Alexandra Klimas: Susan the Cow (2016)
As David Brock reminds us in his most recent column in the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, whilst living on his ranch in New Mexico, Lawrence acquired a cow which he named Susan.
He happily milked her twice a day and was able to produce a couple of pounds of butter each week. But he was also obliged to spend a good deal of time chasing after her on horseback, as Susan was prone to wandering off into the surrounding hills; something he was less pleased about.
For the American James Joyce scholar, William York Tindall, Susan is best thought of as a symbol rather than as an actual cow. For it is as a symbol that she provides the critic with a key to Lawrence's philosophy and art. Indeed, symbolic Susan might even help us, says Tindall, come to a better understanding of some of the wider problems within literature and society. Thus it is that in his 1939 study of Lawrence and Susan, Tindall has very little to say about the latter.
This is disappointing - and also, I think, mistaken. For Lawrence himself makes it very clear in his own writings on Susan that she is not to be thought of as a symbol, or metaphor, or a piece of livestock whose function is simply to produce milk like a machine, but as a living creature with her own non-human reality.
For Lawrence, the fact that birds, beasts and flowers - indeed, all things - exist independently of man is the essential point to make. And the great challenge, this being the case, is to find a way to come into touch with things without compromising their integrity or falling into anthropomorphism and projecting one's own characteristics and values onto them.
Thus it is that Lawrence is desperate to discover how, as a man, he can equilibrate himself with black-eyed Susan in all her cowy mystery. It isn't easy. For although there's a sort of relation between them, neither can ever really know the other (certainly not in full). But still they can sense one another and she can swing her tail in his face when he sits behind her, making him mad.
And this physical relationship hinges, like all relationships, on a form of desire:
"She knows my touch and she goes very still and peaceful, being milked. I, too, I know her smell and her warmth and her feel. And I share some of her cowy silence, when I milk her. [...] And this relation is part of the mystery of love: the individuality on each side, mine and Susan's, suspended in the relationship."
Tindall refers to these lines from '... Love Was Once a Little Boy' in the preface to his study, but seems more than a little embarrassed by them; explaining that whilst "it cannot be denied that [Lawrence] sounds foolish", he was a genius and genius "is not always reasonable".
Well, I don't think Lawrence sounds foolish here; in fact, I think he's being perfectly reasonable and that the lines quoted are not only very beautiful, but also philosophically of great interest. It's Tindall, I'm afraid, who is being crass and displaying a remarkable non-affinity with his subject.
See:
David Brock, 'D. H. Lawrence and his well-loved pet cow named Susan', Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, (1 Dec 2017).
D. H. Lawrence, '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 329-46.
William York Tindall, D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow, (Columbia University Press, 1939).
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