Lawrence's essay on Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) is more piss-take than critical analysis. Lawrence is particularly mocking of the American poet's claim to be he that aches with amorous love, which he thinks a ludicrous assertion born of the latter's idealism rather than genuine feeling.
Better, says Lawrence, to have a belly-ache, which is at least localised. For man is a limited creature and if he aches with love (i.e. physical longing) it's usually for someone or something specific; such as the girl next door, for example. Only some sort of superhuman being aches with amorous love for the entire universe: "And the danger of the superman is that he is mechanical." [149]
Better, says Lawrence, to have a belly-ache, which is at least localised. For man is a limited creature and if he aches with love (i.e. physical longing) it's usually for someone or something specific; such as the girl next door, for example. Only some sort of superhuman being aches with amorous love for the entire universe: "And the danger of the superman is that he is mechanical." [149]
Whitman insists on some kind of elective affinity between himself and every Tom, Dick and Harry he should ever happen to encounter and relates this to the gravitational pull of the earth: 'Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? / So the body of me to all I meet or know.'
In what is, for me, a crucial passage, Lawrence writes:
"What can be more mechanical? The difference between life and matter is that life, living things, living creatures, have the instinct of turning right away from some matter, and of blissfully ignoring the bulk of most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter. As for living creatures all hurtling together into one great snowball, why, most very living creatures spend the greater part of their time getting out of sight, smell or sound of the rest of the living creatures. Even bees only cluster on their own queen. And that is sickening enough. Fancy all white humanity clustering on one another like a lump of bees.
No Walt, you give yourself away. Matter does gravitate, helplessly. But men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways." [149]
No Walt, you give yourself away. Matter does gravitate, helplessly. But men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways." [149]
If Whitman finds himself gravitating towards everyone it's a sign not only of his promiscuous idealism, but of something having gone very wrong with him; the "lonely phallic monster" [150] of his individual and sensual self has either been murdered or mentalised. Or allowed to go all mushy and leak out into the universe.
Healthy individuals keep themselves to themselves; happy to meet and embrace a few others, but unwilling to touch most people with a barge-pole.
Whitman, however, insists with false exuberance on grasping everyone to his bosom, believing as he does in One Identity as the great desideratum: "Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time", until he reaches the supreme state of Allness. Or until, as Lawrence rather cruelly says, he becomes a fat old man bloated with "senile, self-conscious sensuosity" [151].
Whitman, however, insists with false exuberance on grasping everyone to his bosom, believing as he does in One Identity as the great desideratum: "Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time", until he reaches the supreme state of Allness. Or until, as Lawrence rather cruelly says, he becomes a fat old man bloated with "senile, self-conscious sensuosity" [151].
Lawrence - to his credit - knows that there are many things outside of himself that, in their very otherness, he can never know or assimilate: "But Walt wouldn't have it. He was everything and everything was in him. He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world." [152]
Whitman was a great poet. But the very greatest poets are those who sleep under bushes in the dark and prefer the trackless wildernesses, or the woodpaths, to zooming along the Highway of Love in one direction only. For it becomes a dead end at last, as we'll eventually discover.
Ultimately, Whitman's major mistake was confusing his own message of sympathy, with Christian moral-idealism: "He didn't follow his Sympathy. Try as he might, he kept on automatically interpreting it as Love, as Charity." [158]
What a shame, says Lawrence, that Whitman didn't see that sympathy is a form of compassion, i.e., feeling with rather than feeling for, and has nothing to do with identifying (or merging) with others in the name of solidarity, social justice, and self-sacrifice.
In other words, sympathy means "partaking of the passion" [159] which inspires the other; it doesn't mean that their experience, their pain, their struggle, is yours. It means lending support where and when you can, but without trying to walk in shoes (or wear headscarves) that don't belong to you.
For sympathy also means drawing limits, even to love, and preserving integrity: Love what the soul loves; hate what the soul hates; be compassionate, but don't be an indiscriminate. And remember: it's better to display starry indifference, than sentimental stupidity and false feeling.
Notes
D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 148-61.
See also the Intermediate Version (1919) of the Whitman study in the above edition, pp. 358-69, and the 1921-22 version which appears as Appendix V, pp. 401-17. In many respects, these versions are more interestingly complex, although Lawrence's argument remains the same: Whitman is the best modern example of the great triumph into infinitude.
D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 148-61.
See also the Intermediate Version (1919) of the Whitman study in the above edition, pp. 358-69, and the 1921-22 version which appears as Appendix V, pp. 401-17. In many respects, these versions are more interestingly complex, although Lawrence's argument remains the same: Whitman is the best modern example of the great triumph into infinitude.
Stirring post. Our mam is thinking of becoming a bee-keeper at 77 years young, and we look forward to greeting her swarm.
ReplyDeleteLet's go further than the fairly self-evident point that most people are selectively amorous/compassionate/sympathetic (though sometimes, we think, as much from a lack of imagination as a surplus of idealism). We turn, Heaney-style, from all beings through a 'doorway into the dark' to discover anything - or, if the reader is congenial, as s/he will surely agree 'we turn from the light to see' (Don Paterson).
Before going further, let's look at the degree of Lawrentian sensitivity, empathy or compassion for animals involved in bee-keeping, please.
ReplyDeleteKeepingbees for their honey is acknowledged as detrimental to their health, in many ways.
Bees haven't evolved to produce honey for humans, or to be 'kept' by people who are looking for a hobby which may make them feel more connected to nature - and mistakenly consider this one innocuous.
Honey is for bees, as cow's milk is for calves.
Keeping bees involves lots of harmful practices and side-effects.
As one instance, many bees die as a result of being antagonised into using their sting. Kept bees often suffer 'colony collapse disorder'.
Suggest you Google the others, please, Simon, and that your ma seeks urgent advice on these and other ethical issues and matters of animal welfare from the Vegan Society or her local AR group. They will 'greet' her, or you, with a 'swarm' of excellent ideas on having greater feeling for our fellow creatures.
We can think of rather a lot of things we'd rather do than be greeted by a gaggle of vegans telling us where we've been going wrong all these years, but thanks for your tips on a topic our post did not actually address.
ReplyDeleteHeaven knows who the "We" refers to, but hopefully some of their number would believe bees to be relevant to this post - as those amazing beasts are to all human life on earth.
ReplyDeleteAnd, just as geese may do when guarding, so each "gaggle of vegans" sounds a warning as they appeal to the collective consciousness of man - to our better nature - in wanting to wake the great vast soul of humanity to the many crimes against nature.
Never mind gaggles of geese, in Lawrentian terms vegans are the 'wild swans' who are 'singing the swan-song of us'.
As Lawrence writes in The Triumph of the Machine, for a 'sad century/machines have triumphed. . .shaking the lark's nest till the eggs have broken,'
And, though 'hard on the earth' these machines may be 'rolling', through our hearts 'they will never roll'.
We've sent up 'the wild dry of despair' and we're beating 'the waters in rage, white rage of an enraged swan.'
A tame 'gaggle'? No! We are risen 'on great vaults' of our wings.
And this couldn't be more relevant to Stephen's post. . .as Walt wanted to embrace all - including the corruption.
Whilw Lawrence wanted us to be more discriminating - as vegans definitely are.
Tho' they may occasionally appear guilty of Whitman's 'promiscuous idealism', theirs is a lovely, keen, sensitive sympathy, that is neither 'sentimental stupidity' nor 'false feeling', but a vital reaction in the face of a shocking widespread 'indifference' to unnecessary cruelty.
Even amongst a moralising, ideologically-driven sub-group (or, if they prefer, sur-group) like the vegans, there are of course, as intelligent people always recognise and indeed seek out, nuances, ambiguities, and poetic shades of thinking. For those readers interested in a countervailing defence of the vegan/green credentials of (amateur) apairists, see the below article:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/01/beekeeping-and-the-ethical-vegan-will-curley/
We are, however, at least as interested in the symbolic/poetic aspects of bee-keeping, as practised/explored by the likes of Sylvia Plath, whose entire oevure is exquisitely sensitised to the claims of the humblest denizens of the animal/insect kingdom, such as, as she so movingly evokes in her soul-shaking late poem 'Mystic', '[t]he tame flower-nibblers, the ones/Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable'. Plath's over-determined dead father, Otto, was a published beekeeper, whose 1934 work 'Bumblebees and Their Ways', is still regarded as a classic in the field. His daughter's sequence of bee poems, composed in August 1962 a few months before her suicide, includes 'The Bee Meeting', 'The Arrival of the Bee Box', 'Stings', 'The Swarm' and 'Wintering'. Interested readers may care to peruse this fascinating article on Plath and bees from the County Dublin Beekeepers' Association:
http://dublinbees.org/members-area/sylvia-plath-and-the-bees/
With many thanks for the links to this fascinating info, Simon, it must bee said that even the greatest poetry and fine philosophical words cannot make beekeeping okay or exonerate the beekeeper, nor can they derail or divert the inexorable progress to a vegan future. It might seem that the vegan 'aches with an amorous love', but your links, and the ones below, reveal it is the amorousness of the apiarists is misguided. . .
ReplyDeletehttp://www.vegetus.org/honey/honey.htm
https://www.plantbasednews.org/post/misconception-honey-cruel
And, for brevity, please see. . .
https://www.peta.org/about-peta/faq/whats-wrong-with-eating-honey/
Vegans, who are all rounded individuals, Simon, are capable of nuanced thinking, but have compassionate intelligent hearts.
Honeybees are not domesticated creatures and vegans don't keep bees.
Clearly beekeepers are at least as opinionated as you, Simon, consider vegans to be. But, it's a fact - by definition, honey is not vegan.
Ted was a farmer down in Devon. As we fished together at the other end of the UK, on Loch Swannay and Skaill, Ted drew my attention to the "tons of beef" we'd seen grazing. Moortown contains fabulous poetry.
Fly-fishing had made an adrenalin junkie of Ted. He and his mate, Tom Rawling wrote lovely poems of their fishing exploits - poor adrenalin junkies, the pair of them.
It's great to give up that so-called sport. Ted intended to, but didn't live to.
He gave up shooting through Sylvia's opposition. (But later he lapsed)
That authority on Ted and on Lawrence, Keith Sagar, kept tropical fish, and told me he earned far more money from his books on that subject than on literary greats. Bt when Keith was on holiday one time, the neighbour he's left in charge turned the power off and all his fish died. He never 'kept' them again.
Ted was pro fox-hunting, it should be added. However nuanced the thinking of Ted, of Keith, of Lawrence, of Walt Whitman, of any of us, of Simon Solomon, our sensibilities can be afflicted by blind spots. Perhaps vegans have fewer - can see more. . .Have a more enlightened vision.
Stephen's excellent post suggests that Lawrence's great Whitman essay is 'more piss-take than critical analysis'. Certainly Lawrence has some light-hearted fun, while making his deadly earnest point about the healthy way of embracing love and live.
Vegans are frequently targets of 'piss-takes' - but they are to be backed in every ethical debate, and in this issue of 'keeping' bees.
Badger,
ReplyDelete(We are unsure whether you are human, or badger, or just, as we suspect, 'misguidedly', to use your word, over-identified with the latter. Either way, you might want to keep in mind that you don't, we assume, live in the ground, or forage for grubs to stay alive.)
We find your totalising statements about the 'vegan future' disturbing, and precisely resistant to the nuances it was our aim to introduce. You clearly need to pursue a path of insulated and frankly sanctimonious dogmatism - but the fact is, whether you like it or not, the likes of Will Curley both considers himself vegan and is considered as such by at least some other vegans, though you don't seem to have the humility to realise he is himself writing to disabuse YOU of the 'misguided' one-sidedness you impute to him. In short, like it or not, youre in a contested and contestable space in this domain, so we would counsel a soupcon of modesty and self-criticality, unless you wish to come across as an authoritarian ideologue and/or bore. Badger or human (and who wants to be 'badgered' at the best of times?), your intelligence seems frankly delimited by your own idealistic agenda and the narrowness of your definitional reference points. The very fact you see yourself (and vegans generally) as a priori more 'enlightened' itself makes us uneasy.
On whose authority do you presume to calibrate such transcendental, Buddha-like standards of ethical correctness on behalf of the rest of us? We've met a few vegans/ vegetarians, and some of them have been vile people, just as we've come across caring carnivores. Sorry to muddy your pristine categories, but that's what intelligence likes to do.
It wasn't, and isn't, our interest to embark on a detailed 'defence' of Ted Hughes' attitude to hunting, which we already something know about, except to say that an understanding of the violence of nature (and human violence) was integral to TH's poetics. Essentially, as a shamanic figure, Hughes didn't only care about being 'human' in the sentimental sense, and his communion with animal nature was far more profound than most. As a parting thought, though, animals hunt, and human beings are animals, so . . . well, we'll leave you to join the dots.