lawrence is not so widely read in the United
States as are many of his contemporaries, Mr. Compton Mackenzie or
Mr. Frank Swinnerton, for example. But there is a Lawrence cult here
and it is growing, particularly amongst those who like to be called
Greenwich Villagers, the breath of whose nostrils is antinomianism,
especially sex antinomianism. Moreover, he has a way of interpolating
between his salacious romances and erotic poetry books of imagination,
observation, and experience, such as “Bay” and “Twilight in Italy,”
that are couched in language whose swing and go few can withstand.
These are replete with descriptions of sense-stirring scenery and
analyses of sex-tortured souls, analyses which give lyric expression
to the passions of the average man, who finds their lurid and ecstatic
depiction diverting. Finally, Mr. Lawrence is striving to say
something--something of sex and self which he believes the world should
know; indeed, which is of paramount importance to it--and his manner
of saying it has been so seductive that there are probably many who,
like myself, have been clinging to him, as it were, buying his books
and reading him with the hope that eventually he would succeed.
The time limit given him by one of his admirers and well-wishers has
expired. In taking leave of him I purpose to set down my reasons for
severing the emotional and intellectual thread that has kept us--even
though so very loosely, and to him, quite unawaredly--together.
This renders unavoidable a line or two about criticism. I accept
Matthew Arnold's estimate of the function of criticism, “to make known
the best that is thought and known in the world,” providing that the
critic also exposes the poor and meretricious which is being palmed
off as “just as good,” or which is bidding for estimate, high or low.
A guide should not only show the traveller upon whose eyes the scales
still rest, or who has set out on a journey before the dawn, the
right road, but he should also warn him of perilous roads and specify
whether the peril is from bandits, broken bridges, or bellowing bulls.
It is needless to say that the guide should have travelled the road
and should know it and its environment well, and that his information
should be recent.
The road that Mr. D. H. Lawrence has been travelling for the past
decade and more, and making the basis for descriptions of his trips, is
well known to me. I have worked upon it, laughed upon it, cried upon it
for more than a quarter of a century. My information of it is recent,
for there, even now, I earn my daily bread. It is the road leading from
Original Sin to the street called Straight. All must travel it. Some
make the journey quickly; some laboriously. Some, those who have morbid
sex-consciousness in one form or another, inadequate or deviate genetic
endowment, are unable to finish the journey at all.
[Illustration: D. H. LAWRENCE]
Mr. Lawrence seems to have learned early that he could not fulfill
his own nature passionately, and he has been struggling all his life to
find the way in which fulfilment lies. It is generally believed that
“Sons and Lovers” is largely autobiographical and that the writer is to
be identified with Paul. In that book he gave ample testimony that he
could not fulfill himself because of the conflict between mother-love
and uxorial love; for we may venture to catalogue Paul's consortional
experiences under that heading, even though he had no marriage lines.
He has never been able to define just how he expected to fulfill his
nature, but one may legitimately conclude from some of his recent
publications that he believes, if the strings of the lyre of sensuality
can be made taut enough and twanged savagely enough, the tone produced
will constitute not only fulfilment and happiness, but an eternity of
ecstasy, a timeless extension of that indescribable exaltation that
Dostoievsky was wont to experience in moments preceding his epileptic
seizures, which is so vividly described by him and which made such
an impression upon his thoughts and so influenced his imagery. Mr.
Lawrence apparently believes that fulfilment will be meditated by one
“who will touch him at last on the root and quicken his darkness and
perish on him as he has perished on her.” When this happens,
“We shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect”;
and,
“After that, there will only remain that all men detach
themselves and become unique Conditioned only by our pure single
being, having no laws but the laws of our own being.”
Finally:
“Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled.”
“Ideas and ideals are the machine plan and the machine
principles of an automatonised Psyche which has been so
prejudicial to human progress and human welfare. We must get
rid of them both.”
In fact, it is a world without ideals for which Mr. Lawrence is
clamouring and which he maintains he is in process of creating. It must
be allowed that he is working industriously to do it, but most people,
I fancy, will continue to believe that his world will not be a fit
place to live in should he be able to finish his task. Meanwhile he
is doing much to make the world less livable than it might otherwise
be, particularly for those who are not competent to judge whether any
of Mr. Lawrence's contentions are tenable or any of his statements in
harmony with the evidence of science.
“Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious” contains more misinformation in
a small space than almost any recent book save the “Cruise of the
Kawa.” It may reasonably be expected that anyone who writes upon
psychoanalysis and the unconscious today and expects a hearing should
know something about biology. But no biologist would accept such
dogmatic statements as
“Life begins now, as always, in an individual living creature.
In the beginning of the individual living creature is the
beginning of life, every time and always. And life has no
beginning apart from this.... There is no assignable and no
logical reason for individuality.”
To give such sentences the semblance of truth there should have
been added, “so far as I know.” It is misleading to follow up such
statements by saying, “having established so much,” etc. A poet may be
permitted to say that “The young bull in the field has a wrinkled and
sad face.” Indeed, he may abandon all morphology and animal behaviour
and make the graceful serpent rest its head upon its shoulder! But the
man who invades the field of science should, at least, practise some
accuracy of expression, even though he give himself the latitude of
poetic license.
“The White Peacock” was Mr. Lawrence's first novel. It was favourably
received. Letty, the principal character, is the trial portrait of all
his later heroines. Her creator, in his youth and inexperience, did
not know how to make her “carry on,” but she is the _anlage_ for all
his female characters, their immoralities and bestialities. Her story
is a simple one. Her mother, a lady of fine character, has been put to
the acid test by the moral defalcation of her father, a drunkard and
wastrel with charm. Leslie, a young man with money and social position,
commonplace, emotionally shallow, spiritually inelastic, unimaginative,
but intelligent and straightforward, wooes the temperamental, volatile,
romantic Letty. The appeal which Leslie did not make to her is made by
George, a young farmer “stoutly built, brown-eyed and fair-skinned,”
whom Letty finds “ruddy, dark and with greatly thrilling eyes” and
whom she calls her bull. Meanwhile George and Letty's brother form
a friendship which is in dimmest outline the prototype of that
extraordinary relationship existing between Gerald Crich and Rupert
Birkin in “Women in Love.”
The book shows the influence of Thomas Hardy, after whom Lawrence
in his early youth sedulously patterned himself. In those days he
was concerned with the photographic description of rustic scenes and
particularly the lives of farmers and miners--which he knew from
experience--and showed a sensitive appreciation of natural beauty.
But the interest of the book is in the fact that it contains trial
pictures of most of his later characters. George is Tom Brangwen of
“The Rainbow”; Leslie, grown up and more arrogant, is Gerald in “Women
in Love” and Gerald Barlow in “Touch and Go”; Cyril, more experienced
and daring, is called Rupert Birkin when he is introduced again. In
all of Lawrence's books the same characters appear. They vary only
in having different standards and different degrees of immorality.
The environment is always the same--a mining town; a countryside
pitted with collieries; farms teeming with evidence of vegetable and
animal life which is described with such intensity that the reader
feels he is witnessing a new era of creation; mean drab houses; and
squalid pubs. Into these and the schoolhouses and churches he puts his
sex-tortured men and hyper-sexed women and surges them with chaotic
vehemence of invitation and embrace and with the aches, groans, and
shrieks of amorous love.
His second novel, “The Trespassers,” shows the author to have, in
addition to a sensitive and impassioned apprehension of nature, great
capacity for describing the feelings of commonplace people. Helena,
headstrong, determined, emancipated, self-sufficient, falls in love
with her music teacher, Sigmund, a man of forty who had married when
seventeen a matter-of-fact young woman who gave him many children which
he ill-supported while she slaved and became sour and slatternly.
Helena notices that Sigmund is tired and suggests that they spend a few
days together in the Isle of Wight. She makes the plans, finds a nice
motherly person who will take them into her cottage more for company
than money, and, though this seems to be her first adventure, she acts
with the certainty which attends experience. The scenery and tools
that Mr. Lawrence uses so skilfully are all here: moonlight and its
effect to produce ecstasy; bathing and lying naked on the sand or the
grass and gazing approvingly at the body; lovely flowers and plants;
and above all, a knowledge of the effects of baffled eroticism, of
collision between primitive simple passion and artificial fantasying
aberrant passion. Like Hermione Roddice of “Women in Love,” Helena's
genetic instincts are abnormal. She has her Louisa, ten years her
senior, whom she treats with indifference, cruelty, or affection, as it
pleases her. Early in the history of man the prototype of Helena and
Hermione was known. Shuah's second son, it is alleged, was the first
example. The Lord slew Onan as soon as he deliberately violated the
first and most essential principle of nature, but this drastic measure
did not eradicate the biologic aberration, for it has displayed itself
in the human species from that day to this, and even today gives more
concern to parents and pedagogues than any other instinct deviation.
Fortunately novelists, until the advent of Mr. Lawrence, have not
featured this infirmity.
Even in these juvenile days, Mr. Lawrence left very little to the
imagination. Helena and Sigmund, lying on the cold wet beach in the
twilight, enveloped in the Scotch mist (parenthetically it may be
said that his heroes and heroines are wholly insensitive to bodily
discomfort when they are in the throes of concupiscence) were
practising the “Overture to Love,”
“and when Helena drew her lips away she was much exhausted.
She belonged to that class of dreaming women with whom passion
exhausts itself at the mouth. Her desire was accomplished in a
real kiss. She then wanted to go to sleep. She sank away from
his caresses, passively, subtly drew back from him.”
The next morning Sigmund goes into the sea, and this gives the author
opportunity to display the burning passion which the sight and
contemplation of the male human body seems to cause in him.
“He glanced at his wholesome maturity, the firm plaiting of
his breasts, the full thighs, creatures proud in themselves,
and said 'She ought to be rejoiced at me, but she is not. She
rejects me as if I were a baboon under my clothing.'”
When Mr. Lawrence convinced himself that he could write a more
panoplied description of erotic ecstasy than that with which he
afflicted Helena, he wrote the description of Ursula's encounter with
the moon in “The Rainbow.” Indeed the real motive of “The Trespassers”
is a trial portrait of Ursula; and while making up his mind as to
the size of the canvas and the colours that he would use in painting
that modern Messalina, Mr. Lawrence gave the world “Sons and Lovers,”
which more than any other of his books, gave him a reputation for an
understanding of the strange blood bonds that unite families and human
beings, and for having an unusual, almost exquisite discrimination in
the use of language.
From boyhood Mr. Lawrence seems to have been possessed of a demon who
whispered to him by day and shrieked to him by night, “Be articulate,
say it with words,” and the agony of his impotence is heartrending,
as frustration after frustration attends his efforts. He tries it
in prose, then in verse. Gradually, from taking thought, from sex
experience and from hasty perusal of scientific and mystic literature,
there formulated in his mind a concrete thought, which in time
engendered a conviction, finally an obsession. A brief exposition of
the mental elaboration and the Laocoon grip that it took on him follows:
The Greeks, fanning the embers of Egyptian civilisation and getting no
fire for their torch, said,
“Let there be an ideal to which all mankind shall bow the knee.
Let consciousness and all its manifestations be expressed in
terms of ideals and ideas or in conduct that expresses them, and
finally let everything that tends to hinder such expression,
such as the sensual and animal in man be subdued and repressed.”
Christianity went a step further and said,
“Not only shall ideals be exalted, but pure spirituality and
perfection--man's goal--can only be obtained by the annihilation
of what are called Animal Instincts.”
[Illustration: D. H. LAWRENCE] From a drawing by _Jan Juta._
Christianity's promoters and well-wishers realised, however, that
the continuance of the race depended upon the gratification of these
appetites, and so laws and conventions were made under whose operation
they could be legitimately indulged, there being small hope that the
wish expressed by Sir Thomas Browne, the author of “Religio Medici” and
a flock of children, that man might procreate as do the trees, should
ever be gratified. In civilised lands the conquest of the lower self
has been objective. Man has moved from a great impulse within himself,
the unconscious. Once the conquest has been effected, the conscious
mind turns, looks, and marvels:
“E come quei che con lena affannata
Uscito fuor del pelago alla riva,
Si volge all'acqua perigliosa, e guata.”
This self-conscious mental provoking of sensation and reaction in the
great affective centres is called sentimentalism or sensationalism.
The mind returns upon the affective centres and sets up in them a
deliberate reaction. These are passions exploited by the mind. Or the
passional motive may act directly, and not from the mental provocation,
and these reactions may be reflected by a secondary process down into
the body. This is the final and most fatal effect of idealism, because
it reduces everything to self-consciousness into spuriousness, and it
is the madness of the world today. It is this madness that Mr. Lawrence
has sworn to cure. He is going to do it by conquering what he calls
the lower centres, by submitting the lowest plane to the highest.
When this is done there will be nothing more to conquer. Then all is
one, all is love, even hate is love, even flesh is spirit. The great
oneness, the experience of infirmity, the triumph of the living spirit,
which at last includes everything, is then accomplished. Man becomes
whole, his knowledge becomes complete, he is united with everything.
Mr. Lawrence has mapped out a plan of the sympathetic nervous system
and has manipulated what biologists call the tropisms in such a way as
to convince himself that he has laid the scientific foundation for his
work, but as there is scarcely a page or paragraph in his little book
that does not contain statements which are at variance with scientific
facts, it is unnecessary to say that his science will not assist him
in his propaganda nearly so much as his fiction. Like Weininger, he
finally eliminates women. As he puts it: “Acting from the last and
profoundest centres, man acts womanless.” It is no longer a question
of race continuance. It is a question of sheer ultimate being, the
perfection of life nearest to death and yet furthest away from it.
Acting from these centres man is an extreme being, the unthinkable
warrior, creator, mover, and maker. “And the polarity is between man
and man.”
That sentence contains to him who can read it aright the whole truth of
Mr. D. H. Lawrence. To some that brief statement has the luminousness
and significance of the writing on the wall. Anyone who reads Mr.
Lawrence's later books attentively--and I appreciate that it is some
task to do it--will understand it; and those who, like myself, have
devoted themselves to study of aberrations, genesic and mental, as they
display themselves in geniuses, psychopaths, and neuropaths, as well as
in ordinary men, will sense it correctly.
Mr. Lawrence thinks there are three stages in the life of man: the
stage of sexless relations between individuals, families, clans, and
nations; the stage of sex relations with an all-embracing passional
acceptance, culminating in the eternal orbit of marriage; and finally,
the love between comrades, the manly love which only can create a new
era of life. One state does not annul the other; it fulfills the other.
Such, in brief, is the strange venture in psychopathy Mr. Lawrence
is making, and contributions to it up to date are “Women in Love,”
“Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious,” and “Aaron's Rod.” “The Prussian
Officer,” “The Rainbow,” “The Lost Girl,” “Look, We Have Come Through”
were merely efforts to get his propaganda literature into shape.
The Adam and Eve of Mr. Lawrence's new creation are Tom Brangwen and
his wife; and to understand their descendants (and no one, not even
Mr. Lawrence, can understand them fully) one must study the parents.
Tom, the youngest of the Brangwen family, as a boy is rather heavy
and stupid intellectually, sensitive to the atmosphere around him,
brutal perhaps, but at the same time delicate, very delicate. He does
not get on in school, so he leaves precipitously when he is fifteen,
after having laid open the master's head with a slate, but not before
he has formed a masochistic friendship with a warm clever frail boy.
Sex desire begins soon to torment him. His first experience causes his
sensibilities to rebel, and the second is a failure because of his
self-consciousness and the dominancy of a budding inferiority complex.
He is on the way to anæsthetising desire by brandy drinking, to which
he periodically gives himself, when one day he meets on the street a
demure lady whose curious absorbed flitting motion arrests him and
causes a joy of pain to run through him.
“She had felt Tom go by almost as if he had brushed her. She
had tingled in body as she had gone up on the road. Her impulse
was strong against him because he was not of her sort. But one
blind instinct led her to take him, to have him, and then to
relinquish herself to him. It would be safety. Also he was young
and very fresh.”
Her passional reactions are not from the mind. They are spontaneous
and know no inhibition. After a second quite casual meeting, Tom
goes to the vicarage where she, a Polish lady, is housekeeper since
her husband, a doctor obliged to leave his country for political
reasons, had died and left her and her baby daughter in dire want.
“Good evening,” says Tom, “I'll just come in a minute”; and having
entered, he continues, “I came up to ask if you'd marry me.” He
arouses an intensity of passion in her that she cannot, or wishes
not, to withstand. But Tom is conventional and so they are married.
The description of his marital lust is lurid to the last degree, and
finally after one great debauch “he felt that God had passed through
the married pair and made Himself known to them.” Tom is largely brawn
and brute, though he has a vein of sentiment, and finally he yields
to drink and meets a violent death, leaving two sons, a namesake who
is attracted to his own sex, Fred who suffers the tortures of a
mother-sapped spirit, and Anna, his stepdaughter.
Anna hates people who come too near her until she meets Will Brangwen,
the son of Tom's brother who had flagrantly offended matrimonial
convention. She is fascinated by this æsthetic serious self-satisfied
youth with a high-pitched voice, who sings tenor and who is interested
in church architecture and ritualism. Anna hurls herself at Will's head
and tells him in no uncertain tones of her all-consuming love before
he makes any protests. She arranges the wheat shocks in the moonlight
so that they will propitiate her purpose, but only passionate caresses
and a proposal of marriage result. This disappoints her, but the men
of the Brangwen family, though consumed with elemental passion, are
sex-slackers compared with the women. Will goes into states of ecstasy
sitting motionless and timeless, contemplating stained-glass windows
and other religious symbols, and she hates him violently.
“In the gloom and mystery of the church his soul lived and ran
free, like some strange, underground thing, abstract. In this
spirit he seemed to escape and run free of her.”
They are happy only when in the throes of conjugality. She is
profoundly fecund and has periods of ecstasy when she thinks God has
chosen her to prove the miracle of creation. In her exaltation, big
with child as she is, she dances naked in her bedroom, to the Creator
to Whom she belongs.
In order to develop the now widely disseminated Freudian ideas about
the love of the eldest girl for the father, the antagonism between the
mother and daughter, etc., Will falls in love with his oldest child,
Ursula. “His heart grew red-hot with passionate feeling for the child”
when she is about a year old. “Her father was the dawn wherein her
consciousness woke up wide-eyed, unseeing, she was awakened too soon.”
The writer, master as he is of the mysteries of perversion, uses this
sympathy and Will's extrauxorial vagaries and wanderings to cause,
vicariously, a welling-up of passion in Anna. After a revolting scene
with a grisette, Will goes home to his wife who immediately detects
that there is a change in him, that he has had a new experience. She
is excited to wild lubricity, and “he got an inkling of the vastness
of the unknown sensual store of delight she was.” But this is the book
of Ursula. The spontaneous passions of the grandmother and mother are
incidental.
Ursula goes through with the son of the old Polish clergyman Baron the
same sort of experience that her father went through with the flapper
that he picked up at the movie, only not with such _slancio_. The
purpose of this episode is to point out the intensity of love in the
female and her clamour for the dominant male. When Ursula finds that
Skrebensky is a slacker,
“She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two
breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a
quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the
moon. She wanted the moon to fill into her, she wanted more,
more communion with the moon, consummation.”
Since Ursula has not met the one-hundred-per-cent male, and as “her
sexual life flamed into a kind of disease within her,” Mr. Lawrence now
brings her into relations with a finely portrayed Lesbian, Winifred
Inger. The description of their first real contact in the bungalow at
night and their night bath is willfully and purposely erotic. Ursula,
tired of Winifred, plans to marry her to her uncle, Tom. When they meet
“he detected in her a kinship with his own dark corruption. Immediately
he knew they were akin.” One might safely say that Mr. Lawrence had
before him, or in his mind's eye, when he penned the description of
Tom, the photograph of one of his fellow-poets of a generation ago whom
the English public found necessary to put in the Reading Gaol.
“His manner was polite, almost foreign, and rather cold.
He still laughed in his curious, animal fashion, suddenly
wrinkling up his wide nose, and showing his sharp teeth. The
fine beauty of his skin and his complexion, some almost waxen
quality, hid the strange, repellant grossness of him, the slight
sense of putrescence, the commonness which revealed itself in
his rather fat thighs and loins.”
It is in the chapter “The Bitterness of Ecstasy” that Mr. Lawrence
takes off the brakes. In London, whither she has gone with Skrebensky,
Ursula decides to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. She goes about it in
the conventional Brangwen way by biting him, clawing him, and generally
tearing him to pieces. It seems good to him and he likes her and wants
to marry her. One day, after they have had some tall bouts of love at
Richmond, she tells him that she won't marry him and he has a grand
crisis of hysteria. She is sorry she has hurt him. She hails a cab and
takes the sobbing wooer home, and the lecherous cabby is moved nearly
to violence by the radiation of passion from Ursula. She senses danger
and persuades Tony to walk. She knows then that he is but a simulacrum
of man, and when she has gone home she decides that she will not marry.
Finally, however, she gives in and the date is more or less arranged.
Then comes the _grande finale_ with the scene wonderfully set in the
moonlight by the seashore. There she makes an onslaught on him that is
tigress-like to the last degree, throws him on the sand, devours him,
wrings him like a dirty rag, shows him that he is no good, and hurls
him from her, a sucked lemon. He sneaks away and offers himself to his
Colonel's daughter, is accepted, and is off to India, leaving “the need
of a world of men for her.”
Then comes “The Rainbow,” a parody of Freud's exposition of the dream
of being trampled upon by horses. Ursula finds after a time that the
customary result has followed her experiences, so she writes a letter
to Skrebensky saying she'll be good and go out and marry him. She goes
for a walk in the mist and the rain, into the wood where the trees
are all phallic symbols “thrust like stanchions upright between the
roaring overhead and the sweeping of the circle underfoot.” She begins
to hallucinate, to feel her subconsciousness take possession of her,
and the sight of a group of horses fills her bestial soul with a hope
that she might finally be possessed in such a way as would give her
satisfaction, that she might get “some fantastic fulfilment in her
life.” She goes into a state of delirium and several weeks later, when
it has passed, she finds that she has miscarried. This is followed by
a mild dementia; she thinks she is moral and will be good, but as she
gets strong she sees the rainbow, which is Eros kindling the flames
again.
“And 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 fragment of Truth, fitting to the
overarching heaven.”
Mr. Lawrence, exhausted with the perpetration of these sensual delights
and disappointed with the distrusts of the flesh, turned for a short
time to nature to refresh his spirit and bathe his soul. He sensed
frustration despite the unleashment of passion; he realised that
sublimation had eluded him, and so he turned to primitive life and
primitive people, the peasants of Italy. Soon his torments began to
creep up again in “Twilight in Italy.” The roused physical sensations
will not subside. They penetrate pastoral scenes and emanate from
sylvan scenery.
After having refreshed himself, he gave the world “The Lost Girl,”
whose genesic aberrations are comparatively mild, and whose antics
with the half-gipsy, half-circus folk are rather amusing. Some of Mr.
Lawrence's early admirers were encouraged to look for his reformation,
especially after the appearance of a thin book of poems entitled “Bay.”
Even in this, here and there, the inhibited and mother-sapped spirit
crops out, as in the poem called “The Little Town in the Evening,” but
for the most part the verses are founded on sane ideas, even ideals,
truths, and morality. Most of them are poems of the war, wonderful pen
pictures and silhouettes, such as “Town,” a London transformed by the
war as no picture or prose description could render it, ending,
“It is well,
That London, lair of sudden
Male and female darknesses
Has broken her spell.”
In previous volumes of poems, particularly in “Amores” and in “Look,
We Have Come Through,” he had published verse which was highly
appraised by competent critics, and hailed by a small group steeped in
preciosity, as epoch-making. However, if most of his poems have any
central or dominant idea, he is unable to express it. They are the
verbal manifestations of moods expressed symbolically, allegorically;
of sensuous desires, satisfactions, and satieties “seeking polarity,”
to borrow his favourite expression. Nearly everything is passion with
Mr. Lawrence, or suggestive of passion. The pure lily is a phallic
symbol, the bee sucking honey from a flower is a ravisher of innocence,
the earth itself bursts asunder periodically in the throes of secret
sensuality. Only the sea is free from the trammels of lust, and it is
“Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness
Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life's going.”
“New Poems,” published in this country in 1920, did not fame or defame
him, although “Piano,” “Intime,” “Sickness,” and “Twenty Years Ago”
might well have done the former, and “Seven Seals” the latter.
The lull did not last long, and it was only a lull before a storm,
a hurricane, a tornado which spent its force and destruction upon
the author and made him the outlaw, if not the outcast, of English
literature. “Women in Love” is the adventure of two sisters, Ursula
and Gudrun Brangwen, the Brangwens whose frightful passions we have
now known for three generations, and two men of breeding, wealth,
and culture, Gerald Crich, a Sadist by inheritance and natural
inclination, and Rupert Birkin, an intellectual, apparently male, but
contradicted in this by his instinct and by his conduct, whose purpose
and ambition is to fall into the long African process of purely sensual
understanding.
The portrait of Rupert Birkin is superb. No excerpt could convey Mr.
Lawrence's capacity for characterisation as well as the paragraph which
describes him:
“He was thin, pale and ill-looking. His figure was narrow but
nicely made. He went with a slight trail of one foot, which
came only from self-consciousness. His nature was clever and
separate. He did not fit at all in the conventional occasion.
He affected to be quite ordinary, perfectly and marvellously
commonplace. And he did it so well, taking the tone of his
surroundings, adjusting himself quickly to his interlocutor and
his circumstance, that he achieved a verisimilitude of ordinary
commonplaceness that usually propitiated his onlookers for a
moment, disarmed them from attacking his singleness. He did not
believe in any standards of behaviour though they are necessary
for the common ruck. Anyone who is anything can be just himself
and do as he likes. One should act spontaneously on one's
impulses--it's the only gentlemanly thing to do, provided you
are fit to do it.”
Hermione Roddice, daughter of a Derbyshire baron, a tall slow reluctant
woman, with a weight of fair hair and pale long face that she carries
lifted up in the Rossetti fashion, and that seems almost drugged as if
a strange mass of thoughts coil in the darkness within her allowing her
no escape, is in love with him. “She needed conjunction with Rupert
Birkin to make her whole and, she believed, happy. But the more she
strove to bring him to her, the more he battled her back.”
Gerald Crich, whose gleaming beauty and maleness is like a young
good-natured smiling wolf, flashes upon Gudrun Brangwen and she
succumbs at once, just as the Polish lady did when Gudrun's grandfather
got sight of her from the tail of his eye. The first time Gerald and
Rupert meet “There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men
that was very near to love.” Going up in the train to London together,
they have a talk about ideals, the object and aim of life. This gives
Rupert time to formulate his thought that Humanity does not embody the
utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter.
There will be a new embodiment in a new way. Let humanity disappear as
quickly as possible. They are introduced into bohemia; that is, the
haunts of the semi-abandoned and the perverted. Birkin shares a flat
with Halliday, a degenerate “with a moving beauty of his own,” and his
friends. Just how far this group expresses Mr. Lawrence's own views
of art and philosophy, in their discussion of wood carvings of the
primitive negroes of West Africa, we need not attempt to estimate, but
that need not deter us from saying that the description of a gathering
around the fireplace in a state of complete nudity is indecent and
disgusting, even though Mr. Lawrence thinks this kind of thing marks a
milestone on the way to that which he calls “Allness.”
A large portion of the book is, in my judgment, obscene, deliberately,
studiously, incessantly obscene. Obscenity, like everything else, has
its gradations, its intensities, its variations, and the author of this
book knows how to ring the changes upon obscenity in a way that would
make Aretino green with envy. For instance, the so-called wrestling
scene between Rupert and Gerald is the most obscene narrative that I
have encountered in the English language--obscene in the etymological
sense, for it is ill-omened, hence repulsive; and in the legal sense,
for it tends to corrupt the mind and to subvert respect for decency
and morality. The major part of Hermione's conduct with Rupert is in
the realm of perversion, and Rupert in his speech to her conveys by
innuendo what Mr. Lawrence knows the laws of his country would not
permit him to say directly. The Marquis de Sade was a mere novice
in depicting the transports of lust that result from inflicting
injury or causing humiliation compared with Mr. Lawrence; and as for
Sacher-Masoch, who worked on the other side of the shield, he merely
staked out the claim for a young Britisher to cultivate.
Hermione says that if we could only realise that in the spirit we are
all one, all equal in spirit, all brothers there, the rest would not
matter. There would then be no more struggle for power and prestige,
the things which now destroy. This drives Rupert to violence. He denies
it savagely. We are alike in everything _save_ spirit. In the spirit he
is as separate as one star from another; as different in quality and
quantity. Establish a state on that. This destroys the last vestige of
Hermione's restraint and facilitates the consummation of voluptuous
ecstasy at last. With a beautiful ball of lapis lazuli, a paper weight,
she smashes his skull while he is sitting in her boudoir.
A second blow would have broken his neck had he not shied it with a
volume of Thucydides (a deft touch to make the immortal Greek save the
prototype of the Superman that Mr. Lawrence is introducing while he
buries Greek idealism).
“She must smash it, it must be smashed before her ecstasy was
consummated, fulfilled forever. A thousand lives, a thousand
deaths matters nothing now, only the fulfilment of this perfect
ecstasy.”
But he gets away from her.
“Then she staggered to the couch, and lay down, and went heavily to
sleep”; and he wanders into the wet hillside that is overgrown and
obscure with bushes and flowers. Here Mr. Lawrence gives a classic
description of masochistic lust.
“He took off his clothes and sat down naked among the primroses
... but they were too soft. He went through the long grass to
a clump of young fir trees, that were no higher than a man.
The soft-sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs
against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly,
and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles.
There was a thistle which pricked him vividly, but not too much,
because all his movements were discriminate and soft. To lie
down and roll in the sticky young hyacinths, to lie on one's
belly and cover one's back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft
as a breath, softer and more delicate and more beautiful than
the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thighs against
the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel
the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and
then to clasp the silvery birch trunk against one's breast, its
smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges--this was
good, this was all very good, very satisfying.”
And this is the man who Mr. Lawrence would have us believe was
Inspector of Schools in England in the beginning of the Twentieth
Century! The idea that he wants a woman is now absurd. This is his idea
of bliss. He knows where to plant himself, his seed: along with the
trees in the folds of the delicious fresh-growing leaves. This is his
place, his marriage place.
It may interest Mr. Lawrence to know that this procreative idea of
Birkin's is not original with him. Many years ago I encountered a
man in the Kings Park State Hospital who was of the same belief and
addicted to the same practice.
It would not be convincing if only æsthetes, intelligentsia, artists,
and the like had revolutionary ideas. Gerald, a man of business, an
executive, a coal baron, aggressive, capable, also had them, inherited
from his mother, acquired from Birkin and “made in Germany” where he
had been sent to school. He makes love to Ursula by expounding his
theories of life:
“If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would
go on so marvellously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one
of the mistakes of creation--like the ichthyosauri. If only we
were gone again, think what lovely things would come out of the
liberated days; things straight out of the fire.”
He wants her without contract, understood or stated:
“There is a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond
responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there
I should want to meet you--not in the emotional, loving
plane--but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms
of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two
utterly strange creatures. I should want to approach you and
you me.--And there could be no obligation, because there is no
standard for action there, because no understanding has been
reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman--so there can be no
calling to book, in any form whatsoever--because one is outside
the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One
can only follow the impulse, take that which lies in front, and
responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only
each taking according to the primal desire.”
In other words, sheer savagery, and the worst African variety at that!
One of Mr. Lawrence's obsessions is that he can distinguish between
the sexual writhings of his characters, depending upon the environment
in which they writhe and the immediate exciting cause. This justifies
him in describing the same writhe over and over with a different
setting. Of the five hundred pages, at least one hundred are devoted
to descriptions of the sensations that precede and accompany ecstasy
provoked and induced by some form of unhealthy sexual awareness.
It is impossible to give even a brief synopsis of “Women in Love.” One
chapter, however, must be mentioned, for in a way it is the crux of the
book. For some time Birkin has been trying to state his case to Ursula
and stave off her clamour for consummation. He wants sex to revert
to the level of the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional
process, not as fulfilment. He wants her to give him her spirit.
“He knew he did not want further sensual experience, he thought.
His mind reverted to the African statues in Halliday's rooms.
They displayed their thousand upon thousand of years of sensual
knowledge, purely unspiritual. Thousands of years ago that
which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these
Africans. This is what was imminent in him; the goodness, the
holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness
must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge in
one sort, mindless, progressive knowledge through the senses,
knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in
disintegration and dissolution. Is the day of our creative life
finished or are we not ready for the sensual understanding, the
knowledge in the mystery of dissolution? The man Ursula would
take must be quaffed to the dregs by her, he must render himself
up to her. She believed that love surpassed the individual. She
believed in an absolute surrender to love. He didn't.”
They then have a violent verbal altercation in which Ursula tells
him what she thinks of his obscenity and perverseness in words that
admit of no misunderstanding. She then leaves him in a state of wrath
and resentment after having thrown the topaz engagement ring, bought
from a second-hand dealer, in his face. But her ardour conquers her
righteousness and she goes back to him, saying, “See what a flower I
found you.” And then it is settled quietly and as if they were normal
humans. They go to a hotel and there they have super-corporeal contact
that beggars description. As far as can be made out, there is no
consortion in the ordinary sense. It is neither love nor passion.
“She had established a rich new circuit, a new current of
passional electric energy, between the two of them released
from the darkest poles of the body and established in
perfect circuit, and she had done this in some mysterious
ways by tracing the back of his thighs with her sensitive
fingertips, his mysterious loins and his thighs. Something more
mystically-physically satisfying than anything she had imagined
or known--though she had had some experience--was realised. She
had thought that there was no source deeper than the phallic
source, but now from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs
came the flood of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches.”
They laughed and went to the meal provided. And this is what they had:
“There was a venison pasty, of all things, a large broad-faced
cut ham, eggs and cresses, and red beet root, and medlars and
apple tart, and tea.”
There is a deep, dark significance in this meal, which the Freudian
will understand perfectly, but which to the uninitiated will seem quite
meaningless, even after Ursula says, “What _good_ things. How noble it
looks.”
There is a lot more about the full mystic knowledge that she gets from
his suave loins of darkness, the strange, magical current of force in
his back and his loins, that fills with nausea. They finish by driving
to Sherwood Forest, taking all their clothes off and beginning anew
their effort for fulfilment.
“She was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence
of mystic, palpable, real utterance.”
I have neither the strength nor the inclination to follow Gudrun in her
search for her amatory _Glückeritter_, or to hear further exposition of
the _credo_ of the strange freak of nature that Mr. Lawrence strives
to apotheosise. Suffice it to say that the precious quartette go off
to the Tyrol, Ursula and Birkin having gone through the formality of
marriage; Gudrun and Gerald dispensing with it. And there Gudrun begins
writhings which are designed to put all the others in the shade. And in
a way they do, because Gerald's violent death is required to facilitate
her supreme moment. They introduce a super-degenerate Loerke, a
sculptor, who represents the rock bottom of all life to Gudrun.
“There was the look of a little wastrel about him that intrigued
her, and an old man's look, that interested her, and then,
besides this, an uncanny singleness, that marked out an artist
to her. He had come up from a street Arab. He was twenty-six,
had thieved, sounded every depth. He saw in Gudrun his
soul-mate. He knew her with a subconscious, sinister knowledge,
devoid of illusions and hopes. The degradation of his early
life also attracted her. He seemed to be the very stuff of
the underworld of life. There was no going beyond him. Birkin
understood why they should like him, the little obscene monster
of the darkness that he is. He is a Jew who lives like a rat, in
the river of corruption.”
Birkin and Ursula come back for Gerald's funeral. Birkin does some
soliloquising, the burden of which is “He should have loved me. I
offered him.” He is sure Gerald would have been happy if he had
accepted. When Ursula wants to know if she is not enough for him, he
says,
“No, to make life complete, really complete, I wanted eternal
union with a man too, another kind of love.”
“It is a perversity,” she said.
“Well----,” he said.
“You can't have two kinds of love. Why should you?” she said.
“It seems as if I can't,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.”
“You can't have it because it's wrong, impossible,” she said.
“I don't believe that,” he answered.
And that is the unvarying and final answer of the advocates of the
enigmatic aberration whose doctrines Mr. Lawrence is trying to foist
upon an unsuspecting English-reading public.
In “Aaron's Rod” Mr. Lawrence returns to the theme of “The Rainbow”
and “Women in Love.” His ardour, fortunately, has cooled somewhat, but
his psychology is more at variance with facts and his philosophy more
mystic than in either of these. Aaron Sisson, a miner's checkweighman,
with a talent for music, marries when twenty, an over-sexed young woman
of better social position than himself. Though he soon betrays her,
they manage to live, with their three children, an average family life
for twelve years. He then determines that he will not be the instrument
and furnisher of any woman. He rebels against the sacrament by which we
live today; namely, that man is the giver, woman the receiver. He can
not and will not tolerate the life centrality of woman. Man's contact
with woman should be for procreational purposes, but man should blend
his spirit with man: “Born in him was a spirit which could not worship
woman, and would not.”
So he sets up the Christmas tree for the children, goes out to buy
candles for it, and never returns. Instead, he falls in with a
family group of inverts which the little mining towns always seem to
have--a man of perverted type; his fiancée, a Lesbian, the daughter
of a promiscuous Hermione and her complaisant husband; and several
others--and they proceed to have a mild orgy in the ugly midland
mining town, “in which it is remarkable how many odd or extraordinary
people there are to be found.” Aaron gets a position as flutist in an
orchestra, and at the opera he meets Mr. Lilly, who, though married, is
by nature of inverted genesic instinct. He is Aaron's downfall.
It is to be noted that there is a deep symbolism in the names that
Mr. Lawrence selects for his heroes and heroines. Aaron is sure
that he never wanted to surrender himself to his wife, nor to his
mother, nor to anybody. But he falls ill, and Lilly cares for him and
nurses him like a mother, and then goes off to Italy--Aaron after
him like a hound after the scent. We are introduced to a choice lot
of males in Florence, all portraits of exiled Britishers who find
it suits their tastes, which their country calls their infirmities,
to live there, and easily recognisable by anyone who has lived in
Florence. We are regaled with their philosophy and with Mr. Lawrence's
reflections on art and Sixteenth Century music. Finally, to show
Aaron's charm and concupiscense, the author throws a modern brooding
Cleopatra--Anthony-less--across his path. She is an American woman
from the Southern States whose father was once Ambassador to France.
Aaron capitulates at the second interview and then despises himself.
But again he falls a few days later, and then he realises that there
is nothing left for him but flight, flight to Lilly and abandonment of
the love idea and the love motive. Life submission is his duty now,
and when he looks up into Lilly's face, at the moment resembling a
Byzantine Eikon, and asks, “And to whom shall I submit?” the reply
comes, “Your soul will tell you.”
And my soul tells me that he who submits himself to reading the
doctrines promulgated by D. H. Lawrence deserves his punishment.
Moreover, I maintain that, both from the artistic and the psychological
standpoints, Mr. Lawrence's performances are those of a neophyte and a
duffer. He can make words roar and sing and murmur, and by so doing he
can make moral, poised, God-fearing, sentiment-valuing man creep and
shudder, indeed, almost welcome the obscurity of the grave, so that he
will not have to meet his fellow again in the flesh. He libels and he
bears false witness against man. There are persons in the world such
as Mr. Lawrence describes. So are there lepers and lunatics. We do not
talk about them as if the whole world were made up of them; and we do
not confidently look for world reformers or world orderers among them.
Mr. Lawrence is a self-appointed crusader who is going to destroy
European civilisation and at the same time revivify that of six
thousand and more years ago. He is the most shining avatar of mysticism
the Twentieth Century has yet produced, and the most daring champion
of atavism in twenty centuries. He is using a medium to facilitate his
manifestations and embodiments of which he is a consummate master,
viz., fiction. But his statements, both when he uses the language of
science, and when he uses that of fiction, are at variance with truth
and fact; and he has not furnished, nor can he furnish, a particle
of evidence to substantiate his thesis: enhancement of the awareness
and potency “of that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind” by
sensuous satisfaction or through sexual ecstasy. His “broodings and
delightings in the secret of life's goings” are anathema.
During the past decade biology has accumulated a convincing amount of
evidence to show that sex intergrades, or imperfect sex separation and
differentiation frequently exist, and furthermore it may be produced
experimentally. These facts justify the belief that individuals
with the convictions and conduct of Birkin result from a definite
developmental condition, which is the fundamental cause of the peculiar
sex reactions. Such persons are actually different from fully expressed
males or females, and their peculiar condition is permanent, present
from childhood to old age, and uninfluenceable by any measures;
pedagogy or punishment, mandate or medicine.
My experience as a psychologist and alienist has taught me that
pornographic literature is created by individuals whose genesic
endowment is subnormal _ab initio_, or exhausted from one cause or
another before nature intended that it should be, and that those who
would aid God and nature in the ordering of creation are sterile, or
approximately so. This is a dispensation for which we cannot be too
grateful.
There are two ways of contemplating Mr. Lawrence's effort. Has he a
fairly clear idea of what he is trying to say, of what he is trying
to put over; or is he a poetic mystic groping in abysmal darkness? I
am one of those who is convinced that he knows just what he wants to
accomplish, and that he could make a statement of it in language that
anyone could understand, did the censor permit him. Public opinion
is adequate to deal with the infractions of taste and ethics that he
has perpetrated, and it is quite safe to leave him finally to that
judiciary.
Mr. Lawrence once wrote, “The Americans are not worthy of their
Whitman. Miracle that they have not annihilated every word of him.” To
which I would make rejoinder, “The Britishers have not deserved D. H.
Lawrence. Pity it is that they do not annihilate every trace of him.”
Ten years have gone since Henry James, walking up and down the charming
garden of his picturesque villa in Rye, discussing the most promising
successors of Hardy, Meredith, and Conrad, said to me, “The world is
sure to hear from a young man, D. H. Lawrence.” It has heard from him.
He has sown in glory and raised in corruption. He has triumphed,
and his triumph has stained English literature. He has debased an
unusual talent and devoted his splendid endowment of artistry to
spoking the wheel of evolutionary progress, even to spinning it in a
reverse direction. He has arrived, and in arriving has brought with
him a sweltering, suffocating South African atmosphere, difficult
and dangerous for one of his former admirers to breathe, who as he
withdraws from it ventures to call the attention of others to its
noxiousness.