Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton, editor
Mornings in Mexico, D. H. Lawrence
Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence
Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer
"The world is as it is. I am as I am. We don't fit very well." (to Catherine Carswell, May 18, 1924)
He fit not at all, not anywhere. His life was a dizzying procession through temporary lodgings, perennial poverty, ill-health, and flashes of writing, sometimes brilliant, sometimes not so much. The letters--seven volumes of them--are wonderful, better than the novels, none of which moved me when I first read them in college, but all of which have shown me more as I began to reread them in my eighth decade. (So much is revealed that was kept hidden when we were young; then I read to understand myself, now I read to understand others). Best are the travel books. Lawrence was a keen observer, and his agility in blending objective observation with personal reflection makes his non-fiction more readable than his oftentimes mawkish stories about lust and love.
Here's Lawrence wandering Italy's ancient and sacred hills:
"But gradually, one after another looming shadowily [sic] under their hoods, the crucifixes seem to create a new atmosphere over the whole of the countryside, a darkness, a weight in the air that is so unnaturally bright and rare with the reflection from the snows above, a darkness hovering just over the earth. So rare and unearthly the light is, from the mountains, full of strange radiance. then every now and again recurs the crucifix, at the turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow and a mystery under its pointy hood." (from Twilight in Italy, 1916)
There's more eroticism in Lawrence's descriptions of nature than in the stormy couplings of Gudrun and Gerald. And far less melodrama. From Sons and Lovers onward, Lawrence was given to precise, microscopic examinations of his inner life. To say he was a romantic or that his passions prevailed over his intellect seems false: the letters and the travel books show Lawrence to have been thoughtful, with a remarkable memory for books and ideas, with an enviable ability to blend feeling and thinking. "I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self. ... Most [men] are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers." (Letter to Rev. Robert Reid, December 3, 1907). The "laughter" to which men and women are reborn is surely ironic, for while there is pleasure and joy in Lawrence, he is never unaware of life's tragic dimensions. He couldn't be, given his health and the struggle he imposed on himself by declining to live as a comfortable bourgeois. And, frankly, there are some questions to be answered about Lawrence's commitment to "the terrible multitudes of brothers."
It was the provocative wag Geoff Dyer who forced me to recover from my long disinterest in Lawrence. Reading his unclassifiable, Bernhard-infected rant/meditation on everything not about Lawrence and just sort of about Lawrence, I knew that I'd lost again. Hard as I try to put away interests--there's only so much time--someone comes along and writes a book that I can't ignore, and that book leads to another, ad infinitum. I hope that I am done with Karl Ove, and Founder bios, and Cormac McCarthy, but Out of Sheer Rage has made Lawrence, once again, irresistible. Dyer, if you don't know his work, is a fabulist, a Restoration wit, an essayist in a league of his own (Zadie Smith meets W.T. Vollman)--funny, self-deprecating, vulgar and refined, lyrical and wise. His pursuit of the ghost of Lawrence--from Taos to Sicily to Mexico to Eastwood--is evidence of enviable literary obsession. What's the point of reading books if you don't allow yourself to become obsessed with certain writers? We do it with musicians and hobbies--I know people who "followed" the Grateful Dead for years, a few who are Miles Davis completists, and others who collect beer glasses from every micro-brewery they visit (me). So why not chase Lawrence around the globe, read his letters obsessively, and spend years thinking of all the ways this unpleasant, brilliant, tubercular neurotic changed your life?
I feel especially engaged by Lawrence due to his having lived, thanks to Mable Dodge Luhan and weak lungs, on a small ranch outside of Taos, New Mexico. He's buried near San Cristobal, and the letters suggest that this austere landscape meant more to Lawrence than any other. The Lawrence ranch isn't much to look at; he and Freida lived in a ramshackle cabin that looks about to collapse, but the surrounding desert and mountains invite the contemplative viewpoint one finds in the writing Lawrence did during his sojourns in New Mexico.
I first saw the shrine--for that is what it is--in the early 1990's when I was in the throes of my obsession with visiting writers' homes and grave sites. On a warm summer afternoon, the air still and the sky a blue so deep you sensed, at once, the immensity of the world, there was a holiness conveyed by the plain cross and white-washed memorial that I think Lawrence would have approved. Of course every pilgrimage feels anti-climactic. We ask ourselves if is this all that is left of the person whose books have so moved us? But if we carry away a memory of the place it turns out to have surprising resilience, and this memory gives the books a depth of feeling we hadn't experienced before.
***
In preparing for a spring visit to Chihuahua in Old Mexico, I have been reading Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico. It's nearly always summer in Lawrence. As "Paul Morel" he must have tired of the coal-black skies of Eastwood, of England's grimness, and we know for certain that he tired of his fellow Englishmen:
"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling,[sic] dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. . . . God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wishwash. Exterminate them, slime."
Always it was summer, and he bothered to learn the names of the flowers and trees, paid close attention to the birds and to the clarity of the air. Often we find him sitting still, jotting notes or writing letters--what a loss the end of letter writing has been! He doesn't say too much about what he's eating or drinking or wearing, it's the passing impressions on his lively mind that we are privy to, and to what are often stilted conversations with the "natives."
Martin Amis, not jolly himself, has described Lawrence as the most ill-tempered of English writers. We know that Lawrence struck his wife (she was larger and she hit him back). He disliked Jews, wrote cringing sentences about Mexicans (Rosalino, Lawrence's faithful Indian servant in Mornings in Mexico is "a dumb-bell, as the Americans would say"), and was as often unkind and gossipy as not. He had a Freudian dossier of sexual hang-ups--his is the finest example of an Oedipus complex since Hamlet, and that he loved men more than women is a reasonable inference from the letters and fiction.
His writing can be overwrought, sentimental, incoherent:
"[Miriam]knew she felt in a sort of bondage to him, which she hated because she could not control it. She hated her love for him from the moment it grew too strong for her. And, deep down, she had hated him because she loved him and he dominated her. She had resisted his denomination. She had fought to keep herself free of him in the last issue. And she was free of him, even more than he of her." Sons and Lovers, Part 2, Chapter 11.
I find most objectionable the way in which his narrators project themselves into the minds of everyone around them, creating a world that existed solely to mirror Lawrence. A lot of writers do this, but Sons and Lovers and Women in Love feel emotionally claustrophobic, as if there were one voice speaking and everyone else was just moving her lips. This habit imparts a sameness to the novels, a predictability in terms of character and plot. And Lawrence's women are sexualized in the way a man might imagine or wish them to be, and they are also, like Lawrence, tormented by sex. His men are austere and predatory, not often admirable. Nothing wrong with sex, but what seemed tantalizing when I was in the my twenties--this was long before ubiquitous porn or even the tedium of sex-obsessed sit coms--is now boring, even juvenile. There are times when I imagine Lawrence sniggering over his foolscap, shocking the Puritans, working himself up for Freida. (Joyce's letters to Nora are a nice cure for the flowery pudenda and penises of Lawrence).
Henry Miller mirrors Lawrence's preoccupations, his fear (?) of women, his narcissism. There might be a scholarly book comparing the two, something richer than Sexual Politics, but if there is, I don't know about it. Miller grew beyond the Tropics and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, but he remained a dirty old man right to the end of his long life. Both writers were strange, isolated men who appeared to yearn for companionship and yet disdained those who provided it. (See Miller's letters to Anais Nin). Both broke the rules and challenged taboos that now seem incomprehensible. Both had to go to Paris to get their books published, as if that were a hardship!
***
John Middleton Murry, second husband of Katherine Mansfield, flogged Lawrence in his book D. H. Lawrence (1930). Lawrence called Murray "an obscene bug sucking my life away," and Murry repaid the complaint, finding Lawrence domineering and self-centered. Murry and Mansfield both showed up in Lawrence's novels, and the Frieda/DH/Murry/Mansfield quartet is the subject of a group biography by Sydney Janet Kaplan, Circulating Genius that I hope to read soon. Since Murry's book, Lawrence's reputation both as a man and as a writer has undergone several transformations. I find much to admire in the writing, but, with some reservations, I have to agree with Amis--Lawrence is a difficult person to warm up to.
"Sheer rage," Dyer's title is from Lawrence's Letters, and it's a phrase that turns up often in the correspondence. From rage comes art, of a kind. Would that his sheer rage been leavened with some of Frieda's exuberance, or Geoff Dyer's playfulness. Lawrence wrote in order to be saved--I believe he was religious, despite his protestations to the contrary. And he found his version of the divine in "nature" though not of the romantic's sort. He appears never to have made his peace with other people. He was a stranger wherever he went, an emigre Englishmen looking askance at the "wogs," an uptight libertine, dry and judgmental. But, for now--he's fascinating.
George Ovitt (9 March 2019)
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