King Mob Echoes

Print from a copper engraving showing rioters 

setting fire to Newgate Prison in June 1780

 

 

I. 

 

Without wishing to echo those who, like Professor David Betz, predict that the UK is now almost certainly heading for civil war [1] - perhaps not in the old sense, but something widespread and very nasty all the same - I would certainly agree that the future isn't looking particularly rosy.  

 

Like many other European states, we seem to have created the perfect conditions for mass social unrest (at the very least). Falling living standards, ethno-religious tensions fuelled by unprecedented levels of immigration, and loss of faith in the authorities, all add up to a feeling that things can't go on as they are and that something has to change. 

 

As Yeats would say: things are threatening to fall apart; the centre cannot hold; anarchy is about to be loosed upon the world [2] - and not in the romantic and radically chic manner fantasised by some.  

 

 

II. 

 

Perhaps it is the last of these things mentioned above - loss of faith in the authorities - that should concern us most. For as Betz says, insurgency is always rooted in a crisis of legitimacy. If governments and judicial systems lose not only the support but the trust of the people, then that's an extremely serious matter.  

 

In brief, break the magic spell that holds a nation together and things get very real very quickly and citizens - who desire stability and a sense of justice - begin to take matters into their own hands.    

 

And this is why it's so profoundly stupid and politically dangerous for the present government to have effectively put themselves in opposition to the British public by openly declaring that the rights of asylum seekers take precedence over the concerns of the native population [3].

 

 

III. 

 

Funnily enough, the current state of affairs in the UK puts one in mind of the situation in 1780 when a week of rioting in London was triggered by anti-Catholic sentiment and security concerns following the passing of an Act which was intended to reduce discrimination, but perceived as privileging a religious minority over the Protestant majority [4]. 

 

Trouble began on June 2nd, when a huge crowd - estimated to be around 50,000 strong - assembled and marched on Parliament. Many carried flags and banners, as mobs are wont to do. Having failed to force their way into the House of Commons, people grew increasingly angry and the situation quickly got out of hand; members of the Lords were attacked as they arrived and a number of carriages were vandalised and destroyed. 

 

Although this crowd was eventually dispersed by soldiers without further violence, this was not the end of the matter; that same night, Roman Catholic chapels were attacked in several foreign embassies. When it was discovered that protestors who had been arrested were being held in Newgate Prison, this was stormed and largely destroyed, allowing a significant number of prisoners to escape.   

 

On June 7th, things reached a climax when the mob decided to target the Bank of England. Finally, the government called in the army to restore order using deadly force; having been ordered to fire upon groups of four or more rioters who refused to disperse resulted in hundreds of casualties. 

 

Of the 450 people who were arrested, some twenty or thirty were tried and executed. Lord George Gordon who led the original mass protest (and lent his name to the riots that followed) was charged with high treason, but acquitted. 

 

Those who would like to know more are encouraged to read Dickens's historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841), which provides a long and detailed (if fictionalised) account of the Gordon Riots and features Lord George in a prominent role [5]. 

 

IV. 

 

Whilst parallels between then and now can be drawn, they're limited in what they might teach us due to differing socio-historical contexts and circumstances. And Tommy Robinson is no Lord Gordon.  

 

However, we witnessed last year how rapidly situations can deteriorate and how quickly trouble can spread (especially in an age of social media) [6] and one suspects - fears - that if the political climate continues to heat up and the social fabric continues to come apart, then King Mob [7] may once more find its figurehead and assert its sovereignty.   

 

 

V. 

        

Having said all this, Betz may, of course, be mistaken in his analysis and anarchy in the UK may not be an inevitablity. There are those - including individuals in positions of power - who simply don't believe that prolonged and widescale mass violence (let alone civil war) is probable (or even possible); they have an unshakeable faith in the goodness and common sense of the British people. 

 

As one commentator notes:

 

"The UK Government's resilience website lists hazards ranging from severe weather to terrorism, but makes no mention of civil unrest [...] Perhaps politicians realise that any mention of civil war in an official publication would be a PR catastrophe. Or maybe they view Western citizens as simply too cosseted, too biddable. People raised amid relative plenty and security are simply not likely to erupt in significant numbers." [8] 

 

So perhaps we can continue to sleep tightly in our beds at night and wake up full of fresh hope in the morning. 

 

Or perhaps not: for after speaking with Betz, this same commentator concludes that even if the latter is only right in part, then still our lives will be transformed "utterly and for the worse", as we suddenly find ourselves living in a "smaller and more brutal world" [9].     

 

Notes

 

[1] Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World at King's College London: click here to visit his homepage. He has been in the news and all across social media for the last couple of years offering his expert analysis of current events and predictions about the future. See this recent interview, for example, on YouTube with Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster of Triggernometry: click here. 

 

[2] I'm referring of course to Yeats's famous poem 'The Second Coming' (written in 1919). The poem was originally published in The Dial (November 1920), but included also in his collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). To read on the Poetry Foundation website, click here.  

 

[3] I'm referring to the case surrounding the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, which has been at the centre of recent protests against the use of hotels to house asylum seekers at tax payers expense and without consulting the local people, following an alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old schoolgirl by one of the residents. 

      In brief, a temporary injunction granted earlier this month by a high court judge that would have blocked migrants from being housed at the above hotel was overturned on appeal after Home Office intervention (the argument being that there is an obligation for the government to uphold the European Convention on Human Rights). And this has only further raised tensions in the area. A full hearing of the case is expected in mid-October.

 

[4] It should be noted that there were other factors and grievances; political and economic rather than religious in nature. It has been suggested, for example, that many rioters were more concerned about falling wages and rising prices - or the UK's involvement in various foreign wars - than their Catholic neighbours and, as is often the case, these blended together into a general feeling of angry discontent.   

[5] See also Christopher Hibbert's King Mob: The Story of Lord George Gordon and the Riots of 1780 (Longmans, 1958), which provides another colourful reading of the historical record.  

 

[6] I'm referring to the (allegedly far-right) anti-immigration protests and riots that occurred in England and Northern Ireland from 30 July to 5 August 2024, following the Southport stabbings in which three young girls were murdered. The large scale disorder resulted in over 1,800 arrests and many people being handed harsh prison sentences (famously including one woman, Lucy Connolly, for posting a tweet which she deleted soon afterwards). 

 

[7] According to Christopher Hibbert's book on the Gordon Riots, rioters daubed the slogan His Majesty King Mob on the walls of Newgate Prison, after gutting the building. 

      In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a radical group based in London - influenced by (but excluded from) the Situationist International - called itself King Mob. The group, consisting of six main members, published five issues of a journal entitled King Mob Echo as well as many posters and leaflets which mightily impressed a young art student by the name of Malcolm McLaren who, it's claimed, took part in an action at Selfridges in December 1968, that involved freely distributing toys from the store's toy department to children (one of the members - not McLaren - was dressed as father Christmas). 

      Several commentators on the Sex Pistols have asserted the influence of King Mob on the band and McLaren, fascinated by the Gordon Riots, included a punk reimagining of the latter as the opening sequence of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980).       

 

[8] Alexander Poots, 'Is civil war coming for Britain?', on the news and opinion website UnHerd (25 April 2025): click here. 

 

[9] Ibid.  

 

The Sex Pistols - Who the Dickens Were They?

Malcolm McLaren: Oliver Twist Manifesto (42 x 32 cm)

Double-sided flyer created for the Sex Pistols' final British show 

Christmas Day, 1977 [1]

Punk came out of this strange culture that had been repressed through the Victorian times ... 

The Sex Pistols were something more feral and more dark and native to the English psyche than rock 'n' roll 

and Malcolm saw them very much in a Dickensian way. - Julien Temple 

 

 

I. 

 

I spent a fair amount of time earlier in the year arguing that D. H. Lawrence can be thought of as a Sex Pistol: click here, for example. But to think of Lawrence as a proto-punk is not to suggest that we might think of the Sex Pistols as Lawrentian. 

 

In fact, if we are to think of the Sex Pistols in English literary terms at all, it makes far more sense to conceive of Johnny Rotten and company as neo-Dickensian characters. That's certainly how Malcolm McLaren attempted to portray them late on in their career, as the above flyer, written by him in December 1977, illustrates.

 

It begins:   

 

They are Dickensian-like urchins who with ragged clothes and pock marked faces roam the foggy streets of gas-lit London. Pillaging. Setting fire to buildings. Beating up old people with gold chains. Fucking the rich up the arse. Causing havoc wherever they go. Some of these ragamuffin gangs jump on tables amidst the charred debris and with burning torches play rock 'n' roll to the screaming delight of the frenzied pissing pogoing mob. Shouting and spitting 'anarchy' one of these gangs call themselves the Sex Pistols. [2]

 

It's obviously a fantasy vision of the band. But the question is: why does the fantasy take this particular form? Why reference ragamuffin gangs and pogoing mobs, etc? Is it just because McLaren's grandmother adored Fagin and made him read Dickens as a young child, or is there also a wider political context?

 

II. 

 

Before addressing these points, let's first give a bit more background to the production of the flyer ...  

 

By the end of 1977, life had never looked so good for the four Sex Pistols; three hit singles, a number 1 album, and about to commence on their first American tour. 

 

However, things were rapidly coming apart at the seams as relations amongst members of the band - never particularly good - had significantly worsened due to various factors including Sid's addiction to drugs (and to Nancy), Rotten's loathing of McLaren, and Malcolm's desire to ensure the band were remembered as a spectacular failure rather than a benign success.     

 

And so, in hindsight, it isn't all that surprising that the two shows played on Christmas day in Huddersfield - the first, in the afternoon, a benefit gig for the children of striking firemen and the second, in the evening, for fans of the band in and around West Yorkshire - would prove to be their final British performances.

 

Perhaps sensing that the end was nigh, Mclaren began to reimagine the Sex Pistols as so much more than merely another boring rock 'n' roll group. And so he wrote the above text for distribution at the events and illustrated with artwork by George Cruikshank from the original 1838 edition of Oliver Twist [3].

 

According to Paul Gorman, this flyer "acted less as a promotion for the Pistols than a commentary on both his Jewishness and his strange relationship with the group" [4]. But it also demonstrates McLaren's (somewhat bourgeois and overly-romanticised) understanding of working class culture as inherently rebellious, violent, and non-conforming and that returns us to the politics of this manifesto ...

 

 

III. 

      

It's often the case that when commentators discuss the Sex Pistols in terms of politics they immediately reach for their French dictionary and start talking about the Situationists and referencing Guy Debord's La société du spectacle (1967). 

 

That's not mistaken, but it does mean that less attention is given to the fact that the Sex Pistols are also very much part of an English history of insurrection to do with the so-called London mob and the Gordon Riots [5]. 

 

As the opening sequence of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) explicitly informs viewers, the roots of 'Anarchy in the UK' can be traced back to the 1780s [6]. That is to say, to a period fizzing with revolutionary and carnivalesque energies on both sides of the Channel and one that Charles Dickens wrote about in his (little read and rarely adapted) historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841) [7]. 

 

Wilfully conflating mob violence with punk rock, the cinematic re-enactment of the Gordon Riots makes clear that McLaren saw the Sex Pistols as first and foremost a rejection of authority - be it of parents, teachers, priests, policemen, or soldiers of the crown - and representative, as Julien Temple rightly says, of "something more feral and more dark and native to the English psyche than rock 'n' roll" [8].   

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The flyer was signed 'Oliver Twist' to emphasise McLaren's vision of the band as Dickensian urchins. It formed item 52 of the 71 item Stollper-Wilson Collection of Sex Pistols memorabilia auctioned by Sotheby's in October 2022: click here. 

      One of the most noticeable things about the flyer is the fact that Malcolm allowed corrections to the text to remain openly on display, just as they are on the Dickens manuscripts he saw as a child. As Paul Gorman reminds us, McLaren subscribed to the view that honest error is crucial to the creative process, rather than "'the icy perfections of the mere stylist'". 

      See The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 48, where Gorman quotes from an aphorism coined by the Victorian church architect J. D. Sedding (one often falsely attributed to Charles Rennie Mackintosh). 

 

[2] The rest of the text scawled by McLaren (with a wooden stick dipped in ink) reads:

 

This true and dirty tale has been continuing throughout 200 years of teenage anarchy and so in 1978 there still remains the Sex Pistols. Their active extremism is all they care about because that's what counts to jump right out of the 20th century as fast as you possibly can in order to create an environment that you can truthfully run wild in.

 

[3] The illustration by Cruikshank to which I refer depicts the first meeting between Oliver Twist and Fagin entitled 'Oliver introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman'. It's an image which plays an important role in the mythologising of the Sex Pistols, paralleling as it does the first time that Malcolm and members of the band met with the nineteen-year-old who would become their singer and frontman: see the post 'On This Day ...' (22 August 2025): click here. 

      I am grateful for this clever insight to Michael E. Kitson, writing in 'The Sex Pistols and the London Mob', an unpublished doctoral thesis submitted to Western Sydney University (2008): click here to view the abstract and to download the work as a pdf. As this post makes clear, I agree with Kitson's central claim that the culture and semiotics of the London mob was fundamental to McLaren's (distinctly English) punk project and that the influence of Dickens on McLaren's thinking cannot be overestimated. 

 

[4] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren ... p. 381. 

      Interestingly, McLaren signs his manifesto with the name of Oliver Twist and not with Fagin, as one might have expected, as the latter was the explicitly Jewish character in Dickens's 1838 novel and the leader of a group of youngsters whom he grooms into a life of crime. 

      Still, whichever character McLaren ultimately identified with, the fact remains that Dickens's novel played a seminal role in his thinking. In 2000, he named the book as one of his favourites in a piece for The Guardian, describing it as an "unforgettable journey into criminal behaviour" that not only transported him back to his own childhood, but which justified his desire to - and here he paraphrases from his own Oliver Twist Manifesto - "create an environment " in which he could "truthfully run wild" whilst overseeing a generation of artful dodgers.  

      To read the list of Mclaren's top ten books in The Guardian (21 Feb 2000), click here.  

 

[5] The Gordon Riots of 1780 saw several days of violent disorder and destruction in London motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment and instigated by Lord George Gordon. After the mob - which had declared its own sovereignty on the wall of Newgate Prison - attempted to storm the Bank of England, the government finally sent in the army, resulting in several hundred fatalities.

 

[6] Funnily enough, the opening scene of the Swindle set in eighteenth-century London - featuring crowds cavorting in the streets as they joyously string up effigies of the Sex Pistols above a huge bonfire - is one that even Rotten admits to liking, conceding that it amusingly captures the spirit of punk. See John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (Hodder and Stoughton, 1994), p. 289.

 

[7] I don't know if McLaren read Barnaby Rudge, but it's possible and Dickens's novel remains the definitive literary work detailing the phenomenon of the London mob at its height. 

      It's also more than likely that McLaren would have been (at least vaguely) familiar with Christopher Hibbert's King Mob: The Story of Lord George Gordon and the Riots of 1780 (Longmans, 1958), which provides a colourful reading of the historical record. 

      And finally, it should be pointed out that McLaren certainly knew of (and admired) the newsletter King Mob Echo produced by the British offshoot of the Situationist International, with whom he was acquainted whilst an art student in the 1960s (see Gorman 2020, pp. 95-98).

 

[8] Julien Temple, director of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), speaking in the audio commentary [2:13] provided as a bonus to the DVD release of the film in 2005: click here. Temple is speaking with the writer Chris Salewicz. Interestingly, while Malcolm sees the Sex Pistols as Dickensian, Temple prefers to think of them as a bit Chaucerian. 

 

 

In a Time Never-Never (Notes on McLaren & Westwood's Worlds End)

Worlds End: the fifth and final incarnation of McLaren and Westwood's 

store at 430 King's Road, Chelsea.

 

'It was a bright cold day in 1980, and the clocks were striking thirteen ...'

 

 

Whilst David Connor proudly promotes his role in the transformation of Seditionaries into Worlds End in late 1980 - describing the total refurbishment of 430 King's Road as a "collaboration with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren" [1] - I think those of us who care about this matter are aware that it was the latter who essentially should be credited with the work.

 

I'm not suggesting McLaren didn't have help [2]: but the creative vision was his and the key ideas - such as the steeply sloping shop floor and the giant 13-hour clock with hands that rotate anti-clockwise at high speed promising to magically transport those who stepped inside not merely to the past, but to a time never-never or an immanent utopia [3] - were his. 

 

As was the name of the shop: and the Worlds End logo, adapted from the flag design by the eighteenth-century pirate Robert Tew, featuring a muscular arm holding a Saracen sword on a black background (McLaren having decided that the skull and crossbones was simply too clichéd) [4].

 

The interior and exterior designs McLaren came up with for the store were intended to suggest a mixture of The Old Curiosity Shop located in London's Holborn area - and made famous by Dickens in his 1841 novel of that title - and an eighteenth-century galleon.

 

Ultimately, McLaren's idea was to sail away from everything; from punk, from England, from the twentieth-century. And for McLaren, Peter Pan style pirates and Red Indian braves [5] were now sexier, more stylish, and more subversive of the cultural mainstream than rockers in their black leather jackets and ripped jeans.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See David Connor's website page dedicated to Worlds End: click here. 

      Whilst Connor produced a number of drawings for the project that developed what Paul Gorman describes as the "twisted fairy-tale elements of McLaren's concepts" - three of which are included on the page linked to - Malcolm desired a much stronger-looking facade for his store; one that was rooted in history as well fantasy. See Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 457.

 

[2] Gorman informs us that whilst McLaren "oversaw the overhaul", it was carried out by Roger Burton and the electrician Andy Newman. But the latter were simply following instructions and the concept being realised was McLaren's own. See The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 457.

 

[3] This phrase, which I associate with Deleuze and Guattari, refers to a place and time that exists very much now/here rather than nowhere. I discuss the idea in relation to the land of Cockaigne and the Big Rock Candy Mountain in a post of 10 August 2018: click here. 

      As for the idea of a clock that might strike for a 13th time, this is one that resonates within English literature. The line at the top of this post, for example, is a paraphrase of the very famous opening line of George Orwell's novel 1984. Essentially, it's an idea that casts doubt on reality.

 

[4] See Paul Gorman's post of 28 August 2014 published on his (always amazingly well-researched) website paulgormanis.com - click here. 

      Readers might also be interested in Ben Westwood's post of 11 August 2017 on the Worlds End blog published on viviennewestwood.com: click here. 

 

[5] Interestingly, McLaren's relation to the Scottish novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie - creator of Peter Pan - is little dicussed, even though he was clearly much influenced by the latter's adventures in Neverland as leader of the Lost Boys; adventures which involved dealing with pirates and redskins, as well as fairies and mermaids. 

      In a list for The Guardian of his top 10 books, compiled in February 2000, McLaren places Peter Pan at number one, describing it as the "best sex story" he has ever read: click here. As a possible explanation of what he meant by this, see Philip Hensher's article in The Spectator entitled 'The creepiness of Peter Pan' (11 June 2005): click here.

      

 

For a recent post related to this one entitled 'Out of the Punk Ruins and Into the Age of Piracy' (26 May 2024), please click here. 

Spooks and Lovers: Halloween With D. H. Lawrence

 

Although - as far as I'm aware - D. H. Lawrence didn't celebrate Halloween, he did write a number of spooky tales with supernatural elements [1] and he had an abiding interest in the occult and things which go bump in the dark. 

 

And so, I thought it might be fun to look at what he writes in nine of his letters (and one postcard) dated the 31st of October ... 

 

 

[31 October 1903] [2]

 

On a postcard sent from Peterborough to his childhood friend Gertrude Cooper, Lawrence writes to say he is safe and sound and that he has been to visit the 12th-century cathedral, famous for its Early English Gothic façade featuring three large arches.

 

However, Lawrence will increasingly grow disillusioned with monumental religious architecture and reach the stage where he is weary of huge stone erections In other words, he will come to believe in the ruins [3] and will, like Deleuze and Guattari, seek to release desire from all that overcodes it, rejecting the myth of wholeness or completion [4]. 

 

And that is one of the reasons I so admire Lawrence as a writer: because he anticipates both punk and poststructuralism. 

 

 

[31 October 1913] [5]

 

In a letter to Henry Savage - a minor literary figure who had written a positive review of Lawrence's first novel The White Peacock (1911) - Lawrence sets forth his view that what women fundamentally want is sexual satisfaction:

 

"A man may bring her his laurel wreaths and songs and what not, but if that man doesn't satisfy her, in some undeniable physical fashion - then in one way or other she takes him in her mouth and shakes him like a cat a mouse, and throws him away. She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honour, duty, worth, work, salvation - none of them - not in the long run."

 

In other words - and in the long run - she simply desires a good fucking; a fairly conventional view which Lawrence holds too for the rest of his life. Less conventional, however, is the claim (and confession) that follows: "And an artist - a poet - is like a woman in that he too must have this satisfaction. [...] He must get his bodily and spiritual want satisfied [...]

 

Is it just me, or is there not an ambiguity to this sentence which invites a kinky interpretation ...? (Some readers might recall that I've written before on Lawrence's autogynephilia, his perverse tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a woman being penetrated by a large cock: click here.)   

 

In this same long letter, written from Italy, Lawrence also admits that whilst he dislikes Charles Dickens for his mid-Victorian moralising, he's jealous of his characters. 

 

He closes, in typical Lawrence fashion, by requesting some books, giving an update on his health - he has a rotten bad cold - and by admitting that he wishes he had some money, so needn't work. 

 

 

31 October 1914 [6]

In a rather sweet note to his Russian friend S. S. Koteliansky, Lawrence asks the latter if he can do him a favour next time he's in Soho:

 

"I saw a necklace I wanted to buy for Frieda. It is in a shop almost at the south end of Wardour St near Leicester Square [...] a second hand jeweller's - a necklace of lapis lazuli set in little white enamel clasps - costs 30/- It hangs up at eye level near the doorway. I send you a cheque. If you find the necklace, please buy it me - round beads of lapis lazuli - you can't mistake it - marked 30/-"

 

Just to be on the safe side, Lawrence even enclosed  a sketch of the necklace. However, unsure of Kot's ability to locate the piece - despite his detailed description and drawing - he then adds a PS to the letter: "If you don't find it you can give me back the cheque."

 

I suppose that's fair enough - 30 bob might not sound like much, but it would be about £190 today and the averge coal miner in 1914 would only expect to earn about 9 shillings per daily shift. 

 

Lawrence, of course, had a thing for lapis lazuli - he had once given a piece to the poet Hilda Doolittle (or H.D. as she was known) and readers might also recall that Hermione smashes Birkin's skull with a beautiful crystal ball made of such [7].    

 

 

31 October 1916 [8]

 

Lawrence is in Cornwall and has just finished writing his latest novel, Women in Love. Along with a letter to his literary agent, J. B. Pinker, Lawrence encloses the final part of his manuscript - "all but the last chapter, which, being a sort of epilogue, I want to write later".   

 

He also encloses the short story called 'The Mortal Coil', which he is clearly proud of, although not optimistic about its commercial prospects:

 

"It is a first-class story, one of my purest creations, but not destined I fear, like the holy in the hymn, to land On the Golden Strand [...] I really grieve when I send you still another unmarketable wretch of fiction. But bear with me. I will write sweet simple tales yet."  

 

Poor Lawrence! Always hoping to strike it rich with his writing and find the philosopher's stone, if only so that he can escape to sunnier climes and find better health: "I am tired of being unwell in England." 

 

 

[31 October 1919] [9]

 

It would, however, be three years later before Lawrence was finally able to leave England and head south once more: in a letter to Martin Secker expressing his concern about the Women in Love manuscript which has been sent to the US, Lawrence also adds: "I shall be in [London] Monday, preparatory to going off for Italy". 

 

He left London on 14 November: to Turin via Paris on the train and then on to Florence (via Spezia). 

 

Unfortunately, poor health and money worries continue to dog him no matter where he travels, although at times Lawrence affirms his sickness - better than a bourgeois model of good health - and his poverty; for it is preferable, he says, to sit still on a large rock than ride in the car of a multi-millionaire.   

[31 October 1921] [10]

In a Halloween letter sent from Sicily to his literary agent Robert Mountsier, Lawrence says he's thinking of heading out West and trying his luck in the New World: "What's the good of Europe, anyhow?"

 

It was a particularly busy period for Lawrence as a writer:  

 

(i) Sea and Sardinia was about to be published, as well as the poetry collection Tortoises ...

 

(ii) he was rewriting some old short stories and finishing his novella 'The Captain's Doll' ...

 

(iii) Fantasia of the Unconscious had just been sent off to his American publisher ...

 

(iv) he was also busy working on Mr Noon, although he confessed that he didn't know whether he'd actually finish writing the novel: "I get so annoyed with everybody that I don't want to tackle any really serious work. To hell with them all. Miserable world of canaille."

 

Interestingly, this letter also gives us an insight into D. H. Lawrence the wine connoisseur:

 

"We have been trying the new Fontana Vecchia wine: though it shouldn't be tried till November 11th - I don't very much like it - it's going to be rough. I'm glad I had a barrel of last year's from the Vigna Sagnoula." [11]

 

 

31 October 1922 [12]   

The following year, on the same date, Lawrence again wrote to Robert Mountsier ... 

 

He was now in Taos, New Mexico, and thinking of moving into the ranch that Mabel Sterne was offering him and Frieda; somewhere they could they finally call home and make a real life together.  

Having already invited a friend of Mabel's - Bessie Freeman - to come and live with them, Lawrence now invited his literary agent to do the same:

 

"M.S. has got a ranch, 180 acres, on Rockies foothills, about 20 miles away, wild. We went there today. It is very lovely. There are two rather poor little houses [...] all rather abandoned. But we think of going there either this week or next, to try it. If we find it possible, move in there. The ranch is utterly abandoned now, so it will be a good thing for it to have somebody there. If we go, come there with us, and we'll make a life. [...] It's a wonderful place, with the world at your feet and the mountains at your back, and pine-trees. [...] You'd have one of the houses: they almost adjoin. We'd have to get a few repairs done."

Obviously, being neither impetuous nor insane, Mountsier wasn't tempted by this offer. 

 

And one might have imagined that after his experience in Cornwall with Mansfield and Murry, Lawrence would have abandoned plans for communal living, but apparently not; as he said in a letter to Koteliansky from this period, his idea had been sound, but the people invited to build Rananim were not up to the task [13] - which is the bitter conclusion that all utopian dreamers reach.  

 

 

[31 October 1925] [14]

 

And speaking of Jack Murry ... Lawrence wrote to him on Halloween in 1925, whilst staying at his mother-in-law's, on the edge of the Black Forest, which he loved, but always found somewhat spooky; like something from a dream (or nightmare). 

 

Although obviously a little bored and wishing he'd gone to Paris instead, he nevertheless offers the following observation on Germany at the time:

 

"Just the same here - very quiet and unemerged: my mother-in-law older, noticeably. I make my bows and play whist [...] Titles still in full swing here, but nothing else. No foreigners [...] and the peasants still peasants, with a bit of the eternal earth-to-earth quality that is so lost in England. Rather like a still sleep, with frail dreams."  

 

Murry by this stage regarded himself as a radical Christian - he would publish his Life of Jesus the following year - but Lawrence doesn't have much time for this:

 

"Don't you see, there still has to be a Creator? Jesus is not the Creator, even of himself. And we have to go on being created. By the Creator. More important to me than Jesus. But of course God-the Father, the Dieu-Père, is a bore. Jesus is as far as one can go with god, anthropomorphically. After that, no more anthropos." 

 

And that's the Lawrence which the pagan me still loves: anti-Christian (or, at the very least, post-Christian) and in search of queer, inhuman gods who inhabit the outer (and inner) darkness ...

 

  

31 October 1927 [15]

Not the best of days for poor Lawrence. He wrote to Koteliansky:

 

"Altogether the world is depressing - and I feel rather depressed. My bronchials are such a nuisance, and I don't feel myself at all. I'm not very happy here [Florence], and I don't know where else to go, and have not much money to go anywhere - I feel I don't want to work -  don't want to do a thing at all the life gone out of me. Yet how can I sit in this empty place and see nobody and do nothing! It's a limit! I'll have to make a change somehow or other - but don't know how."

 

And as he wrote to the German writer Max Mohr:

 

"I unfortunately can't yet promise to dance - my bronchials and my cough are still a nuisance. But I want so much to be able to dance again. And I think if we went somewhere really amusing, I should quickly be well. My cough, like your restlessness, is a good deal psychological in its origin, and a real change might cure us both. The sun shines here, but the mornings are foggy. And I no longer love Italy very much - it seems to me a stupid country."

 

Oh dear, when one falls out of love with Italy that's not a good sign ...

31 October 1928 [16]

 

Lawrence's final Halloween letter was again written to Koteliansky. 

 

In it, whilst still feeling poorly - this time with Italian flu given to him by Frieda - Lawrence sounds much perkier than a year ago; more full of fight and ready to take on the British press and customs officials who are united in their opposition to Lady Chatterley's Lover (which had been printed privately in Italy ealier that year).   

"What fools altogether!", writes Lawrence. "How bored one gets by endless mob-stupidity."

Lawrence is holed up on the tiny French island of Port-Cros; only four miles across and covered in pine trees; there's a hotel, a port, and a handful of houses. Nevertheless, Lawrence says that, were it not for his cold, he should like it: "I feel very indifferent to almost everything."

 

Interestingly, that's not something one expects to hear from Lawrence, who often contrasts indifference negatively with insouciance, arguing that whereas the latter is a refusal to be made anxious by idealists gripped by a moral compulsion to care, the former, indifference, is an inability to care resulting from a certain instinctive-intuitive numbness (often as a consequence of having cared too much about the wrong thing in the past) [17].

 

Of course, this is just another false dichotomy. At any rate, I'm quite happy to view indifference more positively (within a transpolitical context, for example).

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Perhaps the best known of these tales is 'The Rocking Horse Winner', which can be found in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 230-244. My take on this story can be found here.

 

[2]  D. H. Lawrence, letter to Gertrude Cooper, [31 Oct 1903], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 23.

 

[3] See The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 188-91, where Lawrence writes of Anna's experience of Lincoln Cathedral and see 'Sketches of Etruscan Places', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 32-33, where he writes in favour of small wooden temples rather than enormous stone buildings. I have discussed this material in the post entitled 'Believe in the Ruins' (16 April 2019): click here.

 

[4] See Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 41, where they write in favour of partial objects, fragments, and heterogenous bits, rather than any kind of totality. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Henry Savage, [31 Oct 1913], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 94-96

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky, 31 Oct 1914, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, p. 228.    

 

[7] See Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 105. Hermione uses the ball as a paperweight, when not using it as a weapon. 

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, letter to J. B. Pinker, 31 Oct 1916, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, pp. 669-670.    

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Martin Secker, [31 Oct 1919], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 408. 

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Mountsier, [31 Oct 1921], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-108. 

 

[11] To describe a wine as rough means that it has a coarse texture. It would usually refer to a young tannic red wine, before it has had time to soften or round out.  

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Mountsier, [31 Oct 1922], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, p. 334.

 

[13] In 1916, Lawrence invited Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry to come and live in a cottage next door to him and his wife Frieda, in Zennor, near St. Ives; a tiny place, near the moors, full of black rocks, and overlooking the sea. 

      The idea was to establish an artists' colony or commune of some kind, that Lawrence wanted to name Rananim. Of course, it soon led to tension and conflict and ended in tears and tantrums.

 

[14] D. H. Lawrence, letter to John Middleton Murry, [31 Oct 1925], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 328.

 

[15] D. H. Lawrence, letters to S. S. Koteliansky and Max Mohr, 31 Oct 1927, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 203- 205. 

 

[16] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky, 31 Oct 1928, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, p. 604. 

 

[17] Readers who are interested in this might like to see the post entitled 'Dandelion' (10 Dec 2015) which addresses the question of care in the thought of D. H. Lawrence: click here.  

Reflections on a Forgotten Umbrella

Banksy: Nola (Girl with Umbrella) (2006)

Hexagon Gallery

Ich habe meinen Regenschirm vergessen: I have forgotten my umbrella.

This five word sentence from one of Nietzsche's notebooks, neatly enclosed in quotation marks but without any contextualising information that might help us understand it, has intrigued many readers - not least Derrida, who attempted to deconstruct it in typically exhaustive fashion.

We could, of course, just take its meaning literally: we know that Nietzsche owned a red umbrella which, when in Turin, he liked to carry with him in order to shield his eyes from the bright Italian sun. So it's perfectly possible that he might, in fact, have one day forgotten it - just like all those other people who do so each and every day in towns and cities around the world; it's nice to sometimes imagine Nietzsche not as an anti-Christ or Übermensch, but just a slob like one of us. 

Some scholars, however, are convinced that these words have greater significance; that perhaps the word umbrella refers not to an everyday object, but to something far more mysterious and important - i.e., that umbrella is used here metaphorically. Again, that's certainly possible. But, personally, I prefer to think of Nietzsche's umbrella as an actual thing which is in itself of great interest, as the writer Marion Rankine illustrates in her amusing book Brolliology (2017).     

Rankine reminds us that whilst umbrellas play only a minor role within philosophy and literature, there have nevertheless been several writers and thinkers - including Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson - who turned their attentions to these curious hand-held devices that can open and shut like artificial flowers and afford us protection from the elements. Or, indeed, from tigers and assailants; for many a person has used their brolly as a weapon, as well defensively as a shield. 

Sadly, as Rankine also reminds us, umbrellas are, today, often degraded objects; mass-produced in Chinese factories and no longer treasured by their owners. Once upon a time, they were carefully made by craftsmen using beautiful materials and expensive models were a sign of social status (one of the ways that Robinson Crusoe distinguished himself from Friday was by making himself an umbrella which, when not in use, he carried with him under his arm like a gentleman).

In fact, an umbrella revealed not only an individual's class, but served as a reliable indicator of their taste, style and personality. Today, their construction is so poor and flimsy that umbrellas can hardly even be relied upon to keep you dry; the first gust of wind and they flip inside out like a giant bat's wing or collapse entirely, to be thrown away with an angry curse, but without concern.

One hardly dares to think what this says about us as a culture ... It's as if we've forgotten ourselves.

See:

Leslie Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin (Picador, 1996).

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, (The University of Chicago Press, 1979).

Marion Rankine, Brolliology: A History of the Umbrella in Life and Literature (Melville House, 2017).  

See also:

Charles Dickens, 'Please to Leave Your Umbrella', in Household Words Vol. XVII, Issue 423 (May 1858), pp. 457-59. Click here to read as a pdf via Dickens Journals Online.   

Robert Louis Stevenson, 'The Philosophy of Umbrellas', in Collected Works (Edinburgh Edition 1894-98), Vol. 21, 1896 - Miscellanies, Vol. IV. Click here to read on the NLS website.

Play: Rihanna, 'Umbrella', single release from the album Good Girl Gone Bad (Def Jam, 2007): Orange Version Ft. Jay-Z: click here.