We Old Ones, We Are Still Here!

Meine Mutter celebrating her 96th birthday  

 

The old ones say to themselves: We are not going to make way, we are not going to die,

we are going to stay on and on and on and on and make the young look after us 

till they are old. - DHL [1]

 

 

I. 

 

This Sunday, my mother will reach 96 years of age. 

 

Some people say this is a real achievement, though I'm not sure about that; surely the achievement is dying an authentic death - something that requires courage and skill - not simply celebrating birthday after birthday and endlessly adding candles to a cake ...? 

Having said that, surviving to a very old age and becoming a monster of stamina in the process does seem to suggest a powerful expression of will. 

 

For even today, when - thanks to improved living standards and advancements in health care - life expectancy has significantly increased since the year my mother was born (1926), not many women in the UK will make it past 95 [2].

 

II.

 

Back in July 1926, D. H. Lawrence travelled north from Italy to Germany with his wife Frieda, in order to celebrate his mother-in-law's 75th birthday. In a letter to Edward McDonald, an American professor who was preparing a bibilography of his writings, Lawrence is scathing about the old who cling on to life and refuse to die: 

 

"'Wir alten, wir sind noch hier!' she says. And here they mean to stay, having, through long and uninterrupted experience, become adepts at hanging on to their own lives, and letting anybody else who is fool enough cast bread upon the waters. Baden-Baden is a sort of Holbein Totentanz: old people tottering their cautious dance of triumph: 'wir sind noch hier: hupf! hupf! hupf!" [3] 

 

 

III. 

 

Three years later, in July 1929, and Lawrence is again in Baden-Baden for the Baroness's birthday, despite his previous determination not to go. As John Worthen notes, this was a bad move [4]. For whereas his previous visits had mostly been happy ones, and he had always been rather fond of his Schweigermutter, now he found her unbearable. 

In a letter to his sister Ada, Lawrence writes:

 

"[...] Frieda's mother really rather awful now. She's 78, and suddenly is in an awful state, thinking her time to die may be coming on. So she fights in the ugliest fashion, greedy and horrible, to get everything that will keep her alive [...] nothing exists but just for the purpose of giving her a horrible strength to hang on a few more years." [5]

 

Later, in the same letter, he complains how his mother-in-law will not be left alone, even for a short period: 

 

"No, she must have Frieda or me there. It's the most ghastly state of almost insane selfishness I ever saw - and all comes of her hideous terror of having to die. At the age of seventy-eight! May god preserve me from ever sinking so low." [6]

 

 

IV.

 

Now, to be fair to my mother, she doesn't gulp down the air in greedy gulps like the Baroness - doesn't actively fight to stay alive. She just sits quietly in her chair all day, like a black hole at the centre of the universe [7]. 

 

But I understand - and share - Lawrence's sense of horror and humiliation.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'The grudge of the old', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 436.

 

[2] Readers interested in the national statistics estimating the number of people (mostly women) in the UK population aged 90 and over, between the years 2002 and 2020, can click here. 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Edward McDonald (16 July 1926), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 495-496. Lines quoted are on p. 496.   

 

[4] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005), p. 400.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Ada Clarke (2 August 1929), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 397-398. 

[6] Ibid., p. 398. 

[7] See my poem 'Black Holes' in The Circle of Fragments and Other Verses, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010) - or click here to read it on Torpedo the Ark. 

On D. H. Lawrence and Oscar Wilde

 

 

I.

 

One hundred years ago today - 26 April 1921 - D. H. Lawrence arrived in the German spa town of Baden-Baden, situated on the edge of the Black Forest, close to the border with France. He was on a visit to his mother-in-law, Frau Baronin von Richthofen. 

 

It had been, he tells one correspondent, a devil of a journey from Italy; one that left him feeling not quite right inside his own skin [1]. Perhaps the curious stillness and emptiness of the place intensified this feeling. And one can't imagine the cold northern air helped matters. 

 

Not surprising then that, although his wife hoped they would be staying for the entire summer, Lawrence is already thinking of leaving in a few weeks; "doubt I shall stand it more than a month" [2]. 

 

Interesting as all this is, what really caught my attention, however, was a remark made in another letter written on the 28th of April, this time to his London publisher: "Alfred Douglas is a louse." [3]  

 

 

II.  

 

Why this remark caught my attention is because, as a matter of fact, Lawrence makes very few references to Oscar Wilde and his circle, only one of whom, Reggie Turner, does he ever meet in person [4]. 

 

Why this is so, we can only guess ...

 

For one thing, of course, it's generational; the world has moved on and, despite being born in 1885, Lawrence belongs very much to the unfolding twentieth-century, rather than the fag end of the nineteenth. Like many others, he finds Wilde's work dated and describes the 1890s as a ridiculous decade - a mix of decadence and pietism [5]. 

 

But it's also a question of temperament. For one suspects that Lawrence - an English puritan at heart - would have found Wilde a little too Irish, a little too queer, a little too affected ... In brief, just a little too much all round. We find traces of this in his characterisation of Wilde as a grand pervert, i.e., someone full of ineffable conceit who tried to "intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness" [6].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Lawrence's letter to John Ellingham Brooks (28 April 1921), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 706.

 

[2] See Lawrence's letter to Robert Mountsier (28 April 1921), ibid., p. 707. In the event, Lawrence and Frieda stayed in Baden-Baden until mid-July.  

[3] See Lawrence's letter to Martin Secker (28 April 1921), ibid., p. 708. 

      Despite the harshness of his description, Lawrence had, when younger, admired some of Douglas's poetry in The City of the Soul (1899): "Alfred Douglas has some lovely verses; he is affected so deeply by the new French poets, and has caught their beautiful touch." 

      See his letter to Blanche Jennings (20 Jan 1909), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 107. 

      Lawrence being Lawrence, however, he can't resist also taking a bit of a pop at Douglas in the same letter immediately afterwards: "the fat-head [...] feels himself heavy with nothing and thinks it's death when it's only the burden of his own unused self". 

 

[4] Lawrence is introduced to Reginald Turner by Norman Douglas in 1919 and he partly bases the character of Algy Constable on Wilde's most loyal of friends in Aaron's Rod (1922).

      References to Wilde in Lawrence's work include, for example, 'The Proper Study', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 170, and 'Introduction [version I] to The Memoirs of the Duc de Lauzun', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 89.

 

 [5] See Lawrence's 'Review of Hadrian the Seventh, by Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo)', Introductions and Reviews, p. 239. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Aldous Huxley (27 March 1928), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 342. 

      Wilde finds himself in good company, as Lawrence also brands Goethe, Byron, Baudelaire, and Proust (among others) as grand perverts. 

 

 

For further refections on Lawrence and Wilde, click here.