Gordon Ramsay and D. H. Lawrence Versus the Cornish

I.

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay has apparently received a warning from the Cornish Coastguard for repeated violations of the government's insane lockdown measures put in place primarily to protect the NHS even at the cost of wrecking the British economy and suspending the socio-cultural interactions of everyday life (like Peter Hitchens and other voices of dissent, I'm not convinced that these measures do anything to save lives or stem the spread of Covid-19).     

A Coastguard official told a reporter that Ramsay had been spotted 'multiple times in several places' and had even dared to seem happy and relaxed whilst out strolling on the beach with his wife, cycling on his bike around country lanes, and shopping at the local fishmongers.

Neighbours have also complained to the police of loud noise coming from the £4 million Ramsay home in Trebetherick: 'Why can't he just keep his head down, stay indoors, and be quiet like everyone else?'

Sadly, this sorry tale reveals much about the absurd yet profoundly sinister state of affairs in the UK today; overly zealous officials and fearful, resentment-ridden citizens happy to act as police informants. I'm sure the good people of Cornwall are not the only ones gripped by this viral hysteria (spread by the media), but it does remind me of another incident, in Zennor, that happened a century earlier ...


II.

The novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence lived in Cornwall for almost two years during the First World War and had high hopes of building a new life in the bare, primeval land with his wife Frieda: "When we came over the shoulder of the wild hill, above the sea, to Zennor, I felt we were coming into the Promised Land." [1]

Unfortunately, the neighbours were suspicious and eventually hostile towards this stranger who wrote controversial books and was married to a German woman. The vicar of Zennor, in particular, hated the Lawrences and was largely responsible for them being investigated by the authorities. 

They were suspected of espionage and possibly signalling to U-boats off the coast. Despite pleading their innocence, their cottage was searched (not once, but twice) and some personal papers were removed. The Lawrences were also served with a military exclusion order under the Defence of the Realm Act, forbidden them to reside in Cornwall (or any other coastal region). They were given just 72 hours to leave the county.

Naturally enough, Lawrence found all this hateful and humiliating - just as I'm sure Gordon Ramsay must find the press intrusion, public gossiping, and police snooping in the name of health and safety intolerable - and doubtless Lawrence was reinforced in his initial impression of the Cornish people, which violently veered from love to hate and back again:  

"The Cornish people still attract me. They have become detestable, I think, and yet they aren't detestable. They are, of course, strictly anti-social and unchristian. But then, the aristocratic principle and the principle of magic, to which they belonged, these two have collapsed, and left only the most ugly, scaly, insect-like, unclean selfishness, so that each one of them is like an insect isolated within its own scaly, glassy envelope, and running seeking its own small end. And how foul that is! How they stink in their repulsiveness, in that way.

      Nevertheless, the old race is still revealed, a race which believed in the darkness, in magic, and in the magic transcendency of one man over another, which is fascinating. Also there is left some of the old sensuousness of the darkness, a sort of softness, a sort of flowing together in physical intimacy, something almost negroid, which is fascinating. 

      But curse them, they are entirely mindless, and yet they are living for purely social advancement. They ought to be living in the darkness and warmth and passionateness of the blood, sudden, incalculable. Whereas they are like insects gone cold, living only for money, for dirt. They are foul in this. They ought all to die." [2]       

Kernow a'gas Dynnergh

Notes

[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II (1913-16), ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter number 1187, to Lady Ottoline Morrell (25 Feb 1916), p. 556.

[2] Ibid., letter number 1155, to J. D. Beresford (1 Feb 1916), p. 520. Amusingly, Lawrence confesses at the end of this astonishing description of the Cornish: "Not that I've seen very much of them - I've been laid up in bed."

On Keeping Calm and Carrying On in the Age of Coronavirus

The British have long prided themselves on their sense of humour and their stoicism; their carefree ability to keep calm, carry on and always look on the bright side, whatever the circumstances. Thus, there's something profoundly antithetical to the national spirit about panic buying, self-isolation, and lockdown - the key symptoms (apart from a fever and dry cough) of the media-driven, government-authorised coronavirus pandemic. 

What could be more humiliating than to hide away behind a mound of toilet rolls, checking for the latest updates on how many are infected and how many have died? I think I prefer those Brits in Benidorm defying Spanish police attempts to impose a curfew with chants of we've all got the virus / na, na, na, na.

What on earth are political leaders thinking, as they trigger massive cultural and socioeconomic disruption because of a disease that will make most people only mildly or moderately ill? I mean, it's not the zombie apocalypse or World War III, and one rather admires Peter Hitchens for daring to ask whether shutting down the UK - with unprecedented curbs on civil liberties - is really the most sensible response to the cornovirus crisis?

As Hitchens knows, anyone who doesn't conform to the official line on this question is immediately accused of being irresponsible and threatening public health, undermining the NHS, etc. So it takes a certain courage to even pose the possibility that we might have got things wrong and retreated from reason into mass hysteria, compromising our freedom as we do so (restrictions on movement, travel and public gathering, are already in place). He writes:

"How long before we need passes to go out in the streets, as in any other banana republic? [...] All the crudest weapons of despotism, the curfew, the presumption of guilt and the power of arbitrary arrest, are taking shape in the midst of what used to be a free country. And we, who like to boast of how calm we are in a crisis, seem to despise our ancient hard-bought freedom and actually want to rush into the warm, firm arms of Big Brother. Imagine, police officers forcing you to be screened for a disease, and locking you up for 48 hours if you object. Is this China or Britain? Think how this power could be used against, literally, anybody."

Is the Great Confinement justified? Perhaps. To be honest, I don't know - and neither, of course, does Hitchens. But nor am I confident that anyone else knows for certain; not even the medical experts that the government claims to be relying upon for its information and decision making.

And if coronavirus turns out to be far less deadly than we are being led to believe, then the global decision to shut up shop will be something that future generations will look back on with amused astonishment.

See: Peter Hitchens, 'Is shutting down Britain - with unprecedented curbs on ancient liberties - really the best answer?', Mail on Sunday (22 March, 2020): click here to read online.

Notes on the Case of Peter Hitchens Versus Lady C.

Peter Hitchens (2017) by 65c56 
deviantart.com

I.

Not for the first time when reading an essay, article or - as in this case - a book review by the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, one is left feeling exhausted and a bit bewildered; not quite knowing how or where to begin fashioning a response. And not entirely convinced it's even worth the effort. For Hitchens is a man of firm moral conviction and thus extremely confident as well as forthright in his beliefs. He knows what he thinks and he thinks what he knows is true. 

However, as the book subjected to Mr Hitchens's ire happens to be Lady Chatterley's Lover, I feel obliged as a member of the D. H. Lawrence Society to try and say something - even though, in my view, the best and most powerfully argued defence of the novel was supplied by the author himself and I would strongly recommend those interested in the work to also read Lawrence's 1929 essay, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'.  

Having said that, here are a few thoughts of my own in response to the Hitchens review which appears in the latest edition of the American Christian and conservative journal First Things ...


II.

Hitchens opens with a story of the sixth earl of Craven, appalled by the decision taken in a London criminal court on November 2nd, 1960, to permit the unexpurgated publication of Lawrence's final and most controversial novel. It marked the end of the world as he knew it and his soul howled with pain.

In a sense, it's a faint echo of this angst-ridden, slightly hysterical scream that echoes throughout all of Hitchens's writings, including this latest review. He says the novel is risible, but it doesn't seem to provoke much laughter of any description in Hitchens - even of a nervous kind. Above all, one senses fear. And Hitchens is right to find the book dangerous and threatening at some level. For like Nietzsche, Lawrence is calling for a revaluation of all values and not simply sexual liberation. The democracy of touch that the work invokes - a kind of immanent utopia - is undoubtedly not the future that Hitchens dreams of.   

Indeed, even as a youth, Hitchens wasn't taken with Lawrence: "By the time I was first introduced to Lawrence’s writing in the late 1960s, compelled at school to study Sons and Lovers, his heavy, portentous style was fast slipping out of fashion." 

This is a surprising remark. For one might've imagined that Hitchens - a man once described by James Silver in The Guardian as "the Mail on Sunday's fulminator-in-chief" whose columns contain "molten Old Testament fury" - would rather like elements of portent and prophecy. And it's difficult to imagine Hitchens caring about the dictates of fashion, eagerly pursuing all the latest literary fads and trends as he pulls his frilly nylon panties right up tight, but there you go! His views are reactionary, but never square.


III.

As for the trial of Lady C., Hitchens seems to believe things were rigged from the start. That there was "scarcely a chance" of the jury deciding that the novel should remain banned, "and almost everyone involved knew it". I don't know if that's true. And I don't really care. For ultimately the right decision was reached. Not because the work has redeeming social and literary value, but because ancient obscenity laws drawn up by those grey ones whom Lawrence terms censor-morons brought greater shame upon us as a people than their abolition. 

I suspect that saying this is enough for Hitchens to lump me in with all those liberals, libertines, and libertarians whom he so despises, even though, for the record, I don't think of myself as any of the above. Nor do I live in a square, paint in a circle, or love in a triangle; there's absolutely nothing Bloomsbury about me. Or Fabian socialist. Like Lawrence, I grew up in a working-class community and if I speak up for him and his writing it's for reasons other than those imagined by Hitchens. It's not because I'm a sandal-wearing vegetarian, naturist or health nut; it's because I feel a sense of solidarity with Lawrence and regard his enemies as my enemies.    


IV.

Hitchens describes Lady Chatterley's Lover as a "frankly rather terrible book". And, interestingly, many of Lawrence's own followers seem to agree; often acting as if a little embarrassed by it. But a novel isn't a fixed object. It's a literary machine that invites you to enter the space that it opens up and invest it with external forces; to send it zooming in new and unexpected directions. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that there are no bad books per se, only poor - by which I mean lazy, reactive and judgemental - readings.

And, despite Hitchens insisting that Katherine Anne Porter's 1960 essay on the novel is a supremely honest and courageous reading, I'd place 'A Wreath for the Gamekeeper' in this poverty-stricken category. For all it boils down to ultimately is a superior woman shaking her head in condescending despair over poor Lawrence and his artistic inferiority in comparison to the real literary greats, like Tolstoy, James, and Joyce. And the novel itself ... well, that is nothing but the fevered day-dream of a dying man, or "the product of a once-fine author's sad decline", as Hitchens puts it with a little more compassion.    

As Nietzsche taught, however, whilst strength preserves, it is only through sickness that cultures develop and that we as a species advance. Thus, even if true - even if Lady C. is the product of a diseased imagination and a body corrupt with tuberculosis - we need these works for what they paradoxically teach us of the greater health.  


V.

Eventually, even Hitchens has to admit that the book does, in fact, contain "some moving and thoughtful passages [...] though they are mostly about the industrial ravaging and gouging of the English countryside and the wretched consumer society coming into being after World War I." However, as he then notes: "The idea that these miseries might be redeemed by adulterous sex in an old hut on an army blanket, by twining wildflowers in one’s pubic hair, or by capering naked in the rain is far-fetched."

This, I think, living as we do after the orgy, is hard to deny. Also difficult to deny is that Lady Chatterley's Lover contains "blots and scabs of anti-Semitism", as well as troubling elements of racial bigotry, sexism, misogyny and lesbophobia. But, again, it's Lawrence himself who teaches that the proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it and not merely use these things in order to judge a work and condemn an author. And, to be fair to Hitchens - although he clearly has no interest in saving this particular tale - by offering us a far more sympathetic reading of Sir Clifford than Lawrence encouraged, he invites an interesting reappraisal of the work (one that I have myself also considered: click here).       


VI

Finally, we come to the 'night of sensual passion'. Hitchens seems as baffled by the redemptive possibilities assigned to anal sex within Lady C. as he is perplexed by the importance given to red trousers. But that's because he's ignorant of the wider body of Lawrence's work and fundamentally hostile to the philosophical project of which it's part. Which is fair enough; he isn't and doesn't pretend to be a Lawrence scholar. But it does rather lessen the force and validity of his criticism.

For Hitchens, like Freud, "shame and hypocrisy" are crucial social components; they protect, he says, the boundary "between normal, respectable life and the sordid and dirty". Lawrence disagrees. Not because he desires the latter or despises the former, but because he sees the possibility of a new innocence that lies beyond such a false dichotomy, or what Marcuse terms the fatal dialectic of civilization. 

I'm sorry that Mr Hitchens didn't find a way to enjoy this novel; find a way, that is, to impose his own abrasions upon its surface. And I'm sorry that, unable to ban it or to burn it, he seems determined to foreclose the text and its pleasure with his intransigent moral conformism, his political and social conservatism, and his refusal to allow his body to pursue its own happiness just for once. Despite this, rather perversely perhaps, I retain a fair deal of respect and admiration for Peter (as I do for his much-missed brother, Christopher): May the peace that comes of fucking be upon him.       

See: 

Peter Hitchens, 'Chatterley on Trial', First Things (Feb 2018): click here to read online. 

Katherine Anne Porter, 'A Wreath for the Gamekeeper', Encounter (Feb 1960): click here to read online.

Note that whilst Hitchens was reviewing the 2017 Macmillan edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the standard text is the Cambridge University Press edition, 1983, ed. Michael Squires, which also includes Lawrence's 1929 essay A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' that I mention above. 

Submission (On Christianity, Islam and the European Migrant Crisis)

Cover of the Hungarian edition of 

Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission (2015)

These are strange times indeed! 

So strange, that one even finds oneself in agreement with Peter Hitchens - yes, the slightly younger, much less lovable brother of Christopher Hitchens - on an increasing number of questions, including the European migrant crisis. 

For he's right, surely, to argue that we in the West will not solve this apparently insoluble problem, or be in a position to help anyone, if we destroy our own continent with its own unique history, culture and system of values in the process, or simply give it away, as he writes, "to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves". 

Unfortunately, Hitchens doesn't examine this emotional spasm gripping the political leaders of Europe, the media, bleeding-heart celebrities, and, apparently, large numbers of the British public who were moved by a single photo. And, of course, the reason he doesn't examine it is because it's rooted precisely in the Christian moral tradition of which he is such a vocal exponent. Thus Hitchens is on tricky ground and his analysis of current events is compromised ultimately by his own faith. 

In other words, what I'm suggesting is that it is our own idealism - particularly the ideal of self-sacrifice - that is at play here; we are still attempting to imitate Christ hanging on the Cross and commit one final auto-da-fé en masse so that we too can whisper with our dying breath and face turned towards heaven consummatum est. 

It is finished; meaning, our time as a people is finally over; we give up, let those who are younger, stronger, more devout, more numerous, have a go at running things. Michel Houellebecq understands this suicidal and sentimental fatigue and how our will to love has effectively undermined our will to survival. In his novel, Soumission (2015), he writes perfectly convincingly of how a near-future France easily transforms into an Islamic society.   

It's a book that Hitchens has read and admires. But, again, I don't think he quite understands the work or sees why it is Europe has adopted this submissive position; how what he describes as weakness and cowardice is, in fact, the result of our corrosive and toxic virtues including: pity, charity, and humility.

The sad and terrifying fact is that we would rather turn the other cheek and love our enemies, even when they want to murder us, than be seen to be unkind or unjust in any way. Just as Jesus died for our sins, we want to die for the sins of others. And so we hold open the gates and meekly smile and clap hands as hundreds of thousands of migrants push past and give thanks to Allah for the soft stupidity of the kuffar. 

          

Notes: 

Peter Hitchens's recent Mail on Sunday piece entitled 'We won't save refugees by destroying our own country' can be read here. 

Michel Houellebecq's novel has been translated into English as Submission, by Lorin Stein, (William Heinemann, 2015). 

Obviously, Nietzsche - not an author I suspect Peter Hitchens has much time for - identified Christianity as more harmful than any vice over a century ago and predicted what would happen to Europeans as a result of adopting this slave morality and attempting to put it into practice. That we have not repudiated this creed once and for all not only does us no credit, but it brings down a curse upon us. And if Islam despises the Christian West, writes Nietzsche, "it is a thousand times right to do so: for Islam presupposes men ..." [The Anti-Christ, section 59.]

Why I Don't Love Russell Brand

As an alienated child of Essex who loves playing with language as well as calling for radical social change, I might be said to have something in common with comedian and activist Russell Brand. 

And, at a push, I would readily admit that anyone who unites Peter Hitchens and Johnny Rotten into enmity can't be all bad or entirely mistaken. But, unfortunately, that's as far as it goes. 

Because I don't like all that hair or the wild staring eyes; I don't like the addictive or the paranoid personality traits; I don't like the crass and naive political idealism, or the slightly sinister calls for a new spirituality coupled to a romantic rejection of reason and science; and neither do I care for the preening narcissism, wilful infantilism, and casual sexism.

So, sorry Russell, but whilst I might happily join you for a (non-alcoholic) drink one day, I won't be joining your revolution anytime soon ...