Lawrence’s Goose, Part 1

The forbidden genius of England’s greatest novelist

Feb 1

It was not until I had looked into the heart of the world that I discovered Lawrence. Not until I had looked into the heart of Lawrence that I discovered the world.
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D.H. Lawrence’s admirers included Aldous Huxley, Ford Madox Ford, F.R. Leavis, E.M.Forster, Doris Lessing, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Anthony Burgess, George Orwell and Philip Larkin, who described him, correctly, as England’s greatest novelist. Lawrence wrote four extraordinary novels, along with an almost unbelievable quantity of beautiful and revelatory poems, short stories and essays which put him, as Henry Miller recognised, alongside Dante, Cervantes and Dostoevsky. They, the best of them, are masterpieces of world literature. Yet he lived his life in poverty, he was persecuted by the British establishment, no-one would publish his greatest novel, Women in Love, and he had to self-publish his most popular book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which only made his name because of its frank presentation of sex. His reputation today is as low as it was in his lifetime. He is rarely translated and rarely read. Look at a list of ‘England’s Greatest Writers’ and you are unlikely to find Lawrence.

Why? The first, and some in respects principle reason that Lawrence was, and still is, ignored by the literary establishment is that he was working class. He thought and felt as working people do, (‘he had that alert instinct of the common people, the instinctive knowledge of what his neighbour was wanting and thinking’

) and he hated and was explicit about his hatred for his ‘betters’, specifically those who control the culture industry. ‘How beastly the bourgeois is’, wrote Lawrence in one of his attacks, ‘especially the male of the species’. Handsome, healthy, a fine specimen, ‘Oh, but wait! Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another man’s need, let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty…’ and then watch him turn into a fool or a bully. ‘He’s stale’, says Lawrence, ‘he’s been there too long. Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside just like an old mushroom… hollow under a smooth skin and an upright appearance. Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings, rather nasty…’ He concludes by declaring it ‘rather a shame they can’t all be kicked over.’

Lawrence’s work is salted with this kind of thing, disgust at the ‘saurian’ landed gentry, bile for the ‘darling young men’, at the beautiful ones of the middle-class who, then as now, consider themselves artists,

and at the ‘astute and practical’ men of worldly power, the masters of industry and finance. These latter Lawrence compares to lobsters, ‘with shells of steel, like machines, and inner bodies of soft pulp.’ Such men were ‘almost idiots when left alone to their own emotional life.’

As Conrad recognised, for all his confidence in his immediate, certain world, the average man of wealth, comfort and education simply cannot imagine that cataclysmic uncertainty stands just on the other side of the lobster-shell of habit and civilisation, and needs only use a little pin to bore thorough the castle wall; and… farewell king!

Naturally enough, the social and political elite—the lumpenbourgeoisie—did not take kindly to seeing themselves through Lawrence’s eyes. They are quite happy to be ribbed by their chums, they even enjoy the frisson of critical excitement. What they cannot and will not stand is to be made to look ridiculous, hollow and superfluous, and — a more serious crime still — to read of a reality beyond the tiny ambit of their upbringing and taste, forever beyond their reach. They feel shame to hear or read of unspoken truths, because they live in speech. The qualities which Lawrence wrote of, the undersense of phenomena that he was able to feel and express, simply do not exist for those who spend their lives focused on the rational or empirical form of things.

The shame that the comfortable classes feel before the kind of radical truth that Lawrence expressed is a fear which cannot be perceived as such. When the middle class reader encounters a writer who is actually taking responsibility for quality, who is speaking meaningfully of it, their surface minds may be ‘interested’ in the novelty , but underneath their hearts contract. This gives them the ‘sense’ that something is wrong here. It feels unrefined, over-simplistic, off. They read on, agitation growing, until they find something unfashionable, or something ‘offensive’, and then, ‘ah ha! I knew this was dreadful nonsense…’

For the professional classes, the sticking point in Lawrence’s work is invariably sex. Lawrence spoke truthfully of sex, sexuality and the reality of gendered difference which makes transcendence in sex possible; and that just won’t do. When Lawrence wrote, his views were unacceptable because the middle class were sexist prudes unable to consider the existence of sex. Now his ideas are unacceptable because the middle-class are asexual libertines unable to consider the truth of it. First he was derided as prurient, now this accusation has lost its sting, he is accused of sexist pride. Actually, in a profound sense, nothing has really changed. One form of fear, of love, has replaced another, but neither can bear to hear someone speak of that which lies underneath form.

It is sometimes said that Lawrence had a morbid interest in ‘phallic power’, huge erections and a childish insistence on the dominance of the man in the sex act. There certainly is, unfortunately, some truth to this. Lawrence seemed to have considered worship of the phallus to be a more significant literary trope than that of the yoni, and this lack of balance is sometimes at best tasteless, particularly in the rather unpleasant stories set in Mexico (the ones that Huxley most objected to). At worst, Lawrence’s phallic obsession is an expression of his Nietzschean fixation on power. That said, the matter is far from clear-cut. Critics are very keen to seize on passages such as the following, from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which Connie worships the phallus, ‘in a kind of awe’. But look again:

‘Ah! yes, to be passionate like a Bacchante, like a Bacchanal fleeing through the woods, to call on Iacchos, the bright phallus that had no independent personality behind it, but was pure god-servant to the woman! The man, the individual, let him not dare intrude. He was but a temple-servant, the bearer and keeper of the bright phallus, her own.’
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See that the phallus is serving the woman. It is a ‘god-servant’ to her. What’s more, it is serving the ‘bright phallus’ of the female. A strange choice of words, and touched with hysteria perhaps, all of which which may reveal something of Lawrence’s later intransigence on the point of male vigour, but still — her phallus, her godhead, her mystery — a mystery which permeates Lawrence’s work with a sense of wonder and joy that is totally absent from practically all other ‘great literature’. And which has its source, ‘deeper than the phallus,’

in the female.

Has any author, I’d like to know, male or female, ever presented the bizarre, subtle, elusive interiority of woman more perfectly than D.H. Lawrence did in The Rainbow and Women in Love (and to a lesser extent in Lady Chatterley’s Lover)? How many other authors have seen directly into it as Lawrence did, honoured it and allowed it to be, just as it is, without overlay? As Connie says of Mellors, ‘he leaves me my own mistress entirely’ — he gives her complete freedom to be herself, just as Lawrence did. ‘It seems to me queer,’ he wrote to a fellow writer, ‘that you prefer to present men chiefly — as if you cared for women not so much for what they were in themselves as for what the men saw in them. So that after all in your work women seem not to have an existence, save they are projections of the men… It’s the positivity of the women you seem to deny — make them sort of instrumental.’

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the book most roundly criticised by feminists (which, to be fair, is probably the weakest of his four great novels), it is, as Lydia Blanchard points out,

Connie Chatterley who initiates the relationship with Mellors (who is often presented as rather ridiculous); it is she who is, by far, the most clever, resourceful and courageous of all the characters of the novel; it is she whose will — to be free of the death-in-life of her marriage to Clifford Chatterley, to find another love and to have a baby, all of which she succeeds in doing—drives the fate of the other characters; and it is she who expresses one of the central themes of the novel, the journey from an abstract solipsism to an integrated state of ‘individualism-within-relationship’ which was one of Lawrence’s abiding concerns.

The critical focus of authors like de Beauvoir on Lawrence’s phallus obsession pays no attention to the glory that underpins his formal style. Lawrence’s earth, underneath the world of misery, is rich beyond measure with love of the female, but this love spreads its dark warmth throughout his work, rarely appearing as concentrated literary symbolism or explicit disquisition. He is in awe of woman, he adores her; not by projecting an untouchable otherness on her, as emasculated child-men do, but through sensate love, a real, physical wonder that can only reasonably called, notwithstanding how the profane misunderstand the word, worship.

‘When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened.
They have lost the cosmos.’

Lawrence, as a young man, did have a rather telling, and terrible, fear of female pubic hair. Not quite as extreme as that of John Ruskin, who refused to touch his wife after discovering that she wasn’t as smooth and pubeless as a Renaissance painting, but enough, apparently, to injure his own sex life to some extent. Nevertheless, this, along with many of his youthful vices, was something he overcame, presenting the fruits of his struggle — to love and be loved — in his literature; a teaching of balance, in which self-discovery — the discovery of absolute uniqueness within oneself — is one with other-discovery — the realisation of oneness with that which is completely other, the psyche of the opposite gender. Lawrence understood Ruskin’s madness, faced it head on, and overcame it. This was how he was able to write passages such as this;

The evening came on, he played with Anna, and then sat alone with his own wife. She was sewing. He sat very still, smoking, perturbed. He was aware of his wife’s quiet figure, and quiet dark head bent over her needle. It was too quiet for him. It was too peaceful. He wanted to smash the walls down, and let the night in, so that his wife should not be so secure and quiet, sitting there. He wished the air were not so close and narrow. His wife was obliterated from him, she was in her own world, quiet, secure, unnoticed, unnoticing. He was shut down by her.
He rose to go out. He could not sit still any longer. He must get out of this oppressive, shut-down, woman-haunt.
His wife lifted her head and looked at him.
“Are you going out?” she asked.
He looked down and met her eyes. They were darker than darkness, and gave deeper space. He felt himself retreating before her, defensive, whilst her eyes followed and tracked him own.
“I was just going up to Cossethay,” he said.
She remained watching him.
“Why do you go?” she said.
His heart beat fast, and he sat down, slowly.
“No reason particular,” he said, beginning to fill his pipe again, mechanically.
“Why do you go away so often?” she said.
“But you don’t want me,” he replied.
She was silent for a while.
“You do not want to be with me any more,” she said.
It startled him. How did she know this truth? He thought it was his secret.
“Yi,” he said.
“You want to find something else,” she said.
He did not answer. “Did he?” he asked himself.
“You should not want so much attention,” she said. “You are not a baby.”
“I’m not grumbling,” he said. Yet he knew he was.
“You think you have not enough,” she said.
“How enough?”
“You think you have not enough in me. But how do you know me? What do you do to make me love you?”
He was flabbergasted.
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So was I. The building, premonitory pressure, the man desperate to get away, although from what he does not really know, the uncanny knowledge of the woman, seeing straight into his frantic self… and the strange, sweet resolution, which comes shortly after, as the man’s ego is split open. This was written by someone who has faced and overcome the sexual pretender, the braggart and coward within himself, within all men. It is not the work of a sexist or a emotional tyrant.

Lawrence was bitterly critical of the ‘Lord and Master’ approach to male-female relations and railed against the abstract passivity of woman. What he opposed was the same grotesque emotional possession in modern women — an assumed maleness — that Barry Long critiqued. This might manifest in sex as a kind of detached hunger for clitoral orgasm, which Lawrence rightly derided as infinitely inferior to the immeasurable profundity that a vaginal orgasm can release (metaphorically speaking of course; physiologically both the clitoris and the vagina are involved in the female orgasm). Or it might express itself as woman’s desire to be desired—a desire which is her only consolation after having abandoned her innate, hypnotic sex-power. Or it might appear as the horrendous superficiality, and repressed emotionality, of women who have been forced, by a male world, to live entirely in their heads, as most women today do.

None of these observations endeared or endear Lawrence to the miserable middle-class woman, she who values relationships founded on talk, on mental compatibility, on endless, sterile mind-play — all tricks she has learnt from men to avoid love in the flesh. Lawrence hated and mercilessly excoriated the bloodless love of the professional, modern woman, and she reacted, just as she reacts today, by scratching his face.

This brings us back to interiority — Lawrence’s inward sense of the other, which transcends the scientific worldview he hated so much (because it was unable, ever, to touch the unique). His ability to see the inner nature of the other — other people, animals, even objects — is unsurpassed in world literature. Take this simple observation, of which there are countless similar examples in Lawrence;

This day the child had brought a tight little nosegay of pinks, white ones, with a rim of pink ones. She was very proud of it, and very shy because of her pride.

The child ‘was shy because of her pride’. Only someone who can see children from the inside-out can see this simple, moral truth. Only someone who can absorb himself in what is not the self can assert, as Birkin does in Women in Love that ‘I know what centres they live from – what they perceive and feel – the hot, stinging centrality of a goose in the flux of cold water and mud – the curious bitter stinging heat of a goose’s blood, entering their own blood like an inoculation of corruptive fire – fire of the cold-burning mud – the lotus mystery.’

As Aldous Huxley said, Lawrence ‘seemed to know, by personal experience, what it was like to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or even the mysterious moon itself’,

which is why he despaired at the insensitive hell-like ‘outside-in’ approach of people, particularly lovers, who take each other as knowledge-objects, to be grasped as things;

Lovers henceforth have got to KNOW one another. A terrible mistake, and a self-delusion. True lovers only learn that as they know less, and less, and less of each other, the mystery of each grows more startling to the other. The tangible unknown: that is the magic, the mystery, and the grandeur of love, that it puts the tangible unknown in our arms, and against our breast: the beloved. We have made a fatal mistake. We have got to know so much ABOUT things, that we think we know the actuality, and contain it.
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‘The actuality’ was and is taboo for the literary establishment. As Thomas Carlyle, one of Lawrence’s primary influences, put it;

Intellect, the power man has of knowing and believing, is now nearly synonymous with Logic, or the mere power of arranging and communicating. Its implement is not Meditation, but Argument. ‘Cause and effect’ is almost the only category under which we look at, and work with, all Nature. Our first question with regard to any object is not, What is it? but, How is it? We are no longer instinctively driven to apprehend, and lay to heart, what is Good and Lovely, but rather to inquire, as onlookers, how it is produced, whence it comes, whither it goes. Our favourite Philosophers have no love and no hatred; they stand among us not to do, nor to create anything, but as a sort of Logic mills, to grind out the true causes and effects of all that is done and created.
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Nothing has changed. Then as now those whose first question is ‘what is it?’ are regarded with the same condescending perplexity as Lawrence was. Lawrence wrote meaningfully of the now forgotten reality of the fourth dimension, he saw straight into the truth of primal and early medieval life, without romanticising either (writing some astonishingly penetrating critiques of primal and medieval art), he unpicked the philosophy of [the equally unfashionable] Arthur Schopenhauer and gave it new immediacy and depth, he was bitterly critical of industrial technology, and the manner in which it deformed the human spirit, and he passed effortlessly between the Scylla of modernist subjectivity and the Charybdis of scientific objectivity. This is why he was rejected by the middle-class cultural industry, although of course they couldn’t admit this to themselves, which is why they got up in arms about sex.

Or about style. If a reader is agitated by the content of what someone is saying, but is unable to intelligently explain what the problem is, her search for a reason to stop reading will invariably hit on the way it is presented. It sounds pretentious, it’s ‘a word salad’, it’s ‘unreadable’. Metaphors — the only way that qualitative truth can be presented in language — are taken literally and declared to be meaningless, or overly flowery. This is all standard practice, a more refined version of disposing of the ethical integrity of one’s servants by focusing on their dress sense or inability to spell.

It’s true that there is very often a sense of impatience in Lawrence’s writing, a sense that he wants to get past form, to something else. He could be sloppy and almost self-parodically rhapsodic in his thirst to extract the living waters of experience. If it’s not sex or class which offends the ‘tasteful’ reader, it is surely his endless repetition of flames, flares, blood, bowels and so on. Again though, I invite you to take a look at a typical passage, one in which ‘the blood’ is ‘stirring’ in one of Lawrence’s heroes, as it so often does;

There was a great crop of cherries at the farm. The trees at the back of the house, very large and tall, hung thick with scarlet and crimson drops, under the dark leaves. Paul and Edgar were gathering the fruit one evening. It had been a hot day, and now the clouds were rolling in the sky, dark and warm. Paul combed high in the tree, above the scarlet roofs of the buildings. The wind, moaning steadily, made the whole tree rock with a subtle, thrilling motion that stirred the blood. The young man, perched insecurely in the slender branches, rocked till he felt slightly drunk, reached down the boughs, where the scarlet beady cherries hung thick underneath, and tore off handful after handful of the sleek, cool-fleshed fruit. Cherries touched his ears and his neck as he stretched forward, their chill finger-tips sending a flash down his blood. All shades of red, from a golden vermilion to a rich crimson, glowed and met his eyes under a darkness of leaves.
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If this doesn’t amaze you, move you, may God have mercy on your soul.

Part 2 (Joyce, Proust and the Apocalypse) here.

Henry Miller, The World of Lawrence.

‘With the other classes, there is a certain definite breach between individual and individual, and not much goes across except what is intended to go across. But with the common people there is no breach. The communication is silent and involuntary, the give and take flows like waves from person to person, and each one knows: unless he is foiled by speech. Each one knows in silence, reciprocates in silence, and the talk as a rule just babbles on, on the surface. This is the common people among themselves.’ D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo.

D.H. Lawrence, Pansies.

Or, worse, philosophers.

ibid.

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

As Ursula Brangwen discovers in Lawrence’s Women in Love.

The Letters of D.H. Lawrence.

Lydia Blanchard, Feminist Critiques of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow.

D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love.

Introduction to The Letters of D.H. Lawrence.

D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo.

Thomas Carlyle, Sign of the Times. Carlyle, yet another giant who influenced just about every great writer of the nineteenth century, is rarely read now. His identity crime was a pretty serious one though — quite outrageous racism; ‘[Slavery] is a natural aristocracy, that of colour, and quite right that the stronger and better race should have dominion!’ Nice one Tom.

D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers.