No More Heroes 3: D. H. Lawrence - He Will Always Be a Priest of Love

No More Heroes (D. H. Lawrence)

(SA/2026)

 

 

I.

 

Despite my best attempts over the last thirty odd years to portray Lawrence as a perverse materialist and sulphurous iconoclast, his romantic idealism and fundamentally religious nature cannot be denied: "I shall always be a priest of love," he once famously declared in a letter [1] - and that, for me, is the issue here.

 

My disappointment (and frustration) with Lawrence lies in the fact he could never quite abandon this self-assigned role, nor move beyond his old-fashioned and deeply conservative sexual metaphysics upon which he erected his own phallic creed and ideology. 

 

 

II.

 

Lawrence recognises that the model of Love offered by Jesus founded upon self-denial and self-sacrifice has been fatally mistaken, invariably leading to the Cross: "Remember I think Christ was profoundly, disastrously wrong." [2] 

 

Lawrence also understands how an active process of the healthy human soul can quickly turn reactive and become malignant if we are not careful; how love becomes a disease when insisted upon as a transcendent spiritual ideal in which individuals merge into oneness. He strongly criticises the Romantics for precisely this.  

 

But although he rejected the exclusive truth of Christianity, he was always a theist at heart; "ceaselessly and energetically pursuing God, with the aid of the Holy Spirit", as Catherine Brown says in the third of her Oxford podcasts on Lawrence [3]. 

 

And although he often sneered at the Romantics for making a girl think she wants a mixture of sentiment and spiritual fulfilment when actually what she desires is to be fucked seven ways to Sunday in a world of rain showers, insects, and gamekeepers [4], Lawrence's literary roots are clearly in the English Romantic tradition. His love of nature, his irrationalism, his opposition to industrial modernity, kind of give the game away. He simply likes to pose as the darkest of all dark romantics [5]. 

 

 

III. 

 

One is almost tempted to say of Lawrence what Hannah Arendt once said of Nietzsche: he is basically just a reflection or a reversal of those thinkers he stands before and declares to be his enemies [6]. Although he wishes to relentlessly challenge moral and rational idealism and climb down Pisgah, Lawrence ultimately relies on the same tricks of the trade - the same metaphysical assumptions and dualistic frameworks - as his opponents.   

 

Conceding that, like Melville, he is perhaps "a mystic and an idealist" [7] at the core, Lawrence nevertheless insists that, unlike the author of Moby Dick (1851), he abandons his "ideal guns" [8] and looks for new weapons. 

 

But does he? 

 

Does he "let the old guns rot" [9] - or does he simply repair, polish and repurpose the old guns in the hope of passing them off as new? 

 

I am increasingly of the view that just as Lawrence will always remain a priest of love who makes Foucault smile by positing sex is the great clue to being [10], so too he's something of a fraudulent gunsmith who has ground off old serial numbers and the 19th-century dates of manufacture in order to make his firearms look like newer models.  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] See the letter to Sallie Hopkin, dated [25 Dec 1912] in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 492-3. 

      Lawrence not only promises to remain forever a priest of love - and a glad one at that - but that he'll preach his heart out, insisting: "Once you've known what love can be, there's no disappointment any more, and no despair."

      This self-description and his defence of (heterosexual) love in face of modern scepticism has proved very popular with his devotees. Personally, however, I have always rather regretted the phrase and the way in which it's been interpreted by those who insist on viewing Lawrence's work as a type of moral idealism - which, let's be clear, it isn't (even if his writing repeatedly falls back into such).            

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence writing in a letter to Dorothy Brett, dated [26 Jan 1925], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 205. 

      Later, just to clarify his (quasi-Nietzschean) position, Lawrence will write in a letter to Else Jaffe (Frieda's sister): "I am with the antichrist." See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 332. 

      For my post on Lawrence's sympathy for the devil and Luciferianism (10 April 2020), please click here. 

 

[3] Catherine Brown, 'D. H. Lawrence 3: Christianity', University of Oxford podcast (28 Feb 2012): click here. 

 

[4] I'm primarily thinking here of the conclusion that Connie arrives at in chapter XVI of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), after a night of sensual passion in which Mellors takes her in the Italian way: "It was not really love. [...] It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder." 

      But I'm also thinking of what Lawrence writes at the opening of his essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), sneering at the more soppier forms of Romantic literature in which "rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time". The line can be found on p. 81 of the Cambridge Edition of this work, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (2003) - oh, and the line from Lady C. can be found on p. 246 of the Cambridge Edition of that work (1993).   

 

[5] For those (like me) without a degree in literature, Dark Romanticism is a 19th-century movement that explored the more sinister and irrational aspects of human being. Unlike mainstream Romantics who believed in the inherent goodness of people and nature, Dark Romantics believed mankind is inherently fallen and lives in an outrageously cruel and violent world. It's a little less spooky than the Gothic tradition (i.e., not so reliant on supernatural elements). 

      Several of the American authors admired by Lawrence - Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne - are often seen as representative of the genre. 

 

[6] In 'Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture', Arendt writes: 

      "The quest for meaning, which relentlessly dissolves and examines anew all accepted doctrines and rules, can [...] as it were, produce a reversal of the old values, and declare these as 'new values'. This, to an extent, is what Nietzsche did when he reversed Platonism, forgetting that a reversed Plato is still Plato [...]"

      This essay is in Social Research, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn 1971), pp. 417-446. The paragraph quoted is on p. 435. She later incorporated this idea into the first volume of her (unfinished) work The Life of the Mind (1977) although she's essentially just echoing Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche as remaining within Western metaphysics, despite his best efforts to overcome such. 

      Obviously, Arendt is right to say that simply reversing values paired in binary opposition isn't enough - though it's important to also note that it's a necessary first step toward deconstruction and revaluation. Derrida argues that to effectively dismantle a philosophical hierarchy, one must follow up reversal with displacement; a second phase that aims to disrupt the oppositional structure itself via the introduction of new concepts - such as différance - that resist clean categorisation and cannot be easily placed on either side of the binary   

[7-9] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', in Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 132

 

[10] See the post titled 'Lady Chatterley's Postmodern Lover' (9 Sept 2013), in which I adopt a Foucauldian position to argue - contra Lawrence - that the metaphysical notion of sex as the great clue to being cannot be allowed to pass without close critical examination.

      For rather than simply being an ideal anchorage point that supports the various manifestations of what we term sexuality, sex, says Foucault, is a complex and tyrannical type of agency formed by regimes of power. The Lawrentian belief that it somehow eludes and resists power and resides deep within us over and above the material reality of bodies and possessing its own intrinsic properties and laws, is simply a piece of modern romance.  

      As much as I love Lawrence, I have to admit that I get tired of the austere monarchy of sex ruling over all our thoughts and actions. And I agree with Foucault that what is really peculiar about modern societies is not that they kept sex locked away in darkness, "but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" [35].  

      In a time to come, after the orgy, so to speak, readers will be unable to fathom Lawrence's sex mania. And they will smile, says Foucault, when they recall that there were once a people who believed that in sex resided a truth "every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought". 

      See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 35, 159.    

 

 

Other posts in this No More Heroes series include: 

 

Malcolm McLaren: Stuckism and the Quest for Authenticity (14 July 2026): click here. 

 

Nietzsche: The Man Who Failed to Die at the Right Time (15 July 2026): click here.

 

Larry David: From Social Assassin to Court Jester (17 July 2026): click here.  

 

 

(Re)turn to Red

Fig. 1 Killing Joke: Turn to Red  

(Malicious Damage, 1979) [1] 

Cover design by Mike Coles [2] 

 

 

It's amazing how certain songs and certain images can stay with you for many years after you first encountered them. 

 

Take, for example, the debut EP by Killing Joke with a sleeve design by Mike Coles (fig. 1). It's over forty-five years since its release and yet whenever there's a red sunrise - as there was this morning over Harold Hill (fig 2): 

  

 

Fig. 2 I Wonder Who Chose the Colour Scheme ... 

Photo by Stephen Alexander 

 

 

- it's not shepherds that I think of, but the track 'Turn to Red' that begins to play in my head (even though, ironically, the song twice informs us that the sky is turning grey). 

 

And it's Mike Coles's Mr Punch figure [3] that I look to see dancing across the rooftops; which, I suppose evidences the power of his design, as recognised by Russ Bestley: 

 

"One mark of a great designer in the field of music graphics is in the way that the audio and visual become almost inseparable - you can't listen to the music without picturing the cover artwork, and vice versa." [4].

 

Bestley, in fact, is a huge admirer of Coles's work: more so than me, to be honest; I'm far more of a Jamie Reid fan and punk purist [5]. 

 

Having said that, I agree with Bestley that Coles's images for Killing Joke set the scene for the music; that you can almost hear the band's "dark, raw power when you look at their early record covers" [6], including the Turn to Red EP, which nicely combines collage with drawing and photography set against a flat red background [7].

 

And, coincidently, it was Mike Coles's Turn to Red design that influenced me when asked a couple of months ago by Catherine Brown to come up with an image to promote her walking tour of Hampstead, following in the footsteps of D. H. Lawrence, as part of this year's Being Human Festival [8]. 

 

I hope - should he ever see the image (fig. 3) - that it makes Mr Coles smile ... 

 

 

  

Fig. 3 Turning Hampstead Red with D. H. Lawrence (2025) 

Stephen Alexander (in the manner of Mike Coles)

 

Notes

 

[1] The Killing Joke EP Turn to Red was released in a 10" format by Malicious Damage on 26 October, 1979. It had two tracks - 'Nervous System' and 'Turn to Red' - on the A-side and just one track on the B-side; 'Are You Receiving?'. 

      It was then re-released on 14 December of that year in a 7" and 12" format by Island Records, with an additional track; a dub remix of the title track called 'Almost Red'.   

      The title track, featuring a closed groove so that the word red is repeated endlessly (or at least until you lift the needle of the record), can be played by clicking here. And for the remastered 2020 version, with a video by Mike Coles, click here.

 

[2] Mike Coles can be found on Facebook: click here. Or visit the Malicious Damage website: click here. Coles's artwork is also available to buy from the Flood Gallery: click here. Finally, readers may be interested in Coles's book; Forty Years in the Wilderness: A Graphic Voyage of Art, Design & Stubborn Independence (Malicious Damage, 2016), which traces a pictorial history of his work under the Malicious Damage  label, including the record sleeves, posters and flyers promoting Killing Joke. 

      Historian of punk and post-punk graphic design, Russ Bestley, writes of this book: 

      "Part autobiography, part personal reflection, part celebration, this publication may lead to a critical reappraisal of the designer's work alongside more widely acknowledged contemporaries, though such considerations are far from being a driving force for the project, and the title ironically sums up Coles' attitude towards independent and autonomous production." 

      See Bestley, 'I wonder who chose the colour scheme, it's very nice …': Mike Coles, Malicious Damage and Forty Years in the Wilderness', Punk & Post-Punk, Volume 5, Issue 3, (Sept. 2016), pp. 311-328. The essay, which I shall refer to throughout the post, can be downloaded as a Word doc from the UAL research depository: click here.

 

[3] Coles already had a long interest in the traditional British puppet character of Mr Punch and the latter would become a key figure in his work: "'Mr Punch was something that fascinated me before Malicious Damage or Killing Joke. That drawing from the first single was done in 1977 after I'd been to the Punch & Judy festival in Covent Garden'". 

      Mike Coles, quoted by Russ Bestley in the above cited essay, from email correspondence of 18 August, 2016.

 

[4] Russ Bestley, as cited in note 2 above.

 

[5] Whilst Coles is to be respected as an image-maker who developed his own unique aesthetic, for me, he strays just a little too far from what I would consider a punk visual style. And indeed, by his own admission, he "'never took much notice of all the punk stuff'" and "'never really felt a part of the punk movement'". He was more influenced by "'Victorian freak show stuff'" than the Situationists. Quoted by Russ Bestley in the above cited essay, from email correspondence of 14 August, 2016.   

 

[6] Russ Bestley, as cited in note 2 above.  

 

[7] Readers might be interested to know that along with the hand-drawn image of Mr Punch and the picture of two smiling figures taken from a toothpaste ad, the cover features a (high-contrast) photo of Centre Point (which remains a London landmark to this day).   

 

[8] The Being Human festival is an annual celebration of the humanities led by the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, working in collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. 

      Each November they put on hundreds of free public events across the UK in the hope that they might garner support for the continued study of art, literature, history, and philosophy, etc. by demonstrating the value and relevance of such disciplines; the humanities, it is argued, enable us to understand and fully appreciate what it means to be human. For further information, click here.  

      Dr Brown's Hampstead walk took place on 8 November, 2025 (11:00 - 13:00): click here. It will be noted that it was decided to use an alternative (inferior and far less humorous) image to advertise the talk for reasons unknown.    

 

 

From Harold Hill to Hampstead Heath: Walking in the Footsteps of D. H. Lawrence with Catherine Brown

 

Ceramic Blue Plaque erected in 1969 by Greater London Council 

at 1 Byron Villas, Vale of Health, Hampstead, London, NW3 

englishheritage.org.uk

 

 

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.

 

 

That City of Dreadful Night: D. H. Lawrence's Letters from Paris

Paris est toujours une bonne idée

 

 

I. 

 

I'm currently reading a big fat book of essays, short stories, and poems by over seventy authors, edited by Andrew Gallix [1], exploring the fascination that writers from the English-speaking world have for the French capital - although, as becomes clear, they are mostly enchanted by a myth of their own invention, rather than by Paris as a place that can be located on a map.       

 

Of course, not all English writers have been enamoured with the City of Lights. D. H. Lawrence, for example, famously wrote in 1919: "Paris is a nasty city, and the French are not sympathetic to me." [2] 

 

Five years later, however, Lawrence had changed his tune: "Paris isn't so bad - to me much nicer than London - so agreeably soulless" [3]. 

 

Indeed, in almost every letter and postcard sent to friends at the beginning of 1924 from Le Grand Hotel de Versailles (on the Boulevard Montparnasse), Lawrence was saying much the same thing: "Paris looking rather lovely in sunshine and frost - rather quiet, but really a beautiful city" [4]. He even cheerfully informed his mother-in-law that the Parisians were very friendly [5]. 

But of course, Lawrence being Lawrence, there were sudden (and frequent) mood changes during his short stay in Paris, as this letter written to Catherine Carswell illustrates:

 

"Today it is dark and raining, and very like London. There really isn't much point in coming here. It's the same thing with a small difference. And not really worth taking the journey. Don't you come just now: it would only disappoint you. Myself, I'm just going to sleep a good bit, and let the days go by [...] Paris has great beauty - but all like a museum. And when one looks out of the Louvre windows, one wonders whether the museum is more inside or outside - whether all Paris, with its rue de la Paix and its Champs Elysée isn't also all just a sort of museum." [6]   

Several days later, and Lawrence is still lying low in Paris (whilst Frieda buys some new clothes), but feeling a little more positive about the city and its residents:

 

"Paris is rather nice - the French aren't at all villain, as far as I see them. I must say I like them. They are simpatico. I feel much better since I am here and away from London." [7]

 

And so, despite informing one correspondent that the city was far from gay, Lawrence mostly enjoyed his short stay: "Paris has been quite entertaining for the two weeks: good food and wine, and everything very cheap." [8]  

 

II.

 

In 1929, Lawrence returned to Paris where he oversaw publication of a new (inexpensive) edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover to try and stop the pirated editions then in circulation. If, five years earlier, he had been mostly positive in his response to the city, now he was as hostile to it as he was to most (if not all) large cities:

 

"I don't a bit like Paris. It is nowadays incredibly crowded, incredibly noisy, the air is dirty and simply stinks of petrol, and all the life has gone out of the people. They seem so tired." [9]   

 

Sadly, of course, it was Lawrence himself that the life had almost entirely gone out of; he was to die eleven months after writing this, aged 44, in Vence (428 miles south of Paris, as the crow flies).           

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Andrew Gallix (ed.), We'll Never Have Paris, (Repeater Books, 2019). If I ever manage to work my way through the book's 560+ pages, then I'll doubtless post some kind of review of the work here on Torpedo the Ark.  

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 18 November 1919, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 417. It should be noted that Lawrence hadn't at the time of writing this letter actually been to Paris and wasn't to make his first trip there until January 1924.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mark Gertler, [2 February 1924], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elzabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press 1987), p. 567. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Catherine Carswell, [24 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 561. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen, 24 January 1924, in Letters IV, p. 561. In the original German, Lawrence wrote: "Paris ist doch netter wie London, nicht so dunkel-grau. Die Leute sind ganz freundlich."

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Catherine Carswell, [25 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 563. 

      This letter has parallels with a short essay written at the same time in which Lawrence asserts that whilst Paris is still monumental and handsome, it has lost its true splendour, and become "like an old, weary peacock that sports a bunch of dirty twigs at its rump, where it used to have a tail". He blames this sorry state of affairs on: (i) modern democracy; (ii) too much bare flesh on display in French works of art;  (iii) an overly rich diet; and (iv) the dead weight of history and its architecture.

      See: 'Paris Letter', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 141-146. The line quoted is on p. 143.

      As for the idea of Paris disappointing: 

      "Disappointment, according to Stuart Walton, is actually a 'constitutive factor' in English speakers' experience of France, and its capital in particular: 'It is at least as important to the British, for example, that Paris should fall short of what they expect of it as it is to the Parisians that les Anglais have never really understood it' (p. 332)." 

      See Andrew Gallix's Introduction to We'll Never Have Paris, p. 29. And see also the TTA post 'On Disappointment' (24 May 2020) in which I discuss (amongst other things) le Syndrome de Paris: click here.  

        

[7] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky, [31 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 565. 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Hon. Dorothy Brett, [4 February 1924], in Letters, IV, p. 568. The fact that Paris was, at one time, cheap to live in, was absolutely crucial:

      "Hemingway described Paris in the 1920s as a place 'where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were', adding that this was 'like having a great treasure given to you'. That treasured lifestyle was swept away by the onset of the Depression in the 1930s. As Will Ashon remarks, artists thrive where there is 'affordable, preferably semi-derelict, real estate. Which is to say, you can't be an artist in Paris, anymore, or in London either' (p. 301)." 

      See Andrew Gallix, Introduction to We'll Never Have Paris, p. 24.   

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 3 April 1929, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 234. 

Those interested in knowing more about Lawrence's 1929 visit to Paris - and how his stay at 66, Boulevard de Montparnasse has now been officially commememorated with a plaque - might like to read Catherine Brown's blog post of 29 May 2019, available on her website: click here.     

 

And those interested in Lawrence's wider relationship with French culture, might like to read the following essay by Ginette Katz-Roy: 'D. H. Lawrence and "That Beastly France"', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, (1991), pp. 143-156. This essay is available to download or read online via JSTOR: click here.   

 

 

Musical bonus: the debut single from Adam and the Ants, Young Parisians (Decca, 1978): click here. 

 

 

Pan and Jesus in the Art of Dorothy Brett

Fig 1. Dorothy Brett: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ (1963)

Fig. 2. Dorothy Brett: Pan and Christ (date unknown)

 

I would like, if I may, to develop a point added as a note to a recent post discussing an essay by Catherine Brown [1] which mentions a painting by the Anglo-American artist Dorothy Brett entitled Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ (fig. 1); a work which nicely illustrates Lawrence's dual nature whilst, crucially, making no attempt to reconcile his twin selves.

 

As suggested in the note, the work maintains what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a relation of non-relation. In other words, Brett's very lovely picture illustrates a disjunctive synthesis between divergent forces that somehow manage to communicate by virtue of a difference that passes between them like a spark (or what Lawrence would probably term the Holy Ghost) [2]. 

 

As I also say in the note, if only she'd been thinking with her Nietzsche head on Brett might have called the painting Pan versus the Crucified. But I'm now doubtful she would understand what is meant by this, or why such a twist on the German thinker's original formula provides as useful a key for unlocking Lawrence's philosophical project as Dionysus versus the Crucified does for Nietzsche's own [3]. 

 

For if we are to judge by another painting she produced of Pan and Christ (fig. 2) - in which there is clearly a reconciliation between them (to the extent that they are shown holding hands) - then Brett seems not to grasp the crucial fact that the two gods each have their own flowers, as Brown nicely puts it, and by which she acknowledges that Pan and Christ are antagonists forever separated by a pathos of distance.     

The fact is you can't have horns on your head and wear a crown of thorns - despite the desire of many New Age hippies to create a kind of syncretic religious mishmash. As Lawrence shows in The Escaped Cock, in order for the man who died to resurrect into pagan vitality he has to renounce his mission and his Christhood and accept that the earth doesn't need salvation, it needs tillage and that mankind is better off being watched over by an all-tolerant Pan than a judgemental Jehovah.   

 

Like Elsa in 'The Overtone', you can certainly experience both Jesus and Pan, but not at one and the same time, or in the same way; the former belongs always to the pale light and the latter to the darkness: "'And night shall never be day, and day shall never be night.'" [4]     

 

To imagine them hand-in-hand, as Brett does, is a form of nihilism in that it annihilates the nature of each. As Lawrence notes of another two forces forever divided and at odds - the lion and the unicorn - each exists only by virtue of their inter-opposition: "Remove the opposition and there is a collapse, a sudden crumbling into universal nothingness." [5] 

 

It is the fight of opposites which is holy and there is no reconciliation save in this negation which, for Lawrence, is the unforgivable sin. And Brett has either forgotten this idea, chosen to ignore it, or perhaps never really understood the huge importance it has for Lawrence ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The post in question - Iconography is Never Innocent - can be read by clicking here. See note 4.

[2] In a post on his blog - Larval Subjects - Levi R. Bryant uses non-technical terms to help readers understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean: "Consider the relationship between me and my cat. My cat and I share entirely different worlds even though we inhabit one and the same earth or heteroverse. There is no point where our worlds converge, yet nonetheless certain differential events flash across our distinct and divergent worlds, creating a relation in this non-relation. Somehow our worlds come to be imbricated and entangled with one another, even though they don’t converge on any sort of sameness." To read Bryant's post in full, click here.   

 

[3] See Nietzsche, 'Why I Am a Destiny', in Ecce Homo, where this line appears; or see section 1052 in Book IV of The Will to Power, where Nietzsche explains the distinction between Dionysus and the Crucified as he understands it.   

 

[4] See D. H. Lawrence, 'The Overtone', in St Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 3-17. The line quoted is on p. 16.

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 256. 

Iconography is Never Innocent

Dorothy Brett (1883-1977): 

Portratit of D. H. Lawrence with Halo (1925)

Oil on canvas (78 x 48 cm)

 

'The narrowed, slightly stylised eyes ... gaze with pain ... at the state of the world and at his own fate. 

His halo is formed by a moon in near-total eclipse; soon he will be left in darkness, 

save for the star that burns ...'   

 

 

I. 

 

The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts (2020) is a big, heavy hardback book - over 440 pages divided between 28 essays, written by 27 different authors - so pretty much impossible to read from start to finish. 

 

Thus, once having read the Introduction, one begins to cruise the text, searching out those authors and those essays most likely to give pleasure ... Authors such as Catherine Brown, for example, and her essay: 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon' [1] ...

 

 

II.

 

As the title of the essay indicates, Brown is interested in the manner in which the English poet, novelist, and painter, Mr D. H. Lawrence, has been subordinated to an image [2].   

 

This public image was partly of Lawrence's own making and partly due to the (loving) characterisations and (sometimes spiteful) caricatures produced by friends, followers, critics, and opponents [3]; some of whom portray him as a visionary Christ-like figure, some of whom depict him as a smiling Pan-like figure with devilish horns and hooves, and some of whom - like the Hon. Dorothy Brett - can't quite decide or imagine Lawrence as a combination of both; part-saint, part-satyr [4].

 

Either way, this iconisation of Lawrence as Christ or Pan is not only a bit lame, but, as Brown points out, all too bleeding obvious, as numerous Lawrentian features - not least of all the beard - "suggested contemporary understandings of each or both gods" [5] to many of his circle and, indeed, many of his most ardent (but unimaginative) readers even today. 

 

Brown spends some considerable time discussing Lawrence as Christ and Lawrence as Pan with reference to some of the more famous photographs of Lawrence and I pretty much agree with her analysis; except for her remarks on the 1915 studio portrait of Lawrence in a hat - an image used in 2017 for the 14th International D. H. Lawrence Conference [click here] - which I don't think should be read in religious terms at all. 

 

The image - certainly as featured on the Conference poster - is more punk than Pan and invites viewers to consider Lawrence as a figure within popular culture, rather than Romantic paganism or Ancient Greek mythology. I think you really have to stretch things to insist on Pan as a revolutionary (and/or déclassé) outsider, as Brown does (not once, but twice) - just as you have to subscribe to a false etymology to think that the god Pan lends his name to pantheism [6].          

 

Moving on, we come to the subject of iconoclasm ... As Brown notes: 

 

"One consequence of Lawrence's deification has been that many of the attacks on him have addressed deified versions of him. [...] Such attacks tend to fall into two categories - those which accuse him of resembling Christ or Pan, and those which accuse him of failing to resemble them, thus respectively condemning him by negative association with, and critiquing his alleged pretensions in relation to, these gods." [7]

I have to say, this seems fair enough: those who live by the image, die by the image - and Lawrence lived by the image at least as much as other modernist writers. He may have satirised the desire for literary fame and personal recognition, but, as Brown points out, he certainly contributed to his own celebrity (or notoriety) and was acutely conscious of his public persona. 

 

Thus, whilst most would struggle to remember what James Joyce or Ezra Pound looked like, there are probably still quite a few people who would recognise red-bearded D. H. Lawrence (if only as drawn by Hunt Emerson, comic book style [8]), even though his popularity and iconic status has been waning for the past forty or fifty years.      

 

 

III. 

In conclusion ... Whilst Catherine ends on a relatively upbeat note, calling for "passionate and joyful admiration" of Lawrence, rather than "misdirected deification, or irrelevant iconoclasm" [9], I think I'd like to emphasise the following: Iconography is never innocent ...

 

That is to say, it plays a complicit role in what Baudrillard terms the perfect crime and by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs [10]. 

 

When this happens, we pass beyond representation (or, in the case of the dead, commemoration) towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is made visible and the image no longer reflects, masks, or perverts a basic reality, but bears no relation to any reality whatsoever (i.e., it becomes a simulacrum).

 

Whilst I don't subscribe to aniconism, I do think that all image making is ideally and idealistically reductive and that we - Lawrence scholars included - need to theorise the play and proliferation of images carefully and critically. For it's arguable that philosophical questions of representation and reality, truth and appearance, have never been as crucial as today in an age of social media and deepfake software; a world in which everyone comes to presence on a myriad screens (close-up, in high-definition, and full transparency).     

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] A pre-edited version of this essay can be read on Catherine Brown's website: click here. 

 

[2] As readers will doubtless know, the word icon, from the Ancient Greek εἰκών, simply means image or likeness. As Catherine Brown reminds us, however: "'Icon' expanded its meaning from a visual depiction (especially of a divinity) to 'A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol' or one 'considered worthy of admiration or respect' in the early 1950s (OED draft addition 2001)." See 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020),p. 428. 

 

[3] For details of how Lawrence has been seen by other artists, see the fascinating essay by Lee M. Jenkins, 'Lawrence in Biofiction', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, pp. 385-397. 

 

[4] To be fair, Brett produced a very lovely work which reveals Lawrence's dual nature. Entitled Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ, the picture (produced in 1926 and re-painted in 1963 after she destroyed the original canvas due to the mockery and unfair criticism it received), crucially doesn't try to reconcile the twin selves. Rather, it maintains what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a relation of non-relation. In other words, Brett's picture illustrates a disjunctive synthesis between divergent forces that somehow manage to communicate by virtue of a difference that passes between them like a spark (or what Lawrence would probably term the Holy Ghost). If she'd only been thinking with her Nietzsche head on Brett might have called it Pan versus the Crucified. 

      Whilst Catherine Brown doesn't use the above philosophical terminology, she clearly understands that Pan and Christ are (as she says) mutually antagonistic, despite certain similarities between them, and that "each god has his own, separate validity; each has his own flowers", although she clearly longs for a more balanced (less hostile) relationship between the two. See her essay 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, pp. 427 and 428. Brett's painting is reproduced in this book as Plate 36, on p. 302.      

 

[5] Catherine Brown, ibid., p. 427.  

[6] It's a mistaken piece of folk etymology to equate Pan's name (Πάν) with the Greek word for 'all' (πᾶν). The former is probably contracted from the earlier term Παων, which is in turn derived from a root word meaning to guard (it wil be recalled that Pan is a pastoral deity who looks over shepherds). Lawrence cheerfully exploits this false etymology; thus his talk of the Pan mystery and being "within the allness of Pan". See 'Pan in America', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 158. The line is quoted by Catherine Brown in 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, on p. 434.   

[7] Catherine Brown, ibid.

[8] See 'D. H. Lawrence - Zombie Hunter', by Hunt Emerson and Kevin Jackson, in Dawn of the Unread (Issue #7, 2016): click here. Or see Plate 38 in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, p. 304.  

[9] Catherine Brown, op. cit., p. 439.

 

[10] See Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996). 

 

 

For a follow up post to this on the figures of Pan and and Christ in the art of Dorothy Brett, click here.

Zoom: What Would D. H. Lawrence Do?

 

Sat at home, surrounded by screens, I am no longer anywhere, 

but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality. 

- Jean Baudrillard

 

I.

 

One of the things I admire about Christianity is the inherent challenge it poses: take up your cross and follow me. These words, spoken by Jesus, are not addressed to those who are merely looking for a new faith, but, rather, those who would establish an entirely new ethical practice or mode of being in the world [1]. 

 

As Nietzsche says, this evangelical way of life - which is often a difficult and dangerous way of life (i.e., one at odds with the world and which can get you fed to the lions) - is what distinguishes a Christian from a non-Christian; he or she doesn't merely think differently, they act differently [2].    

 

One finds a similar call to action in the work of D. H. Lawrence; a writer who demands a far greater level of committment from his followers than most others: "whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn’t like it - if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read somebody else" [3].   

 

Like Jesus, to whom he is often compared [4], Lawrence wants his readers to join him in the fight against modern techno-industrial society (or Mammon) and lead radically different lives from their fellow citizens, founded upon contrasting values.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, however, most readers choose to discreetly ignore this revolutionary aspect of his work - and this even includes members of the D. H. Lawrence Society ... 

 

 

II.

 

According to a senior figure within the above - who shall remain nameless - the most exciting thing to emerge out of lockdown (due to the coronavirus pandemic) is the massive extension of social media. 

 

It is, he says, not only a necessity for all of us to embrace new technology, but a wonderful opportunity for members of the Lawrence Society to move online and experience the delights of virtual meetings, rather than suffer the inconvenience of physically gathering in the actual world. 

 

Indeed, he seems to be something of an evangelist for the communications and technology company Zoom, describing his own use of the software as an uplifting experience. 

 

Maybe it is: I don’t know, 'cos I don't use Zoom.

 

But what I do know, however, is that Lawrence was profoundly troubled by transcendent ideals of uplift which run counter to his gargoyle aesthetic and dreams of climbing down Pisgah back into the nearness of the nearest (as Heidegger would say). 

 

He, Lawrence, was particularly concerned by forms of technology that stimulate false feeling and counterfeit notions of community: 

 

"The film, the radio, the gramophone [and now the internet], were all invented because physical effort and physical contact have become repulsive to man and woman alike. The aim is to abstract as far as possible." [5] 

 

Lawrence would thus surely regard social media as just another attempt by hyper-conscious individuals to experience everything in their heads and to exchange the sheer intensity of life lived in the flesh for a virtual sensation. His fear is not that this results in a loss of soul, but in a denial of the body and corporeal reality: 

 

"The amazing move into abstraction on the part of the whole of humanity […] means we loathe the physical element [...] We don't want to look at flesh-and-blood people - we want to watch their shadows on a screen. We don't want to hear their actual voices: only transmitted through a machine.” [6] 

 

The fact that many people prefer to interact with family and friends via a video link is, I think, rather sad. But the fact that a Lawrentian would choose to celebrate this and act as cheerleader for an American tech giant strikes me as, well, problematic to say the least ...

 

For whilst it's not mandatory for an admirer of Lawrence to agree with everything he wrote and live a faultlessly Lawrentian lifestyle, they might at least take his work seriously enough to accept that the question concerning technology remains of vital philosophical import. 

 

Indeed, one might suggest that it has never been more crucial than now to examine our (obsessive) relationship with the screen, which, since the first lockdown in the spring of last year, has become virtually our only communicative interface with the world. 

 

We work online, we shop on line, we play online and thus our professional lives, social lives, and even love lives are all mediated via screens ... If that isn't something to concern members of the D. H. Lawrence Society, then what is?       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Matthew 16:24. The New International Version of this line reads: "Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.'"   

 

[2] See Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), section 33.

      Of course, as Nietzsche goes on to say, hardly anybody who has called themselves a Christian has understood this and risen to the challenge that Jesus presented. Nevertheless: "Even today, such a life is possible, for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will be possible at all times ... Not a belief but a doing, above all a not-doing of many things [...] To reduce being a Christian, Christianness, to a holding something to be true, to a mere phenomenality of consciousness, means to negate Christianness." Ibid., section 39.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Carlo Linati (22 Jan 1925) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), letter number 3341, pp. 200-01.  

[4] See Catherine Brown, 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 426-441. 

      Brown notes of Lawrence: "Christ-like he preached an idiosyncratic vision of salvation both parabolically and explicitly, denounced hypocrisy and materialism, prioritised content over form and soul over intellect, liked children and communal living, prophesised destruction, was poor and physically weak, died in pain and believed in a kind of resurrection." [427] 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 277.

[6] Ibid., p. 283.

 

 

For a follow-up post to this one, click here. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Arts: An Initial Reaction Written Under the Influence of Sour Grapes and Baudrillard

Edinburgh University Press, (2020)

 

 

This new collection of essays on D. H. Lawrence, edited by Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, probably didn't feature on many people's Christmas wish-list. 

 

But for those who feel obliged to keep up with recent developments in Lawrence scholarship, it's obviously required reading. Indeed, one feels duty-bound to break bread with the authors who have contributed to this Companion, even if the bread that is offered is, occasionally, just a bit stale round the edges and showing signs of mould.      

 

Why should that be? Why can't we have an entire loaf of freshly baked bread? 

 

Well, that's difficult when you commision all the usual suspects to write about art primarily in terms of aesthetics and discuss Lawrence's work with more references to philosophical and cultural trends rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, than to ways of thinking that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries [1]. 

 

So it is that whilst the editors of this volume clearly understand the need for a "re-evaluation of existing critical positions" [2], they at no time pause to consider if the very idea of art as a distinct sphere of activity in an era of transaesthetics [3] hasn't - like sex - become merely a nostalgic fantasy.

 

Art, in other words, has lost its specificity and is now indistinguishable from everyday life. It no longer represents anything - no longer means anything - and art no longer possesses the aesthetic power to transfigure or transcend the world; we have realised our own utopia and illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible [4]. 

 

And, unfortunately, not even D. H. Lawrence can save us ...

 

Notes

[1] You will find more references in the index to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts to Friedrich Schiller, for example, than to Jean Baudrillard. In fact, there are no references to the latter, despite his being one of the most important (and provocative) cultural theorists of the last forty years.

 

[2] Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, 'Introduction' to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 1.

 

[3] See Jean Baudrillard, 'Transaesthetics', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993), pp. 14-19. Readers who are interested in this idea should also see also Baudrillard's The Conspiracy of Art, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2005).

 

[4] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Phil Beitchman, Paul Foss and Paul Patton, (Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 38.