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Ceramic Blue Plaque erected in 1969 by Greater London Council
at 1 Byron Villas, Vale of Health, Hampstead, London, NW3
Hampstead is an affluent residential community in northwest London, long favoured by an assortment of artists, intellectuals, millionaires, and Marxists (i.e., the posh, the privileged, the often pretentious, and the politically radical).
It's not an area I'm familiar with or particularly comfortable in; for whilst it's certainly very lovely, it's a long way from Harold Hill and I don't wanna go to where, where the rich are living.
Nevertheless, putting aside my prejudices as a Clash City Rocker [1], I recently agreed to join a walking tour of Hampstead, led by Dr Catherine Brown; Vice President of the D. H. Lawrence Society, Founder of the Lawrence London Group, and unofficial Queen of the wider Lawrence collective [2].
Because Lawrence - a red-bearded poet and novelist who was deeply proud of his working-class roots in an East Midlands mining community - was once, briefly, a resident of Hampstead, there's even an English Heritage blue plaque celebrating the fact.
We might see this as a good thing; a sign of nascent social mobility in the twentieth-century, or the classless nature of the art world; a meritocratic community in which anyone with genius [3] is welcome. Or we might view it as just one more attempt to neutralise Lawrence by assimilating him and his work into the dominant culture that he did so much to counter [4].
Still, the blue plaque was just one of many things to stop and gawp at and hear about on the walking tour. Other highlights included:
(i) Hampstead Underground Station, which Lawrence used (but didn't like). Whether he knew it was (and still is) London's deepest tube stop - 192 feet beneath the surface - (or whether he would've cared), I don't know. Designed by architect Leslie Green, it opened in June 1907, just a few months before Lawrence first visited the area.
(ii) Whitestone Pond, close to where Lawrence saw a German airship over London, in September 1915, an event that obviously captured his imagination. This is how Lawrence describes the incident in a letter:
"Last night when we were coming home the guns broke out, and there was a
noise of bombs. Then we saw the Zeppelin above us, just ahead, amid a
gleaming of clouds; high up, like a bright golden finger, quite small,
among a fragile incandescence of clouds. And underneath it were splashes
of fire as the shells fired from earth burst. Then there were flashes
near the ground - and the shaking noise. It was like Milton - then there
was a war in heaven. But it was not angels. It was that small golden
Zeppelin, like a long oval world, high up. It seemed as if the cosmic
order were gone, as if there had come a new order, a new heavens above
us: and as if the world in anger were trying to revoke it. Then the
small long-ovate luminary, the new world in the heavens, disappeared
again.
I cannot get over it, that the moon is not Queen of the sky by night,
and the stars the lesser lights. It seems the Zeppelin is in the zenith
of the night, golden like a moon, having taken control of the sky; and
the bursting shells are the lesser lights.
So it seems our cosmos is burst, burst at last, the stars and moon blown
away, the envelope of the sky burst out, and a new cosmos appeared,
with a long-ovate, gleaming central luminary, calm and drifting in a
glow of light, like a new moon, with its light bursting in flashes on
the earth, to burst away the earth also. So it is the end - our world
is gone, and we are like dust in the air." [5]
(iii) Various places associated with the short story 'The Last Laugh' (1924), a tale in which Pan appears in Hampstead, with predictably tragic consequences. The story is an example of what might be termed sardonic paganism; a mocking and malevolent form of queer gothic fiction directed towards a dark god who is always coming, but who never quite arrives or reveals himself.
By setting the story in a leafy north London suburb, Lawrence relates his onto-theological vision to everyday experience, whilst, at the same time, demonstrating how the latter unfolds within a wider, inhuman context that is resistant to any kind of moral-rational codification. He thereby attempts to loosen the aura of necessity surrounding categories of the present and restore a little primordial wonder to NW3 [6].
(iv) Several houses belonging to Lawrence's swell friends, who often provided him and Frieda with refuge when needed. These didn't particularly interest, but Hampstead Heath certainly did and one can see why Lawrence - who mostly hated London and its damp gloom - loved this ancient area of woodland, meadows, and ponds spanning 790 acres.
Anyway, in closing I'd like to thank Catherine for all her hard work and kindness; I'm sure the handful of Lawrence devotees who turned up on the day - including Nottingham's favourite son and digital pilgrim, James Walker - enjoyed the tour and learnt something new.
Members of the London Lawrence Group
Notes
[1] I'm referring here to (and paraphrasing a line from) a song by The Clash called 'Garageland', the final track to be found on their eponymous debut album (CBS Records, 1977): click here. The song was written in response to a snide remark by middle-class music critic Charles Shaar Murray - precisely the kind of person who lives in Hampstead.
[2] Catherine Brown, 'Lawrence's Hampstead: A Walking Tour'. Full details (and illustrations) can be found on Catherine's excellent website: click here.
[3] Lawrence was deeply suspicious of how the term genius was used by certain people to excuse his lack of finesse and the more problematic aspects of writing. In a short piece written towards the very end of his life, he recounts, for example, Ford Maddox Hueffer's reaction to the manuscript of The White Peacock: "'It's got every fault that an English novel can have. But, you've got GENIUS.'"
Lawrence notes: "In the early days, they were always telling me I had got genius, as if to console me for not having their incomparable advantages." See 'Myself Revealed', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 178-79.
[4] Guy Debord famously describes this process of recuperation in La société du spectacle (1967). In brief: all politically radical ideas and/or subversive works of art are eventually defused and then safely incorporated back into mainstream culture, where they can be successfully exploited.
[5] See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press,1981), pp. 389-90. The letter was sent to Lady Ottoline Morrell (9 Sept 1915).
One suspects that, Lawrence being Lawrence, he also found the phallic shape of the Zepplin particularly striking ... This same event was also described in his 1923 novel Kangaroo; see pp. 215-16 of the Cambridge Edition, ed. Bruce Steele, (1994).
[6] See the post dated 15 May 2017 - 'Pan Comes to Hampstead' - click here.
