God Save the King ...? The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post (2022)

The ghost of D. H. Lawrence observes a relaxed-looking King Charles III  

 

 

I.

 

And all across the land, the great cry goes up: God Save the King! 

 

The king in this case being Charles III, who has now been formally proclaimed as monarch following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. 

 

But, as every year on this day - 11 September - I always like to stop and ask: What would Lawrence think? 

 

II.

 

As with many other subjects, it's not easy to pin Lawrence down when it comes to the question of monarchy. 

 

On the one hand, he was certainly thrilled to see all the king's soldiers stiffly marching past in their red tunics when enjoying a visit to Hyde Park in the summer of 1909. But that might just be a sign of a penchant for pomp and circumstance, or, indeed, of his homoerotic attraction to virile young men in uniform [1].

 

For when Lawrence actually did see a member of the Royal Family up close and personal - namely, Edward, the Prince of Wales, on a visit to Ceylon in March 1922 - he wasn't particularly impressed. In fact, he seemed far more in awe of the ceremonial elephants and naked devil-dancers, than the pale-faced representative of the British Crown [2].

 

As Lawrence's biographer David Ellis notes, Lawrence characterises the future king, in both his verse and correspondence, with terms and phrases such as sad, nervous, irritable, worn out, forlorn, etc. [3]

 

He is particuarly contemptuous of the Prince's motto, Ich dien, and reasserts an older model of kingship based upon the power of rule over - not service to - the people. And that's really the crucial point; Lawrence doesn't much care for modern forms of constitutional monarchy, he wants kings with dark faces and red beards, and who, like the Sons of Enoch, are hung like horses.

 

In a letter to Mabel Sterne, written in April of 1922, Lawrence states:

 

"I don't believe either in liberty or democracy. I believe in actual, sacred, inspired authority: divine right of natural kings: I believe in the divine right of natural aristocracy, the right, the sacred duty to wield undisputed authority." [4]    

 

He develops this line of thinking in several essays from this period [5], as well as the Epilogue (written in September 1924) to Movements in European History (1921). 

 

Whilst conceding that it is bad to have "greedy, cruel people called 'nobles'" and "rich people squandering money and taking airs" [6], Lawrence argues that, at the same time, we long for those who understand the mysterious responsibility of power, such as the ancient kings; men who were not mere bullies or tyrants and whose kingship was "not a matter of vanity and conceit" [7].      

 

 

III. 

 

So, what then would Lawrence make of King Charles III? 

 

Not much, I suspect. 

 

But, who knows, Charles may at least be able to "keep up a bluff of royalty and nobleness" [8] for a bit longer. And then, after him, le déluge ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Guards!', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 34-35. And see also my post on this poem: click here. 

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Elephant', in The Poems Vol. I, pp. 338-343. This poem can also be found online: click here, for example.

[3] See David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930, (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 16.

[4] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne, 10 April 1922, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 226. 

 

[5] See, for example, the essays 'Blessed Are the Powerful' and 'Aristocracy', both of which can be found in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 261.

 

[7] Ibid., p. 263.    

[8] Ibid., p. 264. 

 

 

For a post published in April of this year in which I discuss Lawrence's reaction to Ceylon, click here. 

 

For another response to presently unfolding royal events in the UK, click here. 

 

Reflections on Frances Wilson's 'Burning Man'

(Bloomsbury, 2021)

 

 

Anyone setting out to write a new biography of D. H. Lawrence has two initial problems:

 

Firstly, they have to find something to say that wasn't said in the three-volumed Cambridge Biography (1991-1998), written by professors Worthen, Kinkead-Weekes, and Ellis. These three wise men managed to stretch Lawrence's short life out over two thousand pages, which doesn't leave much room, one would have thought, to manoeuvre.

 

Secondly - and perhaps even more problematically - Lawrence himself provided an account of his own life in his essays, articles, travel writings, poems, and - not least of all - in his thousands of letters. What's more, he also gives us an autofictional version of events in his novels, plays, and short stories. 

 

In an attempt to try and get round these inconvenient facts, Frances Wilson does two things:

 

Firstly, she follows Lawrence's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work and gives greater roles to those who usually are considered of minor import in his life. Thus, we get to hear a lot about Maurice Magnus, for example, and an in-depth analysis of Lawrence's Memoir of the latter. As someone who likes shadowy figures and random events and is obsessed with marginalia, footnotes, early drafts, unpublished or obscure texts, this is fine by me.

 

Secondly, Wilson reads Lawrence's astonishingly productive mid-period in relation to (or in terms of) Dante's Divine Comedy, dividing her study into three main sections: Inferno (England, 1915-1919); Purgatory (Italy, 1919-1922); and Paradise (America, 1922-1925), with each section divided into three parts. 

 

Wilson's book thus has a nice neat structure, provided by a novel literary device - or, what might better be described as a cloaking device; i.e., one designed to disguise the fact that, actually, there's really very little new to say about the life of D. H. Lawrence: those who know the facts, faces, places, dates, and key events know these things already and those who don't probably aren't all that interested. 

 

The real problem I have, however, is that, ultimately, it's the work - not the life - that matters (although Wilson claims she is unable to distinguish between life and art). And we still await the readers that Lawrence deserves; i.e., readers who will do for him what a number of great French thinkers (such as Foucault and Deleuze) did for Nietzsche; violating his texts from behind and below, in order to produce monstrous new ideas and unleash strange new forces and flows.

 

Wilson, sadly, is not such a reader. Like Geoff Dyer, she seems to think Lawrence needs rehabilitating rather than sodomising and, in order to achieve this, she is prepared to concede all his faults and failings and dismiss some of his major works as mad and bad, including The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod, and even Women in Love, which, in my view, is the greatest novel of the 20th-century (but then I have the mentality of a teenager: click here). 

 

Having said that, her book is well written and (for the most part) fun to read; she clearly still cares for Lawrence a great deal, even if a little embarrassed about her youthful devotion and too readily apologetic when confronted with those issues, such as racism, that drive modern readers into a moral frenzy.

 

Again, for me, it's preferable that Lawence remain a countercultural hate-figure regarded with hostility and contempt, than become a ludicrous figure of fun or remade to suit the prejudices of a contemporary readership. As Malcolm McLaren repeatedly said: It is better to be hated than loved - and better to be a malevolent failure than any kind of benign success. 

 

The greatness of Lawrence resides in the fact that, like Nietzsche, he would rather be a satyr than a saint and that his writing expresses an acute form of evil, with the latter understood as a sovereign value that demands a kind of Übermorality (i.e., beyond conventional understandings of good and evil). 

 

Wilson doesn't seem remotely interested in any of this; she's far more concerned with the minutiae of Lawrence's everyday life than metaphysics; with telling tales and passing the word along, rather than critically evaluating ideas. 

 

Of course, to be fair, she doesn't claim to be writing an intellectual biography and I rather suspect that, like Ottoline Morell, Wilson regards Lawrence's philosophical writings as deplorable tosh - the ravings of whom she calls Self Two; i.e., the Hulk-like Lawrence she finds tiresome and whose reactionary hysteria often "smashed the genius of Self One to smithereens". 

 

The thing is - if we must indulge the untenable fantasy of a dual nature - it's the green-skinned alter-ego rampaging around the world out of sheer rage that often produces the most astonishing work, rather than the pale-faced Priest of Love indulging in Romantic soul-twaddle. As even Wilson acknowledges towards the end of her book: "Good haters are better company than [...] lovers [...]". 

 

 

See: Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021). Lines quoted are on pp. 302 and 386. 

 

For further reflections on the above book, please click here. 

 

 

Reflections on TB in the Age of Coronavirus

Chest x-ray of a patient with tuberculosis 

showing a lesion in the upper-right lung 

Zephyr / Science Photo Library

 

 

One of the positive aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic is that it has obliged people to consider all things virological, including how tiny parasitic agents evolve and cross from one species to another, infecting and exploiting host cells, etc.

 

One of the negative aspects - and this, ironically, as a consequence of knowing too much thanks to a 24-hour news media that is obsessed with the coronavirus - is that almost the entire world seems to have gone mad and is gripped by fear. 

 

In the past, when people knew much less about viruses and disease in general, they may have been concerned about catching something nasty and falling mortally ill, but there was no mass hysteria and the population didn't isolate themselves indoors, or walk around outside wearing masks and obsessively squirting hand gel.  

 

In 1920, for example, when the average life expectancy for a man in the UK was under fifty and for a woman fifty-four - and when we were only just emerging from the post-War flu pandemic that affected a quarter of the population, killing 228,000 British citizens - infectious diseases were the leading cause of death in young and middle-aged people. 

 

Polio, diptheria, measles, and mumps may now have been largely eradicated in the UK thanks to programmes of immunisation, but they were very serious illnesses a century ago. As was tuberculosis; a bacterial disease that was "by far the biggest and most consistent killer in Western Europe throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries" [1]. 

 

 

II. 

 

According to David Ellis, in the year that D. H. Lawrence died, 1930, there were 50,000 registered deaths from TB in Great Britain; a figure higher than the present number of deaths associated with Covid-19, but also a figure that showed a significant decline from earlier years thanks to improved living conditions and better palliative care.   

Like the coranvirus, TB "is chiefly spread by droplets of sputum when the infected person coughs in the presence of others, with repeated close contact an important factor" [2]. But citizens in 1930 weren't ordered by their government to socially distance and obey the rule of six. Apparently, they accepted that disease and dying were a normal part of life and, whilst naturally wishing to remain healthy and avoid infection, they understood that risk can never be eliminated entirely.

 

Oh, and before anybody mistakenly says that consumption is old news in the Age of Coronavirus, it's worth remembering that one quarter of the world's population is thought to have a latent infection with TB and that in 2018 there were more than 10 million active cases, resulting in 1.5 million fatalities. 

 

TB thus remains the deadliest of all infectious diseases afflicting mankind and if we in the West don't seem to care about this, it's probably because the majority of the cases are in Asia and Africa (I think we all know that if Covid-19 had politely respected borders and stayed in China it would have received very little media attention).   

 

 

Notes

[1] David Ellis, Death and the Author, (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 10.

 

[2] Ibid., p. 14.  

On D. H. Lawrence's Fascination with Male Legs

Robyn H. Fitzpatrick: Male Legs 

robynart.com 

As David Ellis reminds us in a recent blog post, Lawrence was a great admirer of the male leg; particularly those legs that have a certain quick vitality, even if rather thin looking like his own. But he's not a fan of stocky, stupid looking legs, no matter how finely muscled; or knees that, in his view, lack meaning or sensuality.

Nor is Lawrence particularly keen on bare legs; his preference is for male legs clad in red trousers - or tight-fitting tartan trews in the case of Capt. Hepburn - and female legs wrapped in brightly coloured stockings.

Thus it is that one could easily imagine Lawrence offering a little travelling tip to a fellow passenger who happened to have his legs exposed: Try not to wear shorts. It's not all that attractive to look at ... Even if, unlike Larry David, he doesn't find naked, hairy male legs intrinsically grotesque.         

Indeed, one suspects that rather like the narrator of 'The Captain's Doll', Lawrence secretly thrilled at the "huge blond limbs of the savage Germans" parading around in their lederhosen and displaying their "bare, brown, powerful knees and thighs".   

And that, like Connie, he ultimately regarded legs as more important than unreal faces ...

Notes

David Ellis, 'Legs' (28 Oct 2018), can be found on dellis-author.co.uk: click here. 

Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm, S7/E4: 'The Hot Towel', (2009): click here. 

It might amuse readers to know that Larry also has a strong aversion to other male body parts, including testicles, which he regards as disgusting, hideous and rightly reviled. See Curb Your Enthusiasm, S8/E2: 'The Safe House', (2011): click here. Obviously, this testicular aversion is a very unLawrentian. Connie famously discovers the balls of her lover to be the primeval root of all that is lovely; full of a "strange heavy weight of mystery, that could lie soft and heavy in [her] hand!" See Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ch. XXII.   

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 122. 

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 254. 

Interestingly, one of the queer after-effects of Connie's affair with Mellors is that she becomes conscious of legs, including the thighs of her father. It strikes her, however, that most modern legs - of either sex - simply pranced around in leggy ordinariness without any significance, or were so daunted as to be "daunted out of existence". One can't help wondering, however, if this new awakening to legs isn't also a reaction to her husband's disability.

Fresh Air Contra Central Heating

I remember being introduced from an early age to something my mother called fresh air and which she seemed to hold in the highest possible regard, as if, for her, a cold draught signified the veritable presence of the Holy Spirit. She would fling open the bedroom windows and the back door - whatever the weather, whatever the temperature - as if fulfilling a daily religious duty. 

In this way, I learnt to equate being healthy and being righteous with exposure to a cool breeze blowing down the back of my neck and quickly grew to hate warm, stuffy rooms with windows closed and the radiators turned up high.  

Later, this obsession with ventilation was reinforced by a neo-primitive form of pagan vitalism. Like Lawrence, I resented all those things - such as central heating and double glazing - that intervened between me and what I thought of as life; the naked forces of the latter being something that had to be experienced directly in order to be authentic. 

This meant, for example, that when a large hole appeared in the roof of the house in which I was living in Leeds, I saw it as an opportunity to admire the stars in the night sky and allow in a little more fresh air, rather than as something in need of urgent repair. Eventually, the bathroom ceiling fell through and I remember sitting in a tub amused as snowflakes fell upon the soap suds.             

But this, of course, was a long time ago and I've since tempered my ascetic idealism and learned to accept many of the conveniences provided by the modern world. It turns out that having frozen fingers doesn't make you a better writer after all and the demand for fresh air can itself become a stale obsession.  

Indeed, even Lawrence discovered during his final days spent living in the South of France that there's something to be said for indoor plumbing after all. For as his biographer David Ellis reminds us, Lawrence was obliged due to ill health to make a number of compromises:

"Central heating was a major concession on his part. Only a few years before, he had been sarcastic about those who turned up the radiator [...] For them, he had felt, there was no vivid relationship with the living universe; they had allowed technology to intervene between themselves and physical reality, numbing and atrophying their senses."       

The son of a miner, Lawrence loved the magical glow of a coal fire; but not the suffocating false heat provided by pipes.

Not, that is, until failing health eroded such long held principles and prejudices, just as mild-mannered middle-age destroyed such in my case (although, in my heart, I still maintain a degree of kontempt for those who happily conform to an easy life founded upon those words beginning with the letter C ... Comfort ... Convenience ... and yes, even Christmas). 

See: David Ellis, Death and the Author, (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 6.