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D.H. Lawrence:
The Other Face of the
Coin
At the height of the San
Francisco Renaissance — the first focus of the Post-War Two rejection of the
war-making State, the exploitative economy of both capitalism and Bolshevism,
and the system of lies which those in power pretend is the Judaeo-Christian
ethic — back in those gaudy and giddy days there was a middle-aged anarchist
woman who was always getting up in meetings and saying, “Comrades, why don’t we
reprint Kropotkin’s Appeal to Youth and distribute it upon the campus at
the University of California and San Francisco State College?” She was quite
convinced that that one simple act would bring the revolution a generation
nearer.
Lawrence is one of those
people like Emma Goldman, Isadora Duncan, Henry Miller whom the aged persist in
assuming appeal to youth. Youth have never heard of Emma Goldman or Isadora
Duncan. Henry Miller makes them giggle. Lawrence, I am afraid, exasperates them.
So many revolutions have been won in our century and found not worth the
winning. As Paul Mattick once remarked, Hitler fulfilled the entire emergency
program of the Communist Manifesto and in addition made May Day a legal
holiday. Few people are prepared to face the fact that the concentration camp
(not the extermination camp) represented juridically, theoretically, on paper,
the most progressive penological notions. Of all the revolutions which have come
home to roost, the Sexual Revolution has turned out to be the most unwieldy
cuckoo of all.
It was D.H. Lawrence’s
great misfortune that he permitted himself to be swept up in a fugitive cause
and to become the prophet and polemicist of a religion which could not, by very
definition, outlive the generation which gave birth to it. What we call
Victorian morality was remarkably short-lived and more honored in the breach
than in the observance. Prior to the appearance of the Prince Consort, British
life was the wonder of Europe for its sluttishness. Debauchery was
institutionalized in the highest and the lowest places. When Lawrence started
his attack on Victorian morality, Edward VII had already lived in lechery and
died in ignominy. Lawrence, himself a provincial, was unaware he had been eaten
by the bear, that he was beating in a door which had long since been removed
from its hinges and that his novels only reflected the curious customs of Lady
Ottoline Morrell’s circle or the reserved banques of the Café Royale. Throughout
his career he tried valiantly to etherialize what was in fact foolishness. His
courage was a function of his naïveté. It is this incongruity and the ill-temper
which it engendered in Lawrence and which corrupts much of what he writes that
exasperates those readers who have come to maturity long after the Sexual
Revolution was over.
During his residence in
Taos Lawrence carried on an affair with a very beautiful and passionate woman,
tubercular like himself, which for complicated, clandestine subterfuges could
not be surpassed in all the annals of the small-town ministry. Nevertheless, at
parties at Mabel Dodge’s when everybody was full of sugarmoon and dancing around
half or all naked and whooping and hooting and making like Geronimo, if anybody
told an off-color joke Lawrence would turn beet red and then snow white and
leave the room, speechless with rage. It is this incongruity which corrupted him
as a man, as a prophet and as a stylist.
He suffered another
corruption too, a literal one. If one of the major factors in the tragedy of
Sinclair Lewis was pustular acne, tuberculosis was equally a factor in that of
Lawrence. He was a sick man. Not only that but neither he nor his wife nor his
friends would face the simple medical facts of the disease. They all acted like
peasants who believe that if you refuse to admit the existence of disease, it
will go away. As Lawrence lay coughing out his lungs, his family and friends
persisted in saying to each other, “Well, you know, Bert always was
bronchial.” Lawrence’s irritability, his revulsion for society, his sexuality,
all reflect morning faintness, 4 P.M. fever and night sweats.
I’m not saying this just
to be nasty. These are facts that must be coped with in a literary diagnosis of
Lawrence as well as in a medical one. Koch’s Bacillus did not invalidate
Lawrence as an artist any more than spirochetes invalidated Baudelaire or
Nietzsche. The men were destroyed by the microorganisms. This took time to do
and the ravages are manifest in their work. The poets and the philosopher
survived. But they cannot be evaluated without taking those ravages into
account. It is simply ignorant to talk about the philosophical significance of
Nietzsche’s delusions when his brain was being eaten up.
A very great deal
survives in Lawrence. He is certainly one of the major poets of the twentieth
century, along with Guillaume Apollinaire and William Carlos Williams. He is one
of the leaders in the rejection of rhetoric and Symbolism and the return of
poetry to colloquial honesty and presentational immediacy. This was one of the
remarkable bouleversements in the history of the human sensibility. It
put to rest once and for all many of the major esthetic quarrels that have
dogged literature since Euripides and Sophocles, the conflict of classicism and
romanticism, form and content, architecture and emotion, and fulfilled countless
programs of the sort promulgated in the preface to Lyrical Ballads or in
the Imagist Manifesto.
However, the critic whose
apparatus prevents him from realizing this is going to have trouble dealing with
Lawrence and is hardly the sort of person qualified to introduce his
Collected Poems. Vivian de Sola Pinto is as whimsical a choice for such a
task as Diana Trilling was for the Viking Portable Lawrence.
He engages in amorphous
argument with a minor American academic critic of the now-forgotten Reactionary
Generation, Professor R.P. Blackmur. These people were left in the ditch of the
high road of literary history thirty years ago in America. Alas, alas, for
England — over there they have just discovered Professor Yvor Winters in all
his rigor. The rigor mortis of The Movement has moved inexorably as the glaciers
from Red Brick to Oxbridge and Camford, as those venerable institutions have
sunk to the same dead level of mediocrity. Under the leadership of those aging
imitators of John Galsworthy, the AYM’s, British writers have forgotten the very
existence of the Common Market of the international intellectual community. Mr.
de Sola Pinto is worried because D.H. Lawrence writes free verse and he bravely
attempts to defend his new-fangledness against the traditionalist strictures of
Professor Blackmur. He is under the impression that the colloquial clumsiness of
his rhymed verse is not deliberate. His preface as an introduction to Lawrence
for people who have never read him is completely misleading. It resembles
nothing so much as an argument overheard on the sunny piazza of a Confederate
Old Soldiers’ Home. Nothing is to be gained by discussing Lawrence in terms of
the militant provincialism and anachronism of The Movement. What we need here is
a Channel tunnel.
For a stylistic
introduction to Lawrence’s poetry, I can think of nothing better than to reprint
verbatim the students’ analyses of his early poem, “Piano,” from Ivor
Richards’s Practical Criticism. Lawrence was not only a consummate artist
but an exquisite sensibility. He was able to weigh and measure that sensibility
with amazing exactitude until fever distracted his poise; and it is only this
lack of balance that injures his later poems.
Several of his poems in
Birds, Beasts and Flowers and his death poem, “Blue Gentians,” are the
perfect expression of what in England was called the Imagist esthetic. They are
quite the equal of anything by Apollinaire, Reverdy or William Carlos Williams.
The only English poem of the period that compares with them is Ford Madox Ford’s
“L’Oubli, Temps de Sécheresse.” Lawrence may have been sick, but poetry like
this will always be a life-giving metaphor for literature, a mithridate for the
young poet. For the layman it will always be a permanently memorable experience,
more real than real. That, after all, is all Lawrence wanted.
There is another aspect
of Lawrence that needs to be faced which is usually dodged by everyone except
the more tendentious Marxist critics. Like Yeats, Stefan George, T.S. Eliot,
Valéry, Unamuno, Ezra Pound, von Hoffmansthal, Lawrence was a dedicated
spokesman for what Joseph Freeman thirty years ago called the fascist
unconscious. Note the “f” is in lower case. Lawrence did not live to see the
horrors of Nazism, but the Nibelungen Geist that haunted Frieda’s
relatives aroused in him only amused contempt, as did the more trivial popinjay
antics of Mussolini’s minions. Nevertheless Lawrence was anti-humane,
anti-humanist and anti-humanitarian, like most of the leading poets of the
international community of the first half of the twentieth century. Mistral —
Marinetti — Maiakofsky — Genêt — a progress from the ridiculous to the
infamous. Unfortunately, Lawrence is caught in the middle of this tradition
along with the greatest of his contemporaries. It is true that the exponents of
humanism were frauds. In Europe they were proved so by the First War. In
America, where by a historical accident the hereditary guardians of humanism
were given the chance to act personally in committee their very selves, they
were proven malevolent frauds by the Sacco-Vanzetti case. But this does not mean
that humanism is a fraud. Nor does it excuse an anti-humane way of life.
Lawrence once remarked that the beastliness of man to man increased in
proportion to growth in membership in the S.P.C.A. and the perfection of
painless dentistry. This is probably true, but it does not excuse Ernest
Hemingway’s attendance at bull fights.
This question is usually
dismissed as one of the out-of-date concerns of the Thirties. It is not and some
day it is going to be necessary to revaluate book by book and almost sentence by
sentence the moral meaning of the leading poets of the first half of the
twentieth century. Since Lawrence occupies so exposed a position in this
context, he would make an excellent subject for the first chapter. The polemics
of the Thirties were very far from settling the matter since both sides of the
controversy were in fact militant anti-humanists, whatever they called
themselves. In America one sect of
them did in fact call themselves Humanists — as of course did Zhdanov in the
last bloody hours of Stalin.
Nor is there much to say
about The Paintings of D.H. Lawrence. I have
the original book. It has become completely unobtainable and
fabulously expensive. It is good to have a copy of the new edition, with more
and better reproductions, that is, if you are a Lawrentian. Like most famous
people, Lawrence was indulged and self-indulged. Like Henry Miller, he was
persuaded that he was a painter. Painting is hard work and the business of
professionals. Lawrence was not as skilled an amateur as Winston Churchill or
Dwight Eisenhower — much less Estlin Cummings. He painted for relaxation, not
least the relaxation of sexual tensions. His paintings are rather silly, just
like the verses he wrote for such purposes. Some of them, with red naked males
with Abyssinian faces and mountainous women with Brunhildian bottoms, are
diagnostic Krankenkunst, slightly crazy fantasies of himself and Frieda.
The whole book is one of those embarrassing historically important documents so
vital to the history of literature but so expendable by good taste.
Finally to return to the
Collected Poems, as a final editio princeps it leaves nothing to
be desired. Juvenilia and variora and dismembra rejecta, all are
here, edited, collated and printed with loving care. It is hard to see how,
barring the discovery of a trunkful of unknown manuscripts, this edition will
ever be superseded.
KENNETH REXROTH
1964
This review of The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence and The Painting
of D.H. Lawrence originally appeared in The Nation (23
November 1964) and was reprinted in With Eye and Ear (Herder & Herder, 1970).
Copyright 1964. Reproduced here by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
[Another Rexroth essay on D.H. Lawrence]
[Other Rexroth essays]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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