A Feisty Evening with Isobel Dixon, Douglas Robertson and D. H. Lawrence

Isobel Dixon, Douglas Robertson & D. H. Lawrence

 

 

I. 

 

A couple of nights ago, I went to the National Poetry Library - which, for those who don't know, is housed on the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall in London's Southbank Centre - for what was billed as a D. H. Lawrence celebration, with particular focus being given to the collection of poems entitled Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923).

 

The event also called attention to a recent book by the South African poet Isobel Dixon, produced in collaboration with the highly acclaimed Scottish artist Douglas Robertson who provided a dozen finely detailed illustrations: A Whistling of Birds (Nine Arches Press, 2023).

 

II. 

 

Whilst this work is essentially a response to Lawrence's text - and his short essay 'Whistling of Birds' (1919) lends the book its name - Dixon also invites others, including William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Ted Hughes into the conversation, whilst still finding time to make her own distinctive voice heard. 

 

It's a work that will leave the majority of members of the D. H. Lawrence Society very happy, as it uncritically reinforces the idea of Lawrence as a nature lover in the English Romantic tradition and a poet with an almost uncanny ontological insight into the essence of birds, beasts, and flowers. 

And in their hour long presentation at the NPL, this idea of Lawrence was further reinforced; it was almost as if the important challenge thrown down by the Indian author Amit Chaudhuri twenty-odd years ago to read Lawrence's poetry in light of poststructuralist theory has been completely forgotten [1].

 

Which is profoundly unfortunate in my view. For it results in an interpretation of Lawrence that not only fails to understand the radical nature of his aesthetic, but means he is sold short as a thinker-poet whose primary object is language. 

 

It's because Lawrence writes so well, that we believe he has captured the true nature or being of a snake, for example, when, actually, he dissolves such essentialism based on the idea of a fixed identity into a game of difference and becoming - which is why philosophers including Derrida and Deleuze are such admirers of Lawrence's poetry [2].     

 

 

III. 

 

Just to be clear: I enjoyed the event and wish Dixon and Robertson every success with their book (which has already garnered considerable praise).

 

However, they disappointed by refusing to take Lawrence seriously as a writer; preferring instead to think of him in all too human terms (thus the frequent references to biographical details, as if these somehow might illuminate the text or explain away its complex and often troubling character). 

They also disappointed by dismissing Lawrence's work as a painter in a lighthearted manner, saying it simply wasn't very good. Again, without wanting to go into too much detail here - as I've written at length on this subject elsewhere - this simply betrays an ignorance of what it is Lawrence is attempting to do on canvas; namely, produce an art of sensation that is concerned with the invisible forces and flows that shape the flesh via what Deleuze terms a very special violence. 

 

His is a non-representational depiction of the body without organs and therefore Lawrence is not overly concerned with anatomical fidelity, or reducing figures to the level of optical cliché. In other words, he is not trying capture a likeness and, by his own admission, his pictures are rolling in faults of technique - but that doesn't matter; Lawrence is not so much interested in that which is merely true-to-life, but that which is more true-to-life (we might call this phallic realism).   

 

In sum: just as Lawrence's poetry is primarily involved with language and the assembling of textual abstractions, his painting is involved with colour, line, and the forces of chaos; a violence that works upon the flesh and upon the canvas, distorting and deforming bodies and liberating pictures from the tyranny of the stereotype; a violence that knows nothing of symbolism or signification and cares nothing for narrative or illustration (for if painting has no model to depict, neither has it a story to tell).

 

Lawrence may not be a great painter, or even a very good one. But he's a better one than his critics realise - and a far more intelligent and sophisticated writer than they think him too.   

  

One of Robertson's illustrations for A Whistling of Birds (2023) feat. a squirrel 

next to Lawrence's astonishing Ink Sketch (1929) feat. a nude man and woman 

within a field of rhythm and desire demonstrating how waves 

of inorganic life exceed the bounds of organic activity.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, (Oxford University Press, 2003). 

      I have discussed this book and made reference to it elsewhere on this blog: click here. I might not agree with everything Chaudhuri says, but this is an important text whose challenge to the (almost wilfully naive) manner in which Lawrence is usually portrayed and his writing interpreted has still not been met by many within the Lawrence world.

 

[2] See for example Derrida's discussion of Lawrence's poem 'Snake' in volume one of The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago University Press, 2009).

      Readers might also be interested in a post dated 17 July 2015 on Lawrence, Derrida, and the snake: click here.

 

 

Re the use of the word feisty in the title of this post: click here. 

 

This post is for Chloe Rose Campbell and Tamara Ber.   

 

Is the Elephant Slow to Mate?

And what ages of time

the worn arches of their spines support! [1]

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence wrote several poems featuring elephants, one of which makes the claim that they are, as a species, slow to mate: 

 

 

The elephant, the huge old beast 

    is slow to mate; 

he finds a female, they show no haste 

    they wait 

 

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts 

    slowly, slowly to rouse 

as they loiter along the river-beds 

    and drink and browse 

 

and dash in panic through the brake 

    of forest with the herd, 

and sleep in massive silence, and wake 

      together, without a word. 

 

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts 

   grow full of desire, 

and the great beasts mate in secret at last, 

    hiding their fire. 

 

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts 

    so they know at last 

how to wait for the loneliest of feasts 

    for the full repast. 

 

They do not snatch, they do not tear; 

    their massive blood 

moves as the moon-tides, near, more near 

    till they touch in flood. [2]

 

 

It's a lovely poem. 

 

But is what it says about the mating habits of the elephant true, or is Lawrence simply constructing another of what Amit Chaudhuri identifies as a dummy creature [3]; i.e., one which fits nicely into his own philosophy, but has little or no relation to natural history or mammalian biology? 

 

Unfortunately for those who like to believe that Lawrence has an uncanny insight into the essence of animals (and plants), I think it's the latter. That is to say, I don't think this verse tells us much about the love lives of actual elephants - and what it does tell us is misleading. 

 

For the fact is elephants - despite their huge size and weight - are not slow to mate and have been successfully fucking and evolving for tens of millions of years (i.e., long before there were any human beings to watch and wax lyrical about their sexual habits).

 

 

II. 

 

As is so often the case, the facts about most things - including elephant sexual behaviour - are at least as interesting as the musings of a poet. And so, for the record ...

 

Adult male elephants enter a state of amour fou known as musth when searching for a mate; massively increased testosterone levels produce highly aggressive behaviour and this helps them not only see off or gain dominance over potential love rivals, but increases their chance of reproductive success with the ladies (musth enables females to determine the condition of the male, as weak or injured males cannot cut the mustard).    

 

As for female elephants, they have their own recurring periods of sexual madness when they are receptive to male advances. When on heat, they release pheromones in their urine and vaginal secretions, signalling their fertility and the fact they are ready and willing to be mounted. (Males will often collect a chemical sample from a potential mate with their trunks and analyse such with their vomeronasal organ.) 

 

Elephants are polygynous by nature; i.e., they subscribe to a mating system in which one male lives and breeds with multiple females (although each female only mates with a single male). And once a bull elephant has his harem, he will jealously guard it, thereby ensuring paternity of any offspring that result from union with the cows. 

 

Although Lawrence suggests elephants mate in secret, actually, for young females, the attentions of a large older bull can be intimidating, so her relatives will often stay nearby to provide support and reassurance. The deed itself - i.e., of copulation - lasts for less than a minute and does not involve any pelvic thrusting by the male, whose penis has a remarkable degree of independent mobility. 

 

Having ejaculated, the male's sperm then have to swim six feet in order to encounter and penetrate an egg. If all goes well and one manages this mammoth task (no pun intended), then two years later a baby elephant will be born into the world (and as an endangered species - thanks to poaching and habitat destruction - that's an increasingly rare and vital event).          

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Elephants plodding', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 370.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The elephant is slow to mate', The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 403-04.  

[3] See Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, (Oxford University Press, 2003). 

      Amongst other things, Chaudhuri demonstrates how - contrary to the conventional view - Lawrence as a poet is not a simple-minded nature lover concerned with understanding the beauty and essence of real animals, but, rather, in artificially constructing creatures in and on his own terms. In other words, he recreates and imitates various birds and beasts for his own artistic and philosophical amusement, assembling a menagerie of textual mannequins.

 

 

For a sister post to this one on D. H. Lawrence and circus elephants, click here. 

Reflections on the Vulture 1: Lawrence Doesn't Like Them

I.

Vultures are large scavenging birds of prey. Although they rarely attack healthy animals, they may move in for the kill if they chance upon a wounded or sick individual.

Found in both the New and Old World, many think of them as secretly belonging to a dark and disgusting Underworld due to their penchant for feasting on the decaying flesh of corpses until their crops bulge and they vomit like an Ancient Roman. They're able to safely digest putrid carcasses infected with dangerous bacteria thanks to exceptionally corrosive stomach acid.
 
Their looks don't do them any favours either; particularly the bald head, devoid of feathers. And - just to ensure their repulsiveness - nor does their habit of pissing on themselves in order to keep cool and clean (the uric acid kills those bacteria picked up from walking through blood and guts).  

II.

According to D. H. Lawrence, the vulture was once an eagle who decided that it was the high point of evolution and thus no longer in need of any further change; it would henceforth remain as it was for all eternity, in a state of static perfection.

The vulture, in other words, is a perfectly arrested egoist as well as a foul carrion-eater; fixed in form and corrupt of soul. It should be noted that Lawrence says the same of the baboon and the hyaena too, but here I'm only interested in his particular fear and loathing of vultures: shameless birds with "obscene heads gripped hard and small like knots of stone clenched upon themselves for ever".     

His ornithophobic vision is a crescendo of vulture hatred:

"So the ragged, grey-and-black vulture sits hulked, motionless, like a hoary, foul piece of living rock, its naked head and neck sunk in, only the curved beak protruding, the naked eyelids lowered. Motionless, beyond life, it sits on the sterile heights.
      It does not sleep, it stays utterly static. When it spreads its great wings and floats down the air, still it is static [...] a dream-floating. When it rips up carrion and swallows it, it is still the same dream-motion, static, beyond the inglutination. The naked obscene head is always fast locked, like stone.
      It is this naked, obscene head of a bird [...] that I cannot bear to think of. When I think of it, I never live nor die, I am petrified into foulness."

As we'll discover in part two of this post, other poets have a rather less negative view of the vulture - and some even manage to write about the actual animal, without immediately assigning it a symbolic role within their own philosophy.

Lawrence, however, can never resist lapsing into metaphysics. Indeed, the argument has been made that ultimately - for all his sensitivity to the otherness of birds, beasts and flowers - Lawrence only has two great objects of concern: (i) himself and (ii) language.

Amit Chaudhuri is right to suggest that Lawrence never accurately describes creatures at all, nor directly touches on them as things in themselves. Rather, he recreates and imitates them for his own artistic and philosophical amusement, assembling a menagerie of textual mannequins and symbolic beasts.  

See: 

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003).


To read part two of this post - on Robinson Jeffers and his poetic vision of the vulture - click here. 

Thoughts on D. H. Lawrence (Stephen Alexander in Conversation with David Brock)

                                   

Back in the far-off summer of 2014, I was interviewed by then Editor of the D. H. Lawrence Newsletter, David Brock, who wanted to know my thoughts on a number of questions that were then troubling him in relation to his hero poet.

As most torpedophiles are not members of the D. H. Lawrence Society and will not therefore have read the published interview, I thought it might be helpful to reproduce extracts of it here, thereby making my own rather ambivalent relationship to Lawrence a little clearer ... 


DB: In her guide to the life and work of D. H. Lawrence entitled The Country of My Heart (1972), Bridget Pugh argues that Lawrence looked deeper into the human soul than any of his contemporaries, concerned as he was with the hidden and unconscious sources of the self. Do you feel that any writers today look as deeply?

SA: Probably not. But then this metaphysical notion of subjective depth is no longer one that greatly troubles us in an essentially non-essential age of irony, inauthenticity, and insincerity. We are far more Wildean in this regard than we are Lawrentian and have become - in Nietzschean terms - superficial out of profundity. Personally, I think this is a good thing and much prefer Lawrence when he sticks to the surface, writing about the importance of fashion for example, than when he indulges in folk psychology and starts speculating about fundamental human desire, feeling, and belief.

DB: Bridget Pugh also writes that Lawrence "saw the invasion of the landscape by the ugliness of industrialism as a reflection of the destruction of natural man removed from his instinctive communion with the rest of the universe ..." Other than by reading and re-reading Lawrence, how do you feel we can regain that vital communion? What hope is there for humanity?

SA: Well, hope isn't something I cling to or seek to offer others; not only does it encourage optimism, but it's one of the three theological virtues upon which Christianity is founded and, like Lawrence, I am, in a sense, with the Anti-Christ, rather than with Jesus and all the saints and angels of heaven. As for humanity, that's something to be overcome, is it not? A form that is restrictive and no longer tenable. Sorry to be so Nietzschean about this once again.

As for the quotation from Bridget Pugh, I'm afraid that doesn't interest me in the least. That's not to say it's wrong: Lawrence clearly subscribed to certain romantic and neo-pagan narratives regarding nature, industrialism, and the vital character of the cosmos. But it's very difficult for us to share his beliefs without sacrificing intellectual integrity. We can have an immensely exciting understanding of the universe we inhabit - thanks to modern science - but we cannot enter again into any kind of religious communion with the earth and stars in good faith. Or, as Lawrence concedes when face to face with the religious rituals of Native America: Sorry, I can no longer cluster at the drum. This might seem like typical English reserve in the face of genuine otherness, but it is rather one of the most honest admissions that Lawrence makes anywhere in his writings. He knows there’s no going back to an earlier way of being.

DB: As Lawrentians, Stephen, how do we justify our joy and our continual celebration of his creative genius? Would Lawrence prefer to have loyal readers, or active followers who put his ideas into practice?

SA: Nietzsche once said that there was only ever one Christian and that he died on the Cross; that for others to call themselves Christians was a fatal misunderstanding. I think we can - and should - feel something similar whenever the term Lawrentians is used. Thus I would answer your question this way: we don’t need to justify our pleasure in reading his books and celebrating his life; there’s no need for apology or explanation here. Those who seek to make others feel guilty about their pleasures are the kind of censor-morons sitting in judgement on life that Lawrence despised and so courageously fought against.

Lawrence would prefer unashamed readers, rather than loyal ones. Like Zarathustra, he would quickly lose patience with followers and tell them that ultimately their task is simply this: Lose me and find yourselves. That’s the key. Unashamed readers must be prepared to challenge Lawrence and recontextualise his ideas; which isn’t the same as simply putting them into practice as if Lawrence supplied a convenient set of dos and don’ts. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze - who happens to be one of Lawrence’s great readers - says the task is to pick up the arrow that he fired into the world and then shoot it anew into the future, in a new direction and at a new target. As a reader - particularly as a reader of a writer like Lawrence - you remain loyal by an act of infidelity.

DB: Do you think that Lawrence Society members should oppose factory farming and care about animal rights?

SA: In principle I’m tempted to say yes. Obviously the question of the animal and its suffering is an important one, although I’m not sure it’s one that is best addressed in terms of ‘rights’. I’d like to think we might develop an altogether different relationship with non-human forms of life - and it’s here that Lawrence might perhaps prove useful.

To be clear on this: I don’t think we should plead the case for animal liberation, or argue that they have specific interests that give rise to certain moral claims; rather, I’m interested in the becoming-animal of man and undermining the singular status of the human. We need to find a post-metaphysical way of thinking man and animal both; one that does away with anthropocentrism and deconstructs the violent hierarchy that places us in opposition to the animal and accords us superiority.

Having said this, whilst you have every right to imagine Lawrence as an ardent animal activist, I’m not sure you’re entitled to imply that those members of the Lawrence Society who don’t concern themselves with the exploitation of animals and who don’t think meat is murder, are somehow morally deficient or missing the point of his work. It should always be remembered that Lawrence was primarily a writer and his concern was language and thus, even when seemingly celebrating the otherness of the animal, be it a bat, snake, or fish, it might be argued that Lawrence is really still just playing textual games on the page. Amit Chaudhuri makes a very powerful argument that even in the famous poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers Lawrence doesn’t accurately describe such things at all, or directly touch on them as things in themselves. Rather, he recreates and imitates them for his own amusement and that of his readers, assembling an exhibition of stuffed creatures; “his collection of textual mannequins, his pantomime of nature”.

DB: You once reminded me that Lawrence thought there was nothing romantic about madness - that it was a tragic waste of sane consciousness. Do you consider that we have an insane and romantic view of the importance of human life and are we wasting our consciousness in this respect?

SA: We certainly have a conceited and somewhat sentimental view of our own importance and one of the things I love most about Lawrence is that, for the most part, he avoids (and combats) anthropocentric vulgarity. Unfortunately, he doesn’t go far enough in his attempt to thoroughly dehumanize nature and remains trapped within what Quentin Meillassoux terms correlationism - i.e., Lawrence continues to make a link between thinking and being and so can never quite accept the possibility of a mind-independent reality.

This is a great shame and a great failing in his work; one which keeps him within a theo-humanist tradition. Ultimately, he’s not really interested in the stars, animals, trees, or other objects, but only in their relation to man, who, in turn, cannot be considered outside of his relation to the world. That’s the contradiction or paradox at the heart of his writing. For whilst he repeatedly insists that he wants to know the great outside - that inhuman space of the savage exterior - like all critical thinkers after Kant Lawrence too is fundamentally more interested in consciousness and language and these concerns keep him tied to a form of correlationism. 

DB: Despite all Lawrence's best efforts, one has a strong sense that most people are still only half alive. Should this concern us, do you think?

SA: No, I don’t think so. As is perhaps clear from some of the earlier answers, I’m not a vitalist and don’t fetishize or privilege being alive over being dead. As Nietzsche pointed out, being alive is only a rare and unusual way of being dead. Death is ultimately a welcome return to material actuality and an escape from complexity and, as Heidegger argued, all being is a being-towards-death. I think Lawrence recognised this as is clear in his late poetry.

Perhaps the undead fascinate more, philosophically-speaking, than the half-alive. The zombie, for example, embodies the Derridean notion of undecidability which so threatens the traditional foundations of Western metaphysics and so-called common sense. Like the vampire, or, more recently, the cyborg, the zombie cannot be classified as either alive or dead. Rather it belongs to the indeterminable realm of the neither/nor whilst also being, paradoxically, both at once.

Zombies not only indicate the limits of our thinking on life and death, but help to subvert all of those other binary oppositions upon which we establish conceptual coherence and build a stable world - but also a world of violent inequality. It might be stretching things a bit, but might we not read the story of The Man Who Died as a piece of zombie fiction?

D. H. Lawrence's Becoming-Bat

Lawrence doesn't like bats, but this doesn't stop him writing about them in his poetry in a manner of real philosophical interest. For rather than anticipate Thomas Nagel's question and attempt to say what it's like to be a bat, Lawrence allows a proto-Derridean play of différance to infuse his writing, constructing a dummy creature with a mask-like face which parodies and subverts the very notion of an essential batness.

In the short poem, 'Bat', for example, Lawrence first confuses them for swallows flying late in the Italian twilight and sewing the shadows together. But then he realises his mistake:

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop ...
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in the flight 
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.

Never swallows!
Bats!The swallows are gone.

This realisation that he's watching bats and not birds flitting about the Ponte Vecchio and flying overhead, gives Lawrence an uneasy creeping in his scalp. He thinks of them as little clots of darkness with wings like bits of umbrella:

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.
Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

They may very well be symbols of happiness and good fortune in China, but not so for this former resident of Eastwood.

In the much longer and more amusing poem 'Man and Bat', Lawrence develops his chiroptophobia whilst again doing something of philosophical and literary import. The impure frenzy with which a bat flies round and round his room in mad circles of delirium disgusts and disconcerts him, but it also allows Lawrence to demonstrate not merely how experience might be transfigured into art and given poetic expression, but how writing is inseparable from a process of becoming.

Lawrence, that is to say, establishes what Deleuze terms a zone of proximity with the bat, just as he does elsewhere with various other birds, beasts and flowers. He becomes-bat as the bat in turn becomes-rag or old umbrella. This is not something which is easy to accomplish. But to affect a becoming of this kind is something which all great writers must achieve. Indeed, this is the very mark of literary greatness.  


Notes

For an excellent reading of Lawrence's poetry in terms of différance and intertextuality, see Amit Chaudhuri's study, D H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003). I am grateful to Chaudhuri for showing how - contrary to the conventional view - Lawrence is not a simple-minded nature lover concerned with understanding the beauty and essence of real animals, but, rather, in artificially constructing creatures in and on his own terms.

'Bat' and 'Man and Bat' may be found in Volume I of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013), pp. 294-300.  

D. H. Lawrence's Dendrophilia

DHL sitting under an olive tree in Italy (1926)

Lawrence is very fond of trees and there are many trees in his writings. In fact, at times, he feels there are too many trees crowding round and staring at him, interfering with his attempts to think about subjects other than trees (such as human babies and the complicated story of their unconscious life). 

The trees, he says, seem so much bigger and stronger in life than we are; so overwhelming in their silence and rather sinister arboreal presences. Lawrence writes, for example, of the magnificent cruelty or barbarous nature of the huge fir trees that grow in the Black Forest:

"It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerful sap drumming in their trunks. Great full-bodies trees, with strange tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming."

He continues:

"Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? You can't. It hasn't got a face. You look at the strong body of a trunk; you look above you into the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs; you see the soft green tips. But there are no eyes to look into, you can't meet its gaze."

Thus it's pointless staring at a tree in an attempt to know it. All you can do is "sit among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk" in a form of insouciant tree worship and fantasise about becoming-tree, full of root-lust but completely mindless. 

If, at one time, he were frightened of the trees and felt them to be primeval enemies, now Lawrence says they are his "only shelter and strength" and that he is happy to lose himself amongst them and to be with them "in their silent, intent passion and great lust", feeding his soul with their non-human life and indomitable energy. He concludes this rather beautiful (and somewhat erotic) meditation on trees by saying:

"One of the few places that my soul will haunt, when I am dead, will be this. Among the trees here near Ebersteinburg ... I can't leave these trees. They have taken some of my soul."

But we should note, however, that Lawrence's trees - here, and most certainly in his poetry - are not simply natural phenomena; they are also ornamental figures of Gothic resistance forming part of an allegorical landscape that, as Amit Chaudhuri points out, "brings together the natural and the unnatural". 

Ultimately, Lawrence's thinking on trees (and flowers) owes more to Ruskin than to Wordsworth ...

Notes:

The quotations from Lawrence are from Chapter IV of Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). pp. 85-88.

The quote from Amit Chaudhuri is from D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 208.