D.H. LAWRENCE

D.H. Lawrence was much the most bourgeois/proletarian author of all the major English literary figures to emerge during the first-half of the twentieth century. By which I mean that, technically, he was a proletarian author whose style was more radically spontaneous than that of any of his contemporaries, including John Cowper Powys, and betrayed a more naturally proletarian tone than could have been found in essentially bourgeois authors who occasionally created proletarian characters and settings. But if he wrote as a proletarian, much of his thinking and, indeed, the novelistic context in which he worked, was distinctly bourgeois, though of a less radically reactionary order than the 'back-to-nature' thinking of, for example, John Cowper Powys. For while 'back to sex', as Lawrence conceived of it, was hardly a morally progressive teaching, it at any rate had the virtue of referring to a higher type of sensual indulgence than could have been gleaned from nature in the raw. The man who stakes his salvation on sex is a little higher than the one who stakes it on a love of plant life. Both 'salvations', however, can never be anything more than relative.

There was, of course, an element of 'back to nature' in Lawrence, although it was usually subsidiary to his sexual philosophizing. One cannot imagine him actually loving nature, optically 'plunging into' it with an almost possessive zeal, the way Powys would have done. A close physical proximity to nature was rather the appropriate setting in which to cultivate one's sex life. It formed a kind of ideal backdrop for the more important business of satisfying those natural instincts which, according to Lawrence, urban civilization was systematically thwarting and corrupting.

One cannot argue, however, with his findings. What marks Lawrence out as a devil's advocate is that he chooses to draw the wrong conclusions from them, and thus rebel against the 'corrupting influences' of urban civilization, instead of to see in the thwarting of natural instincts a means whereby nature could be overcome in the interests, ultimately, of higher spiritual development. There was no room for the idea of such a higher development in Lawrence's mentality, which was essentially base and plebeian. If civilization was corrupting the natural man, then the only thing to do was to rebel against it so that, freed from its artificial influence, the thwarted, corrupted instincts could gradually recover their ancestral spontaneity of impulse, and man thereafter live the ideal sensual life in an earthly paradise. Rousseau? Yes, not all that different, although rather more sexually earnest than that, at times, somewhat frivolous Frenchman. An earnestness, too, to be found in Powys, though scarcely of the sexual variety!

Nietzsche remarked somewhere on the danger to the development of truth that the rise of the common man would entail if given the means to express himself. Perhaps more than any other twentieth-century author, Lawrence expresses that very danger in confirmation of the Nietzschean fear. The son of a collier, he remained to the end of his life a victim of the darkness, a prisoner of subconscious domination. You cannot turn the son of a collier into an intellectual gentleman just by educating him; for an intellectual gentleman is as much the product of heredity as of upbringing or education - possibly more. Unlike Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence wasn't naturally disposed to think in terms of the light, the superconscious mind, the spirit. Everything reverted to the darkness for him, and that is why he advocated the 'dark gods of the loins' as being preferable to any spiritual or transcendent god. Even though he was aware of a distinction between soul (as body) and spirit (as intellect), his strongest inclination was for the soul, which he considered superior to the spirit. So, no doubt, would many other less-evolved types, whether primitive, pagan, neo-pagan, or whatever. One cannot be surprised that Lawrence's basic sympathies lay with the primitive, or that he should have endeavoured to establish his own existence on a pseudo-primitive footing, like a belated Pre-Raphaelite. In this, however, he proved himself to be an abject failure; for even Lawrence was to some extent a product of bourgeois civilization and thus dependent for both a living and spiritual self-satisfaction on his writings. Neither could he forsake the writings of other men, including many of his contemporaries. He remained, to the end of his life, an intellectual, if at times a rather soulful and sensual one!

His temperament, somewhat Byronic in its egotistical individualism, wasn't a particularly ingratiating one, and few of his contemporaries seem to have liked him or to have enjoyed his company. Some disliked him for what they saw as his bohemian, restless, informal, slovenly lifestyle. Others found him impertinent, quick-tempered, impatient, self-opinionated, cynical, and a variety of other unflattering things besides! He was certainly a rather ugly man, quite the most unattractive romantic of his generation, and, in all probability, he suffered a chip-on-the-shoulder in consequence. He completely lacked a sense of humour in his writings, as in his life - a fact which could hardly have endeared him to would-be detractors! His earnestness was of that plebeian variety which bespeaks poverty and social inferiority. Also, as already noted, in the service of sex. The effort to translate this basic class earnestness into intellectual terms proved largely unsuccessful, since the result was unconvincing. He remained a victim of ancestral deprivation, never more convincingly so than when bewailing the fate of the common man. He did this in a number of novels, not least of all Lady Chatterley's Lover.

As a poet, Lawrence's technical progress was not meagre; for having begun his career as a rhyming, versifying, bourgeois type of poet, he in due course forged one of the most essential, free styles of poetry to appear in the first-half of the twentieth century, a style going way beyond anything attempted by W.B. Yeats in the general direction of technical freedom. But whereas the free verse of his late period is technically meritorious, the general content of the poems sadly leaves something to be desired. For it is usually of an anti-progressive, naturalistic tendency, as in that poem where he bewails the fact that modern men are becoming so many 'monkeys minding machines'. No doubt, the 'men' whom Lawrence would have preferred us all to become would be natural doers rather than artificial be-ers, active lechers rather than passive ascetics!

Quite often one reads Lawrence with a patronizing tolerance for his stylistic shortcomings, deeming them inseparable from his humble origins and taking an almost paradoxical pleasure in the fact that he can express himself as well as he sometimes does. This is the way a 'man of the people' writes, one tells oneself, and because he is such a man one cannot allow oneself to become too critical of his stylistic limitations, such as his constant repetition of certain words (not alien to writers like Hemingway either), his limited vocabulary, his seemingly slapdash approach to grammar, and so on. A novel like Kangaroo particularly lends itself to this impression, since at times it is so carelessly written and thematically unconvincing as to threaten to fall completely apart. One wonders where he got the nerve or patience to continue writing it! On the other hand, one can find oneself admiring the more carefully-structured and artfully-written work of a novel like Women in Love, which Lawrence evidently took some pains with. In this, as in The Plumed Serpent, the artistry at times attains to a degree of merit which brings out the converse impression of the condescending one - namely puzzlement as to how a 'man of the people' could have written so well as this?

Undoubtedly, Lawrence was one of the most technically uneven writers who ever lived, the victim in part of an unstable temperament, in part of his constantly changing domestic circumstances. If there was a creative constant in him, it had to do with his opposition to modern civilization and, not least of all, the avant-garde attitude it often entailed. For all his technical freedoms and/or limitations, Lawrence persisted in the literary tradition of story-teller. His philosophizing was an aspect of his story-telling, not the raison d'être of his novels - as in the case of the more sophisticated Aldous Huxley. He disliked Huxley's novels, and we can surmise that their disrespect for conventional story-telling was a factor in his negative response. As also, of course, their penchant for intellectual philosophy and highly artificial tone. There existed, however, a degree of mutual respect between Lawrence and Huxley, but it was essentially the respect of opposites, not of kindred spirits. By the time of his death, no man could have been spiritually farther apart from the naturalistic philistinism of Lawrence than Aldous Huxley. Huxley ascended transcendentally, whereas D.H. Lawrence sank to the lowest mundane level of sensual faith!