From Harold Hill to Hampstead Heath: Walking in the Footsteps of D. H. Lawrence with Catherine Brown

 

Ceramic Blue Plaque erected in 1969 by Greater London Council 

at 1 Byron Villas, Vale of Health, Hampstead, London, NW3 

englishheritage.org.uk

 

 

Hampstead is an affluent residential community in northwest London, long favoured by an assortment of artists, intellectuals, millionaires, and Marxists (i.e., the posh, the privileged, the often pretentious, and the politically radical). 

 

It's not an area I'm familiar with or particularly comfortable in; for whilst it's certainly very lovely, it's a long way from Harold Hill and I don't wanna go to where, where the rich are living.      

 

Nevertheless, putting aside my prejudices as a Clash City Rocker [1], I recently agreed to join a walking tour of Hampstead, led by Dr Catherine Brown; Vice President of the D. H. Lawrence Society, Founder of the Lawrence London Group, and unofficial Queen of the wider Lawrence collective [2].

 

Because Lawrence - a red-bearded poet and novelist who was deeply proud of his working-class roots in an East Midlands mining community - was once, briefly, a resident of Hampstead, there's even an English Heritage blue plaque celebrating the fact. 

 

We might see this as a good thing; a sign of nascent social mobility in the twentieth-century, or the classless nature of the art world; a meritocratic community in which anyone with genius [3] is welcome. Or we might view it as just one more attempt to neutralise Lawrence by assimilating him and his work into the dominant culture that he did so much to counter [4].       

 

Still, the blue plaque was just one of many things to stop and gawp at and hear about on the walking tour. Other highlights included:

 

(i) Hampstead Underground Station, which Lawrence used (but didn't like). Whether he knew it was (and still is) London's deepest tube stop - 192 feet beneath the surface - (or whether he would've cared), I don't know. Designed by architect Leslie Green, it opened in June 1907, just a few months before Lawrence first visited the area.    

 

(ii) Whitestone Pond, close to where Lawrence saw a German airship over London, in September 1915, an event that obviously captured his imagination. This is how Lawrence describes the incident in a letter: 

 

"Last night when we were coming home the guns broke out, and there was a noise of bombs. Then we saw the Zeppelin above us, just ahead, amid a gleaming of clouds; high up, like a bright golden finger, quite small, among a fragile incandescence of clouds. And underneath it were splashes of fire as the shells fired from earth burst. Then there were flashes near the ground - and the shaking noise. It was like Milton - then there was a war in heaven. But it was not angels. It was that small golden Zeppelin, like a long oval world, high up. It seemed as if the cosmic order were gone, as if there had come a new order, a new heavens above us: and as if the world in anger were trying to revoke it. Then the small long-ovate luminary, the new world in the heavens, disappeared again. 

      I cannot get over it, that the moon is not Queen of the sky by night, and the stars the lesser lights. It seems the Zeppelin is in the zenith of the night, golden like a moon, having taken control of the sky; and the bursting shells are the lesser lights. 

      So it seems our cosmos is burst, burst at last, the stars and moon blown away, the envelope of the sky burst out, and a new cosmos appeared, with a long-ovate, gleaming central luminary, calm and drifting in a glow of light, like a new moon, with its light bursting in flashes on the earth, to burst away the earth also. So it is the end - our world is gone, and we are like dust in the air." [5] 

 

(iii) Various places associated with the short story 'The Last Laugh' (1924), a tale in which Pan appears in Hampstead, with predictably tragic consequences. The story is  an example of what might be termed sardonic paganism; a mocking and malevolent form of queer gothic fiction directed towards a dark god who is always coming, but who never quite arrives or reveals himself. 

      By setting the story in a leafy north London suburb, Lawrence relates his onto-theological vision to everyday experience, whilst, at the same time, demonstrating how the latter unfolds within a wider, inhuman context that is resistant to any kind of moral-rational codification. He thereby attempts to loosen the aura of necessity surrounding categories of the present and restore a little primordial wonder to NW3 [6].

 

(iv) Several houses belonging to Lawrence's swell friends, who often provided him and Frieda with refuge when needed. These didn't particularly interest, but Hampstead Heath certainly did and one can see why Lawrence - who mostly hated London and its damp gloom - loved this ancient area of woodland, meadows, and ponds spanning 790 acres. 

Anyway, in closing I'd like to thank Catherine for all her hard work and kindness; I'm sure the handful of Lawrence devotees who turned up on the day - including Nottingham's favourite son and digital pilgrim, James Walker - enjoyed the tour and learnt something new. 

Members of the London Lawrence Group 

   

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring here to (and paraphrasing a line from) a song by The Clash called 'Garageland', the final track to be found on their eponymous debut album (CBS Records, 1977): click here. The song was written in response to a snide remark by middle-class music critic Charles Shaar Murray - precisely the kind of person who lives in Hampstead.  

 

[2] Catherine Brown, 'Lawrence's Hampstead: A Walking Tour'. Full details (and illustrations) can be found on Catherine's excellent website: click here. 

 

[3] Lawrence was deeply suspicious of how the term genius was used by certain people to excuse his lack of finesse and the more problematic aspects of writing. In a short piece written towards the very end of his life, he recounts, for example, Ford Maddox Hueffer's reaction to the manuscript of The White Peacock: "'It's got every fault that an English novel can have. But, you've got GENIUS.'"

      Lawrence notes: "In the early days, they were always telling me I had got genius, as if to console me for not having their incomparable advantages." See 'Myself Revealed', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 178-79. 

[4] Guy Debord famously describes this process of recuperation in La société du spectacle (1967). In brief: all politically radical ideas and/or subversive works of art are eventually defused and then safely incorporated back into mainstream culture, where they can be successfully exploited.   

 

[5] See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press,1981), pp. 389-90. The letter was sent to Lady Ottoline Morrell (9 Sept 1915).

      One suspects that, Lawrence being Lawrence, he also found the phallic shape of the Zepplin particularly striking ... This same event was also described in his 1923 novel Kangaroo; see pp. 215-16 of the Cambridge Edition, ed. Bruce Steele, (1994).

 

[6] See the post dated 15 May 2017 - 'Pan Comes to Hampstead' - click here.

 

 

That City of Dreadful Night: D. H. Lawrence's Letters from Paris

Paris est toujours une bonne idée

 

 

I. 

 

I'm currently reading a big fat book of essays, short stories, and poems by over seventy authors, edited by Andrew Gallix [1], exploring the fascination that writers from the English-speaking world have for the French capital - although, as becomes clear, they are mostly enchanted by a myth of their own invention, rather than by Paris as a place that can be located on a map.       

 

Of course, not all English writers have been enamoured with the City of Lights. D. H. Lawrence, for example, famously wrote in 1919: "Paris is a nasty city, and the French are not sympathetic to me." [2] 

 

Five years later, however, Lawrence had changed his tune: "Paris isn't so bad - to me much nicer than London - so agreeably soulless" [3]. 

 

Indeed, in almost every letter and postcard sent to friends at the beginning of 1924 from Le Grand Hotel de Versailles (on the Boulevard Montparnasse), Lawrence was saying much the same thing: "Paris looking rather lovely in sunshine and frost - rather quiet, but really a beautiful city" [4]. He even cheerfully informed his mother-in-law that the Parisians were very friendly [5]. 

But of course, Lawrence being Lawrence, there were sudden (and frequent) mood changes during his short stay in Paris, as this letter written to Catherine Carswell illustrates:

 

"Today it is dark and raining, and very like London. There really isn't much point in coming here. It's the same thing with a small difference. And not really worth taking the journey. Don't you come just now: it would only disappoint you. Myself, I'm just going to sleep a good bit, and let the days go by [...] Paris has great beauty - but all like a museum. And when one looks out of the Louvre windows, one wonders whether the museum is more inside or outside - whether all Paris, with its rue de la Paix and its Champs Elysée isn't also all just a sort of museum." [6]   

Several days later, and Lawrence is still lying low in Paris (whilst Frieda buys some new clothes), but feeling a little more positive about the city and its residents:

 

"Paris is rather nice - the French aren't at all villain, as far as I see them. I must say I like them. They are simpatico. I feel much better since I am here and away from London." [7]

 

And so, despite informing one correspondent that the city was far from gay, Lawrence mostly enjoyed his short stay: "Paris has been quite entertaining for the two weeks: good food and wine, and everything very cheap." [8]  

 

II.

 

In 1929, Lawrence returned to Paris where he oversaw publication of a new (inexpensive) edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover to try and stop the pirated editions then in circulation. If, five years earlier, he had been mostly positive in his response to the city, now he was as hostile to it as he was to most (if not all) large cities:

 

"I don't a bit like Paris. It is nowadays incredibly crowded, incredibly noisy, the air is dirty and simply stinks of petrol, and all the life has gone out of the people. They seem so tired." [9]   

 

Sadly, of course, it was Lawrence himself that the life had almost entirely gone out of; he was to die eleven months after writing this, aged 44, in Vence (428 miles south of Paris, as the crow flies).           

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Andrew Gallix (ed.), We'll Never Have Paris, (Repeater Books, 2019). If I ever manage to work my way through the book's 560+ pages, then I'll doubtless post some kind of review of the work here on Torpedo the Ark.  

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 18 November 1919, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 417. It should be noted that Lawrence hadn't at the time of writing this letter actually been to Paris and wasn't to make his first trip there until January 1924.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mark Gertler, [2 February 1924], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elzabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press 1987), p. 567. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Catherine Carswell, [24 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 561. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen, 24 January 1924, in Letters IV, p. 561. In the original German, Lawrence wrote: "Paris ist doch netter wie London, nicht so dunkel-grau. Die Leute sind ganz freundlich."

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Catherine Carswell, [25 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 563. 

      This letter has parallels with a short essay written at the same time in which Lawrence asserts that whilst Paris is still monumental and handsome, it has lost its true splendour, and become "like an old, weary peacock that sports a bunch of dirty twigs at its rump, where it used to have a tail". He blames this sorry state of affairs on: (i) modern democracy; (ii) too much bare flesh on display in French works of art;  (iii) an overly rich diet; and (iv) the dead weight of history and its architecture.

      See: 'Paris Letter', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 141-146. The line quoted is on p. 143.

      As for the idea of Paris disappointing: 

      "Disappointment, according to Stuart Walton, is actually a 'constitutive factor' in English speakers' experience of France, and its capital in particular: 'It is at least as important to the British, for example, that Paris should fall short of what they expect of it as it is to the Parisians that les Anglais have never really understood it' (p. 332)." 

      See Andrew Gallix's Introduction to We'll Never Have Paris, p. 29. And see also the TTA post 'On Disappointment' (24 May 2020) in which I discuss (amongst other things) le Syndrome de Paris: click here.  

        

[7] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky, [31 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 565. 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Hon. Dorothy Brett, [4 February 1924], in Letters, IV, p. 568. The fact that Paris was, at one time, cheap to live in, was absolutely crucial:

      "Hemingway described Paris in the 1920s as a place 'where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were', adding that this was 'like having a great treasure given to you'. That treasured lifestyle was swept away by the onset of the Depression in the 1930s. As Will Ashon remarks, artists thrive where there is 'affordable, preferably semi-derelict, real estate. Which is to say, you can't be an artist in Paris, anymore, or in London either' (p. 301)." 

      See Andrew Gallix, Introduction to We'll Never Have Paris, p. 24.   

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 3 April 1929, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 234. 

Those interested in knowing more about Lawrence's 1929 visit to Paris - and how his stay at 66, Boulevard de Montparnasse has now been officially commememorated with a plaque - might like to read Catherine Brown's blog post of 29 May 2019, available on her website: click here.     

 

And those interested in Lawrence's wider relationship with French culture, might like to read the following essay by Ginette Katz-Roy: 'D. H. Lawrence and "That Beastly France"', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, (1991), pp. 143-156. This essay is available to download or read online via JSTOR: click here.   

 

 

Musical bonus: the debut single from Adam and the Ants, Young Parisians (Decca, 1978): click here. 

 

 

Pan and Jesus in the Art of Dorothy Brett

Fig 1. Dorothy Brett: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ (1963)

Fig. 2. Dorothy Brett: Pan and Christ (date unknown)

 

I would like, if I may, to develop a point added as a note to a recent post discussing an essay by Catherine Brown [1] which mentions a painting by the Anglo-American artist Dorothy Brett entitled Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ (fig. 1); a work which nicely illustrates Lawrence's dual nature whilst, crucially, making no attempt to reconcile his twin selves.

 

As suggested in the note, the work maintains what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a relation of non-relation. In other words, Brett's very lovely picture illustrates a disjunctive synthesis between divergent forces that somehow manage to communicate by virtue of a difference that passes between them like a spark (or what Lawrence would probably term the Holy Ghost) [2]. 

 

As I also say in the note, if only she'd been thinking with her Nietzsche head on Brett might have called the painting Pan versus the Crucified. But I'm now doubtful she would understand what is meant by this, or why such a twist on the German thinker's original formula provides as useful a key for unlocking Lawrence's philosophical project as Dionysus versus the Crucified does for Nietzsche's own [3]. 

 

For if we are to judge by another painting she produced of Pan and Christ (fig. 2) - in which there is clearly a reconciliation between them (to the extent that they are shown holding hands) - then Brett seems not to grasp the crucial fact that the two gods each have their own flowers, as Brown nicely puts it, and by which she acknowledges that Pan and Christ are antagonists forever separated by a pathos of distance.     

The fact is you can't have horns on your head and wear a crown of thorns - despite the desire of many New Age hippies to create a kind of syncretic religious mishmash. As Lawrence shows in The Escaped Cock, in order for the man who died to resurrect into pagan vitality he has to renounce his mission and his Christhood and accept that the earth doesn't need salvation, it needs tillage and that mankind is better off being watched over by an all-tolerant Pan than a judgemental Jehovah.   

 

Like Elsa in 'The Overtone', you can certainly experience both Jesus and Pan, but not at one and the same time, or in the same way; the former belongs always to the pale light and the latter to the darkness: "'And night shall never be day, and day shall never be night.'" [4]     

 

To imagine them hand-in-hand, as Brett does, is a form of nihilism in that it annihilates the nature of each. As Lawrence notes of another two forces forever divided and at odds - the lion and the unicorn - each exists only by virtue of their inter-opposition: "Remove the opposition and there is a collapse, a sudden crumbling into universal nothingness." [5] 

 

It is the fight of opposites which is holy and there is no reconciliation save in this negation which, for Lawrence, is the unforgivable sin. And Brett has either forgotten this idea, chosen to ignore it, or perhaps never really understood the huge importance it has for Lawrence ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The post in question - Iconography is Never Innocent - can be read by clicking here. See note 4.

[2] In a post on his blog - Larval Subjects - Levi R. Bryant uses non-technical terms to help readers understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean: "Consider the relationship between me and my cat. My cat and I share entirely different worlds even though we inhabit one and the same earth or heteroverse. There is no point where our worlds converge, yet nonetheless certain differential events flash across our distinct and divergent worlds, creating a relation in this non-relation. Somehow our worlds come to be imbricated and entangled with one another, even though they don’t converge on any sort of sameness." To read Bryant's post in full, click here.   

 

[3] See Nietzsche, 'Why I Am a Destiny', in Ecce Homo, where this line appears; or see section 1052 in Book IV of The Will to Power, where Nietzsche explains the distinction between Dionysus and the Crucified as he understands it.   

 

[4] See D. H. Lawrence, 'The Overtone', in St Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 3-17. The line quoted is on p. 16.

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 256. 

Iconography is Never Innocent

Dorothy Brett (1883-1977): 

Portratit of D. H. Lawrence with Halo (1925)

Oil on canvas (78 x 48 cm)

 

'The narrowed, slightly stylised eyes ... gaze with pain ... at the state of the world and at his own fate. 

His halo is formed by a moon in near-total eclipse; soon he will be left in darkness, 

save for the star that burns ...'   

 

 

I. 

 

The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts (2020) is a big, heavy hardback book - over 440 pages divided between 28 essays, written by 27 different authors - so pretty much impossible to read from start to finish. 

 

Thus, once having read the Introduction, one begins to cruise the text, searching out those authors and those essays most likely to give pleasure ... Authors such as Catherine Brown, for example, and her essay: 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon' [1] ...

 

 

II.

 

As the title of the essay indicates, Brown is interested in the manner in which the English poet, novelist, and painter, Mr D. H. Lawrence, has been subordinated to an image [2].   

 

This public image was partly of Lawrence's own making and partly due to the (loving) characterisations and (sometimes spiteful) caricatures produced by friends, followers, critics, and opponents [3]; some of whom portray him as a visionary Christ-like figure, some of whom depict him as a smiling Pan-like figure with devilish horns and hooves, and some of whom - like the Hon. Dorothy Brett - can't quite decide or imagine Lawrence as a combination of both; part-saint, part-satyr [4].

 

Either way, this iconisation of Lawrence as Christ or Pan is not only a bit lame, but, as Brown points out, all too bleeding obvious, as numerous Lawrentian features - not least of all the beard - "suggested contemporary understandings of each or both gods" [5] to many of his circle and, indeed, many of his most ardent (but unimaginative) readers even today. 

 

Brown spends some considerable time discussing Lawrence as Christ and Lawrence as Pan with reference to some of the more famous photographs of Lawrence and I pretty much agree with her analysis; except for her remarks on the 1915 studio portrait of Lawrence in a hat - an image used in 2017 for the 14th International D. H. Lawrence Conference [click here] - which I don't think should be read in religious terms at all. 

 

The image - certainly as featured on the Conference poster - is more punk than Pan and invites viewers to consider Lawrence as a figure within popular culture, rather than Romantic paganism or Ancient Greek mythology. I think you really have to stretch things to insist on Pan as a revolutionary (and/or déclassé) outsider, as Brown does (not once, but twice) - just as you have to subscribe to a false etymology to think that the god Pan lends his name to pantheism [6].          

 

Moving on, we come to the subject of iconoclasm ... As Brown notes: 

 

"One consequence of Lawrence's deification has been that many of the attacks on him have addressed deified versions of him. [...] Such attacks tend to fall into two categories - those which accuse him of resembling Christ or Pan, and those which accuse him of failing to resemble them, thus respectively condemning him by negative association with, and critiquing his alleged pretensions in relation to, these gods." [7]

I have to say, this seems fair enough: those who live by the image, die by the image - and Lawrence lived by the image at least as much as other modernist writers. He may have satirised the desire for literary fame and personal recognition, but, as Brown points out, he certainly contributed to his own celebrity (or notoriety) and was acutely conscious of his public persona. 

 

Thus, whilst most would struggle to remember what James Joyce or Ezra Pound looked like, there are probably still quite a few people who would recognise red-bearded D. H. Lawrence (if only as drawn by Hunt Emerson, comic book style [8]), even though his popularity and iconic status has been waning for the past forty or fifty years.      

 

 

III. 

In conclusion ... Whilst Catherine ends on a relatively upbeat note, calling for "passionate and joyful admiration" of Lawrence, rather than "misdirected deification, or irrelevant iconoclasm" [9], I think I'd like to emphasise the following: Iconography is never innocent ...

 

That is to say, it plays a complicit role in what Baudrillard terms the perfect crime and by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs [10]. 

 

When this happens, we pass beyond representation (or, in the case of the dead, commemoration) towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is made visible and the image no longer reflects, masks, or perverts a basic reality, but bears no relation to any reality whatsoever (i.e., it becomes a simulacrum).

 

Whilst I don't subscribe to aniconism, I do think that all image making is ideally and idealistically reductive and that we - Lawrence scholars included - need to theorise the play and proliferation of images carefully and critically. For it's arguable that philosophical questions of representation and reality, truth and appearance, have never been as crucial as today in an age of social media and deepfake software; a world in which everyone comes to presence on a myriad screens (close-up, in high-definition, and full transparency).     

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] A pre-edited version of this essay can be read on Catherine Brown's website: click here. 

 

[2] As readers will doubtless know, the word icon, from the Ancient Greek εἰκών, simply means image or likeness. As Catherine Brown reminds us, however: "'Icon' expanded its meaning from a visual depiction (especially of a divinity) to 'A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol' or one 'considered worthy of admiration or respect' in the early 1950s (OED draft addition 2001)." See 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020),p. 428. 

 

[3] For details of how Lawrence has been seen by other artists, see the fascinating essay by Lee M. Jenkins, 'Lawrence in Biofiction', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, pp. 385-397. 

 

[4] To be fair, Brett produced a very lovely work which reveals Lawrence's dual nature. Entitled Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ, the picture (produced in 1926 and re-painted in 1963 after she destroyed the original canvas due to the mockery and unfair criticism it received), crucially doesn't try to reconcile the twin selves. Rather, it maintains what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a relation of non-relation. In other words, Brett's picture illustrates a disjunctive synthesis between divergent forces that somehow manage to communicate by virtue of a difference that passes between them like a spark (or what Lawrence would probably term the Holy Ghost). If she'd only been thinking with her Nietzsche head on Brett might have called it Pan versus the Crucified. 

      Whilst Catherine Brown doesn't use the above philosophical terminology, she clearly understands that Pan and Christ are (as she says) mutually antagonistic, despite certain similarities between them, and that "each god has his own, separate validity; each has his own flowers", although she clearly longs for a more balanced (less hostile) relationship between the two. See her essay 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, pp. 427 and 428. Brett's painting is reproduced in this book as Plate 36, on p. 302.      

 

[5] Catherine Brown, ibid., p. 427.  

[6] It's a mistaken piece of folk etymology to equate Pan's name (Πάν) with the Greek word for 'all' (πᾶν). The former is probably contracted from the earlier term Παων, which is in turn derived from a root word meaning to guard (it wil be recalled that Pan is a pastoral deity who looks over shepherds). Lawrence cheerfully exploits this false etymology; thus his talk of the Pan mystery and being "within the allness of Pan". See 'Pan in America', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 158. The line is quoted by Catherine Brown in 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, on p. 434.   

[7] Catherine Brown, ibid.

[8] See 'D. H. Lawrence - Zombie Hunter', by Hunt Emerson and Kevin Jackson, in Dawn of the Unread (Issue #7, 2016): click here. Or see Plate 38 in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, p. 304.  

[9] Catherine Brown, op. cit., p. 439.

 

[10] See Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996). 

 

 

For a follow up post to this on the figures of Pan and and Christ in the art of Dorothy Brett, click here.

Zoom: What Would D. H. Lawrence Do?

 

Sat at home, surrounded by screens, I am no longer anywhere, 

but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality. 

- Jean Baudrillard

 

I.

 

One of the things I admire about Christianity is the inherent challenge it poses: take up your cross and follow me. These words, spoken by Jesus, are not addressed to those who are merely looking for a new faith, but, rather, those who would establish an entirely new ethical practice or mode of being in the world [1]. 

 

As Nietzsche says, this evangelical way of life - which is often a difficult and dangerous way of life (i.e., one at odds with the world and which can get you fed to the lions) - is what distinguishes a Christian from a non-Christian; he or she doesn't merely think differently, they act differently [2].    

 

One finds a similar call to action in the work of D. H. Lawrence; a writer who demands a far greater level of committment from his followers than most others: "whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn’t like it - if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read somebody else" [3].   

 

Like Jesus, to whom he is often compared [4], Lawrence wants his readers to join him in the fight against modern techno-industrial society (or Mammon) and lead radically different lives from their fellow citizens, founded upon contrasting values.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, however, most readers choose to discreetly ignore this revolutionary aspect of his work - and this even includes members of the D. H. Lawrence Society ... 

 

 

II.

 

According to a senior figure within the above - who shall remain nameless - the most exciting thing to emerge out of lockdown (due to the coronavirus pandemic) is the massive extension of social media. 

 

It is, he says, not only a necessity for all of us to embrace new technology, but a wonderful opportunity for members of the Lawrence Society to move online and experience the delights of virtual meetings, rather than suffer the inconvenience of physically gathering in the actual world. 

 

Indeed, he seems to be something of an evangelist for the communications and technology company Zoom, describing his own use of the software as an uplifting experience. 

 

Maybe it is: I don’t know, 'cos I don't use Zoom.

 

But what I do know, however, is that Lawrence was profoundly troubled by transcendent ideals of uplift which run counter to his gargoyle aesthetic and dreams of climbing down Pisgah back into the nearness of the nearest (as Heidegger would say). 

 

He, Lawrence, was particularly concerned by forms of technology that stimulate false feeling and counterfeit notions of community: 

 

"The film, the radio, the gramophone [and now the internet], were all invented because physical effort and physical contact have become repulsive to man and woman alike. The aim is to abstract as far as possible." [5] 

 

Lawrence would thus surely regard social media as just another attempt by hyper-conscious individuals to experience everything in their heads and to exchange the sheer intensity of life lived in the flesh for a virtual sensation. His fear is not that this results in a loss of soul, but in a denial of the body and corporeal reality: 

 

"The amazing move into abstraction on the part of the whole of humanity […] means we loathe the physical element [...] We don't want to look at flesh-and-blood people - we want to watch their shadows on a screen. We don't want to hear their actual voices: only transmitted through a machine.” [6] 

 

The fact that many people prefer to interact with family and friends via a video link is, I think, rather sad. But the fact that a Lawrentian would choose to celebrate this and act as cheerleader for an American tech giant strikes me as, well, problematic to say the least ...

 

For whilst it's not mandatory for an admirer of Lawrence to agree with everything he wrote and live a faultlessly Lawrentian lifestyle, they might at least take his work seriously enough to accept that the question concerning technology remains of vital philosophical import. 

 

Indeed, one might suggest that it has never been more crucial than now to examine our (obsessive) relationship with the screen, which, since the first lockdown in the spring of last year, has become virtually our only communicative interface with the world. 

 

We work online, we shop on line, we play online and thus our professional lives, social lives, and even love lives are all mediated via screens ... If that isn't something to concern members of the D. H. Lawrence Society, then what is?       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Matthew 16:24. The New International Version of this line reads: "Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.'"   

 

[2] See Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), section 33.

      Of course, as Nietzsche goes on to say, hardly anybody who has called themselves a Christian has understood this and risen to the challenge that Jesus presented. Nevertheless: "Even today, such a life is possible, for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will be possible at all times ... Not a belief but a doing, above all a not-doing of many things [...] To reduce being a Christian, Christianness, to a holding something to be true, to a mere phenomenality of consciousness, means to negate Christianness." Ibid., section 39.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Carlo Linati (22 Jan 1925) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), letter number 3341, pp. 200-01.  

[4] See Catherine Brown, 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 426-441. 

      Brown notes of Lawrence: "Christ-like he preached an idiosyncratic vision of salvation both parabolically and explicitly, denounced hypocrisy and materialism, prioritised content over form and soul over intellect, liked children and communal living, prophesised destruction, was poor and physically weak, died in pain and believed in a kind of resurrection." [427] 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 277.

[6] Ibid., p. 283.

 

 

For a follow-up post to this one, click here. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Arts: An Initial Reaction Written Under the Influence of Sour Grapes and Baudrillard

Edinburgh University Press, (2020)

 

 

This new collection of essays on D. H. Lawrence, edited by Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, probably didn't feature on many people's Christmas wish-list. 

 

But for those who feel obliged to keep up with recent developments in Lawrence scholarship, it's obviously required reading. Indeed, one feels duty-bound to break bread with the authors who have contributed to this Companion, even if the bread that is offered is, occasionally, just a bit stale round the edges and showing signs of mould.      

 

Why should that be? Why can't we have an entire loaf of freshly baked bread? 

 

Well, that's difficult when you commision all the usual suspects to write about art primarily in terms of aesthetics and discuss Lawrence's work with more references to philosophical and cultural trends rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, than to ways of thinking that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries [1]. 

 

So it is that whilst the editors of this volume clearly understand the need for a "re-evaluation of existing critical positions" [2], they at no time pause to consider if the very idea of art as a distinct sphere of activity in an era of transaesthetics [3] hasn't - like sex - become merely a nostalgic fantasy.

 

Art, in other words, has lost its specificity and is now indistinguishable from everyday life. It no longer represents anything - no longer means anything - and art no longer possesses the aesthetic power to transfigure or transcend the world; we have realised our own utopia and illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible [4]. 

 

And, unfortunately, not even D. H. Lawrence can save us ...

 

Notes

[1] You will find more references in the index to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts to Friedrich Schiller, for example, than to Jean Baudrillard. In fact, there are no references to the latter, despite his being one of the most important (and provocative) cultural theorists of the last forty years.

 

[2] Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, 'Introduction' to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 1.

 

[3] See Jean Baudrillard, 'Transaesthetics', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993), pp. 14-19. Readers who are interested in this idea should also see also Baudrillard's The Conspiracy of Art, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2005).

 

[4] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Phil Beitchman, Paul Foss and Paul Patton, (Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 38.

 

 

A Brief Note on the Question of Scale in the Work of D. H. Lawrence

Okay, one last time: these are small, 

but the ones out there are far away.

 

 

As a mortal being, man is a creature of time and space. That is to say, one bound by certain limits and defined by certain coordinates and measurements. Man, therefore, is not so much the measure of all things, as measured by all things and Lawrence insists on the importance of man knowing his limits; of accepting that he ends where his fingers and toes stop. 

 

Having said that, Lawrence also asserts that man has a transcendent quality and is like a rose; "perfected in the realm of the absolute, the other-world of bliss" [RDP 9]. When we blossom into singular being, we do so off the scale; "absolved from time and space" [RDP 9]. 

 

That’s why Lawrence hates talk of the average man or woman, perfectly cut to size, and rejects ideals of equality and social perfection. The average, he says, is a pure abstraction; "the reduction of the human being to a mathematical unit" [RDP 63]. 

 

However, Lawrence certainly believes in a scale of values and what Nietzsche termed an order of rank. Every man and every woman may be a star, but they exist in relation to one another and must fall into place according to their status: "The small are as perfect as the great, because each is itself and in its own place. But the great are none the less great, the small the small. And the joy of each is that it is so." [RDP 103] 

 

Thus, there’s a very real social scale operating within the Lawrentian universe, only he insists that it’s a natural hierarchy. There must, says Lawrence, be a system of some sort and there must be different classes; "either that, or amorphous nothingness" [RDP 111]. And the individual’s place within this system is determined by the degree of power - or life - that they manifest in the world: "The only thing to do is to realise what is higher, and what is lower, in the cycles of existence." [RDP 352] 

 

This has nothing to do with size or even physical strength, but everything to do with vitality or what Lawrence sometimes calls vividness. A tiny ant, for example, belongs to a higher cycle of existence than a giant redwood because it is more alive and, if it comes to a contest, "the little ant will devour the life of the huge tree" [RDP 357]. 

 

Similarly, this is why Hepburn is right to insist to Hannele – much to her irritation – that, ultimately, he is greater than even the tallest mountain [Fox 137-38].

 

 

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lines quoted are from the following four essays: 'Love', 'Democracy', Education of the People', and 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine'.

 

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 

 

 

Notes 

 

The image is from an episode of Father Ted entitled 'Hell' [S02/E01], dir. Declan Lowney, written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, in which Ted uses some toy cows to try to explain issues of scale and perspective to Dougal whilst on holiday in a caravan. The episode originally aired on 8 March 1996. Click here to watch the iconic scene on YouTube.  

 

This post was inspired by Catherine Brown's presentation - 'D. H. Lawrence and the Sense of Scale' - to the D. H. Lawrence Society (14-10-20).

Ours Is Essentially a Tragic Age: Notes on the Opening of a Novel

Two female readers of the Penguin edition of 
D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960)

showing little interest in the opening lines

Lady Chatterley's Lover opens with the following paragraph:

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

I think it's an opening that deserves to be looked at a little more closely ...


One immediately notes the use by Lawrence of an omniscient third person narrator; one who sees and knows all things in a god-like manner, even the private thoughts and feelings of the characters. As one Nietzschean little girl informed her mother, there's something indecent about this.

One suspects that Lawrence would seek to justify his narrative technique in terms of perfect empathy rather than epistemological transparency, but I still find it questionable that although in this opening paragraph the narrator describes Connie's position in a rather matter-of-fact manner, thereby ironically distancing himself from her, he will later describe things from Connie's perspective in a far more lyrical fashion, as if even her most intimate experiences were also his own and ours as readers.

Thus, whilst we get to see the workings of Clifford's mind, we get to share Connie's orgasm and made fully complicit in her sexual shenanigans. That's what happens when free indirect discourse meets the pornographic imagination - interiority is taken to a perversely material conclusion.   

What I'd like to suggest is that whenever a narrator says ours is we should be on our guard; we certainly shouldn't be lulled into false consensus or made an accessory after the fact. His - and maybe Connie's - may be an essentially tragic age, but it's not compulsory for any reader to subscribe to this belief.

And what does this claim mean anyway, for those of us living in an essentially inessential age that lacks any intrinsic character or indispensable quality? Lawrence would doubtless say that's the nature of our (postmodern) tragedy; that we have no soul or substance and live accidental lives of random contingency. But Lawrence is more of a metaphysician than he often pretends and still clings to the verb to be in all seriousness. 

Essential or otherwise, it seems that the narrator employs the idea of tragedy in a conventional sense; i.e. this is a post-cataclysmic period of great suffering, destruction, downfall etc. But it's important to note that Lawrence is not a tragic writer and, in fact, hates tragedy as usually conceived; thus his refusal to take it tragically.

This saying no to the tragic reception of tragedy is part of Lawrence's admirable attempt to take a great kick at misery and his refusal to wallow in his or anyone else's misfortune. Lawrence despises those who, in his words, are in love with their own defeat; he would be the last person on earth to subscribe to the contemporary cult of victimhood. 

But what is the terrible deluge that is supposed to have happened? Obviously, it's a reference to the Great War. But, as a Nietzschean, I also conceive of this cataclysmic event as the death of God - a tragic but also joyous event that changes everything and creates opportunities to build new little habitats and opens new spaces for thought in which we might also allow ourselves to dream again and form new little hopes.  

Nietzsche famously (and cheerfully) writes of this event in The Gay Science and the rejuvinating effect it has upon free spirits who feel themselves "irradiated as by a new dawn" by the news that God is dead:

"Our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an 'open sea' exist."

Thus, to be among the ruins needn't be thought negatively; needn't oblige one to give in before one starts. Indeed, whilst Lawrence doesn't quite go so far as the Situationists and believe in the ruins, I think he understands their appeal and the fun to be had with fragments - or bits as he calls them in Kangaroo. Indeed, one could read the cataclysm as the collapse of grand narratives and understand the building of new little habitats as the attempt to find more localised, more provisional, more relative truths that aren't coordinated by an ideal of Wholeness or swept up into an Absolute.

Almost one is tempted to suggest that in the following paragraph from Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari are rewriting Lawrence's opening to Lady C. and theoretically expanding upon his thinking on plurality and multiplicities: 

"We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately." 

Finally, we come to the last line: We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. I suppose that's true - even if it's factually not the case. For we could, of course, choose to die; as Gerald chooses to die at the end of Women in Love, rather than accept being broken open once more like Mellors, or voluntarily leave the tomb like the man who died.

And learning how and when to die at the right time is as much an art, requiring just as much courage, as living on regardless of the circumstances and becoming one of those unhappy souls; individuals like Clifford who are afraid to die and fall silent, determined to continue asserting themselves even when they have fallen out of touch with others. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 5.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 42.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Press, 1974), V. 343, p. 280. 

See also: Catherine Brown, 'Resisting Tragedy: A Report on the International D. H. Lawrence Conference, Paris, 2018', in the D. H. Lawrence Society Newsletter (Winter 2018/19), or click here to read in a pre-edited version on her website.

Interestingly, Dr. Brown argues that Lawrence adopts various literary means and devices in order to resist tragedy, whereas the narrator calls for a refusal - something that those researching this topic might like to consider. As a nihilist, I'm more attracted to a strategy of active negation (refusal) than offering a dialectical form of (often complementary) opposition (resistance): click here for an explanation why.  

On Why Lawrentian Werewolves Are Not Vegans 2: A Reply to Catherine Brown

Benicio del Toro in The Wolfman (2010) 
Does he look like he enjoys lentils?

Interestingly, the attempt to not merely anticipate but invoke and affirm a vegan world in relation to the work of D. H. Lawrence is also now being made by the much admired literary scholar Catherine Brown, herself a recent convert to this militant form of ascetic idealism. 

Brown argues that although Lawrence wasn't a vegan - nor even a mild-mannered vegetarian - his thought contains much that resonates with veganism as it is understood and practiced today. This is perhaps true, but, having said that, I don't think we can simply equate Lawrence's work with veganism, nor allow his thinking to be co-opted by any single cause or crusade. 

For whilst I'm sure Lawrence would have despised factory farming as much as Heidegger - the latter notoriously suggesting metaphysical equivalence between mechanized food production and the Nazi death camps long before Morrissey came up with the slogan meat is murder - he remained, as Brown admits, "comfortable within the omnivorism and speciesism that was dominant in his as in our culture".  

Indeed, whilst the tiger and the wolf present terrible problems to those idealists who want to think life exclusively in terms of the lamb, Lawrence invariably sides with those beasts of prey - including man - that feast on the flesh of other creatures in good conscience. What's more, he makes no secret of his contempt for those domestic farm animals - pigs, sheep, and cattle - that fail to attain purity of being and lapse into nullity:

"They grow fat; their only raison d'être is to provide food for a really living organism. [...] It is given us to devour them." [RDP 41]  

You can try and get around this by adopting the trust the tale, not the teller defence, and find fictional passages in which a character might turn their nose up at a plate of beef, or, like Ursula Brangwen, thoroughly enjoy a tasty vegetarian hot-pot, but, still the stubborn fact remains that Lawrence's carnivorous vitalism ultimately trumps any nascent veganism.    

And if, as we have noted, Lawrence despises those creatures that lack creative impulse, so too does he abhor human beings who have become docile grazing animals, subscribing to what Nietzsche calls a herd morality - cry-bullies forever bleating about rights and bloated on their own sense of righteousness. Such people are, he says, "the enemy and the abomination" and he is grateful for the "tigers and butchers that will free us from the abominable tyranny of sheep" [RDP 42].

Ultimately, Lawrence wants men and women with large mouths, big teeth and sharp claws and we can even locate within his work something that might be termed a werewolf manifesto - cf. the vegan manifesto that Dr. Brown finds within his writing. This werewolf manifesto openly sets itself against the Green Age - i.e., the utopia imagined by cabbage-hearted vegans, environmentalists, cows, Christians, and social justice warriors in which the lion lies down with the lamb and "no mouse shall be caught by a cat" [RDP 275].

Lawrence writes:

"This is the [...] golden age that is to be, when all shall be domesticated, and the lion and the leopard and the hawk shall  come to our door to lap [soy] milk and to peck the crumbs, and no sound shall be heard but the lowing of fat cows and the baa-ing of fat sheep. This is the Green Age that is to be, the age of the perfect cabbage." [RDP 275-76]

Of course, Catherine is perfectly at liberty to read Lawrence however she wishes: as am I. And, as a matter of fact, I'm very sympathetic to her idea that if we conceive of veganism "not as a dogma, identity, or state of putative purity, but as a queer nexus of perceptions and affects, then Lawrence can, at moments, be described as vegan".

Although, of course, we could easily replace the word veganism here with any other -ism - including fascism or feminism - and this sentence would still make perfect sense: that's the beauty (and the danger) of Lawrence's text; it invites anyone and everyone to play within the space that it opens up and to invest it with their own forces.  

See:

Catherine Brown, 'D. H. Lawrence and the Anticipation of a Vegan World'. This paper was originally given at the 33rd annual international D. H. Lawrence conference held at the University of Nanterre, Paris (3-7 April 2019). It can be read on the author's website: click here. 

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

Readers interested in part one of this post - in which I address the comments made by another vegan Lawrentian (David Brock) on an earlier post to do with dental morphology - should click here.

Orophobia (With Reference to the Case of Alexander Hepburn)

Casper David Friedrich: 

Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818)

[Oder typischer romantischer Bullshit]

I don't like mountains and can never decide whether it's more depressing to be stuck at the foot of one, or atop the highest peak; the crushing claustrophobia of steep rock looming naked and inhuman, contra the radiant spiritual uplift of ice and snow - which is worse?

Either way, I suffer from a form of acute mountain sickness which has more to do with a philo-pathological disposition than with a lack of oxygen or trouble adjusting to altitude. I don't like being made to feel small and insignificant before what is ultimately just an elevation of the earth's surface, pushed up by tectonic activity (i.e., a large bump when all's said and done); but neither do I like submitting to Alpine ecstasy and being whooshed away into another world and another (higher) life and the promise of icy immortality.   

This is why I'm very sympathetic to the sceptical - some would say orophobic - reaction of Alexander Hepburn when he is taken by his German mistress, Hannele, to the popular Tyrolean resort of Kaprun, in order to experience the majesty of God's mountains.

Despite her strident insistence that the latter are wonderful and empowering, Hepburn soon expresses his disillusion and distaste. For, in his heart of hearts, he loathed the mountains, which seemed to him almost obscene in their unimaginably huge weight and size. As he tells Hannele, he is no mountain-topper or snow-bird, preferring to live as close as possible to sea-level at all times.

Lawrence writes:

"A dark flame suddenly went over his face.
     'Yes,' he said, 'I hate them, I hate them. I hate their snow and their affectation.'
     'Affectation!' she laughed. 'Oh! Even the mountains are affected for you, are they?'

     'Yes,' he said. 'Their loftiness and their uplift. I hate their uplift. I hate people prancing on mountain-tops and feeling exalted. I’d like to make them all stop up there, on their mountain-tops, and chew ice to fill their stomachs. I wouldn't let them down again, I wouldn't. I hate it all, I tell you; I hate it.'"

 Perhaps not surprisingly, Hannele is a little taken aback by this outburst:

"'You must be a little mad' she said superbly 'to talk like that about the mountains. They are so much bigger than you.'
     'No', he said. 'No! They are not.'

   'What!' she laughed aloud. 'The mountains are not bigger than you? But you are extraordinary.'

     'They are not bigger than me' he cried. 'Any more than you are bigger than me if you stand on a ladder. They are not bigger than me. They are less than me.'
      'Oh! Oh!' she cried in wonder and ridicule. 'The mountains are less than you.' 
      'Yes,' he cried, 'they are less.'"

Hannele mistakes this for megalomania, but, actually, it isn't that. It is, rather, a noble refusal to be intimidated by grandeur, be it divine or natural in origin, and a rejection of romantic idealism founded upon notions of transcendence and the sublime. In other words, Hepburn is attempting to curb his - and Hannele's - enthusiasm; something which I think a (pretty) good thing.

Indeed, for me, Lawrence is at his best not when indulging his penchant for theo-poetic speculation (sorry Catherine), but, rather, being sardonic and stubbornly down-to-earth; like one of those Jews of the wrong sort whom Hepburn encounters at his hotel; imparting a "wholesome breath of sanity, disillusion, unsentimentality to the excited Bergheil atmosphere".

Ultimately, as much as Lawrence wishes to make life seem glamorous and rich with cosmic significance, he doesn't want men and women to sprout wings of the spirit too often; nor pose as solitary superhuman beings on mountain summits, as if belonging to a glacial world sufficient unto itself and devoid of cabbages.

His great teaching, rather, is to climb down Pisgah and for man to affirm the horizontal limitations of his own flesh and mortality.  

Notes

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll' in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, edited by Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 2002), chapters XIV-XVIII. 

Note: The Captain's Doll (1923) can be read online as an eBook thanks to Project Gutenberg of Australia: click here.

See also the fascinating article by Catherine Brown, 'Climbing Down the Alpine Pisgah: Lawrence and the Alps', which explores Lawrence's relationship to the mountains in much more detail: click here.