A Brief Note on the Life and Work of Stephan Hermlin

Stephan Hermlin by Gudrun Brüne (1985) [1]

 

"Where one asks, others will know no answer, and 

where answers are given, questions will be waiting."

 

 

Stephan Hermlin was born (as Rudolf Leder) into a bourgeois Jewish family in Chemnitz, in 1915. Aged sixteen, he joined the Socialist Student Association as well as the Young Communist League (KJVD). Unfortunately, Germany was probably not the best place to be at that time for a Jewish Marxist and so, in 1936, Hermlin fled abroad; drifting round Egypt, Palestine, England and Spain, before settling in France. 

 

Quickly establishing contact with literary circles in Paris, Hermlin also became involved with an underground German-language radio station. During the occupation - and after a period of internment - Hermlin lends support to the Resistance and goes on the lam, before escaping to Switzerland in 1943 with the help of the (exiled) German Communist Party. 

 

Whilst living in Switzerland, he publishes his first work; a volume of ballads influenced by his experiences in France. Considering the nature of these experiences, one might have expected that Hermlin's Zwölf Balleden to possess a hard militant-ideological edge, but, as one commentator points out, these carefully crafted poetic pieces reveal "a high degree of artistic sensibility and familiarity with European literary traditions from the Middle Ages into Modernity" [2].

 

Hermlin's goal was not to turn poetry into a form of political propaganda but "'to harmonize once and for all that which cannot be fully grasped, that which is perennially eclipsed, that which can only be intimated through music and poetry, the dream, the quiet, the incoming tides of silence, in short everything that makes up the world of lyrics, with the world of the visible.'" [3]

 

As well as establishing his own name as a poet and writer of essays and short stories, Hermlin also enjoys success as a literary translator. I discuss my favourite piece of his from this period in an earlier post on Torpedo the Ark: click here. 

 

Post-War, Hermlin returns to Germany and gets a job as a broadcaster at a radio station in Frankfurt. In 1947 he decides to move to East Berlin in the Soviet-controlled zone (which will eventually become the GDR), where he becomes an active supporter of the new regime. In an obituary for Hermlin, Philip Brady writes:

 

"His move to East Germany was more than a matter of ideology. He returned in many essays and interviews to the question of Heimat (fatherland) and to his own powerfully emotional conviction that the GDR was his only conceivable home." [4] 

 

In 1972, Hermlin is presented with the Heinrich Heine Award by the East German Ministry of Culture, for his services to literature (and the state). In 1979, he publishes what is to become his most popular work, Abendlicht (1979) "in which fact and fiction, reality and dream, politics and Romantic gesture, combine in a story that shifts between autobiography [...] and the narrative of a distanced, anonymous observer" [5].

 

In 1995, two years before his death - and six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall - Hermlin gives an interview to Die Zeit in which he finally responds to the perceived failings of communist intellectuals such as himself and friends including Jean-Paul Sartre. 

 

Perhaps, looking back, Hermlin - like many other writers - was naive to think he could combine his sophisticated artistic sensibility with the political brutalism of Stalinism. Of course it's important to remember the historical context, but, even so ... Having said that, to dismiss his life and work as nothing more than an overly-aestheticised revolutionary fantasy is, I think, a bit harsh.

 

Defending Hermlin from what might be perceived as unfair criticism [6], Síomón Solomon - translator of Hermlin's 1970 radio play Scardanelli - suggests that perhaps his personal failings and political shortcomings might themselves be regarded as "inextricably bound up" [7] with his life as a writer.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This portrait by Gudrun Brüne can be found in Für Stephan Hermlin zum 13. April 1985, (Reclam, 1985). 

      Dates and details in the post are mostly based upon Síomón Solomon's Biographical Chronology in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. xxvii-xxix, and Philip Brady's, Obituray for Stephan Hermlin, in the Independent (11 April 1997): click here. 

 

[2] Axel Fair-Schulz, 'The Impact of Swiss Exile on an East German Critical Marxist', Vol. 43, No. 3, of the Swiss American Historical Society Review (Nov 2007), p. 31. 

 

[3] Ibid. Fair-Schulz is quoting Hermlin writing in 'Von der Musik Shelleys', in Das Goldene Tor, (Feb. 1947), pp. 108-109. 

 

[4] Philip Brady, Obituray for Stephan Hermlin, Independent (11 April 1997).

 

[5] Ibid.

 

[6] This criticism includes the work of the investigative journalist Karl Corino, who - whilst looking for possible Stasi connections - discovered that Hermlin had reimagined the facts of his own life in order to further his own status as a heroic figure. See Corino's book on this matter entitled Aussen Marmor, innen Gips: Die Legenden des Stephan Hermlin (Econ, 1996). 

 

[7] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, footnote 43 in the 'Translator's Introduction', p. 20. 

 

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked: Notes On Síomón Solomon's Fantasia of Translation

Der Übersetzer - ready at any moment 

to shed their skin and become-other

 

I. 

 

What is the role of the translator? It's an old question: but it remains a fascinating and important question. 

 

And it's a question that the poet and playwright Síomón Solomon has clearly spent a good deal of time thinking about, as evidenced by the Introduction to his translation - and extended remix - of Stephen Hermlin's radio play, Scardanelli (1970), in a newly published text celebrating the life and work of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin [1].

 

I'm hoping to discuss Solomon's bold adapatation of Hermlin's audio drama in a later post. Here, however, I wish only to examine his theory of translation [2] which, in a nutshell, posits the translator as an artist in their own right; one who (paradoxically) shows fidelity to a text not by staying as close as possible to it, but by daring to deviate. 

 

Solomon's theory of translation is, therefore, ultimately rooted in a perverse aesthetic; one that queers the text and allows for the birth of an illegitimate (sometimes monstrous) new literary offspring [3]; one that hears strange voices and intertextual murmurings [4] ...  

 

II.

 

Now, of course, there will be many critics who will loathe and despise this model of translation; who will loathe and despise Solomon for what he does with Hermlin's work and for his schizopoetic reading (and re-creation between the lines) of Hölderlin. But I'm not one of them. 

 

In fact, I'm happy to endorse this model which acts "'as a preventative against cultural atrophy and homogenisation'" [5]. And if, as Solomon acknowledges, the translator's cruelty of style results in an inevitable giving and taking of offence, well, that's too bad - can there be art without somebody being disturbed or having their nose put out of joint?  

 

Solomon nails his colours to the mast in the following superb passage:

 

"What we wish to affirm is that [...] the infidelity of [every translation] is not merely an occupational hazard but its transcendental sickness. On this basis, we propose recalibrating the translator's 'success' according to the boldness of [their] betrayals. [...] What is by definition commemorated and celebrated by the translator's Janus-faced remakings is the insufficiency of the source to itself, whose rewriting represents a wager on the literary future. In the necessary corruption of practice, to translate means to return to the origin/al to reimagine it, to complicate and regenerate it, and to recompose its music - even and especially in the teeth of 'misreading' it - through the rash passion for metamorphosis." [6]     

 

Later, Solomon reduces things down to just one (memorable) line that invites readers to imagine translators as a breed of reptilian shape-shifters living and working in a domain in which : "There is no tongue [...] that is not forked" [7].

    

  

Notes

 

[1] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020).

      Solomon explains what he means by the term remix to describe his adaptation of Hermlin's play on pp. 13-14 of his Introduction; "we are calling this work a 'remix', aiming as it does to offer a musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix [...] influenced by Kenneth Goldsmith's modish conception of translation as renovatory displacement". 

      Readers interested in knowing more about Solomon's reading of Goldsmith can find his three-part post on this topic on Torpedo the Ark: click here. And those who may wish to check out Goldsmith's work for themselves should see Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation, (Jean Boîte Editions, 2016).  

 

[2] It should be noted that at no time does Solomon refer to his writings on translation as his theory of such and I'm fairly certain he'd wince at the idea, probably insisting that it's more a delirious shared fantasy of translation (of what it might become if pushed to its external limit). Whilst I understand his postmodern concerns and desire to move beyond theory (towards play, performance, and poetry), I'm using the word here for the sake of convenience. However, I have substituted the term fantasia in the title of this post in the hope that this is one that he will very much approve of.    

 

[3] Solomon recalls and transposes Deleuze's self-styled relationship to the history of philosophy as a form of buggery via which he sought to engender monsters; see pp. 9-10 of his 'Translator's Introduction' to Hölderlin's Poltergeists. 

      I have to say, it's a little odd to find Deleuze posing as a sodomite and delighting in fantasies of anal rape (or bum banditry, as Solomon refers to it). Perhaps it betrays the influence of his friend Michel Foucault on his thinking; or maybe he was thinking of D. H. Lawrence, who argued that the power of inspiration always comes from outside and enters us from behind and below.

 

[4] There's a very good reason that Solomon uses the following from Roland Barthes as an epigraph to his work: "Do I hear voices within the voice? But isn't it the truth of the voice that it be hallucinated? Isn't the entire space of the voice an infinite spaciousness?" 

      If, as I do, you accept Kristeva's idea of intertextualité (and/or Bakhtin's dialogism), then the question of translation is made all the more complex; arguably, every text is already a translation at some level and the author a multiple personality who speaks with many tongues masquerading as a unified subject. 

      Clearly Solomon also (more or less) accepts this line of thinking; see footnote 20 in his Introduction where he quotes from Susan Bernofsky's Foreign Words (2005). Bernofsky has also explored the significance of Barthes's work on intertextuality and the death of the author for contemporary theories of translation.   

 

[5] Mark Polizzotti, quoted by Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, footnote 1, p. 2. 

 

[6] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 7. 

 

[7] Ibid., p. 12. 

 

 

For a related post to this one - on Stephan Hermlin's short text 'Hölderlin 1944', trans. Síomón Solomon, click here.   

 

 

On the Splendour of Greco-Sicilian Superficiality

 D. H. Lawrence: Fauns and Nymphs (1927)

  

I. 

 

"Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: what is needed for that is to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin; to worship appearance, to believe in shapes, tones, words - in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial - out of profundity!" [a]

 

If I had to choose the one passage by Nietzsche that has most significantly shaped my own thinking as a philosopher, both on and off the catwalk, it would be this one. 

 

And, interestingly, despite his onto-theological penchant for indulging in what Nietzsche would characterise as beautiful soul twaddle [b], D. H. Lawrence also seems inspired by this idea of Greek (and Sicilian) superficiality in his 'Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga' [c] ...

II.

 

Regrettably - and unlike Lawrence - I've never lived in Sicily [d], nor even visited this "sun-beaten island whose every outline is like pure memory" [148]. But I'm happy to accept the literary consensus and regard it as a magical location, which provides a clue not only to understanding modern Italy, but also the ancient Mediterranean world. 

 

For according to Lawrence, not only are the Sicilians marked by an ironic fatalism, like the ancient Greeks, but they also lack psychic depth. In other words: 

 

"The Sicilian has no soul, except that funny little naked man who hops on hot bricks, in purgatory, and howls to be prayed into paradise [...] He can't be introspective, because his consciousness, so to speak, doesn't have any inside to it." [151].      

Developing his theme, Lawrence continues:

"The Sicilians today are supposed to be the nearest descendants of the classic Greeks, and the nearest thing to the classic Greeks in life and nature. And perhaps it is true. Like the classic Greeks, the Sicilians have no insides, introspectively speaking." [152] 

 

Unfortunately, however, unlike the classic Greeks, the Sicialians have no external gods. This, for Lawrence at least, is a problem and represents a great loss.

 

Why? Because, says Lawrence, people who live in the sun like flowers - i.e., beautiful but soulless - still need "the bright and busy gods outside" in order to make them feel heroic in the old Homeric sense with "the same easy conscience, the same queer openness [...] and the same ancient astuteness" [152].

 

Whilst the more soulful - more Christian - races of Northern Europe "have got over the old Homeric idea of the hero, by making the hero self-conscious, and a hero by virtue of suffering and awareness of suffering" [151], the Sicilians only feel this sort of thing in short spasms and it is unnatural to them. 

 

In fact, Lawrence concludes, it's pointless to suggest that a Sicilian learn how to develop northern (or Russian) inwardness: "You might as well say the tall and reckless asphodel of Magna Graecia should learn to be a snowdrop." [153]

 

 

III. 

 

Of course, even if the modern Sicilians have lost the bright and busy gods, still they possess the undying beauty of the island itself:

 

"And we must remember that eight-tenths of the population of Sicily is maritime or agricultural [...] and therefore practically the whole day-life of the people passes in the open, in the splendour of the sun  and the landscape, and the delicious, elemental aloneness of the old world. This is a great unconscious compensation. But what a compensation, after all! [...] and you can't read Mastro-don Gesauldo without feeling the marvellous glow and the glamour of Sicily, and the people throbbing inside the glow and the glamour like motes in a sunbeam. [...]

      And perhaps it is because the outside world is so lovely, that men in the Greek regions have never become introspective. They have not been driven to that form of compensation. With them, life pulses outwards, and the positive reality is outside. There is no turning inwards. So man becomes purely objective. And this is what makes the Greeks so difficult to understand: even Socrates." [154]

 

These, then, are the three key words of Greek profundity: superficiality, externality, and objectivity. And these the three key words of the ancient Greek character: singleness, carelessness, dauntlessness [e]. 

 

If you want to become an artist or practice la gaya scienza - if you want to become heroic in the old sense - then you must abandon ideas of salvation or retreating inside yourself in order to twist the soul into knots; instead, concentrate on care of the self as an aesthetic and ethical project that aims for splendour (becoming what Lawrence elsewhere terms an aristocrat of the sun) [f].   

 

Notes

 

[a] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Preface to the second edition (4), pp. 8-9.  

 

[b] This amusing phrase can be found in note 951 (Spring-Fall 1887) of The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufman, (Vintage Books, 1968), p. 499.  

[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 145-156. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text. Readers are encouraged to also read the two earlier versions of Lawrence's Introduction which appear as Appendices II and III (pp. 369-378 and 379-389). This passage from Version I is particularly Nietzschean-sounding in its vision of the Greeks: 

 

"The Greeks were far more bent on making an audacious, splendid impression than on fulfilling some noble purpose. They loved the splendid look of a thing, the splendid ring of words. Even tragedy was to them a grand gesture, rather than something to mope over. Peak and pine they would not, and unless some Fury pursued them to punish them for their sins, they cared not a straw for sins: their own or anyone else's. 

      As for being burdened with souls, they were not such fools." [376-77]    

[d] Lawrence and his wife Frieda spent two years living in Sicily in the early 1920s, at the Fontana Vecchia, on a hill above Taormina. Like many others before him, including - perhaps most famously - Goethe, Lawrence was captivated not just by the island, but also its people, flora, and fauna and he wrote some of his loveliest poetry on the island. In Version I of his Introduction to Mastro-Don Gesualdo, he confesses: 

 

"Perhaps the deepest nostalgia I have ever felt has been Sicily [...] Not for England or anywhere else - for Sicily, the beautiful, that which goes deepest into the blood. It is so clear, so beautiful, so like the physical beauty of the Greek." [378].     

[e] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction [Version I] to Mastro-Don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga', Introductions and Reviews, Appendix II, p. 378.

[f] See the poem 'Aristocracy of the sun', in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 457. See also the related verses 'Sun-men' and 'Sun-women', p. 456.  

How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All (With Reference to the Case of Stephan Hermlin)

Stephan Hermlin (1915-1997)

 

 

I.

 

One of the defining features of Hitler's Germany is that no one was ever left alone; the private citizen was effectively abolished and every man, woman and child was forced to participate and declare themselves as either for or against the Third Reich.

 

(One of the privileges of living in a lacklustre (pre-pandemic) liberal democracy, by contrast, is that the individual is free to abstain or remain apathetic.)  

 

Given this state of affairs, many Germans enthusiastically raised their arm and shouted Sieg Heil, whilst others put their hands up and surrendered to the Nazis as if resigning themselves to Fate. A courageous few actively took up arms against the regime. 

 

But saying nothing and doing nothing was not an option; everyone was politicised and mobilised for  the coming catastrophe; no one could simply ask to be excused. 

 

 

II. 

 

I was reminded of this whilst reading Síomón Solomon's new translation of Stephan Hermlin's short text 'Hölderlin 1944' [1].  

 

In this piece - described by Solomon as a memoir essay, though one wonders to what extent it's a fictionalised account that blurs reality and dream [2] - Hermlin recalls his time on the run in southwest-central France in early 1944, when resistance to the German occupation was at its height and hardly a day went by "without explosions, attacks, massacres" [3]. 

 

Warned by comrades that his situation was compromised and that the authorities were closing in on him, he agrees to be taken to a new (and safer) location - a solitary farmhouse in the middle of he knew not where:

 

"A farmer, still young, received us in a friendly manner [...] He was helping the Resistance with his wife and two adolescent children. But I would need to be aware, he explained to me in a whisper, that there was someone dangerous to me living on the farm, namely his old mother, who was a fanatical supporter of Pétain and would turn me over to the Germans in an instant should she discover my presence. If I kept quiet, I would be tolerably safe from her. [...] The farmer escorted me into the barn. I clambered up into the hayloft, which was to be my eyrie for some time." [4] 

   

Although the long days hiding in the hayloft could be monotonous, at least there was plenty of time for reflection and reading his volume of Hölderlin, about whom he decides to write an essay. But then, one day, an incident occurs that could have easily ended in a terrible and tragic manner ...

 

"It was around lunchtime when, at an unaccustomed hour, the door squeaked, and unknown footsteps and a reluctant muttering were heard. I guessed that the ominous old woman had entered the barn, and, when the ladder began to creak, I realised she was heading for the hayloft. [...] I pulled the hay silently over me, breathing as lightly as possible. In the same moment, I felt a strange cold fury. I knew that, in the instant of discovery, I would not hesitate to kill that nameless old woman, lightning quick and without a sound. At that moment, she was standing about three metres away from me; I had pulled myself back deep into the hay but could see her with one eye. A dangling piece of straw obscured my view, but for a few blurred seconds I beheld my potential victim, a haggard crone in a black dress, whom I had never seen before, would never see again. At that moment, she gave up her search and climbed, grunting, back down the ladder. I lay with my body over Hölderlin's verses, having not had to become a murderer." [5] 

  

Whether this actually happened or it's a homocidal fantasy, I don't know. But the point remains the same: fascism makes killers of us all - or, at the very least, it obliges us to recognise that we all have the potential to commit terrible deeds when forced to do so. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Síomón Solomon, 'Hölderlin 1944', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. 83-88. The original German text can be found in the Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 23, (1982/83), pp. 172-77.

   

[2] It's no secret that Hermlin reimagined the facts of his own life. He was certainly creative with the truth, shall we say, when it came to his experiences during the War; portraying himself as an anti-fascist hero who fought with the Resistance in France and the Republicans in Spain. His tendency to dissolve the genre distinction between life and literature is best exemplified in Abendlicht (1979). 

      Solomon addresses this issue and provides some useful references to other critics who have been troubled (or amused) by Hermlin's tendency to project subjective experience into false historical context and tell true lies in part (ii) of his 'Translator's Introduction' to Hölderlin's Poltergeists. Unsurprisingly, since Solomon is himself a poet, he concludes sympathetically: 

"The hyperreal horror of the German menace and the continuous terror by which its paranoiac war machine infected the spirits of those it harassed and hunted down can hardly be underestimated, moreover, for the chaos it formented in curdling the contours of actuality, fantasy and memory. At the same time, poets are beings predisposed by definition to exercises of poetic licence. In the political interstices of Hermlin's own Vergangenheitsbewältigung, his reconciliation with his past, if he retrospectively massaged his own myth, he was surely in some measure just being himself." [21]

 

One work that Solomon doesn't refer us to, but which is certainly relevant to this discussion, is David Bathrick's 'Rereading Stephan Hermlin: Residues of Difference in the Post-Wall Public Sphere', in What Remains? East German Culture and the Postwar Public, ed. Marc Silberman, (American Institute for Contemporary German Studies / The John Hopkins University, 1997), pp. 90-100. To read as a pdf online, visit: https://www.aicgs.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/silberman.pdf

    

[3] Síomón Solomon, 'Hölderlin 1944', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 85.

 

[4] Ibid., p. 86.

 

[5] Ibid., pp. 87-88.

 

 

For a related post to this one - on Síomón Solomon's fantasia of traslation in Hölderlin's Poltergeists - click here.   

Reflections on a Green Carnation

 

"When Oscar Wilde said that it is nonsense to assert that art imitates nature, because nature always imitates art, that is absolutely true of human nature."  [1] 

 

It might surprise some readers to discover that this is D. H. Lawrence writing in agreement with Wilde and his anti-mimetic philosophy. It might further surprise them to discover that in the same text he goes on to dismiss the notion of spontaneous human nature and attack the idea that our feelings arise from deep within of their own accord:

 

"The thing called 'spontaneous human nature' does not exist, and never did. Human nature is always made to some pattern or other. The wild Australian aborigines are absolutely bound up tight, tighter than a China-girl's foot, in their few savage conventions. They are bound up tighter than we are. [...]

      And this we must finally recognise. No man has 'feelings of his own.' The feelings of all men in the civilised world today are practicaly all alike. Men can only feel the feelings they know how to feel. The feelings they don't know how to feel, they don't feel. This is true of all men, and all women, and all children." [2]

 

And this, concludes Lawrence, is central to the agony of our human existence: "that we can only feel things in conventional feeling-patterns", rather than directly express the strange howlings of the yeasty soul [3].    

 

To do that, we must either give birth to a new humanity - perhaps what might even be described as a posthuman humanity - or we must find a way to become-animal, become-demon ... [4]    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction (version I) to The Memors of The Duc de Lauzan', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 89. 

      Lawrence is referring to Wilde's essay 'The Decay of Lying', in Intentions (1891) in which he writes: "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life [...] It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates Art." Of course, Wilde is by no means the first to advance such a thesis; Ovid, for example, anticipates the idea in Book III of Metapmorphoses. 

      

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction (version I) to The Memors of The Duc de Lauzan', in Introductions and Reviews, p. 89. 

    It might be argued that Lawrence is here reaffirming La Rochefoucauld's famous maxim: "Il y a des gens qui n'auraient jamais été amoureux s'ils n'avaint jamais entendu parler de l'amour." 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction (version I) to The Memors of The Duc de Lauzan', in Introductions and Reviews, p. 90. 

 

[4] See Deleuze and Guattari on the idea of becoming in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 

      In brief, becoming is an opening up to alien forces, but not so these can be filtered through the ego or experienced imaginatively. Becoming is not a fantasy; it is rather a real process involving events at the molecular level of forces. Deleuze and Guattari admire Lawrence as a writer precisely because he was able to tie his work "to real and unheard of becomings" [p. 244]. Becoming is diabolical in the sense that it fundamentally opposes the ontotheological belief in the immortal soul of Man as something fixed and essential. 

 

For an earlier post on Lawrence and Wilde, click here.       

 

 

On D. H. Lawrence and Oscar Wilde

 

 

I.

 

One hundred years ago today - 26 April 1921 - D. H. Lawrence arrived in the German spa town of Baden-Baden, situated on the edge of the Black Forest, close to the border with France. He was on a visit to his mother-in-law, Frau Baronin von Richthofen. 

 

It had been, he tells one correspondent, a devil of a journey from Italy; one that left him feeling not quite right inside his own skin [1]. Perhaps the curious stillness and emptiness of the place intensified this feeling. And one can't imagine the cold northern air helped matters. 

 

Not surprising then that, although his wife hoped they would be staying for the entire summer, Lawrence is already thinking of leaving in a few weeks; "doubt I shall stand it more than a month" [2]. 

 

Interesting as all this is, what really caught my attention, however, was a remark made in another letter written on the 28th of April, this time to his London publisher: "Alfred Douglas is a louse." [3]  

 

 

II.  

 

Why this remark caught my attention is because, as a matter of fact, Lawrence makes very few references to Oscar Wilde and his circle, only one of whom, Reggie Turner, does he ever meet in person [4]. 

 

Why this is so, we can only guess ...

 

For one thing, of course, it's generational; the world has moved on and, despite being born in 1885, Lawrence belongs very much to the unfolding twentieth-century, rather than the fag end of the nineteenth. Like many others, he finds Wilde's work dated and describes the 1890s as a ridiculous decade - a mix of decadence and pietism [5]. 

 

But it's also a question of temperament. For one suspects that Lawrence - an English puritan at heart - would have found Wilde a little too Irish, a little too queer, a little too affected ... In brief, just a little too much all round. We find traces of this in his characterisation of Wilde as a grand pervert, i.e., someone full of ineffable conceit who tried to "intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness" [6].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Lawrence's letter to John Ellingham Brooks (28 April 1921), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 706.

 

[2] See Lawrence's letter to Robert Mountsier (28 April 1921), ibid., p. 707. In the event, Lawrence and Frieda stayed in Baden-Baden until mid-July.  

[3] See Lawrence's letter to Martin Secker (28 April 1921), ibid., p. 708. 

      Despite the harshness of his description, Lawrence had, when younger, admired some of Douglas's poetry in The City of the Soul (1899): "Alfred Douglas has some lovely verses; he is affected so deeply by the new French poets, and has caught their beautiful touch." 

      See his letter to Blanche Jennings (20 Jan 1909), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 107. 

      Lawrence being Lawrence, however, he can't resist also taking a bit of a pop at Douglas in the same letter immediately afterwards: "the fat-head [...] feels himself heavy with nothing and thinks it's death when it's only the burden of his own unused self". 

 

[4] Lawrence is introduced to Reginald Turner by Norman Douglas in 1919 and he partly bases the character of Algy Constable on Wilde's most loyal of friends in Aaron's Rod (1922).

      References to Wilde in Lawrence's work include, for example, 'The Proper Study', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 170, and 'Introduction [version I] to The Memoirs of the Duc de Lauzun', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 89.

 

 [5] See Lawrence's 'Review of Hadrian the Seventh, by Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo)', Introductions and Reviews, p. 239. 

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

      Wilde finds himself in good company, as Lawrence also brands Goethe, Byron, Baudelaire, and Proust (among others) as grand perverts. 

 

 

For further refections on Lawrence and Wilde, click here.  

As for Lawrence ... He's a Moral Conservative

 

 

Perhaps one of the most surprising - and, for some, disappointing - things that D. H. Lawrence ever wrote is found in the Foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922):

 

"On the whole, our important moral standards are, in my opinion, quite sound [...] In its essential character, our present morality seems to me to offer no very serious obstacle to our living: our moral standards need brightening up a little, not shattering." [1]

 

Tell that to the followers of Nietzsche, for example, who call for a revaluation of all values ...! Indeed, this might almost be read as an explicit rejection of Zarathustra, who famously advocates the breaking of law tables [2]. 

Of course, as digital pilgrim James Walker reminds us, Lawrence was a mass of contradictions - elsewhere in his work he explicitly rejects the idea of standards of any kind - and so maybe we shouldn't take what he says in Fantasia too seriously after all ...? [3]

 

It could be, for example, that Lawrence was simply being contrary in the face of one critic who suggests that he seeks a "'revision of moral standards such as will remove artificial bars to the escape of each person from the isolation which is his most intolerable hardship'" [4]. 

 

That would explain why - again to one's bemusement - Lawrence even challenges the idea that isolation is an intolerable form of hardship for the individual. And yet, it's precisely such solitary confinement - leading ultimately to self-enclosure or solipsism - that Lawrence elsewhere rages against:

 

"For it is only when we can get a man to fall back into his true relation to other men, and to women, that we can give him an opportunity to be himself. So long as men are inwardly dominated by their own isolation [...] nothing is possible but insanity more or less pronounced. Men must get back into touch." [5]

 

If it isn't his contrary nature that explains this surprising defence of the present moral order, then, I suppose, we might just have to consider the possibility that Lawrence was fundamentally more conventional and conservative than many of his readers like to believe [6]; thus his support for traditional marriage, capital punishment, and the censorship of pornography. 

 

And thus his contempt for those writers and artists who wore jazz underwear and didn't subscribe to his central teaching that the "essential function of art is moral." [7]  

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 60.  

[2] The line I'm thinking of is found in Zarathustra's Prologue (9) and is translated by Adrian Del Caro as: "'Look at the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? The one who breaks their tablets of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker - but he is the creative one.'" 

      See the Cambridge University Press edition of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006), ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. The line quoted is on p. 14.   

 

[3] See the related post to this one - As for Lawrence ... A Reply to James Walker - click here.

 

[4] L. L. Buermyer, writing in the New York Evening Post Literary Review (16 July 1921), quoted by Lawrence in Fantasia, p. 60. 

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 336. 

      It's worth noting that whilst Lawrence says there's no need to shatter moral standards, he does argue here for the shattering of the ideal of a standardised (or normalised) humanity. 

 

[6] This might help explain why Lawrence is increasingly popular in conservative (and even neo-reactionary) circles; see for example Micah Mattix, 'Reconsidering D. H. Lawrence', The American Conservative, (9 Oct 2020): click here.  

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 155. 

      See also the essay 'Art and Morality' in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 161- 168, which opens: "It is part of the common clap-trap, that 'art is immoral.'" In this short text, Lawrence expresses his loathing for those artists whose only aim was to épater les bourgeoisie.      

As for Lawrence ... A Reply to James Walker

James Walker: Senior Lecturer School of Arts and Humanities

Nottingham Trent University: full profile click here. 

 

 

I. 

 

As torpedophiles will be aware, digital storyteller James Walker is someone I have a fair degree of time for, even if his political views often strike me as all-too-predictably prim and proper. 

 

His graphic novel (co-produced with Paul Fillingham), Dawn of the Unread (2014-16), which celebrates Nottingham's literary heritage, was amusing and his current transmedia project which aims to build an online Memory Theatre inspired by D. H. Lawrence's global wanderings, also promises to be of interest.    

 

A member of the D. H. Lawrence Society Council, Walker assembles and edits a monthly bulletin that is emailed to members of the Society, thereby demonstrating his commitment to circulating all the latest news of Lawrence, but without becoming an uncritical follower of the latter. 

 

Indeed, Walker often seems to regard Lawrence primarily as a figure of fun, rather than as a novelist and poet who might actually have something important to teach us. This helps explain his remark left in a comment to a recent post published here on Torpedo the Ark:          

 

"As for Lawrence, he's a mass of contradictions who needs to be read in context. I wouldn't take quotes from Fantasia too seriously, although at least he was honest enough to call it what it was: this 'pseudo-philosophy of mine'."

 

It's a remark I thought we might examine a little more closely ...

 

 

II. 

 

Firstly, it's true that Lawrence is a mass of contradictions and that there is little point in searching for a coherent or consistent philosophy in his work. Like Nietzsche, Lawrence makes no attempt to systematise his ideas - something which betrays a lack of integrity according to the former. However, he does offer a very distinctive style which is characterised by plurality, difference, and insouciance.

 

In other words, it's a style that enrages the puritan who not only expects but demands logical seriousness and dependability. 

 

Arguably, Lawrence anticipates the figure imagined by Roland Barthes who "abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple disregard of that old spectre: logical contradiction" [1]; that anti-Socratic hero who mixes every language and endures the mockery of moral-rational society without shame. 

 

For me, this is one of Lawrence's strengths and at the heart of his appeal; but do I sense a trace of disappointment and/or irritation in Walker's As for Lawrence remark? Does he secretly hope that by reading Lawrence in context - something he says needs to be done, although he doesn't specify what constitutes this context - his work might not only be better understood but, as it were, coordinated within a wider framework of meaning which is clear, coherent, and woven into Truth?

 

Secondly, one might wonder just how seriously Walker would have us take Lawrence's work in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). Not too seriously, he says, but what exactly does that mean; who determines what is and is not a serious piece of writing and what is and is not an appropriate reader response? 

 

Again, I might be mistaken, but I get the impression that Walker secretly thinks Lawrence a clown and his work ludicrous. I also suspect he thinks Lawrence something of a fraud. This is why he is quick to remind us of Lawrence's own use of the phrase pseudo-philosophy to describe his thinking in Fantasia. And why he commends Lawrence for his honesty here, as if elsewhere in the book he is flagrantly dishonest and peddling falsehoods.

 

The ironic thing is that Lawrence's pseudo-philosophy remark is one that is usefully read within a wider context; namely, the Foreword to Fantasia in which Lawence amusingly answers his critics, including Mr. John V. A. Weaver of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, who reviewed Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious and coined the term Pollyanalystic which Lawrence then rewrote as pollyanalytics in order to describe his own philosophy.

 

Read within this context, it becomes clear that Lawrence neither regards his own thinking as a pseudo-philosophy nor a "wordy mass of revolting nonsense" [2]. He is using this phrase - as he's using pollyanalytics - in an ironic (rather weary) manner in the face of past criticism and anticipated future criticism. 

 

It also becomes clear that Lawrence takes his philosophical inferences - deduced from the novels and poems -  seriously and he challenges his readers to do so also if they wish to fully understand his work. For Lawrence, underlying all art is a philosophy upon which it is utterly dependent:

 

"The metaphysic or philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated" [3] - it may contain a mass of contradictions or be wearing woefully thin - but it is of primary importance and not to be scornfully dismissed as something unworthy of serious consideration.    

 

 

Notes

  

[1] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 3. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 62.  

[3] Ibid., p. 65. 

 

For a follow-up post to this one - in which it seems James Walker might have a point after all and we examine Lawrence's moral conservativism - click here.

On Olaf Stapledon's Moral Rationalism

Promotional image for the 2020 film adaptation of Olaf Stapledon's novel 

directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson and narrated by Tilda Swinton

Click here to view the trailer 

 

 

Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) [1] sets out the future history of mankind divided into eighteen distinct species of human being across a period of some 2000,000,000 years. The narrator of the work is supposed to be channelling a text dictated to him by one of the last men. 

 

If Stapledon's cyclical (whilst progressive) theory of history, complete with rising and falling civilisations, owes something to Spengler and the Hegelian dialectic, his theory of a universal supermind (i.e., a consciousness composed of many telepathically linked individuals) arguably has its origins in religious mysticism.

 

That's bad enough. But, in a sense, my main problem with this essay in myth creation, is that, ironically, it remains very much of its own time. Stapledon is clearly not all that interested in a posthuman future; his real concern is with the politics of the post-War world and the "earnest movement for peace and international unity" [xv] that he hopes will triumph. 

 

At its core, then, this work is less one of speculative fiction and more a piece of propaganda on behalf of universal moral rationalism. A form of communism, which helps explain its aggressive anti-Americanism. As more than one critic has pointed out, this is what makes the book - particularly in its opening chapters - seem "awkward and naive" [2].        

 

But, actually, the end of the work is just as ridiculous: the Last Men, we are told, have finally achieved "spiritual maturity and the philosophic mind" [xviii] - a sort of mix of Socrates and Jesus, whom the Last Men think highly of, as the very first page of chapter one makes clear:

 

"Socrates delighting in the truth for its own sake and not merely for practical ends, glorified unbiased thinking, honesty of mind and speech. Jesus, delighting in the actual human persons around him, and in the flavour of divinity which, for him, pervaded the world, stood for unselfish love of eighbours and of God. Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionte intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.

      Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable. For many centuries these twin stars enticed the more precociously human of human animals, in vain. And the failure to put these ideals in practice helped to engender in the race a cynical lassitude which was one cause of its decay." 

 

It's passages like this that, unfortunately, make it impossible for me to read this novel from start to finish - even though I've tried to do so numerous times - and which kind of make me happy to discover at the end of the work that the sun is about to explode!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (Gollancz, 2004). All page references to this edition will be given directly in the text. 

[2] Gregory Benford, Foreword to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, ibid., p. ix. 

      As Benford reminds us, Stapledon was a Marxist with a strong dislike of capitalism - particularly American capitalism. Unfortunately, this causes him to give a reading of his own times and the near future that has proved to be completely mistaken. Thus Benford advises readers to skip the first four chapters. 

 

What if the Shoe Were on the Other Foot?

Photo by Chris Buck for O - Oprah Magazine (May 2017)

chrisbuck.com

 

 

New York based photographer Chris Buck is known for his unconventional portraits of various celebrities and politicians - and celebrity politicians - including Presidents Obama and Trump. His arresting images have appeared in many top publications and he has been involved with a number of high profile commercial campaigns, including the controversial Be Stupid campaign for Diesel. 

 

Like many people, however, I know of him primarily for his pictures in the May 2017 edition of O - The Oprah Magazine, which played with the idea of a reversal of class and race roles, in which whiteness was suddenly disprivileged, at best, if not subject to systemic discrimination in this alternative universe.

 

The photos - which quickly went viral - were for the most part positively received, though, predictably, some found them offensive. Buck claims that his pictures were intended to stimulate questions, but not necessarily provide answers and that he's pleased to know that different people had different reactions:

 

"I want everyone to feel like they can vocalize their feelings about it, whether they’re positive or negative. More talk about this is a good thing. I’d rather people not get upset or offended, but if that’s their reaction then I think that’s totally fair too." *

 

For me, they illustrate something I think we all know at heart: that given the opportunity, everyone is capable of behaving as a cruel, selfish, exploitative arsehole who doesn't give a shit about those who are regarded as inferiors. 

 

In other words, no one is innocent. And those currently oppressed or subject to injustice and violence would behave just as appallingly - if not worse - given the upper hand. Slave morality - for all its fine words - is, let us not forget, a resentment-fuelled desire for revenge; a reactive expression of will to power. 

 

And so, even if the shoe were on the other foot, it would still mean a kick in the face for someone ... Is the solution then that we must all learn to go barefoot (were such a thing possible)?

 

* Note: I'm quoting from an interview with Chris Buck by Jennifer Berry. See: 'The Real Story Behind the O Pics That Have Been All Over Your Feed', Flare, (23 May, 2017): click here.