A short guide to D. H. Lawrence country
by Bridget Pugh (Nottinghamshire
Local History Council, 1972)
I. The View from Walker Street
In a letter to Rolf Gardiner written in December 1926, Lawrence provides a fairly detailed description of the East Midlands landscape in which he grew up; the so-called country of his heart - a phrase much loved by those who would forever tie Lawrence to Eastwood and fix his work within a literary tradition of English Romanticism.
It is, for me - as for all those who prefer to think of Lawrence as a perverse European modernist, writing after Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud rather than Byron, Shelley and Keats - another of those deeply unfortunate expressions.
Like his self-description as a priest of love, I really wish he'd never said it. But, say it he did. And so let's examine this phrase and see if we can interepret it in a manner that doesn't serve a depressingly provincial purpose - as if the view from Walker Street was the only one that shaped Lawrence's perspective upon the world.
Like his self-description as a priest of love, I really wish he'd never said it. But, say it he did. And so let's examine this phrase and see if we can interepret it in a manner that doesn't serve a depressingly provincial purpose - as if the view from Walker Street was the only one that shaped Lawrence's perspective upon the world.
II. The Savage Pilgrimage
As is clear from much of his writing - particularly his letters - one of Lawrence's driving obsessions was to stage an angry engagement with England, whilst also making good his escape from the place of his birth in all its perceived dullness.
His savage pilgrimage is usually said to begin after the War and refer to a period of voluntary exile. And whilst it's true and important to recall the fact that Lawrence left Britain at the earliest practical opportunity - only returning for brief visits, the last of which was in 1926 - I think we find this schizonomadic desire to flee from the suffocating familiarity of home from the start.
The fact is, Lawrence always hated Eastwood and couldn't wait to get away - first to Nottingham, then to London and to Cornwall, before drifting with Frieda around Europe, America and Australia. In 1913, he once confessed as much to his sister Ada, telling her that he should be glad if the town were one day blown off the face of the earth.
As is clear from much of his writing - particularly his letters - one of Lawrence's driving obsessions was to stage an angry engagement with England, whilst also making good his escape from the place of his birth in all its perceived dullness.
His savage pilgrimage is usually said to begin after the War and refer to a period of voluntary exile. And whilst it's true and important to recall the fact that Lawrence left Britain at the earliest practical opportunity - only returning for brief visits, the last of which was in 1926 - I think we find this schizonomadic desire to flee from the suffocating familiarity of home from the start.
The fact is, Lawrence always hated Eastwood and couldn't wait to get away - first to Nottingham, then to London and to Cornwall, before drifting with Frieda around Europe, America and Australia. In 1913, he once confessed as much to his sister Ada, telling her that he should be glad if the town were one day blown off the face of the earth.
We shouldn't forget that nostalgia is a type of disease - not a sign of health - and that if Lawrence occasionally displayed symptoms of homesickness he was essentially sick of home:
"It always depresses me to come to my native district. Now I am turned forty, and have been more or less a wanderer for nearly twenty years, I feel more alien, perhaps, in my home place than anywhere else in the world. I can feel at ease in ... Rome or Paris or Munich or even London. But in Nottingham Road, [Eastwood], I feel at once a devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion."
That's the Lawrence I admire: refusing to belong to any community or region; a singular individual who is no longer their Bert - and probably never was.
And as for the heart to which memories of childhood landscapes are said to belong, well, like Lawrence, I would prefer for it to be broken rather than preserved in formaldehyde; for it's wonderfully liberating to abandon the past and to find new things to treasure, new people and places to love, within the dawn-kaleidoscopic loveliness of the crack.
See:
D. H. Lawrence, letter to Rolf Gardiner, 3 Dec. 1926, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V. March 1924 - March 1927, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
D. H. Lawrence, letter to Rolf Gardiner, 3 Dec. 1926, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V. March 1924 - March 1927, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
D. H. Lawrence, [Return to Bestwood], Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 15.
Punk bonus: Stiff Little Fingers: Gotta Gettaway (Rough Trade, 1979): I'm sure this is how the young Lawrence felt (it's certainly how I felt at 16): click here to play on YouTube.
Punk bonus: Stiff Little Fingers: Gotta Gettaway (Rough Trade, 1979): I'm sure this is how the young Lawrence felt (it's certainly how I felt at 16): click here to play on YouTube.
It's impossible to pin Lawrence down to one place. He lived a nomadic life. This is why Paul Fillingham and me are creating a traveling memory theatre, to celebrate Lawrence's restlessness. But if we separate the artist from his work, his plays and novels are firmly embedded in the Midlands which is why the area is important for literary pilgrimages (though Geoff Dyer beautifully rips this assumption apart when confronted with the blue and yellow hell of IKEA outside Eastwood). Literary heritage can be a poorly disguised attempt to fleece punters. In the desire to boost tourism it can be managed poorly and often with a disingenuous spirit. But at least in terms of the UK, the Midlands is the most logical location through which we can try to understand Lawrence, but we should do so with caution, and an eye on getting out of there as quickly as we arrived. When Lawrence left the Midlands he lived mainly in places with a view of the sea, even desiring once to set sail and live on the ocean. You don't get more land locked than the Midkands..
ReplyDeleteLet's assume we can, in fact, separate the author from their work - and I would tend to regard the former as a function (and an effect) of the text - I would still have reservations about tying criticism to biography.
DeleteAlso, it's not quite true that all the novels are "firmly embedded in the Midlands" - Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent are obvious exceptions.
Re humanity, nostalgia and pathology, surely it's humankind that is the disease, whose homelessness is its crystallisation? A settled and sedentary life, the horror of feeling at home, is the true sickness.
ReplyDelete