Of Spiders and Flies (Notes on the Lawrence-Eliot Relationship)

D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot 
by David Levine

The relationship between D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot was never going to be anything other than strained at best. And often it was hostile, even spiteful (one is tempted to say catty). There are several explanations why. F. R. Leavis, for example, accused Eliot of snobbishness in his appraisal of Lawrence and there is undoubtedly an element of class antagonism present in the Lawrence-Eliot relationship.

But Eliot doesn't just dislike or dismiss Lawrence for being an oik; they were artistically and philosophically irreconcilable, as well as belonging to different social worlds. And they were also poles apart religiously, which, arguably, was the really crucial issue for both.

Eliot, who famously converted to Anglicanism in 1927 and identified with the more orthodox wing of the Church, was as contemptuous of the young Lawrence's nonconformist background as he was disdainful of the mature Lawrence's neo-paganism. In After Strange Gods (1934), Eliot argues that whilst Lawrence's vision of life is spiritual, it's nonetheless corrupt and represents the intrusion of the diabolic into modern literature. 

Eliot also seems to have disliked Lawrence's idea of what constituted wholesome fucking:

"When his characters make love - or perform Mr. Lawrence’s equivalent for love-making - and they do nothing else - they not only lose all the amenities, refinements and graces which many centuries have built up in order to make love-making tolerable; they seem to reascend the metamorphoses of evolution, passing backward beyond ape and fish to some hideous coition of protoplasm."

This might not be entirely fair, but it is rather amusing.

Far less amusing, however, was Eliot's response to E. M. Forster's generous and straight out description of Lawrence following his death in 1930 as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation". Eliot - to his great discredit - felt it appropriate and worthwhile to pick this touching tribute apart, demanding that Forster explain and justify his terms:

"I am the last person to wish to disparage the genius of Lawrence, or to disapprove when a writer of the eminence of Mr Forster speaks 'straight out'. But the virtue of speaking straight out is somewhat diminished if what one speaks is not sense. And unless we know exactly what Mr Forster means by greatest, imaginative, and novelist, I submit that this judgement is meaningless."

This - written in a published letter - is just nasty and petty, is it not? Insulting to Forster, insulting to Lawrence and insulting to the friendship between them. Forster was stung to reply:

"Mr T. S. Eliot entangles me in his web. He asks exactly what I mean by 'greatest', 'imaginative', and 'novelist', and I cannot say. Worse still, I cannot even say what 'exactly' means - only that there are occasions when I would rather feel like a fly than a spider, and the death of D. H. Lawrence is one of these."

       
See:

T. S. Eliot, 'The Contemporary Novel', in The Times Literary Supplement (12 August 2015). Click here to read.

The Forster-Eliot letters were published in The Nation and Athenaeum in March/April 1930 and can be found in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 5: 1930-1931, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, (Faber and Faber, 2014): click here. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Grand Perverts

Drawing of D. H. Lawrence by David Levine (1968)

According to D. H. Lawrence, in a letter written to Aldous Huxley, behind all of those whom he identifies as grand perverts, lies "ineffable conceit" and boundless ego.

Figures including St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust, are all guilty of the same thing; namely, "attempting to intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness", says Lawrence.

By this, he seems to mean they get their sex in their heads and barter away the sheer intensity of lived experience for mere representation. In other words, they fall into idealism, into narcissism and into solipsism; "the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being".

But, in as much as phallic consciousness is also "the basic consciousness, and the thing we mean, in the best sense, by common sense", I suppose he's also taking a dig at all those who dare to think differently from those who subscribe to the morality of custom and popular prejudice, or what Lawrence mistakes for an instinctive-intuitive form of folk wisdom. 

 
And this, when you think about it, is not only surprising, but bitterly disappointing. That Lawrence - of all people - should end up defending doxa (that form of truth and goodness which goes without saying and from which we should never deviate) and condemning a host of other writers, artists, and thinkers as perverts (a term used in an admittedly idiosyncratic manner, but still in an essentially negative and pejorative sense), is, if nothing else, an outrageous example of the pot calling the kettle - and every other kitchen utensil - black.   


See: D. H. Lawrence, Letter 4358, to Aldous Huxley, 27 March 1928, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James. T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 342.