As many readers will know, D. H. Lawrence was born on this day in 1885.
To mark the occasion, I thought it might be interesting to examine a few of the other events that unfolded during this year, so as to have a better understanding of the world into which baby Bert was born, giving special emphasis to those things that Lawrence would himself later comment upon ...
20 January
On this date, an American, LaMarcus Adna Thompson, patents his design for an amusement ride known as a roller coaster which had opened at Coney Island a year earlier. I don't know if Lawrence and Frieda ever went on one, but I very much doubt it. We know, for example, what Lawrence thought of even an innocent merry-go-round and its "violent mechanical rotation", as depicted by the artist Mark Gertler. [1]
In brief, Lawrence didn't approve of sensational fun in which the body is worked by a machine.
26 January
The year opens with British imperial forces fighting Islamic insurgents in foreign fields: the Sudanese campaign famously costing General Gordon his life after the siege - and subsequent fall - of Khartoum. In a letter to Dorothy Yorke, written in August 1928, Lawrence fantasises about yet another exotic adventure: "Let's go to Egypt [...] and go up the Nile and look at the desert and perhaps get shot in Khartoum like General Gordon". [2]
23 February
Convicted murderer John Babbacombe Lee was due to be hanged at Exeter Prison. However, after three failed attempts due to a faulty trapdoor stubbornly refusing to open, the medical officer in attendance declined to play any further part in the proceedings and the execution was called off. Lee's sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
Again, whilst I cannot say for sure what Lawrence's view of this would have been, he was a proponent of capital punishment, writing in an essay: "I know we must look after the quality of life, not the quantity. Hopeless life should be put to sleep, the idiots and the hopeless sick and the true criminal." [3]
14 March
Gilbert and Sullivan's popular comic opera The Mikado opens at the Savoy Theatre, London, where it ran for over 670 performances. Lawrence makes a reference to one of the songs, 'Tit Willow', which describes the suicide of a rejected lover, in his first novel, The White Peacock (1911). [4]
17 June
The Statue of Liberty arrives in New York Harbour; a gift of friendship from the people of France and a sign of welcome to visitors to the United States. Lawrence first encountered this colossal neoclassical sculpture in person in July 1923. But, in an epilogue to Fantasia of the Unconscious written in 1921, he has already described Lady Liberty as brawny and suggested that the torch she holds aloft with which to enlighten the world, resembles a giant carrot:
"How many nice little asses and poets trot over the Atlantic and catch sight of Liberty holding up this carrot of desire at arms length, and fairly hear her say, as one does to one's pug dog, with a lump of sugar: 'Beg! Beg!' - and then 'Jump! Jump then!' And each little ass and poodle begins to beg and to jump, and there's a rare game round about Liberty, yap, yap, yapperty-yap!" [5]
15 September
Four days after Lawrence was born, the world-famous elephant Jumbo was killed by a freight train, in Ontario, Canada, as he crossed railroad tracks on the way to his box car.
Born in 1860, Jumbo was a large African bush elephant who was transferred to London Zoo from the Jardin des Plantes (Paris), in 1865. Despite huge public protest, he was eventually sold to P. T. Barnum, who took him to the US for exhibition at Madison Square Garden (NYC), in March 1882.
Lawrence would later write several poems about elephants - perhaps most famously 'Elephant' and 'The elephant is slow to mate', though mention should also be made of the series of Pansies that begins with 'Elephants in the circus' and ends with 'Two performing elephants'.
Although they don't mention Jumbo, they could easily have been written about him or any other elephant with "aeons of weariness round their eyes" and obliged to sit up "and show vast bellies to the children" who watch in half-frightened silence: "The looming of the hoary, far-gone ages / is too much for them." [6]
30 October
Seven weeks after Lawrence entered the world, American poet and Mr. Modernism himself, Ezra Pound, was born. During his early years in London, working as a teacher and attempting to forge a literary career, Lawrence met Pound on several occasions and formed a favourable impression:
"He is jolly nice: took me to supper at Pagnani's, and afterwards we went down to his room at Kensington. He lives in an attic, like a traditional poet - but the attic is a comfortable well furnished one. [...] He is rather remarkable - a good bit of a genius, and with not the least self-consciousness." [7]
And, for his part, Pound was supportive of Lawrence as a poet and full of praise for the latter's first book of verse, Love Poems and Others (1913). But, of course, the two men were as different as chalk and cheese, both in character and as artists, and initial friendship soon led to mutual disenchantment and hostility (Pound eventually describing Lawrence as detestable).
The problem, as Helen Sword notes, is that whilst, formally, as a poet, Lawrence was very much a modernist and "an iconoclastic practitioner of Pound's famous dictum, 'Make it new'", he was, at the same time, "a modernist poet who cultivated [...] a distinctly anti-modernist stance". Unfortunately for Lawrence, his "oracular tone, visionary pretensions, lyrical cadences, overt sentimentality, highly personal subject matter, and lack of irony [...] earned him the antipathy of many members of his modernist cohort". [8]
And, indeed, it continues to lose him many readers today ...
Notes
[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter 1291, p. 660.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), letter 4603, p. 513.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Return to Bestwood', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 24.
[4] D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 15.
[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Epilogue', Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 201-204. Lines quoted are on p. 203.
[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Elephants in the circus' and 'Two performing elephants', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 369 and 370. The other two poems mentioned - 'Elephant' and 'The elephant is slow to mate' - can be found in the above on pp. 338-343 and 403-04 respectively.
[7] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), letter 132, pp. 144-45. This letter was written to Louie Burrows on 20 November, 1909. Comparing himself to Pound, Lawrence also wrote in this letter: "He is 24, like me, but his god is beauty, mine, life."
[8] Helen Sword, 'Lawrence's Poetry', The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 119-135. Lines quoted are on p. 120. See also Michael Bell's essay in the above work, 'Lawrence and Modernism' (pp. 179-196), in which he argues that Lawrence's complex and critically important relation to modernist writers "is most clearly illustrated by the case of his coeval Ezra Pound" [179].
