D. H. Lawrence and America: A bibliographical and critical study of the influence of the United States and Mexico on the thought and writing of D. H. Lawrence

Citation preview

D. H. LAWRENCE AND AMERICA: A BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY OF THE INFLUENCE OF THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO ON THE THOUGHT AND WRITING OF D.-H. LAWRENCE

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Department of English University of Southern California

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

by E. W. Tedlocfc Jr.. Summer 1950

UMI Number: DP22997

All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

Dissertation Publishing

UMI DP22997 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code

ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346

Ph. 0

E-

51

Tib"&

T h is disse rta tio n , w ritte n by ERHEST WARMOCK TEDLOCK, J r .

u n d e r the g u idan ce o f

F a c u lty C o m m itte e

on S tudies, a nd a p p ro v e d by a l l its m em bers, has been presented to and accepted by the C o u n c il on G ra d u a te S tu d y a nd R esearch, in p a r t ia l f u l ­ f illm e n t o f require m en ts f o r the degree o f DOCTOR

O F P H IL O S O P H Y

,.l2L

L

Committee on Studies

Chairman

Dean

T A B L E OF CONTENTS

PAGE INTRODUCTION PART I

V

1 :1913-1922

Chapter I II III IV

PART II

1

Early Reading

1

Imagist Poetry

(1913-1914)

4

The War Years

(1914-1918)

9

Post-War Europe: Invitation and Journey to Taos (1918-1922)

37

First Visit to New Mexico . 1922-1923

6l

Chapter I

The Life

61

II

The Prose

73

III PART III

The Poetry

100

First Visits to Mexico:

The Pull

of Europe and the Past: A Return Chapter I II PART IV Chapter I II PART V

128

The Life

128

The Work

152

Return to New Mexico, 1924

193

The Life

193

The Work Return to Mexico:

207 The Plumed

Serpent, 1924-1925 Chapter I

The Life

II The Wor£

264 264 273

TABLE OF CONTENTS

(Con't.)

PAGE PART VI

Last Visit to NewMexico (1925)

329

Chapter I

The Life

329

II

The Work

339

PART VII

363

Chapter I II BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aftermath inEurope

363

Conclusion

378 386

INTRODUCTION The title of this study of Lawrence may seem, at first glance, to involve a tour de force, a strained group­ ing of fragments.

Yet America, first imagined at a distance,

then encountered first hand, was important to Lawrence from World War I until his death in 1930.

His early reading of

American literature verified for him the conflict between the physical and the intellectual and spiritual he saw as the crux of modern m a n ’s problems, traceable through the Christian era.

Opportunities to go to America offered

refuge from an England and Europe of which he had sickened and despaired, and a chance to create, in miniature social experiment, the integration which always lay at the center of his philosophy.

In the midst of his search for clues to

a religion which would be real to him, he Was lured by re­ ports of Indian New Mexico.

His visits to the United States

brought the anti-democrat in him into contact with the most, powerful of the democracies.

The disintegration he found in

Europeans seemed to him, paradoxically, to have reached a more advanced stage in the rootless, mechanical life of ’’white” America as distinguished from "dark" or Indian America.

In Mexico his imagination, struggling between old

and new, found a mixture, already seething with revolution, that tempted the seer of problems and solutions.

His re­

turns to Europe formed contrasts which threw the convolutions

vi of hie problems into relief.

In view of all this, Lawrence's

American experience, with the sizeable literary production accompanying it, is hardly a minor subject. No sustained study of this phase of Lawrence's career has been made before, although fairly numerous fragmentary comments exist. focuses.

The present studies of Lawrence use other

The justification of this one lies not only in

the sizeableness and importance of the American experience but in the control thus gained over the'bewildering multi­ plicity and extent of Lawrence's output.

Study of a co­

herent segment of the life and work reveals concerns and themes which illuminate Lawrence's entire career. This study attempts to answer two questions.

What

was the effect of the American experience on Lawrence, the man?

What was its effect on Lawrence, the artist, who in

literature explored the man and his world? tion of the life and the work is attempted.

Thus a correla­ The method is

to preface each period of the American experience with a short biographical sketch, and then to deal analytically and comparatively with the work produced during that period, so that the relationship between the conflicts and ideas of the man and the themes of the writer may be revealed.

An

understanding of overall direction and the development of technique is, of course, also attempted. Such a broad statement of the Intent of this study

vii

brings one, with a sigh, to a sense of inherent difficulties and of inadequacy.

To understand, one must formulate:

the

danger is that one may distort through the imposition of a single formula, as Tindall brashly did in D. H. Lawrence and Susan, His Cow.

Here one needs the humility of knowing that

literature always contains more than the commentaries on it that the two are never the same thing.

This study would

not be worth doing were not Lawrence primarily a skillful artist rather than an erratic irrational theosophist, as Tindall has him, or the religious and political leader of a lunatic fringe. While the study may make some contribu­ tion to literary history, its chief value to criticism will lie in its usefulness to the exegesis of Lawrence’s works. One'last warning:

Lawrence dominates his material.

As a friend said to me with wry truth, perhaps the subject of this study ought to be reversed and made the influence of Lawrence on America.

Well, there is at least reciprocity.

But as for '’local color” and startling change, these must await some critical millennium. I should like to acknowledge the help of Dr. Garland Greever, without whose patience and counsel I should not have been able to proceed this far, and of Dr. Prank Baxter and Dr. Aerol Arnold, whose reading and suggestions amid many other duties, have been invaluable.

I have had, from

time to time, the opportunity to consult Mrs. Lawrence, and

viii I am indebted for her patience, advice, and encouragement, yet refusal to attempt to determine the conclusions of this study.

The shortcomings of the study are mine alone.

PART I :

1913-1922

CHAPTER I EARLY READINGLawrence's, early years, from IS85 to about 1908, were spent in the mining region of Nottinghamshire.

The context

of his early intellectual and artistic growth was the ten­ sion of family life and the relationship of the sexes in a setting which contrasted old and new in the countryside, with its farms and natural life, reminiscent of did England, and the black pits, entered daily by father and neighbors.

This

borderland setting gave Lawrence his strong sense of hidden places in the earth, revealed in his later fascination with snakes and his symbolic use of the earth and darkness as a source of raw power, his revulsion from the modern scene with its mechanization and bungling attempts at amelioration, and his dream of escape into a new world.

It was inevitable

that this dream should involve America. Lawrence's very early work contains allusions to America.

In his first novel, The White Peacock. Canada and

California are mentioned, Canada as a place for a new start and greater freedom as life on the little Midlands farm begins to break up.

America is again used as a potential

refuge in the early short story, "The Thorn in the Flesh"; Bachmann, the fugitive G-erman soldier, would flee there,

2 and, "Emilie would come and join him.

They would be in a

fine, land then."'*’ These are but glimmerings, in plots in­ volving untenable situations in the old countries, of a hope that became extremely important to the writer himself not many years later.

They seem to indicate a young man's

share in the American dream.

Sophistication was to come

later. Indicative of the future, too, are his early encoun­ ters with American literature^

When he was sixteen or seven­

teen he read Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and The Patho finder “with its impression of level lake and silence." “He read and liked Emerson's Essays and became wildly enthusiastic over Thoreau's Walden, especially the essay on 'The Ponds."*

3

William James* Pragmatism "especially ap­

pealed to him. . . . What he read was to be applied here and now; he seemed to consider all his philosophical reading from the angle of his own personal need."^ G-rass was one of his great books."

“Whitman's Leaves of

He would sometimes write

to Jessie Chambers,""I'm sending you a Whitmanesque poem®' _ _

D. H. Lawrence, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (London, 191^), p. 55* ^ E. T., D. H. Lawrence: York, 1936), p. 96. 3 Ibid., p. 101. k

Ibid.. p. 113.

A Personal Record (New

3 when he was .enclosing one of his own."

Years later Cooper

and Whitman would he assigned chapters in Studies in Classic American Literature (I923)’.

The early title of this hook was

The Transcendental Element in American Literature: its focus was on pursuit of the ideal, hut Emerson and Thoreau were omitted.

Elsewhere, Lawrence noted the one-sidedness of

Emerson that both Melville and Hawthorne had felt; their criticism seems to have escaped Lawrence, who, without noting it, finds them also .victims of the ideal.

He liked Emerson’s.

courage and genuine belief, hut not his idealism, which had become a drug in an age which called for "a different sort 6 of sardonic courage." There does not seem to he much of Thoreau in Lawrence's frugality and simplicity of living, and in his sensitivity to natural life.

The reverential

frugality seems to stem, rather, from his impoverished youth in the Midlands.

As for James, his influence is felt, per­

haps, in Lawrence's eclecticism, dislike of absolutes, and world in which all is relative. 5

6 p. 318.

Ibid.. p. 122. Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence.

CHAPTER II IMAGIST POETRY

(1913-1914)

Lawrence's first important relationship with America and Americans is that through the then avant garde of poetry, the imagist poets such as Ezra Pound, H. D., and Amy Lowell, .and Harriet Monroe and her Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. In June, 1913 > Pound asked Lawrence for some stories 1 for “an American publisher under his wing.” Two he received from Lawrence were returned by The Smart Set.

In

the July, 1913. number of Poetry. Pound reviewed Lawrence1s third book (following two novels. The White Peacock and' The Trespasser) .' Love Poems and Others.- In his review Pound rejected certain .themes, and their treatment, that were to . dominate Lawrence'1s work more and more.

He began:

The Love Poems. if by that Mr. Lawrence means the middling-sensual erotic verses in this collection, are a sort of pre-raphaelitish slushy disgusting or very nearly so. The attempts to produce the typical Laurentine line have brought forth: • I touched her and she shivered like a dead snake. which was improved by an even readier parodist, to I touched her and she came off in scales. Jesting aside, when Mr. Lawrence ceases to discuss his own disagreeable sensations, xirhen he writes low-life The Letters of JD. H. Lawrence. edited by Aldous Huxley (New York, I932T, p. 128. 2 Ibid.. p. 145.

5 narrative, as he does in Whether or Hot and in Violets, there is no English poet under forty who can get within shot of him. That Masefield should be having a boom seems, as one takes count of these poems, frankly ridiculous.J In this Pound essentially was following the editorial line of Lawrence's “discoverer," Ford Madox Hueffer, editor of ‘tlie English Review, who had been struck by Lawrence's “real­ ism," his authentic treatment of mining village life, and his artist s sense for the significant detail. Two months later, in the September number of Poetry. Hueffer himself in the second part of “Impressionism —

Some

/ Speculations" named Lawrence, with Yeats, De la Mare, Flint, and Pound, as exhibiting "a new quality, a new power of im­ pressionism, that is open to poetry and not so much open to 5 prose." Then, in the January, 1914, number, Poetry published eight poems by Lawrence, introducing him under "Notes": Mr. D. H. Lawrence has become conspicuous of late both in England and this country. Besides such works in prose as The White Peacock and The Trespasser, he is the author of Love Poems and Others (Kennerley), and of the recently published Sons and Lovers (Kennerley).o Thus Lawrence was gaining attention in the United States, at least as far as the advanced criticism went, by the 3

Poetry: A

Magazine of Verse. II (July, 1913),

149. 4

Ford Madox Hueffer, Portraits from Life (Boston, 1937), P. 72 ff. ^ Poetry: 220-221 .

A Magazine of Verse. II (September, 1913),

------------

^ Ibid., Ill (January, 1914), 151•

j.

beginning of World War I. In March and April, Amy Lowell corresponded with Pound about the periodical, The Egoist.

She wished to edit

it from the United States; Pound suggested that it contain American and English sections, the latter to be edited by Hueffer, Joyce, Lawrence and himself.

Her reply to his sug­

gestion contains an interesting contrast of reputations: don't hnow who Joyce is.

lou say he and Lawrence are the

best among the younger men.

I quite agree with you as to

Lawrence, but I never heard of Joyce. who is he?"

“I

What did he write, and

7

In the slimmer of 191^ she made the trip to England which was to result in the Imagist anthologies and a life­ long friendship with Lawrence.

Lawrence had just been

married, after a two years' struggle for equilibrium and Frieda's divorce. had gone slowly.

As far as money was concerned, the career In America Harriet Monroe had accepted six

of his poems for publication In November or December.

8

On

July 30, while war impended, the Lawrences dined with Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington, and Hilda Doolittle (Mrs. Aldington), reading and discussing poetry afterward.

9

Miss

Lowell and Pound were disputing over future anthologies. 7 S. F. Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle (Boston, 1935), p. 223.

8 9

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 210. Damon, ojc. . 0 it.. pp. 235, 2L0.

Pound, who had issued Des Imagistes in February and was now experimenting with Vorticism, objected to her idea of republishing the same poets every year for five years, for the cumulative effect on the public, allotting the same amount of space to everyone, getting a reputable publisher or, if that were impossible, paying for publication herself All this was in lieu of Pound's wish that she guarantee the money for his editorship of the Meroure de France. quarrel was a complicated one.

The

Pound accused her of steal­

ing his editorship; she, the Aldingtons, Flint, Hueffer, and Lawrence decided to let Pound go his way.

John Gould

Fletcher was added; unproductive poets of the last imagist 10 volume were struck out. In the midst of this, on August Belgium, and England declared war. on her plans.

k,

Germany invaded

But Amy Lowell carried

On., the thirteenth, she had the Lawrences to

dinner, and he consented to contribute to the new antholo­ gies although, in his usual attitude,toward movements and literary coteries, he "thought that Imagism was merely an advertising scheme; and as he hated French poetry, he sup-

11 posed her enthusiasm over it must be a pose." Years later, in 1929, in an interview with Glenn Hughes, Lawrence called imagism "an illusion of Ezra Pound1 10 Ibid., pp. 237-239. Ibid., p. 246.

and said, "In the old London days Pound wasn’t so literary as he is now.

He was more of a mountebank then.

more than he preached, for he had no audience. amusing."

He practiced He was always

In Imagism and the Imagists Hughes concluded that,

while one imagist has said that Lawrence was influenced by the imagist credo and wrote certain poems in conformity with it, there is no proof of this.

The poems of his in the'

anthologies are only occasionally, and then accidentally, imagistic.

12

As he admitted, Whitman was the strongest in­

fluence on him.

He began writing free verse because it was

"so much easier to handle some themes without a regular pattern."-*-3 Practicing imagist or not, Lawrence appeared in the three anthologies, Some Imagist Poets, in 1915, 191&, and 1917*

Throughout the war he was desperately poor, and the

royalty check Amy Lowell sent faithfully, acts of help by her and other friends, as well as several small grants from the Royal Literary Fund, and what Lawrence could eke from his writing and occasional labor, enabled him to survive. The tie with America established through imagism was to increase in importance. 12

Richard Aldington has said that Look ! We Have Come Through I shows the influence of the Imagists in its "tight discipline." He liked Lawrence’s freedom of "mind and body" and "revolt against stale, tame lives," if perhaps "too vehement and scornful." "D. H. Lawrence as Poet," The Saturday Review of Literature ii (May 1, 1926), 7^9-750* 13 Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists (Stanford University, 1931), pp. 170-171*

CHAPTER III THE WAR YEARS

(1914-1918)

Hew lines Lawrence's art and thought were to take had been indicated before the outbreak of the war.

In January

of 1914 he had written of his work on The Rainbow:

"I have

no longer the joy in creating vivid scenes, that I had in Sons and Lovers.

I don't ea£e much more about accumulating

objects in the powerful light of emotion, and making a scene 1 of them." The theme of the new novel was "woman becoming 2 individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative." As for method, he had seen something of what he was after in Marinetti's statement, " . . .

the profound intuitions of life

added one to the other, word by word, according to their il­ logical conception, will give us the general lines of an intuitive physiology of matter."

He did not "care about

physiology of matter," but was interested in non-human ele­ ments rather than those which involved conception of charac­ ters in certain moral schemes and a consistency within the 3 schemes. What he had in mind was a higher law, to be ap­ prehended intuitively, a conception that henceforth character­ ized his thought and art.

As a consequence, words become

-

The Letters of D. H, Lawrence, p. 179• 2 Ifcid., p. 192. 3 Ibid.. pp. 199-200.

10 increasingly inadequate to represent experience, and there enter repetitions of key words and images,- and other man­ nerisms, and an apparent looseness of structure, as sugges­ tion is attempted.

The prophetic manner was necessarily

involved in the teaching of what became for Lawrence a new , religion.

In this connection one notes his numerous allu­

sions to the Bible, his use of parable, his preference for the Old Testament, and1a use of its rhetoric'and rhythms. In America, his use of Indian symbol and ritual would often demand such a manner. The War accelerated his search for philosophical /

foundations.

Just after its outbreak he turned to the writing

of an essay on Hardy "out of sheer rage."

But many parts,

as he predicted, were "about anything but Thomas Hardy." The only good that could come from the war, he felt, was . . . that we realize once more that self-preservation is not the final goal of life; that we realize that we can still squander life and property and inflict whole­ sale suffering. That will free us, perhaps. . . , from the cowardice that . . . will only let us exist in security, unflowerin'g, unreal, fat, under the c cosy jam-pot of the state, under the social frame. The self-reliance of his conception of life becomes apparent. Is there not life enough in us to break out of this system? Let every man take his own, and go his own way, regardless of system and State, when his hour 4 5

Ibid., p. 212.

"Study of Thomas Hardy," Phoenix: the Posthumous. Papers of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Edward D. McDonald (New York, 1936), p. 407.

11 comes. Which is greater, the State or myself? My­ self unquestionably, since the State is only an arrangement made for my convenience. If it is not convenient for me, I must depart from it. There is no need to break^laws. The only need is to be a law unto oneself. A characteristic paradox of his anti-Christian attitude, more fully and aggressively developed during the American period, is made clear at one point: This is what we have made of Christ's commandment: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy s e l f — a mirror for the tears of self-pity. How do we love our neighbor? By taking to heart his poverty, his small wage, and the attendant evils thereof. And is that how.we love our neighbors as ourselves? Do I, then, think of myself as a moneyed thing enjoying advantages, or a non-moneyed thing suf­ fering from disadvantages? Evidently I do. Then why the tears? They must rise from the in­ born knowledge that neither money or non-money, advantages or disadvantages, matter supremely: what matters is the light under the bushel, the flower fighting under the safeguard of the leaves. I am weeping for my denied self.7 His solution was a dynamic individualism.

"The final aim

of every living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself.

This accomplished, it will . . .

bear the .fruit-of its nature."

8

Thus the essay on Hardy beeame a statement of his answer to the challenge of the war,

From the point of view

of his individualism, the war "was a monstrous mass operation The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. pp. ^28-^29. 7

"Study of Thomas Hardy," Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. p. 408.

8

Ibid.. p. 403.

13 sort of communism as far as necessaries of life go, and some real decency. It is to be a colony built up on the real decency which is in each member of the community. A community which is to be established upon the assumption of goodness in the members, in­ stead of the assumption of badness.11 At the same time he was expressing the idea of death and resurrection which was to appear strongly in the American work: I don't feel so hopeless now I am risen. My heart has been as cold as a lump of dead earth, all this time, because of the War. But now I don t feel so dead. I feel hopeful. I couldn't tell you how fragile and tender this hope is— the new shoot of life. But I feel hopeful now about the war. We should all rise again from this grave— though the killed soldiers will have to wait for the last trump.12 His hope was not for the past, but for the new community, ". . . i n which the only riches is integrity of character. So that each one may fulfill his own nature and deep desires to the utmost, but wherein tho', the ultimate satisfaction 13 and Joy is in the completeness of us all as one." Individual fulfillment, and yet the need for others; this problem too was to torment Lawrence during the Ameri­ can experience.

Whether a psychological obstacle lay within

him is a pertinent question, for as a very young man, just beginning his career, he had written of a friendship that

11

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 219.

12 Ibid., p. 222. 13

Ibid., p. 22k

14 was waning, “My soul has strenuous work in intimacies to do.

But then I scorn the intimacy, when it's formed; it is

always a lot short. . . . "

The entry into intimacy and

a plan for joint action followed by revulsion becomes a pattern of his restless existence.

Insight into the cause

and significance of this- pattern is contained in William Troy's “The Lawrence Myth."’*’"* Troy finds its origin in “a surrender of the finite human self to the infinite nothing­ ness of the flux" necessitated by Lawrence's rejection of the intellect and emphasis on the blood-consciousness.

This

is an over-simplification of Lawrence's theory; but I am Indebted to Troy's consequent insight into the emphasis on death in Lawrence, occasioned also by abdication of reason, which makes a death the only possible ultimate “merging," in Nature. Lawrence is partially aware of this danger in . • -

»

-

^

..

— v

his rejection of primitiviness and retrogression and in his belief in higher cycles of life, but the death motif becomes especially important during the American experience. For Troy, “Laxsrrence1s program is, in the last analysis, a program for a mystery god— but hardly for a man.

And

Dionysus in every age can terminate his agony only by dis­ solving into his native element." Troy also emphasizes, however, as one must, that at

1 4

Ibid.. p. 9.

^

Partisan Review. IV (January, 1938)*

15 the heart of Lawrence's philosophy is a salutary indict­ ment of modern disintegration from the intellectual side, born of an insight into modern sicknesses of being.

In 1915,

Lawrence felt that his community could be a hope for the "maimed and injured" soul after the War,

Into the same dis­

cussion enters his mistrust of the mob as representing "the greedy soul,"

the view that the people themselves could

represent a tyranny, and that members of his community must be “aristocrats . . . , wise . . , in dealing with the mob."

16

The theoretical basis of such an attack on democracy lay in the idea of dynamic self-fulfillment. not capable of the same development.

Individuals were

This belief was to

be a source of conflict and theme during the American visit. Through the early months of 1915, bis anguish in­ creased.

He expressed faith that finally the English would

say, “ ‘We will not do these things, because in our know­ ledge of G-od we know them wrong.'

We shall put away our 17 greatness and our living for material things, . . . " Of

the psychic depression that sometimes afflicted him, he wrote, I've got again i^to one of those horrible sleeps from which I can t wake. I can't brush It aside to wake up. You know those horrible sleeps when one is struggling to wake up and can't-g I was like it all autumn— now I am like it again. 16

Ibid., p. 225.

17 Ibid., p. 231.

18

Ibid., p. 233*

16 Such a feeling receives expression much later in New Mexico in the poem "Men in New Mexico." 1915 also marked the friendship with Bertrand Russell and' the first of Lawrence's failures to carry out a plan of action.

Almost all the two had in common was the feeling

that the war threatened disaster to civilization.

Russell

was the formal philosopher whose view of intuition and feel­ ing was the reverse of Lawrence's.

Russell's position is

clear: It is the older kinds of activity, which bring out our kinship with remote generations of animal and semi-human ancestors, that show intuition at its best.' In such matters as self-preservation and love, intuition will act sometimes (though not alxirays) with a swiftness and precision which are astonishing to the critical intellect. But philosophy is not one of the pursuits which illustrate our affinity with the past: it is a highly refined, highly civilized pursuit, demanding, for its success, a certain liberation from the life of instinct, and even, at times, a certain aloofness from all mundane hopes and fears. . . . It is here, more than almost anywhere else, that intellect proves superior to intuition, and that quick--unanalysed convictions are least deserving of uncritical acceptance. ' Russell and Lawrence planned-a series of lectures in London, Russell to. treat ethics, Lawrence immortality.

They planned

also to establish, in Lawrencels words, "a little society or body around a religious belief, which leads to action." In July Russell sent Lawrence an outline of his ideas. Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (New York, 1929), pp. 17-18. ^

20

,

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 243.

20

17 Prom one point of view, Lawrence’s action in covering Russell’s typescript with disagreements and suggestions is that of a brash young tyro unaware of the calibre of his collaborator.

Pron another point of view, it is that of an

individual gifted in his own way and exerting great force of character.

Lawrence liked Russell’s attack on the spirit,

"this great falsity of subjectivism," in the state, mar­ riage, and elsewhere, but told him he must "dare to be positive, not only critical."21 Lawrence’s acute shyness, involving, probably, a feeling of-inadequacy, came out in his comment, "It will be horrible to stand up and say the things I feel most vitally before an audience."

The paradox involved in his social

criticism is expressed in the comment: Bertie Russell talks about democratic control and the education of the artisan, and all this, all this good­ ness, is just a warm and cosy cloak for a bad spirit. They all want the same thing: a continuing in this state of disintegration wherein each separate little ego is an independent little principality by itself. . . . That is what they all want, ultimately— that is what is at the back of all international peace-for-ever and democratic control talk: they all want an outward system of nullity, which they call peace and goodwill, so that in their own souls they can be independent little gods, referred nowhere and to nothing, little mortal Absolutes, secure from ques­ tion.22 Lawrence’s objection may be seen from the other side ^ Harry T. Moore, D. H. Lawrence’s Letters to Bertrand Russell (New York, 19I4-8 }, p p . 77-78• op The Letters of D . H . Lawrence, p . 2f?l.

18

in a memoir by John Maynard Keynes, who participated in Lawrence*s meetings with Russell and a little group of in­ tellectuals at Cambridge.

Keynes thinks that during this

period Lawrence "was influenced by two causes of emotional disturbance."

One was the movement away from himVof Lady

Ottollne Morrell and David Garnett, who were attracted by the Cambridge group.

"Lawrence was jealous of the other

lot; and Cambridge rationalism and cynicism, then at their height, were, of course, repugnant to him." But . . . was there something true and right in what Lawrence felt? There generally was. His re­ actions were incomplete and unfair, but they were not usually baseless.23' Keynes then reviews the intellectual history of the Cambridge group, and finds their chief deficiency in recognition of "no moral obligation. . . , no inner sanction,to conform to and obey," a code "flimsily based on an a ■priori view of what human nature is like

which was disastrously mis­

taken." . . . If I imagine us as' coming under‘the observation Of Lawrence's ignorant, jealous, irritable,’ hostile eyes, what a combination of qualities we offered to arouse his passionate distaste; this thin rationalism skipping on the crust of the lava, ignoring both the reality and the value of the vulgar passions, joined to libertinism and irreverence. . . . That is why I say that there may have been just a grain of truth 24whep Lawrence said in 1914 that we were "done for." John Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 194-9), pp. 79-80. 2 k

Ibid., p. 103. David Garnett, in his "Introductory Note" to Keynes' memoirs, finds Lawrence's attitude one of religious intolerance. "He was a prophet who hated all those whose creeds protected them from ever becoming his disciples."

19 In the Russell-Cambridge episode, one sees an im­ portant aspect of the world Lawrence was in revulsion from-the wasteland of the intellectuals.

The American was

to be full of this revulsion, and of the discovery of a religious life which rationalism and cynicism disparaged or ignored. During the debate with Russell, Lawrence continued to formulate his philosophy.

At one point, he felt that

he had come ’’out of the Christian camp,” and that now he "must come out of these early Greek philosophies.”^^ I have been reading Frazer's Golden Bough and Totemism & Exogamy. Now I am convinced of what I believed when I was about twenty--that there is another seat of consciousness than the brain & the nerve system: there is a blood-consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary mental consciousness. . . . There is the blood-conscious­ ness, with the sexual connection holding the same relation as the eye, in seeing, holds to the mental consciousness. One lives, knows, and has one’s being in the blood, without any reference to nerves and brain. This is one half of life, belonging to the darkness. And the tragedy of this our life, and of your life, is that the mental and nerve consciousness exerts a tyranny over the blood consciousness and that your will . . . i s engaged in the destruction of your blood-being or blood-consciousness, the final , liberating of the one, which is only death in r e s u l t Here Lawrence not only drew the theoretical line, apart from the disagreement over democracy, between Russell and himself, but marked off the area of experience he was already exploring, 2 "consciousness” far different from that I1116 Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 239. p£y

Moore, D. H. Lawrence's Letters to Bertrand Russell, p. 6 3 .

20 of such writers as Joyce, and based on a disagreement with Freud as to the nature and function of the subconscious. At the same time, he rejected traditional Western culture in favor of anterior religion which supported his belief in the blood-consciousness.

The search for a contemporary em­

bodiment of this religion eventually led him to the Indian of New Mexico. While Lawrence was debating democracy and religion with Russell, he made plans with J. M. Murry and Katherine Mansfield to publish a little paper to be called The Signa­ ture in which he would "do the preaching."

Murry would

write of "freedom for the individual soul," and Katherine Mansfield would do "her little satirical sketches." and Gilbert Cannan were invited to join them.

Russell

Three issues

of the magazine appeared in October and November, before it suspended.

Lawrence contributed a long essay, "The Grown," 27 in which with elaborate symbolism he formulated his idea of the fundamental schism in modern man.

The Crown is the

Absolute; under it.the unicorn and the lion fight, the uni­ corn symbolizing the spirit and its attributes, the lion the flesh and its attributes, fbrcen which elsewhere Lawrence calls "virtue and virgin spontaneity," and "pox^er and ^ W. X. Tindall in P. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow refers sneeringly to "the imagery of lions, lambs, and even unicorns." He might have noted, without contempt, the ap­ propriateness at the time of Lawrence’s using for his own purposes the symbols of English kingship in the royal arms.

21 splendor." darkness.

28

The duality is also represented by light and

Properly neither unicorn nor lion achieves

supremacy.

"The direct opposites . . . imply their own 29 supreme relation." In our era “the seed of light has

come to supreme self-consciousness and has gone mad" while the other clings "faster upon the utter night."

Both beasts 30 have gone mad and "tear themselves and each other.0 . And men go to both extremes.

Lawrence’s idea of integration

involves man's taking the way of the blood to the darkness, the source of power, through the woman in desire, then, new-born, looking to the light, which is the end of his 31 Journey, "the oneness of the spirit." In the world of governments, the triumph of power is like the lion of his imagery beeome a beast of prey, as in Caesar and Napoleon. And the triumph of democracy is like the unicorn become a beast of prey; "it too become hideous with egoism, like 32 Russia now." The dualism integrated here would easily appropriate the symbolism of invocation of earth and sky, and other aspects, of the rites of the New Mexico Indian. By October, 1915» Lawrence's colony idea involved 28

D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (Philadelphia, 1925)V P* 13* 29 ■Ibid.. p. 12. 50 Ibid.. p. 13. Ibid.. pp. 2^-26. 32 Ibid.. pp. 32, 33.

22

going to America.

He had been offered a cottage in Florida.^3

In a letter thanking Harriet Monroe for subscriptions to The Signature, he thought he would be in New York in a month, and asked her to tell Amy Lowell.

He felt that the "whole

tree of life" was dying in England, and that in America one could "feel hope."

He proceeded to try to get passports,

asking Lady Asquity to help with Mrs. Lawrence's, since her German origin might prove an obstacle.-^"

The passports

arrived early in November, and Lawrence contemplated the problem of "changing the land of my soul as well as my mere domicile.

It is rather terrible, a form of death.

Suppression of The Rainbow, published on September 30, intervened.

For a time Lawrence went ahead with plans to

leave, "so sick, in body and soul, that if I don't go away I shall di e . " ^

Only loans from friends made it possible

for him to raise enough money for the voyage, which he planned for November 2ij.th.

He was torn between discussing plans for

a fight for the book and his leave-taking, which he finally postponed.

In the same month he expressed a feeling that

characterized many of his later acts and produced a volume of poetry, Birds, Beasts and Flowers: 33

"I don't want to go

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 265. been able to discover the details of this offer. 3^ Ibid.. p. 267. 3^ Ibid., p. 273. 3^ Ibid., p. 27k.

I have not

23 to New York— not yet, not now.

I would like to go to a

land where there are only birds and beasts and no humanity, nor inhumanity-masks."3?

He thought he might be able to do

something with the "very young people,"3® mentioning Aldous Huxley and Dorothy Brett, who later was to go to America with him.

By early December he had declined a suggestion

that a trial of The Rainbow case be forced, saying, "But my spirit will not rise to it. . . . I am not going to pay any more out of my soul, even for the sake of beating them.”39 Apparently no organized opposition to the suppression de­ veloped, though there were individual efforts by Henry James, Arnold Bennett, Oliver Lodge, action by the Authors’ Society, and a question by Phillip Morrell in the House of Commons. A private issue of the book was proposed and arrangements made for its American publication. The Lawrences made plans for sailing late in December, amid fears that he would not be permitted to leave the country. On the eleventh he went to be examined at a recruiting sta­ tion to secure a military exemption but left the line after waiting two hours he "hated it so m u c h . " ^ plan seems to have lapsed.

37 I M d . , P. 282. 38 Ibid., p. 28939 Ibid-» P* 287.

Ibld•> P • 295.

Gradually the

On December 12 he said, "I shall

24 not go to America until a stronger force from there pulls 41 me across the sea. It is not a case of my will." In­ deed, he seems to have reached a state of fatalistic indifference, perhaps protective in natUhe:

"We must all sub­

mit to be helpless and obliterated. . . . There is something will rise out of it. . . . D o not struggle with your will, to dominate your conscious life— do not do it. Only drift, 42 and let go. . . ." He had given up his London flat and sold the furniture, in anticipation of leaving; late in December he and Frieda moved to remote Cornwall, to a cot­ tage offered him by J. D. Beresford.

Here Lawrence was to

remain, with one move to a cottage not far away, until Octo­ ber of 1917, a period of about two years. The plan to go to America was not completely given 2*3 up; he considered Cornwall "the first move to Florida." He thought he might be able to write again, and felt free­ dom, "the world as it was in that flicker of pre-Christian Celtic civilization, when humanity was really young."

The

need of something to replace his English, indeed Western, h.h

heritage, was strong,

' Conversion to Homan Catholicism

was, he thought, "for an Englishman . . . 41

Ibid.

42 Ibid.. pp. 289-290. 43

^

Ibid.. p. 305.

Ibid., p. 307*

a piece of

25 retrogressive sentimentalism."^

There was little money,

and. no prospect of more, but he had ''lost the faculty" of bothering, perhaps in "sheer self-preservation,

I wish we

could go a long voyage, into the South Pacific. . . .

I am

afraid now of America. go there.

I am afraid of the people. I daren't , 46 My will won t carry me either." Lawrence's

interest in the South Pacific may have been stimulated, in February, 1916, by his reading of Moby Dick, which he found “a very odd, interesting book" and which he eventually dis47 cussed in Studies in Glassic American Literature.

When

he did voyage to America, it was via the Pacific, once "a vast basin of soft, lotus-warm civilization," now "a huge 48 man-day swung down into slow, disintegration." His appetite for knowledge of other civilizations was strong now that his despair over contemporary England and Europe had reached nihilistic intensity,

"I curse my

age, and all the people in it. I hate my fellow men most 49 thoroughly," he wrote. While his correspondence with individuals shows a sensitivity to their feelings and a desire for rapprochement, iconoclasm dominated his work. 45

^

4? 48

n

Ibid., p. 308. Ibid., p. 320. Ibid., p. 322. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature.

P* 197. ^9

Ibid., p. 323.

26

I wish one could be a pirate or a highwayman in these days. But ray way of shooting them with noiseless bullets that explode in their souls, these social people of today, perhaps it is more satisfying. But I feel like an outlaw: All my work is a shot at their veryninnermost strength, these banded people of today. Another enterprise began (and eventually failed because of cross-purposes'); in the plans of Lawrence, Philip Heseltine, and Murry to launch into private publishing, the list to include The Rainbow^ Lawrence urged the Murrys to take a house near him, and they came to form in miniature the community of which he had so long dreamed.

But in two

months the arrangement failed, and the Murrys moved to the South of Cornwall, the ostensible reaaon being their dis­ like of their house and the ruggedness of the coast; but Lawrence felt Murry and he were not “really associates" and that he had deceived himself. Again the intimacy had *1 52 "fallen short," and there was a recoil. The quarrel H

with Murry continues through Lawrence’s life, to appear thematically in essay and story during the American ex­ perience. ..

,,

Late in May Lawrence was conscripted, went through the distasteful process of examination, and received an exemption.

Of the experience he said, "It is the annulling

5° I M & - , PP* 328-329. 51 Ibid.. p. 334. 52 Ibid., p. 357.

27 of all one stands for, this militarism, the nipping of the very germ of one's being. . . . The sense of spiritual dis­ aster everywhere was quite terrifying."

He liked the men,

but "their manliness all lies in accepting calmly this death, this loss of their integrity."£3

about the same

5lt time, early in July, he had finished Women in Love. ^

In

it he had worked out in tense, turbulent situations much that had actually taken place during the early days of the war, using many people he had known, though the novel had been begun as The Sisters back in 1913*

Gudrun's love for

Gerald ends in the realization that men such as he, parts of the industrial system, become "instruments, pure machines, pure wills, that work like clock-work, , . In the final chapter Birkin (Lawrence) feels that "either the heart would break, or cease to care.

Whatever

the mystery which has brought forth man and the universe, it is a non-human mystery, it has its own great ends, man is not the c r i t e r i o n . I n the closing note there is a cry characteristic of Lawrence's unsatisfied social need when Birkin says to Ursula of the dead Gerald:

"You are

enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned.

You sire

Ibid., p. 359^

Ibid., p. 361.

55 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Hew York: The Modern Library), p. 532. ^

Ibid., p. 5^5.

28

all women to me.

But I wanted a man friend, as eternal

as you and I are eternal."^7

It might have been Lawrence

speaking to his wife. A source of future conflict lies in Birkin1s denial of Ursula’s belief that he can’t have the two kinds of love, "I don't believe that.” The novel was a major accomplishment, and in a sense a recovery, but Lawrence could not find a publisher.

He

turned now to the idea of escape to America by writing, and lecturing, on American classics which he had been reading.-' On August 23 he wrote a long letter to Amy Lowell about his plans and hopes. Your remoter America must be splendid . . . Often I have longed to go to a country which has new, quite unknown flowers and birds. . . . Have you still got humming birds, as in Crevecoeur? I liked Crevecoeur's ’Letters of ah American Parmer,' so much. And how splendid Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick’ is, and Dana's ’Two Years before the Mast.' But your classic Ameri­ can literature, I find to my surprise, is older than our English. The tree did not become new, which was transplanted. It only ran more swiftly into age, impersonal, non-human almost. But how good these books are.59 In September Miss Lowell, at Mrs. Lawrence's appeal, sent Lawrence sixty pounds.

In his letter of thanks, Lawrence

Ibid., p. ^ 8 . Mrs. Lawrence thinks that ”when Lawrence was prowling in Charing Cross Road, London, where the cheap second-hand books are, he found some Penimore Cooper, and that and the idea of going to Florida set him off." The purchase of books in London must have, taken place in the last months of 1915>, before the move to Cornwall. < q

Damon, Amy Lowell, A Chronicle, pp. 370-371*

29 explained further the point of view he was to take in much of his criticism of American literature.

The Americans

have . . . gone beyond tragedy and emotion, even beyond irony, and have come to the pure mechanical stage of physical apprehension, the human unit almost lost, the primary elemental forces, kinetic, dynamic. . . never softened by life, that hard universe of Matter and Force where life is not yet known, come to pass again. He found this in some of her own work.

And he added that

if he ever came to America he would “write about these

60

things.11

Present now in his thinking was the idea that his support must come primarily from the sale of his work in America.

61

In January, 1917-, he sought passports, hoping 62 it would be legal for him to leave. His plan had de­

veloped into the idea of going to New York to “write a set of essays, or lectures, on Cl&ssiG American literature.“ He already had them in m i n d . ^

But in February indorse64 ment of his passport was refused. Probably there was little consolation in a review of Amores. by Eunice Tietjens in the February number of Poetry, that came to him from 60 Ibid.. pp. 387-388. 61 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 382. 62 Ibid., pp. 395-396. 63 Ibid.. p. 398. Ibid.. p. 401.

30 Harriet Monroe.

f.c J

Seldom has anyone expressed with such vividness the tinge that stifled flesh gives to the universe, the urge that gives to flowers and stars the wine-color of longing, and brings into these, passionate re­ lief details that otherwise were meaningless. . . . Read as a whole, the book has a cumulative effect that set Lawrence definitely in the front rank of English poets. Most of this number of Poetry was givencover to poems from "American-Indian motives” by Prank S. Gordon, Alice Corbin, Mary Austin, and Constance Lindsay Skinner.

While they may

have further interested Lawrence in the West, he found American poetry "ungenuine. . . , blatant. Meanwhile, among other work, Lawrence turned again to

philosophy, "a little pure thought, a little perfect

and detached understanding."^ his major theses.

In this,

he did not alter

As for the new Military Service Act,

which made him liable to re-examination, he felt he would

69

"go to prison rather than be compelled to anything." 7 70 He was re-examined and rejected for army service, though he engaged in work on nearby farms. In August, he turned to the American essays, which •he now titled, The Transcendental Element In American 65

66 ^

1 The Letters of D.. H. Lawrence. p. ^03. Poetry;

A Magazine of Verse, IX (February, 1917) •

Th.e Letters of I). H. Lawrence. loc. clt.

^ Ibid., p. iK)8. 69 Ibid., p. L06. Ibid., p. 4-15.

31 Literature, ,!in the hopes of relieving my ominous financial prospects.”

He wrote to Miss Lowell of his idea:

It sounds very fine and large, but in reality is rather a thrilling blood-and-thunder, your-money-or-your-life kind of thing: Hands up, America !--No, but they are very keen essays in criticism--cut your fingers if you don't handle them carefully.--Are you going to help me to hold up the "Yale Review” or the "New Republic” or some such fat old coach, with this ten-barrelled pistol of essays of mine, held right in the eye of America? Answer me that, Donna Americana. Will you try to suborn for me the conductor of one of these coaches?--Never say nay.--'Tis a chef-d'oeuvre of soul-searching criticism. Shall I inscribe it to you? Say the word 1 To Amy Lowell Who buttered my bread these few fair words For she can butter her own parsnips. Being well-to-do She gave to the thankless Because she thought it was worth it.' Thus he approached the subject in a teasing, farcical mood at the end of a letter which was serious on many other sub­ jects .

Pride made it difficult for him to plead seriously

for help; such a spirit of michievous fun, a recurrent part of his complex nature, made possible an independent approach. There ensued for the Lawrences the bitter experience of being suspected of spying.

(Lawrence has told the story

unforgettably in the Australian novel, Kangaroo.)

There had

been a feeling of strain all through the war because of Mrs. Lawrence's origin, as the Baroness Von Richtofen. 71

Damon, Amy Lowell, A Chronicle, p . 1^22 .

In

32 October, 1917, after several lesser episodes, the Lawrences were ordered to leave Cornwall, to live in an unprohibited 72 area, and to report to the police. The restrictions haunted them for the remainder of the war. In London &e73 tectives bothered them from time to time. For a while Lawrence considered a plan to go with some friends who knew the country "to the east slope of the Andes, back of 74 Paraguay or Colombia," but this, too, never materialized. The last year of the war was spent by the ha'pences in the refuge of cottages in England loaned by friends. There were efforts to get him money from the Literary Fund,

75

and in March Amy Lowell sent $200 with the Imagist anthology 76 receipts . 1 Bits of money came from other friends. Lawrence began a new novel, a "blameless" one which would be "but77 toned up like a Member of Parliament," The Lpgt Girl. 78 There was talk of issuing Women in Love privately. He was also at work on the American essays,^ and in March felt that in them he had written his last page of philoso­ phy.®0

Indicative of the future, he wanted to be "houseless 72 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 421. 7^ Ibid., pp. 428-429. 7 k

Ibid., p. 424. 75

Ibid., p. 431. Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle, p. 443•

77 II

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 4-31. Ibid., p. 427. ■Ibid., p. 433.

80 Ibid., P. 439.

33 and placeless and homeless and landless, just move apart.0 He abhorred “being stueH on to any form of society."

81

Lawrence continued to rely on Amy Lowell for help in coming to America.

In two lectures on "Imagism Past and

Present0 in March at the Brooklyn Institute, she spoke of Lawrence and Look

I

We Have Come Through i which had been re^ly

ceived badly in England. tial incompatibility.

Her comments reveal their essen­

Lawrence is “a poet of sensation, but

of sensation as the bodily efflorescence of a spiritual growth."

He is "an erotic poet," but that is “only one

half of the truth.

For his eroticism leans always to the

mystic something of which it is an evidence."

He is "a man

of genius," despite the fact that "he does not quite get his genius into harness; the cart of his work frequently overturns. . .

Look 1 We Have Gome Through. I is “a greater

novel even than Sons and Lovers" though as poetry it fails "by & too loud insistence upon one thing, by an almost

,.82

neurotic beating, beating, upon the same tortured note."

Lawrence read the lectures (which he received from Hilda Doolittle) and wrote to Miss Lowell: . . . thanks for the nice things you say about me. I don’t mind what people think of my work, so long as their attitude is -passionately Honest— which I believe yours is. As for intellectual honesty, I care nothing for it, for it may rest on the most utterly false a •priori.

81 82

Ibid.. p. *£8 . Damon, Amy Lowell-.-A. Chronicle, pp. 443-^7*

34 He thanked her now, after Frieda, for money sent in March, explaining that "sometimes one's soul is a dumb) rock."

He

wished to inscribe to her a new hook of poems, containing go

both old and new work, just finished;

this -was Hew Poems.

which appeared in October with the inscription.

He still 84 wanted to come to America "when everything quiets down." In her letter accepting the dedication, she counselled more reticence in his work.

"You need not change your attitude

a particle, you can simply use India rubber In certain places, 85 and then you can come into your own as it ought to be." He replied that she was wrong in thinking that the eraser would let him through into a paradise of popularity. Without the India-rubber I am damned along with the evil, with the India-rubber I am damned among the disappointing. Xou see what it is to have a reputation. I give it up, and put my trust in heaven. One needn't trusg^a great deal in anything, and in humanity not at all. Earlier in the year he had felt himself a '^walking phenome­ non of suspended fury" and had found "great satisfaction in reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Homan Empire— the 87 emperors are all so indiscriminately bad." One may be sure he was confirmed in his anti-Ghristian attitude. ----

Ibid., p. 462. 84

Ibid., p. 463.

Q £j Ibid., p. 483. 86 87

Ibid.. pp. 484-485. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 444.

35 As the war neared an end, Lawrence was giving a final going-over -£ to March, 1920, the Lawrences lived on Capri, then settled in a house in Taormina, Sicily.

There they remained, with some excur­

sions, until in the latter part of April, 1922, Lawrence was at last to fulfill his wish to leave Europe.

In Capri

Lawrence had found Compton Mackenzie, Brett Young, and a few others congenial, but he felt it to be "a gossipy, villa-stricken . . . microcosmos that does heaven much credit, but mankind none at all. bit impossible for long.”9

Truly, humanly, it is a

He was cheered by negotiations

with Martin Seeker for re-publication of The Rainbow and issuance of Women in Love, but had "lived so long without money" that he knew he could continue doing so— this in rejecting Seeker's offer of a lump sum. his "books, and in their future."-3-^

He believed in

In Sicily he found

for a time the greater isolation he preferred, and it was "where Europe ends, finally." In these first months away from England he began the series of poems to be known as Birds, Beasts and Flowers which significantly excluded the human from its title.

His

attitude toward contemporary Europeancivilizationapproached nihilism.

In January, 1921, inTaormina

if he knew how, he would join himself 9 Ibid., pp. 50k-505. 10 Ibid., pp. 501-502.

hecommented

that

. . . to the revolutionary socialists. . . . I think the time has come for a real struggle. That’s the only thing I care for: the death struggle. I don’t care for politics. But I know there must and should be a deadly revolution very soon, and I would take part in it if I knew how.11 12 A trip to Sardinia gave rise to Sea and Sardinia,

but he was so disappointed in the island as a place to live that he made another effort to go to America.

An

American farm, available before, was still offered, and Lawrence wrote to his American agent, Robert Mountsier, to investigate the feasibility of taking it at once.

Mountsier’

cabled reply informed him that the cost of repairing it was impossible, but at the same time, apparently urged him to come to buy another

farm.1^

Lawrence had taken his

Sicilian house until April, with the option of continuing the year.

In March he was still undecided whether or not

to take the farm originally offered. I k not materialize.

The venture did

By October Italy had "gone a little

rancid" for him, and Taormina's set was "like a continental Mad Hatter’s tea-party.

If you’ll let it be, it is all tea-

party— and you wonder who on earth is going head over heels into the teapot nex t . " ^ Ibid., pp. 517-518. E. W. Tedlock, Jr., The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts [Albuquerque, 19^8), p. 92. 13 I W d * ^

Tke Letters of D. H. Lawrence» p. 5l8.

^

Ibid-» P* 533-

42 During the post-war Italian sojourn, Lawrence wrote two poems and an essay which were directly concerned with the problem of going to America.X6 One poem, "Turkey-Cock,11 was probably written during one of three visits to the neighborhood of Florence in 1919 and 1921, since Lawrence inscribed it "Fiesole." He had used the turkey as a symbol of the new life as early as 1915*

In a letter he had described the English country­

side in terms of decadence, and then turned to an encounter with “clusters of turkeys that ruffled themselves like flowers suddenly ruffled into blossom. . . , exiles of another life."

In Florida they would "go in droves in the

shadow, like metallic clouds,11 and there would be "a re17 surrection." Now, in post-war Italy, a turkey-cock be­ comes the symbol of America, pondered in an attempt to understand what might be encountered there. gorgeousness evokes “puzzled admiration."

The turkey's Its aborigi-

nallty, like that of an Indian, is like the "seeds of count­ less centuries."

Its wattles are the color of cooling

"steel-slag," and image the.bird's arrogance, the "asser­ tion . . .

of raw contradictoriness,“ or of "something

unfinished," or of "a raw, unsmelted passion."

The bird's

Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers, pp. 141-145. 'Pbe Letters of D, H. Lawrence, p. 286,

lj-3 movement Indicate "a raw American will, that has never been tempered by life.”

The drumming of its wings is

like the sound of the drums of Huichilobos during a Mexi­ can sacrifice.

May a new day be opened by taking "the

trail of the vanished American," before Christianity, with his "more than human, dense insistence of will?" East dead, and Europe dying?

Is the

Do the Aztecs and Amerindi­

ans, "half-godly, half-demon," wait to be called back by the cry of the turkey-cock?

Or must the bird be smelted

again until pure? The turkey-cock as a somewhat ambiguous symbol par­ takes of both contemporary America and pre-European America. The Lawrence who felt he must reject his intellectual and spiritual tradition contemplates the uncertainties of the non-traditional, and even non-human, he was committing himself to seek out.

The power of the bird comes through

with great intensity at times, and It is this that gives the poem its immediate impact.

But the contemplation of

arrogant power is the ambiguous contemplation of a man seeking to escape into life from one form of death, only to find the alternative uncertain, potentially impure, and containing its own threat.

Death of the moribund past must

precede the resurrection* that is the first struggle.

But

the new life is both a recovery of lost ground and a hazardous pioneering of new.

One should note that the

theme of The Plumed Serpent, as well as the themes of minor

kk American pieces, was already well developed, and that one of the paradoxes in Lawrence is the large amount of In­ tellectuality that went into the anti-intellectual philo­ sophy . The poem,

"The Evening Land,"

18

may "be rather

closely dated, between April and July, 1921, at Baden-Baden. In the first person, it is an explicit contemplation of emigration.

Is America "the grave of our day," the "open

tomb" of his race?

He wishes it would cajole him, for he

confesses he is afraid of it.

He fears its "more-than-

European idealism," "exggerate love," loss of "pristine, isolate integrity," and inability to rise "from this grave of mingling.11 But worse yet is the "Machine Ameri­ can, " the "automaton" of the "uprisen self."

Nevertheless,

a "New England uncanniness, " a "western brutal faery quality," half-cajolec’ him.

He fears the loss of the

"human" contact, but the mere word "human" should not de­ ter him.

After wondering if he is in love with his own im­

aginings (one must remember how formulated his idea was), he concludes with a series of statements of hope for a “new throb," a nascent American. Ideal love and the impersonality of the machine age, both quite different from "intense, individual contact," are Lawrence’s two great fears.

But he is fascinated by

_

Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers. pp. 28-32.

other aspects, the uncanniness, the ''"brutal faery quality," which may also be antipathetic to the human contact he fears to lose.

The conflicts sketched here will appear

in many forms during the American experience. The essay,

"America, Listen to Your Own,"

19

which

appeared in The Hew Republic December 15, 1920, evidently was written earlier that year.

It originates in Lawrence's

objection to the "sniffy amusement" of an Italian newspaper at the awkward behavior and abject admiration of Old World monuments by visiting American Knights of Columbus.

To

Lawrence European cultural superiority is actually "the stagnation of the ebb."

The attitude of superiority makes

understandable "the barbarian rage against the great monu­ ments of civilization."

Now "the Americans can merely

leave us to our monuments" instead of destroying them. Lawrence's idea of the chance America has to escape the de­ cadence of Europe, hinted at in the poems, is made expli­ citly clear.

r

Americans must take up life where the Red Indian, the Aztec, the Maya, the Incas left it off. . . . They must catch the pulse of the life which Cortes and Columbus murdered. . ., . A great and lovely llfeform, unperfected, fell with Montezuma. The respon­ sibility for the producing and the perfecting of this life-form devolves upon the new American . . . . It means a departure from the old European morality, ethic. It means even a departure from the old range of emotions and sensibilities. 19

Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence.

pp. 87-91. 20 ifria... pp. 90-91.

k6 An important statement of Lawrence's philosophy, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, was published in May, 1921.

Its continuation, Fantasia of the Unconscious,

completed by October 8, 1921, is important to an under­ standing of the American experience, supplementing the poems and the essay. The foreword shows that Lawrence was aware of and disdainful., of objections to his eclectic disregard of scholarly methods and rational, scientific exactness. I warn the generality of readers, that this pre­ sent book will seem to them only a rather more revolt­ ing mass of wordy nonsense than the last. I would warn the generality of critics to throw it in the waste paper basket without more ado. As for the limited few, in whom one must perforce find an answerer, I may as well say straight off that I stick to the solar plexus. That statement alone, I hope, will thin their numbers considerably. Finally, to the remnants of a remainder, in order to apologize for the sudden lurch into cosmology, or cosmogony, in this boolj:, I wish to say that the whole thing hangs inevitably together. I am not a scientist. I am an amateur of amateurs. As one of my critics said, you either believe or you don't.^1 The foreword contains‘.also an interesting state­ ment of what he felt was the relationship between hie philosophic essays and his fiction and poetry. This pseudo-philosophy of mine— “pollyanalytics," as one of my respected critics might say— is de­ duced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and poems come unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need which one has for 21

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (New kork, 1930), PP* vii-viii.

47 some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's ex­ periences as a writer and as a m a n . 22 It seemed to him that art is "dependent on philosophy," on a metaphysic, even if unconscious and nowhere "very accurately stated," since "men live and see according to 23 aome gradually developing and gradually withering vision. " In the "Epilogue" there was a humorous, playful salute to the United States which shows Lawrence's need of a good reception and his refusal, perhaps inability, to remain solemn or to be tractable.

After describing

the fantastic announcements of Professor Pickering of Harvard about life on the moon, he concluded: Now I'm sure Professor Pickering's photographs and observations are really wonderful. But his explanationsi Come now, Columbia, where is your Hlgh-falutin' Nonsense trumpet? Vast fields of foliage which spring up at dawn ( i i i) and come' into blossom just as quickly ( i i J) are rather too flowery even for my flowery soul. But there, truth is stranger than fiction. I'll bet my moon against the Professor's, anyhow. So long, Columbia. A rlverdici. Most significant for the American future was his statement of belief in a "golden age" which, in decaying, left traces through which it might be apprehended.

Tak­

ing Belt's suggestion that during the Glacial Period "the 22 Ibid., p. xiv. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 29?.

14-8 sea-beds of today must have been comparatively dry," he /

theorized that . . . in that world men lived and taught and knew, and were in one complete correspondence over all the earth. Men wandered back and forth from Atlantis to the Poly­ nesian Continent as men now sail from Europe to America. The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science was universal over the earth as it is today.25 By "science1* he meant "the science which proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of living experience and sure intuition." science."

He was willing to call it "subjective

Modern, "objective" science concerned itself

"only with phenomena as regarded in their cause-and-effect relationship."

After destruction of this theoretical civi­

lization by a world flood, the refugees fled to the high places of our time. . . . Some degenerated naturally into cave men, neo­ lithic and paleolithic creatures, and some retained their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfection, as the South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some, like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese, refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its half-forgotten, symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge: remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story.26 The theory of the blood-consciousness had bereft Lawrence of a tradition, except as he might use that of the Christian era in satirical reverse.

Mysticism, including theosophy,

apparently could not fill this void.

^ ^

•» P • x . Ibid., pp. x-xi.

The reading of Frazer

k9 "bore fruit.

Lawrence sought evidences of a tradition for

his belief, and the voyage around the world soon to follow found a part of its itinerary In the passage from the Fan­ tasia. A cue came on November 5, 1921, when Lawrence noted In his diary:

"Had a letter from Mabel Dodge Sterne asking 27 us to go to New Mexico— to Taos. Want to go.11 This un­ usual American woman, after years spent among the literati of the eastern United States and Europe as a wealthy hostess and dilettante, had in middle age, after three marriages, fhe latest to Maurice Sterne, the painter, discovered-Taos and an interest in the Indians as the source of a new life, and was living with Antonio Luhan, a pueblo Indian.

As she

had done in Europe, she was engaged in making her home^a literary and artistic center.

A reading of Lawrence*s Sea

and Sardinia had moved her to write to him.

It was,"one of

the most actual of travel books. . . , for In it, in that queer way of his, he' glves the feel arid touch and smell of places so that their reality and their essence are open to 28 one. . . .’• She felt "capacities in him that would enable •

. - •

him to understand the invisible but powerful spirit that 29 : . hovered over the Taos valley. Later, when he arrived, Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts, p. 93* 28 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York, 1932), P • ^ • 29 Ibid., p. 12.

she putshim to work at once experiencing and writing ahout the Indians.

Now, in 1921, she sent him,a long, rather

fantastic letter, full of details she thought would attract him, emphasizing the country's isolated, unspoiled nature. Lawrence replied the same day, saying they would like to come.

He enquired ahout the cost of living, men­

tioning that they lived frugally and did their own work, and asked if there was "a colony of rather dreadful sub-arty people,;” if the Indians were dying out so that it was sad, what the "sound, prosperous Americans" did in that region, and what the nearest port was.

He believed " . . .

what you

say— one must somehow bring together the two ends of human­ ity, our own thin end, and the last dark strand from the previous, pre-white era." 30 to take the next step."

He wanted "to leave Europe. . . ,

Lawrence wrote to friends to enquire about Taos, and to his American agent to enquire about ships.

31

Late in

November, he was planning to come to Taos in January, having "

a very great desire to land on the Pacific coast."-^

The

plan persisted into late December, Lawrence feeling that he had enough money, though he was poor, to come and to pay 33 ' the usual rent. But in January', 1922, he shrank "as yet 30 ifria-, P- 6. ^ Ihe Letters of D . H. Lawrence, p. 536. 32 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos.' p. 33 Ibid., p. 13.

51 from the States," though he felt he would ultimately go there.

His American friends, Earl and Achsah Brewster,

were in Kandy, Ceylon, where Brewster was studying Buddhism' in a monastery, and Lawrence wished to join them.

". . . 1

want to go east before I go west; go west via the east." (This paradox of direction he used in the New Mexico poem, "The Red Wolf.")

It is noteworthy that the eastern route

made it possible for him to see at first hand many links with the pre-Flood past.

His stated reason was an inner

one. I think one must for the moment withdraw from the world, away towards the inner realities that are real: and return, maybe, to the world later, when one is quiet and sure. . . . I don't believe in Buddhistic inaction and meditation. But I believe the Bur” * J ' ' ^ from— not our A few days later Mrs. Lawrence wrote to Mrs. Sterne that Lawrence didn't "feel strong enough" to come just then. "Strengthened with Buddha, noisy, rampageous America might 35 be easier to tackle." Mrs. Sterne felt that someone had warned them about her.

She had been involved in a good

many quarrels and scenes, and she had confided to Lawrence something about her ventures in psychoanalysis.

Lawrence

wrote to her that he wanted first “to get quite calm and sure and ‘istill and strong.

3k 35

^

I feel America is so unreligious:

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 15.

pp. 53?-5kO

52 it's a "bad word: and that it is on the brink of a change, but the change isn't quite ready yet, so I daren't come. And I feel you yourself are harried out there.

There was

a proposal that she Join them in Ceylon, and that they con­ tinue together to Taos. On February 26, 1922, the Lawrences sailed for Ceylon. He had at last left the Europe which had come to mean to him the unbearable tensions of the War.

On shipboard he thought

that "once beyond the Red Sea one does not feel any more that tension and pressure one suffers from in England— in Europe altogether— even in America, I believe— perhaps worse 37 there." But in Ceylon neither the people nor Buddhism attracted him.

A celebration for the Prince of Wales was

'gorgeous," but it made him realize "how very barbaric the 38 substratum of Buddhism is. " He felt that "all dark people have a fixed desire to Jeer at us" and that Buddhism was "a vulgar temple of serenity built over an empty hole in space, His feelings fluctuated, as though the old, established pat­ tern of recoil could not be broken.

Most of the people on

the ship that brought him to Ceylon.had been Australians, and he had an impression of the country as “full of life and 36 Ibid,. pp. 16-17. 37 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 5^6-5^7. 38 Ibid.. p. 5^8. 39 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 19.

39

53

4o

energy.“

He thought of going there, then in a revulsion

of feeling wrote to an English friend that he had made "a mistake in forsaking England and moving out Into the peri­ phery of life."

Italy, Ceylon, Africa, America represented

a “running away." duals revived.

His hope for a hand of devoted indivi­

“I really think that the most living clue

of life is in us Englishmen in England, and the great mis­ take we make is in not uniting together.

..."

Conse-

quently he planned to return to England that summer.

41

However, at the end of April, after ahout a month and a half of the contrast of the philosophy and "too hot and enervating" if "lovely to look at" East, Lawrence sailed for Australia.

actuality of the After approximately a

fortnight at Darlington, West Australia, he moved to Sydney and took a house ahout forty.miles south of the city, "Wyewurk," Thlrroul, N. S. W. Australia, where he remained until August.

What he now encountered was the antithesis

of Ceylon with its ancient, Oriental past, its “glimpse in43 to the world before the Flood." His first reaction was in the terms of the remark to Amy Lowell that American literature was older, impersonal, 5o The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 546. ^ Ibid.. pp. 548-549. 42 Ibid., p. 550. 43 Ibid.. p. 551.

54 non-human.

“G-od," he wrote, “how I hate new countries.

They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like 44 senility than anything." The egotistic bullying that he detected in democracy, English as well as Australian, galled him. If every American is a King or Queen, I'm sure every Australian is a little Pope all on his own, G-od's Vicar. 'There is nothing better^-than me on earth, * he seems silently to proclaim, not with tongues of angels or tones of silver, either: and not always silently. I've got a bitter burning nostalgia for Europe, for Sicily, for old civilization and for real human understanding— not for this popery of sacfed {convenience'— everything is 'so convenient,' they keep telling you. * But another aspect of a new country exerted a fascination, as it would later in the United States. . . . there seems to be no inside life of any sort: just a long lapse and drift. A rather fascinating indifference, a physical indifference to what we call soul or spirit. . . . Often I hate it like poison, then again it fascinates me, and the spell of its indifference gets me. I can't quite explain It; as if one resolved back almost to the plant kingdom, before souls, spirits and minds were grown at all. . . .40 The same feeling was to appear in the American work. He began almost at once the novel, Kangaroo, which marks, among his major works, the transition from Europe. One chapter, XII, “The Nightmare," 44 45 46

Ibid.. p. 554. Ibid., pp. 553-554. Ibid., p. 555.

$.ves in retrospect the

crisis of life in England during the war.

Here Lawrence

worked out as an imaginative unit stemming from a sense of fear in Somers, his chief character, the reasons for his sense of exile and isolation.

During the war, he wrote,

“a man must identify himself with the criminal mob, sink his sense of truth, of Justice, and of human honour, and bay like some horrible unclean hound. . . . " to do this. tures."

He refused

He had "detested the German military crea­

"But then the industrialism and commercialism of

of England, with which patriotism and democracy became iden­ tified: did not these insult a man and hit him pleasantly across the mouth?

How much humiliation Richard had suffered,

trying to earn his living I" created in detail.

The entire experience is re­

There are the first medical examination

and rejection in the conscription with a sense of degrada­ tion of the individual, Lbndon and the Zeppelin raids, savagely ironic since Harriet (Mrs. Lawrence) might have relatives aboard the airships, and the political bullying of Bottomley and John Bull.

There follow the retirement to

Cornwall in 1915 where the Somers are suspected of being spies, the ensuing searches and indignities, a plan to go to America, which step would be "the death of his own country in him," and the feeling that it was "the end of the old England" when Asquith's government fell and Lloyd George came in.

After re-examination and classification "for

light, non-military duties," there is the engrossment in

farm work and attraction to the mysticism of the Cornish Celts.

The climax is a secret search of the house and the

order to leave Cornwall, followed by harassment by the police in London, and growing hatred of those suspecting them, to counteract a feeling of terror, of being "a crimi­ nal marked out by society . . . for annihilation."

There

is a discovery of "the greatest secret of behaviour: to stand alone, and judge oneself from the deeps of one's own soul. , . and never to fear the outside world," and of a new sense of sweetness and humanness there "in the heart of England— Shakespeare’s England."

After a move to his

own boyhood countryside, Somers feels “the alien spirit of coal and iron" controlling people’s lives.

A third

physical examination follows, with greater humiliation and a decision not to submit to it again, and never again to "be at the disposal of society."

As the chapter ends,

Somers tries to understand why "the dread, almost the horror, of democratic society, the mob," should erupt from his sub­ conscious here in Australia. fellow-men.

"He felt broken off from his

He felt broken off from the England he had

belonged to. . . . So be it. he would remain."

He was broken apart, apart

The chapter concludes: "The judgments of

society were not valid to him.

The accepted goodness of

^ D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (New York; 1923), pp. 24-8-302 passim.

society was no longer goodness to M m .

In his soul he was 48 cut off, and from his isolated soul he would judge.1’ Richard Somers is patently Lawrence working out for himself, in the isolation of Australia where his identity was little known, the intellectual and emotional problems inherited from the war.

In Taormina, he had said that if

he knex* how he would join "the revolutionary socialists" 49 for a "death struggle." Later he had commented that he had heard the revolution would only "resolve itself into the continued faction fights between socialists and facisti. In Kangaroo Richard Somers becomes involved in a rather similar fight.

He is invited to join and work for the

political triumph of both a socialist organization and a secret band of Australian war veterans headed by Benjamin Cooley, nicknamed "Kangaroo," who plans to establish a benevolent dictatorship. As for the socialists' offer, . . . he did love the working people. . . and did also believe, in a way, that they were capable of building up this great Church of Christ, the great beauty of a People, upon the generous passion of mate-love. All this theoretical socialism started by Jews like Marx and appealing ohlyrto'.the will-topower in the masses, making money the whole crux. . . — all politics, in fact— have conspired to make money the only god. . . . A new great inspiration of belief rbta-, P* 304. 49

50

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 51?* Ibid., p. 518.

58 in the love of mates might he achieved, hut it would he too great a “strain on the hearts of man. . . .

Men would go m a d . " ^

As for “Kangaroo’s" dictatorship, it, too, is hased on a concept of love that violates integrity, . . . working everything from the spirit, from the head. Xou worlj: the lower self as an instrument of the spirit. Mow it.is time for the spirit to leave us again; it is time for the Son of Man to depart, and leave us in dark, in front of the unspoken God; who is just-beyond the dark threshold of the lower self. . . When "Kangaroo" attempts to win him hy an appeal to love between the two men, Somers finds “Kangaroo’s love only a great general emotion" turned on him "like a tap.8^

When

he refuses to return this emotion, "Kangaroo’s" love turns to a righteous hatred that arouses horror and fear in Somers.

At this point occurs "The Nightmare11 chapter analyz­

ing the war-time fears, surging to the surface after the quarrel with "Kangaroo." The political struggle.between the Socialists and "Kangaroo’s" veterans ends in violence and killing, which is, for Lawrence, the revenge of "the spontaneous soul," which . . . must extricate itself from the meshes of the . almost automatic white octopus of the human ideal, the Lawrence, Kangaroo. pp. 23^235. 52 Iftld., p. 155.

^

p» 2^3.

59 octopus of humanity. It must struggle clear, knowing what it is doing: not to waste itself In revenge. The revenge is inevitable enough, for each denial of the spontaneous dark soul creates the reflex of its own revenge. But the greatest revenge on the lie is to get clear of the lie.54 Here Lawrence must have been struggling with the nihilistic hatred and desire for revenge in himself which had resulted from the war. i

k

In his struggle with himself Somers turns, as Lawrence did, away from humanity to Nature.

One passage in a scene

on the beach (suggestive of Whitman's "Out of the Oradle Endlessly Rocking!1) expresses the conflict between human warmth (the social) and the only partially compensatory merging with Nature. Richard rocking with the radium-urgent passion of the night: the huge, desirous swing, the call clamour, the low hiss of retreat.- The call, call J And the answerer. Where was hisvahswerer? There was no living answerer. No dark-bodied, .warm-bodied answerer. He knew that, xdien he had spoken a word to the nighthalf-hidden ponies with their fluffy legs. No animate answer this time. The radium-rocking, wave-knocking night his call and his answer both. This God without feet or knees or face. This sluicing, knocking, urging night, heaving like a woman with unspeakable desire, but no woman, no thighs or breast, no body. The moon, the concave mother-of-pearl of night, the great radiumswinging, and his little self. The call and the an­ swerer, without intermediary. Non-human gods, non­ human human beings.55 This communion with non-human gods, sometimes the gods of death, through Nature was to manifest itself more and more

&

Ibid.. pp. 312-313. Ibid.. pp.

kQO-k lQ.

60 in his work, and particularly in that to follow now, in the United States and Mexico.

Beside it, man was indeed

'•little," hut when human affairs went wrong, he could re­ sort to it.

The prophet of such gods had set for himself

a task of communication and reconciliation with the human world that would trouble him as long as he lived.

A merg­

ing in death, and the act of drawing into death those aspects of the human world that he despised, would tempt him more than once, in an ancient, non-human America, and contem­ porary America and Europe,

PART XI FIRST VISIT TO NEW MEXICO, 1922-1923 CHAPTER I THE LIFE Both Frieda and Lawrence had come to lore Australia, but "the restless ’questing beast” 1 in Lawrence sent him on to America.'*'

The long voyage was broken by a stop at

Tahiti, linked in his mind with the study of Melville and with his concept of a pre-historic golden age.

He thought

the island beautiful, but Papeete "a poor, dull, modernish place."2 Arrival in San Francisco was on Monday, September 1922.

k,

Next day, in a letter, he spoke of "such nice letters

and telegrams from Mabel Dodge" and his American agent.

In­

deed, Mrs. S't.erne had written that she considered the Lawrences her guests from San Francisco, and had sent them railway tickets,^ Lawrence's income was still uncertain, and his rapid The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited by 4'ld°us Huxley (New York, 19327, P* 557* 2 Catherine Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage (New York, 1932), p. 169. 3 Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . . . " (Santa Fe, 193^), P. 1^9.

62 movement at this time made it difficult for him to know exactly the condition of his hank accounts and to keep much cash on hand.

This uncertainty had been communicated

in his letters to Mrs. Sterne.

From San Francisco he sent

his mother-in-law thirty dollars by check, with the promise to send more, and asked if Mrs. Lawrence's sister, Else, needed any, adding:

"I don't know how much I've got, but

our life in Taos will cost little— rent free and wood free."

if

At the moment he had less than twenty dollars cash, and re­ mained in San Francisco several days awaiting the wiring of money by his agent in Mew York.-^ Lawrence's arrival in America was marked by recur­ rence of another old problem. Amy Lowell:

On September 8 , he wrote to

"Well here I am under the Star-spangled Banner—

though perhaps the Stripes of persecution are more appro­ priate."

After mentioning his plans to leave that night

for Santa Fe, he asked her to write to Taos "unless of course the new prosecution of Women in Love makes you feel £ that least said soonest mended." The "persecution" he referred to had begun in July with a raid on the offices of his publisher, Thomas Seltzer, by John S. Sumner of the Mew k

5 Mabel Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York, 1932), p. 28. 6 p. 621.

S. F. Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle (Boston, 1935),

Yor]£ Society for the Suppression of Vice. titles had been seized:

Copies of three

Lawrence's Women in Love, issued

in 1920 in a limited edition; A Young Girl's Diary. “an anonymous book by anyoung Australian girl with foreword by Sigmund Freud"; and Casanova1s Homecoming by Arthur 7 Schnitzler. At the hearing on July 31, Seltzer had vigorously defended all three books, producing such wit­ nesses as Miles M. Dawson, Garl Van Doren, Gilbert Seldes, Mrs. Dorothea Brande, Dr. Adolph Stern, and Dr. Gregory Stragnell.

8

How much of these events Lawrence knew before his arrival on September

k

is not certain.

It is likely- that

among letters awaiting him, and arriving in the first few days, was further news of the case.

On September 12, near

the time of his arrival in Taos, the court rendered a de­ cision in favor of the publisher and all three books. Women in Love Magistrate George W. Simpson said:

Of

"The

author attempts to discover the motivating power of life. 9 He writes of the elemental passions of men and women." Of all three he said: . . . I do not find anything in these books which may be considered obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, in­ decent or disgusting. On the contrary, I find that each of them is a distinct contribution to the

7 Publisher1s Weekly. (July 15, 1922), p. 118.

8

Ibid., (August 5, 1922), pp. 463-^6^.

9 Ibid.. (September 16, 1922), p. 802.

*4 literature of the present day. Each of the books deals with one or another of the phases of present thought. They are not written in a manner that would incite impure imaginations and lustful desire in the reader of ordinary intelligence. Pornographic tides should be stemmed, but dis­ tinction must be drawn between that which is merely obscene and that which the higher Courts' tests allow and sanction. It has been said, with some justice, that the policy of pouncing upon books too frank for contemporary taste, without regard to the motive or purpose for which they were written, or the use to which they are to be put, is objectionable and should be curbed.10 The verdict may have afforded Lawrence some consola­ tion later, but one must realize the bitterness to him of such a prosecution during the approach to America.

It must

have re-irritated the wound of The Rainbow suppression, and it assuredly reminded him of Amy Lowell's strictures and her resistance to his early attempt to come to America.

The

things he disliked in the contemporary world must have seemed to Lawrence as inescapable in America as in Europe. Amy Lowell did reply with a "hearty welcome," and said of Women in Love: Are you really such a silly fellow as to suppose that the suppression . . . can make a difference to me? I think 'Women in Love' one of your very finest books, and this suppression business makes me sick. Everybody knows that I am one of your chief champions in this country. . . . 1 1 But the latter assertion is not altogether borne out by the record.

^ 11

Ibid., p . 80ij.. Damon, Amy Lowell, A Chronicle, pp. 621-622.

65 The Lawrences were met at Lamy, New Mexico, by Mrs. Sterne and Tony Luhan, who had come down from Taos by motor car.

12

(The car is worth mentioning because it be­

came f.br Lawrence a rather omnipresent symbol of modernsociety.) Because of motor trouble, the party arrived in Santa Fe too late to obtain rooms at a hotel, and Mrs. Sterne took the Lawrences to the home of Witter Bynner, where Lawrence also met Willard (Spud) Johnson and Alice Corbin . Next day they proceeded to Taos.

^

ILl

That same week, after a few days of settling down, Mrs. Sterne set in motion her plan to have Lawrence write of. the Indians. 11. . . 1 wanted Lawrence to get into the Indian thing soon.** she has said.^

He was sent off on

a five-day trip with Tony Luhan and Bessie Freeman, a friend of Mrs. Sterne's from her Buffalo, New York, days, to an 12

Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, 'p., 36. Evidently the date was-Sunday, September 10, for the Lawrences, after the de­ lay occasioned by short funds, had left San Francisco on Friday, the eighth.(Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle, p. 621.) On September 19, a Tuesday, Lawrence wrote that they had arrived "last week," (The Letters of D* H. Lawrence. p. 556), which makes Sunday, the tenth, the earliest date in that week. Saturday the ninth is a possibility for the arrival in Lamy if h e m s speaking of arrival in Taos. ^ 3

lA

Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle. p. 623. Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos. p. 39 • Ibid., p. £i7.

66 Apache fiesta.

Evidently "Indians and an Englishman, 11 an

accoufit of the trip, was written shortly after his return. But Lawrence had anticipated that America, too, would not betfree of the Ills he found in Europe.

"The land" he

liked "exceedingly."

Mrs. Lawrence and he rode horseback 16 a good deal and found it “great fun." But the people

were something else.

To an old friend in England he wrote

recommending "a gentle faith in life itself" as "far better than these women in breeches and riding boots and sombreros, and money and motor-cars and wild west." Only the desert has a fascination— to ride alone— in the sun in the for ever unpossessed country— away from man. That is a great temptation, because one rather hates mankind nowadays. ' A visitor to Taos in October, Maurice Lesemann, reported that Lawrence found " . . . an appalling thing.

...

our machine life . . .

It would take the most Intense

individualism to escape the deep seated American impulse toward uniformity.

All that a sensitive person could do now

was to live totally to himself."

Lawrence was amazed at

the American way of treating "everyone with the utmost familiarity on first acquaintance," the presumption of "an exact community of interest."

He knew that the intention

was"kindly and generous" but had "the feeling of being perpetually Insulted."

16 17

He sensed a terrible latent power

Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle. p. 622. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 562.

67 in Americans.

He spoke also to Lesemann of his idea for a

colony, a farm or ranch for a group of young people who would not attempt to make it pay, as the Brook Farmers did, but would support themselves by writing, painting, and other activities There were signs of coming trouble in Lawrence's com­ ments on women.

To Harriet Monroe he wrote that Taos moun­

tain was "like an unwilling woman." unwilling that Cassandra.

Thais was "far more

The one woman who never gives

herself is your free woman, who is always .giving herself. America affects me like that."

He extended the comparison

to Alice Corbin, who was staying with Mrs. Sterne late in September: I like her very much. But her mouth talks of freedom and her eyes ask only to have freedom taken avmy: such freedom. The Land of the Free. Thank God I am not free, any more than a rooted tree is free.19 The theme of the woman whose freedom brings her to unhappiness and a destructive relationship with men was not new to Lawrence, appearing as it had in Women in Love and other earlier works.

In Kangaroo he had recorded the strug­

gle in her own marriage, humorously and realistically: She was to submit to the mystic man and male in him, with reverence, and even a little awe, like a woman before the altar of the great Hermes. She might remember that he was only human, that he had to change his socks if he got his feet wet, and that he would make a fool of himself nine times out of l R

Maurice Lesemann, "D. H. Lawrence in New Mexico," The Bookman, LIX (March, 192i|.), p. 30. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 559-

ten. But— and the but was emphatic as a thunder­ bolt— there was in him also the mystery and lord­ ship of— of Hermes, if you like— but the mystery and the lordship of the forward-seeking male.20 This though "he was not really lord of his own bread and butter" and "not even master of himself, with his ungovern­ able furies and his uncritical intimacies with people.

. . .

This theme was to appear in the American work. Submission to a higher power extended to himself, who must "truly submit" to "the dark god he had sensed." Life involved such a religious sense, and very early in the Taos visit the crux of his criticism of America was that the sense was not to be found.

The "individual, egoistic

will" was superimposed "over the real genuine sacred life." . . . And that's why I think Ameriea is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real cour­ age of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. • They can't trust life until they can control it. So much for them— cowards 1 You can have the Land of the Free--ae much as I -knowogf it. In the spring I want to come back to Europe. At the same time he spoke of Mrs. Sterne as "very nice to us— though I hate living on somebody else's property and accepting their kindnesses."

In connection with Mrs.

Sterne's desire that he write about Mew Mexico, he broached a difficulty that confronted' him as an artist: 20 p. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (New York, 1923), p. 202.

21 22

Ibid., p. 203 Frieda L awrence,

"Not I. But the Wind, pp. 171-172.

69 . . . There seems to be no feeling at all— no genuine bowels of compassion and sympathy: all this gripped, iron, benevolent will, which in the end is diabolic. How can one write about it, save analytically. For creation, as opposed to analysis, the artist must have feeling.

When Lawrence did begin to write stories of America,

the theme of the perverse results of living from will entered strongly.

Even in himself the moments of spontaneous crea­

tivity seem to have come with some difficulty.

And to reach

t-hem he passed through many relatively unproductive months. The arrangement of living so near Mrs. Sterne in the house she had carefully planned, lasted only until Novem­ ber 30.

She was partly successful in drawing him into the

battle she, with other intellectuals, was waging against the federal governments treatment of the Indians, and particularly the threat to the Indians1 land raised by the Bursum Bill.

But, as we have seen, the war years in Europe

had made Lawrence both weary and wary of such embroilments. This, however, was not the major source of the trouble that developed. For a time Lawrence entered into a plan to write about Mrs. Sterne’s own life, her "discovery" of the Indian country and her feeling of entrance into a new life superior to that in the East and in Europe.

Notes and a small fragment of a

chapter of this projected American novel survive. 23

Ibid., P. 171.

Later

70 Mrs. Sterne wrote the story herself in Intimate Memories along lines recognizable in the Lawrence, fragments.

But as

they worked together on the story, a struggle developed be­ tween Mrs. Lawrence and Mrs. Sterne.

There is no evidence

of sexual unfaithfulness by Lawrence; indeed, he was never the promiscuous person those with superficial knowledge have supposed, but was personally fastidious, somewhat Puritani­ cally so.

Orldinarily the relationship with his wife moved

dynamically between quarrel and rapport, maintaining remark­ able stability between the two poles of feeling.

When this

relationship was challenged by Mrs. Sterne, Mrs, Lawrence fought, rather savagely and probably with more subtlety than she has been credited with, to pull Lawrence back into her orbit.

She always opposed his enthusiasms and projects

xfhen they threatened her centrality, and often Lawrence was adamant; but in this crisis there was no question of his loyalty.

On November 30 the Lawrences left Taos for a cabin

(belonging to Mrs. Sterne) high up on Mt. Lobo.

Such a move

was Spartan as winter came on; but the Lawrences had lived under such relatively primitive conditions before. Involved in the quarrel was the Lawrence,y. friendship with Knud Merrlld and Kai Gotzsche, two Danish artists who had drifted into Taos that fall on their way to California. Both men seem to have been non-sophisticates, sincere, not easily won, and loyal.

Merrild seems to have been the harder-

headed, more rational and questioning, Gotzsche the more

71 enthusiastic.

In Taos they had met the Lawrences more or

less by accident, and had been liked and encouraged to be­ come friends even when it was obvious that Mrs. Sterne dis­ approved of them.

Indeed Lawrence had defied her disapproval,

once mischievously giving Merrild a rather fantastic scarf she had knitted for him, which Merrild wore for her to see. It was they who drove the Lawrences to the Lobo ranch in their Model-T Ford on Uovember 30.

The Lawrences asked them

to stay, Lawrence suggesting that they work on designs for his books. Relations with Mrs. Sterne were not broken, though the enmity persisted.

In Merrild’s opinion Mrs. Sterne’s

next move was to oust the Danes, for she told the Lawrences by messenger the next day that they could have only one cabin, the other being needed by her son on hunting expedi­ tions.

Lawrence was furious, and that afternoon found and

rented two cabins from William Hawk at Del Monte Ranch nearby.^

After much labor, these were made habitable, and

in them the little party spent the winter, making occasional excursions and receiving some visitors, many of whom Lawrence avoided by going off into the woods. In December Lawrence thought of returning to Europe ^ Knud Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters (Hew York. 1939), PP. 36-28. Ibid., pp. 6I4.-6 6 .

72 when spring came, perhaps to try Russia. it appeals to me.

“After America,

No money there (they say).M

January, 1923, he was thinking of Mexico.

But in

By the middle

of March, when the group at the ranch parted, he had evolved a plan for the birth, in Mexico, of his long-dreamed of colony.

As Merrild puts it,

The one thing that Lawrence never got tired of speak­ ing of was the "new life" that he wanted to start or create. But that could not be accomplished in this dreaded civilized America and less in suicidal Europe, ... It was an old idea of his, but he had not yet found a suitable place for it, although he had circled half the globe in its pursuit. Now he thought the possibility might be in bid Mexico. And he was de­ termined to go down there in search for a place, and when he had found it we were to Join him and Frieda there.27 T

The Lawrences proceeded to Mexico City in late March, 1923*

28

accompanied from Santa Fe by Witter Bynner and Spud Johnson. Merrild and G-otzsche lingered awhile in Taos before driving to California.

Lawrence corresponded steadily with them

during the following months, his plan not forgotten. 26 ^

28

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. pp. 566-567. Merrild; A Poet and Two Painters, p. 251* Ibid., p. 264.

CHAPTER II THE PROSE The first New Mexico visit was not a particularly productive period for Lawrence, the artist. in Mrs. Sterne's house at Taos until November

From the stay 30

came the

essays "Indians and an Englishman" (from the Apache trip) and "Taos," both collected in Phoenix: the Posthumous Pacers, and probably an article against the Bursum Bill, the un­ collected "Gertain Americans and an Englishman."

Sometfhat

later, probably from the stay at the ranch from November 30 to the middle of March are the essays "Surgery for the Novel— or a Bomb" and a review of Stuart P. Sherman's Americana, both collected in Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers.

From the

Taos stay there are the slight fragments of the abortive American novel. The opening paragraphs of "Indians and an Englishman" are in the humorously realistic vein (rather overlooked by his critics) Lawrence often used in such short pieces.

He

had been maneuvered into the Indian thing early, and he must have been well aware that an American audience might think a consistently serious tone presumptuous.

He was

not naive after his war-time reception in England.

Then,

too, the Taos milieu threatened the detachment and inner poise that was so necessary to him, and so easily broken;

Ik this is implicit in the opening of the essay.

Beyond this

he was adept at satire and inclined to speak his mind. The Southwest is . . . rather like comic opera. . . . all the wildness and woolliness and westernity and motor-cars and art and sage and savage are so mixed up, so incongruous, that it is a farce, and everybody knows it. But they refuse to play it as farce. As for purpose, "the Indians and Mexicans don't even seem very keen on dollars."

As for sympathy, the wild-west is

"bad-on-purpose"; "commerce is a little self-conscious about its own pioneering importance"; the highbrow is bent on "saving the lost soul"; the Mexican "is bent on being Mexican and not gringo; and the Indian is all the things that the others aren't."^

Prom the comic-opera, farce

imagery, he turned to that of the circus. In such a masquerade of earnestness, a bewildered straggler out of the far-flung British empire, my­ self I Don't let me for a moment pretend to know anything. I know less than nothing. I simply gasp like a bumpkin in a circus ring, with the horselady leaping over my head. Despite this, it is insisted that one "take sides."2 There are seven paragraphs of this satirical stock­ taking.

It is almost as if the artist is shaking himself

loose from the turmoil and pressure of his immediate situa­ tion.

In the eighth paragraph Lawrence turns to a serious

Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Edward D. McDonald (New York, 193S), p. 92.

2 Ibid., p. 93-

75 account of his trip to the Apache encampment. style change markedly.

Tone and

As he begins to create scenes, the

sentences elongate and become rhythmic, the rhythm enter­ ing even those paragraphs which are essentially commentary. His earlier reading of American literature, and writing on it, significantly affected his interpretation of the first view o.f the encampment.

". . . To my heart, born

in England and kindled with Fenimore Copper, it wasn't the wild and woolly West, it was the nomad nations gathering 3 still in the continent of hemlock trees and prairies." His first hearing of the war-whoop of the dance produced in him "an acute sadness, and a nostalgia, unbearably yearning for something, and a sickness of the soul. . . ."

He felt

nostalgia for a time "when man was dusky and not individual4 ized." The first part of the essay, after the introduction, is organized around two scenes, the encampment, and the dancing and singing at the kiva, expressed chiefly in terms o’f sound, the singing, the "pat-pat" of the feet, and the "gobble-gobble-gobble" of the war-whoop.

The latter part

is organized around the narrative of a visit alone to the kiva at night after supper, and it too is done largely in terms of sound, the voice of an old man reciting. 3 Ibid., p. 94. 4 Ibid*» P* 95-

The key

76 feeling, the nostalgia for a distant past, links both parts* In his approach to the kiva, the narrator, wrapped in a serape, feels "warm inside" and "as good as invisible" in "the dark air thick with enemies."

However subjective

this may be, it;; keys, artistically, the evolvement of the idea of distance between Indian and spectator.

That side

of the West satirized in the introductory paragraphs in­ trudes for a moment as he notes a soft-drink stand near the kiva, and, among the white people, "one screechy, ungentle cowgirl in khaki."

Beyond, in the camp, he felt, what may

have been "the limitation of (his) European fancy, . . .

a

stress of will,- of human.wills, in the dark air, gibing even in the comic laughter.

And a sort of unconscious

5

animosity."

As he stands at the kiva, listening to an old man recite, a young Indian questions him and tells him he cannot enter the Indian "church."

Scene and dialogue are keyed

to the idea again of the separation of old and new.

As he

remains watching and listening, he finds a "dauntless . . . persistence" in the old reciter.

He is far from being an

enemy of the Indians, and he does not need to understand the words. The soul is as old as the oldest day, and has its own hushed echoes, its own far-off tribal understandings sunk and Incorporated. . . . But I don't want to go

5 Ibid., p. 96 .

77 back to them,vah, never, I never want to deny them or break with them. But there is no going back. . . . The greatest devious onward-flowing stream of conscious human blood. From them to me, and from me on. The challenge of the young Indian is used, in the last para­ graph.

n. . . I stand on the far edge of their firelight,

and am neither denied nor accepted.

My way is my own, old £ red father; I can't cluster at the drum any more." So the initial Hew Mexico essay turns out to be neither a sentimental effusion nor a prosaically factual account.

In parts it is Lawrence at his best, creating an

experience in much the manner of his best stories.

He was

not without knowledge of the Indians beyond the Fenimore Cooper version; a poem like “Turkey-Cock,u written in Italy much earlier and only revised slightly in America, reveals that; besides, there were the communications and gifts from Mrs. Luhan, and his habit of reading up on strange civiliza­ tions.

But possession of factual knowledge is really not

the point.

The important thing to observe is that Lawrence

could make of such an episode as the Apache trip an indivi­ dual created experience because it was at once integrated by his philosophy, without concession to conventional treat­ ment.

The artist who rejected the modern world here reached

tentatively for a tradition to support his belief in the blood-consciousness.

It was this above all that America

might give him. 6 Ibid., pp. 97-99•

78 Related somewhat to the Apache essay is an uncollected one entitled “Certain Americans and an Englishman,11 which ap­ peared in the New York' Times Magazine December 24, 1922.

In

it Lawrence attacked the bill introduced in Congress by Senator Bursum to settle the dispute between Indian, SpanishAmerican, and the squatter of all origins over land and water rights around Taos pueblo.

Internal evidence indi­

cates composition in December, since at one point the text reads:

"His famous Bursum bill has passed the Senate and

comes before the House, presumably this month (December)."'7 However, Mrs. Luhan in reproducing in Lorenzo in Taos frag­ ments of the Apache essay, included five paragraphs which appear almost verbatim as the first six of the Times essay.

8

Unless she mingled two fragments of separate origin, one must conclude that Lawrence in a revision of the Apache essay excised the five paragraphs and used them as the be­ ginning of what was really a different subject.

It is plain

that the attack on the bill resulted from Mrs. Luhan*s ef­ forts to interest Lawrence in the Indian problem.

While

Lawrence sincerely opposes the bill, he is also satirical of the intellectual climate In which he found himself. I arrive in New Mexico at a moment of crisis. I suppose every man always does, here. The crisis Is a thing called the Bursum bill, and it affects the ^ New York Times Magazine (December 24, 1922), p. 3*

8

Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, pp. 52-58.

79 Pueblo Indians. I wouldn't know a thing about it if I needn't. But it's Bursum, Bursum, Bursum J the Bill, the Bill, the Bill I Twitchell, Twitchell,- Twitchell,! f 0 Ms** Secretary Fall, Fall, F a l l .' 0 Mr. Secretary Fall, you bad man, you good man, you Fall, you Rise, you Falli The Joy Survey, Oh, Joy, Ho Joy, Once Joy, Now Woe Woe, Whoa i Wioa, Bursum i Whoa, Bill I Whoaa-a .' — like a Yachell Lindsay Boom-Boora bellowing, it goes on in ay unwonted ears, till I have to take heed. And then I sit down solemnly in a chair and read the Bill, the Bill, the printed Bursum Bill, Section one-two-three-four-five-six-seven, whereas and where­ fore and heretobefore, right to the damned and distant end. Then I start the insompeh-as of Mr. Francis Wilson's Brief concerning the Bill. Then I read Mr. C.'s passionate article against, and Mrs. H.'s hatchetstroke summary against, and Mr. M.'s sharp-knife jug­ glery for the Bill. After which I feel I'm getting mixed up. Then, lamb-like, ram-like, I feel I'll do a bit of butting, too, on a stage where every known animal butts. But first I toddle to a corner,and, like a dog when music is going on in the room, put my paws exasperatedly over my ears, and my nose to the ground, and groan softly. So doing, I try to hypnotize rayself back into my old natural world, outside the circus-tent, where horses don't buck and prance so much, and where not every lady Is leaping through the hoop and crashing through the paper confines of the universe at every hand's turn.9 There follows a clearly-written analysis of the land situa­ tion and a resume of the Bursum Bill and its consequences to the Indian, though as usual Lawrence refused the heavy touch.

Near the end, pleading that the Indian be kept out

of politics and be allowed to die at least a natural death, he came to his theory of the crisis of his times. Because, finally, in some curious way, the pueblos still lie there at the core of American life. In ^ Hew York Times Magazine (December

2k,

1922), p. 3»

80 some curious way, it is the Indians still who are American. This great welter of whites is not yet a nation, not yet a people. The Indians keep burning an eternal fire, the sacred fire of the old dark religion. To the vast white America, either in our generation or in the time of our children or grand-children, will come some fearful convulsion. Some terrible convulsion will take place among the millions of this country, sooner or later. When the pueblos are gone. But oh, let us have the grace and dignity to shelter these ancient centers of life, so that, if die they must, they die a natural death. And at the same time, let us try to adjust ourselves again to the Indian outlook, to take up an old dark thread from their vision, and see again as they see, without forgetting we are ourselves. For it is a new era we have now got to cross into. And our own electric light won't show us over the gulf. We have to feel our way by the dark thread of the old vision. Before it lapses, let us take it up.i0 The brief eessay, "Taos," from this same time (pub­ lished in the Dial for March, 1923 ) , is a slighter piece of work, episodic, if with a strand of feeling running through it.

The first paragraphs are unified by the idea

of the nodality of places.

Beginning with the Indians'

belief that Taos was the heart of the world, he reflects on the feeling he had once had that London was a "great heart of the world," a heart that for him had broken during the war.

Other places had held it for him, and some had

lost it.

The nodality of the pueblo was like that of "the

ruins:: of the old great monasteries of England. . . , one of the choice spots of the earth, where the spirit dwelt." There in the midst of devastation "those whose souls were

10

Ibid., p. 9*

still alive. . . kept the human spirit from disintegration.” This is more than a comparison containing a reminiscence of the beauty of the English countryside, which, Merrild says, Lawrence frequently spoke of with nostalgia; some­ thing of the mission he felt was necessary in his contem­ porary world comes through.

He continues with a descrip­

tion of activity in the pueblo, moving at once to an evening scene, with himself "on a pony, a far-off stranger with gulfs of time between me and this.

And yet, the old nodal­

ity of the pueblo still holding. . . . " H e finds, too, a "sense of dryness, almost of weariness," and of the "in­ alterable" that brings "a sick sort of feeling" over him.1^ With no transition, two episodes follow which illustrate "the old, amusing contradiction between the white and the dark races":

the fining and the confiscation of the film

of a girl who was taking forbidden pictures, and the re­ fusal of entrance to the Church to a woman doctor from New York, who then excused the Indians.

To Lawrence this

was not mere enforcement of rules; there was an "almost jeering triumph" in the action.

He had "heard the same

story at Buddhist temples in Ceylon."

Perhaps there was

something of his sensitivity and accumulation of painful experience in the feeling; the antagonism between the races

p. 100.

-*-1 Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, *” 12 Ibid., p. 101.

82 would appear in his stories.

The final episode of the essay

is a description of a religious procession.

As the singers

dispersed, it seemed to Lawrence that "they were grinning subtly."

To him "it must have been a sort of ordeal" to

dance "between that solid wall of silent, impassive white faces.

But the Indians seemed to take no notice."

In the

crowd he found a "strange, static American quality of laissezfaire and of indomitable curiosity."13 It seems likely that the short essay, "Surgery for the Novel--or a Bomb," was written during the first New Mexico visit.

Published in April, 1923» in International

Book Review, it sounds as though it may have been commis­ sioned by an editor a few months earlier— commissioned be­ cause there was no other particular reason for Lawrence’s doing an essay at this time on the state of the novel— during the New Mexico visit because of allusions to The Sheik and Babbitt among the popular novels and to Zane Grey among the novelists. 14 In a teasing, satirical manner Lawrence finds the "serious" novel, represented by Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Proust, occupied with a self-consciousness that is "obvious senile prococity."

It is "absorbedly, childishly

13 Ibid-» PP- 102-103. ^

Ibid., p. 519.

83 15 concerned with what I am.11

The popular novels are "just

as self-conscious, only they do have more Illusions about themselves."

As for himself, "the purely emotional and

self-analytical stunts" were "played out."

He was not

cynical but "just interested in something else. . . . What next?

That's what interests me.

any more."

16

'What now?1 is no fun

In the past, among the Greek philosophers,

philosophy and fiction were one.

Later they had been split,

and now "should come together again in the novel." The novel has a future. It'6 got to have the courage to tackle new propositions without using abstractions; it's got to present us with new, really new feelings, a whole line of new emotions,'which will get us out of the emotional rut. Instead of snivelling about what is and has been, or inventing new sensations in the old line, it's got to break a way through, like a hole in the wall. And the.public will scream and say it is sacrilege. . , . ' As we have seen, Lawrence began doing this himself with The Rainbow.

Now in America, physically as well as intel­

lectually cut off from Europe, having a well-developed philosophical belief, and in tentative possession of a tradition, he must reach into the future and attempt pro­ phecy, at first in short things, and finally at length in The Plumed Serpent. The review of Stuart P. Sherman's Americanst IfricL. p. 518.

16 Ibid.. pp. 519-520.

17

Ibid., p. 520.

published in the Dial for May, 1923, is Lawrence in a mis­ chievous mood, one that often possessed him in his relation­ ships with people as well as in his work, and an aspect of the man often overlooked by his supporters as well as his detractors.

Beneath the mischief is an underlying current

of seriousness that tells much of his direction* In mood, tone and style the review is very like the essays in Studies in Classic American Literature. which Lawrence was revising during this period far publication in book form.

And when he comments on Sherman's treatment of

an American discussed in the Studies. Lawrence's Judgments are consistent with those in his own book.

The first six

paragraphs set the tone: Professor Sherman once more coaxing American criti­ cism the way it should go. Like Benjamin Franklin, one of his heroes, he at­ tempts the Invention of a creed that shall "satisfy the professors of all religions, and offend none." He smites the marauding Mr. Mencken with a velvet glove, and pierces the obstinate Mr. More with a re­ proachful look. Both gentlemen, of course, will purr and feel flattered. That's how Professor Sherman treats his enemies: buns to his grizzlies. Well, Professor Sherman, being a professor, has got to be nice to everybody about everybody. What else does a professor sit in",a chair of English for, except to dole out sweets? Awfully nice, rather cloying. But there, men are but children of a later growth.-*-” Sherman tells the Menckenites not to Jeer “at the Great Past and at the Great Dead." 18

Ibid., p. 314.

He tells “the smaller and

85

more select company of Moreltes: Scorn not the horny hand of 19 noble toll. . . . " When Sherman speaks glowingly of the average man's religion of democracy, Lawrence remarks that profiteers, place-grabbers and bullies of the war "were, of course, outside the average.

The supermen of the occasion."

Franklin's deity "turns out to be a sort of superlative Mr. 20 Wanamaker," Indeed, Deistic prudence and Lawrence's dark gods had little in common.

But Emerson, whom he did not

treat in the Studies, presents a more complex problem to which Lawrence gives some sixteen paragraphs, more than a fourth of his space.

Emerson was still a great man, but

his idealism- (such a statement as "We are all aiming to be idealists, and covet the society of those who make us-so, as the sweet singer, the-orator, the ideal painter") was no longer valid. As a matter of fact we have worked the ideal bit of our nature to death, and we shall go crazy if we can't start working from some other bit. Idealism now is a , sick nerve, and the more you rub on it the worse you"' feel afterwards.. Your later reactions aren't pretty at all. LlkegJostoievSky's Idiot, and President Wilson sometimes. As for the courage to "treat all men as gods," It took cour­ age now not to treat them so.

Perhaps this is in part the

realistic side of Lawrence, the pragmatism indicated by his 19 Ibid.. p. 315.

20 21

Ibid., p. 316. Ibid., pp. 317-316..,

86

early interest in William James; at any rate there is a strong affinity with the temper of his times in the mis­ trust of idealism.

Many writers, Hemingway for example,

were signaling its collapse, though they might not venture into the future.

There was prophecy in Lawrence's

We've got to have a different sort of sardonic courage. And the sort of credentials we are due to receive from the god in the shadow would have been real hones out of hell-bggth to Ralph Waldo. Sic transeunt Del homlnorum. As for Hawthorne, in The Scarlet Letter he was not interested in "what Hester and Dlmmesdale really felt.

Only

with their situations as Sinners.

The hook was a "master23 piece, hut in duplicity and. half-false excitement." J Lawrence himself, as we have seen, had given up fixed moral systems for what he thought a greater morality; and he had, with whatever strength andWeakness, traced the feelings as they, moved outside the fixed systems. Whitman, whom he liked.in so many other ways, was no longer valid in his identification of the self "with every­ thing and everybody."

"We don't want tot-be embracing every­

thing any more., ..Or to be embraced in one of Walt's vast promiscuous armfuls." to repeat often:

Here, he used a phrase that he was

"Noli me tangere."

22 Ibid.. p. 318. 23 Ibid.. pp. 318-319. 2k

Ibid.. p. 319.

, After brief treatment of Joaquin Miller, Sandburg, Carnegie, Roosevelt, and the Adams family he concluded that Sherman's "cookies," which his readers were to "eat and have are "Tradition and Heroes, and Great Men, and $350,000,000 in your pocket.

And eating 'em is Democracy, Serving Man­

kind, piously giving most of the $350,000,000 back again." In a "P.S." he adds:

"You can't get past arithmetic."^5

Discussion of Studies in Classic American Literature has been reserved until now because, although they were be­ gun in 19l6 , and appeared in the English Review in 1918-1919 it was in Taos, of at Del Monte Ranch, or both, that they were revised for publication in book form in August, 1923* The greatest change was in form.

The English Review

essays were rather formally and conventionally expository in style and paragraphing.

That is, most of the paragraphs

were long, most of the sentences complete; there were no eccentricities of capitalization; the tone was essentially serious.

All this is changed in the book form.

The para­

graphs are broken up at times into mere phrases, and in general are shorter.

There is widespread use of phrases

punctuated as sentences.

Key abstract words, usually

those representing the ideas or emphases under attack are often printed in capitals: NATURE, SPIRIT, KNOWING, GENTLE­ MAN, IDEAL, IDEAS, IN LOVE, ONE IDENTITY, I AM HE THAT ACHES

Ibid., pp. 320-321.

88 WITH AMOROUS LOVE, EN MASSE. Lawrence had humorously described the early essays to Amy Lowell as "rather a thrilling blood-and-thunder, your-money-or-your-life kind of thing:

Hands up, America I"26

They were nothing to the colloquial assault, outraging all the usual notions of propriety in the critical essay, that he makes in the final form.

The technique is somewhat sug­

gestive of American newspaper headlines, and Mrs. Lawrence remembers that he thought them interesting and effective. Gone too, in the final form, was most of the phy­ siological-psychological theory of the blood-consciousness which Lawrence explored at some length earlier as a foundai

tion to his criticism.

For example, the original essay

on Hawthorne had begun: Before beginning the study of Hawthorne, it is necessary again to consider the bases of the human consciousness. Man has two distinct fields of con­ sciousness, two living minds. First there is the physical or primary mind, a perfect and spontaneous consciousness located in the great plexuses and ganglia of the nervous system, and in the hind brain. Secondly there is the ordinary consciousness which we recognise as mental, located in the brain. We are mistaken when we conceive of the nerves and the blood as mere vehicles or media of the mental consciousness. The blood itself is self-conscious. And the great nerve-centres of the body are centres of perfect primary cognition.2? There follow four pages of discussion of the relationship of art to these two minds, called later "the passional psyche." Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle, p. lj.22. English Review, (May, 1919)*

89 and "the rational psyche." The nearest approach of the passional psyche to scientific or rational reality is in art. . . . The nearest approach of the rational psyche towards pas­ sional truth is in philosophy. . . . When the unison between art and philosophy is complete, then knowledge will be in full, not always in part, as it is now. Hawthorne attempts "to understand as deeply as he feels" but does not succeed.

The Scarlet Letter "contains the pas­

sional or primary account of the collapse of the human psyche in the white race.

Hawthorne tries to keep up a parallel

rational exposition of this fall.

But here he fails."

Thus

Lawrence approached his criticism with careful effort at consistent use of terms, setting up his conception of the highest art before analyzing a failure to achieve it.

We

have already noted his belief, stated also here, that in the Christian era "the rational or upper or spiritual mind has risen superior to the primary or physical being."

Hawthorne's

Hester Prynne on the scaffold is a perverse symbol of this triumph, Just as in H elville, Ahab seeks to kill in Moby Dick his "primary or physical being."

Hawthorne longs

. . . . for revenge, even upon himself. He is divided against himself. Openly he stands for the upper, spiritual, reasoned being. Secretly he lusts in the sensual imagination in bruising the heel of this spiritual self and laming it for ever. All his reasoned exposition is a pious fraud, kept up to satisfy his own upper or outer self.28 This paradox is the thread that binds the Studies to­ gether.

All of the American writers, in one way or another, 28 Ibid,

seek development of the upper, rational self at the expense of rebellion by the passional self.

In the far different

form of the book the idea appears thus; Always the same. The deliverate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under­ consciousness so devilish. Destroy I destroy ! destroy hums the under consciousness. Love and produce cackles the upper consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and-produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath. Until such time as it will have to hear. The American has got to destroy. It is his des­ tiny. It is his destiny to destroy the whole corpus of the white psyche, the white consciousness.29 Franklin’s moral code, within the mechanistic uni­ verse of the Deist, was of course entirely antithetical to Lawrence, and he had a field day satirizing the limitations of prudential experience.

In building the new democratic

state, Franklin in "his own tinder-consciousness. . . hated England" and "the whole corpus of the European being."3® Crevecoeur is the "emotional" prototype of the Ameri­ can.

He got his "emotional reactions" from "NATURE."

And

here, despite apparent traces of it in himself, Lawrence rejects, like a good realist, the primitivistic return to nature.

"I used to admire my head off; before I tiptoed

into the Wilds and saw the shacks of the Homesteaders. Particularly the Amiable Spouse, poor thing."31

And in

29 7 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Litera ture (New York, 1930), p. 122. ' 30 Ibid., p. 29. 3"^ Ibid., p . 35.

91 another place:

"Jean Jacques, Bernardin de St. Pierre,

Chateaubriand, exquisite Francois Le Vaillant, you lying little lot, with your Nature Sweet and Pure i"32

But

Crevecoeur the artist, not the idealist, he greatly admired 33 for 11glimpses of actual nature, not writ large." Cooper’s “white" novels exhibited the destructiveness of the ideal, here the democratic one.

The Effinghams "felli

terribly superior to Mr. Dodge, yet, since they were his equals in the sight of God, they could not feel free to say to him:

’Mr. Dodge, please go to the devil,1 They had to say:

'Pleased to meet you.*"3^

Lawrence does not seem to have

known- of, or at least did not mention, the later Cooper novels and essays that attempt to correct rudeness and levell­ ing in democracy and brought Cooper such bitter embroilment. The Leatherstocking Tales were almost another story, Lawrence had loved them "so dearly."

But they were "wish-fulfilment."3-5

Pictures! Some of the loveliest, most glamorous pictures in all literature. Alas, without the cruel iron of reality. It is all real enough. Except that one realises that Fenimore was writing from a safe distance, where, he would idealize and have his wish-fulfilment.-?® Met at the end, in contemplating Deerslayer, Lawrence must 32 Ibid., p. 36. 33 Ibid., p. 37. 34. Ibid., p. 60. 35 Ibid., p. 67.

^

Ibid., pp. 80-81.

92 have seen something of his own position, if also something of the threat he felt in America. A man who turns his bach on white society. A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, xdio lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white. This is the very intrinsic-most American. He is at the core of all the other flux and fluff. And when this man breaks from his static isolation, and makes a new move, then look out, something will be happening.37 He found in the friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumpo, Cooper's dream of “a new human relationship, . . . the stark, loveless, wordless unison of two men who have come to the bottom of themselves.H It was "the new nucleus of 38 *'-~T , a new society." It was Lawrence's own dream. Cooper represented both the "sloughing of the old consciousness11 and the forming of a new one underneath; 39 but Poe was only disintegrative. His " 'morbid' ;tales“ had to be written "because old things need to die. . . . " "Ligeia," which Lawrence discusses at some length, is "a ghastly story of the assertion of the human will, the willto-love and the will-to-consciousness, asserted against 40 death itself.

The pride of human conceit in KNOWLEDGE."

In the second chapter on Hawthorne, Lawrence works 37 Ihld., og Ibid., 39 XLid.. 48 Ibid.,

p. 92. p. 78* p. 93. p. 109.

93 chiefly with Blithedale Romance. in which, he thinks, Hawthorne "came nearest to actuality."

The people at

Brook Farm illustrated the failure of Idealism.

The bal­

ance Lawrence theoretically sought is expressed in the comment, "You've got to learn to change from one conscious­ ness to the other, turn and about. Not to try to make if-2 either absolute, or dominant." Resort to spiritualism, "psychic tricks," is "a certain sign of the disintegration of the psyche." In the Dana essay, he felt that Americans, making only an ideal home-land of their soil, turned next for im­ aginative conquest to the sea. ...

For Dana, since "knowing

is the slow death of being,"

a step in dissolution.

A/i

knowing the sea was

But for having "lived this great

experience for us, we owe him homage.

k-5

And after all, we

have to know all before we can know that knowing is nothing. . . . Then there is a sort of peace, and we can start afresh, knowing we don’t know."

k 6

Dana's reaction in the famous

flogging scene is rather perversely interpreted not as ^

Ibid., p. 153.

jj.2

Ibid.. pp. 15^-155. Ibid., p. 162. Ibid., p. 166. k 5

Ibid.. p. 185. k S

Ibid., p;?192.

9k salutary human! tarianism, but as the idealist "refusing the blood-contact of life . " ^ But Melville was "the greatest seer and poet of the sea.

The South Seas adventures of Typee and Omoo show

a man hating the civilized, white world and "passionately filled with the sense of vastness and mystery of life which is

non-human."^

But he was unhappy in his South Seas

paradise because "one cannot go back. . . . Melville couldn’t go back: and G-auguin couldn’t really go back: and I know now that I could never go back."^®

Afterwards, however,

determined that Paradise existed, Melville "was always in Purgatory," one of those souls destined for Purgatory Even his marriage was a disillusionment "because he looked for perfect marriage."^

In much of this, one is reminded

of Lawrence’s own "purgatorial" struggles.

He concludes

the first Melville chapter: Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist. Perhaps, so am I. And he stuck to his ideal guns. I abandon mine. He was a mystic who raved because the old ideal guns shot havoc. The guns of the "noble spirit." Of "ideal love." W

Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 193. I M I - , P* 197I M d . , p. 201.

^

Ibid., p. 205.

Ibid., p . 211.

95 I say, let the old guns rot. ^ Get new ones, and shoot straight .b-5 Apparently what he sought was a more relativistic dynamic life as a solution. In Moby Dick Melville "was a futurist long before futurism found paint. ments.

The sheer naked slidings of the ele­

And the human soul experiencing it all.

it is almost over the border: psychiatry.

So often,

Almost spurious.

Yet so great. «5ij- Melville knew "his great white epoch" was doomed.

Moby Dick "is the deepest blood-being of the

white race. . . hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness.

We want to hunt him down.

subject him to our w i l l . " ^

Thus in Melville, in many

To

ways, Lawrence found a parallel to his own problems, and an illustration of his major theses. The chapter on Whitman ends the Studies. To Lawrence he was "the one pioneer,^.

. . the first to smash the old

moral conception, that the soul of man is something 'super­ ior' and 'above' the flesh. Europe has never got beyond the morality of salvation. Ibid., pp. 212-213. ^

Ibid., p. 216.

^

Ibid., p. 238.

^

Ibid., p. 253.

^

Ibid., p. 255-

96 America to this day is deathly sick with saviourism. But Whitman, the greatest and the first and the only American teacher, was no Saviour. His morality was no morality of salvation. His was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving herself. Accepting the contact with other souls along the open way, as they lived their lives. Never trying to save them. . . . It is the inspiration of thousands of Americans today, the best souls of today, men and women. And it is a message that only in America can be fully understood, finally accepted.5° Whitman's mistake was in confounding his watchword, sympathy, with "Jesus1 LOVE and with Paul's CHARITY ."^9

Thls confu­

sion resulted in the undiscriminating identification and merging which led to his being also mechanical at times and "a very great post mortem poet, of the transitions of the soul as it loses its i n t e g r i t y . " ^

The last paragraphs

of the book sum up the Whitman criticism and define what Lawrence could accept as good: Love, and Merging, brought Whitman to the Edge of Death ! Death ! Death I But the exultance of his message still remains. Purified of MERGING, purified of MYSELF, the exul­ tant message of American Democracy, of souls in the Open Road, full of glad recognition, full of fierce readiness, full of joy of worship, when one soul sees a greater soul. /_ The only riches, the great souls. 1 The contemporary reception of the Studies was some­ what mixed.

The reviewer in The Bookman, Raymond M. Weaver,

53 Ibid.. pp. 256-257£9 ibid., p. 2 5 7 . 60 Ibld•* P • 2^2 • ^

itid•» P • 26I4..

97 thought that . . . In this last hook. . . , strange gods pranoe into the clearing to do a stout menagerie prance of self ostentation. Nor is freedom of what Mr. Lawrence calls 'my own Holy Ghost' hampered by information. His ignorance of American literature is comprehensive and profound. At the same time Weaver was reviewing Stanley T. Williams' Studies in Victorian Literature, and he concluded: " . . . Barbarian souls are likely to discover Professor Williams atrociously harmless, insipid beyond human tolerance. such hail Mr. Lawrence.

Let

He is as good as an Armenian mas-

62 sacre."

The reviewer in The Dial. Alyse Gregory, found

that Lawrence's theme was buffeted "from page to page as an excited school boy might bat at an evasive and recalci­ trant baseball, emitting strange guttural noises the while which we are, it is supposed, to understand as the 'real, right' American vernacular."

In general she finds him,

beginning with Women in Love, corrupted "by the disease of ideology," but of his idea that the American soul is "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer," she says, with much reluc­ tance:

"And so with a chance cunning he thrusts his finger

straight through the flimsy draperies of our public pre­ tences and touches the sharp and jagged blade beneath. can anyone deny that this is not true of America?"

For

(Her

phrasing and her logic part company in the last sentence.) 62 The Bookman. LVIII (November, 1923), pp. 327-328. 63 The Dial (January, 19240, pp. 70-71.

98 Lawrence’s book has made its way into wide-spread use in critical and academic circles.

In 1928 in The

Reinterpretation of American Literature, edited by Norman Foerster, Fred Lewis Pattee said of the new sort of his­ tory of literature that he felt was needed: First, it must be written primarily as a history, with no thought of class-room use. If professors can use it as a textbook let them, but it must be as detached from class-room thinking as is D. H. Lawrence's amazing volume. Edmund Wilson reprinted the studies in The Shock of Recognition.

Willard Thorp, in editing selections from

Melville for the American Writers Series, cites E awrence‘s interpretation of Moby Dick as a fruitful one.

F. 0.

Matthlessen alludes extensively to the Studies, and to other Lawrence criticism, in The American Renaissance. Lawrence's dictum, "Never trust the artist.

Trust the

tale," sounds like a cogent bit from the present school of "organic" criticism with Its focus upon the unity and mean­ ing of the work Itself. What Lawrence did was to apply his sense of and theory of psychic unbalance in our era.

Applied elsewhere

to such writers as Hardy, Tolstoy, and Galsworthy, it 1

yielded recognizably similar results.

In early versions

of the American studies, exposition of his theory dominated application. K E

—

Later, much of the exposition was thrown away

The Reinterpretation of American Literature. edited by Norman Foerster (New York, 1928V, p. 6 ,

99 for brilliant, if sometimes showy and disjointed, exploi­ tation of the paradoxes the theory yielded.

All of Lawrence’s

antipathies are involved, and these overshadow at times his acutely sensitive appreciation of achievements compatible with his own tendencies and strengths.

In the historical

sense, he is relatively ignorant of American literature. He seems unaware of how’far Hawthorne and Melville agreed with him about transcendental over-optimism.

But Melville’s

Promethean, sceptical storming of the gods, and Hawthorne’s moral gloom, involved conflicts he himself was trying to resolve.

His philosophy dictated focus upon symptoms of

decadence, defined in his own terms.

Headers who would

hesitate to embrace the whole of his philosophy, find that its application often yields suggestive and illuminating insights, as if Lawrence had shown a side of his subjects their own theories had refused to recognize.

It is astonish­

ing to think with what critical intensity he must have read.

CHAPTER III THE POETRY Along with Studies in Classic American Literature. Lawrence was preparing another manuscript for publication, that of the booh of poems called Birds. Beasts and Flowers* In November, 1915, in the midst of The Rainbow suppression and the war, Lawrence had written:

"I would like to go to

a lend where there are only birds and beasts and no human­ ity, nor inhumanI'ty-masks.

This may not have been the

conscious origin of the subject-matter and theme of the volume, but it foreshadows the primary purpose of the poems.

They were to be a turning from humanity to the

significance Lawrence had found- in birds and beasts from the time of his very earliest work.

It is noteworthy that

not one of the poems was composed in England.

They were

begun in Italy in late 1919 and continued through"the en­ suing journeys and experiences to 1923 and the NewoMexico ranch, where, on February 10, Lawrence wrote to Harriet Monroe:

“I have made up the complete MS. of Birds. Beasts 2 and Flowers and sent it to Seltzer.” Nine of the forty-eight poems were written in New.

Mexico.

"Eagle in New Mexico,” “The Red Wolf,” "Men in New ^ The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 282. 2 i^id*» P* 5^9.

101 Mexico," "Autumn at Taos," and "Spirits Summoned West" are signed "Taos," and thus date from the period between 3 about September 11 and November 3 0 , 1922, at Taos. "The Blue Jay," "Bibbles," “Mountain Lion," and "The AmericanEagle" (though there may be some doubt about the latter) are signed "Lobo" and date from the stay at Del Monte Ranch between November 30 and. about the middle of March, 1923* On October 19, 1922, Lawrence wrote to Amy Lowell from Taos: America." ico."

k

“I have done two poems here: my first in One of these is undoubtedly "Eagle in New Mex­

The other is not certain, since four others are

signed as written at Taos, and there is a possibility that an early draft of "The American Eagle" dates from the Taos stay. The "occasion" of "Eagle in New Mexico" has been de­ scribed by Mrs. Luhan in Lorenzo in Taos: The "Eagle poem" . . . came from a drive we had one day far out in the desert that leads down to the Manby Springs. As we silently turned a curve, we came upon an eagle sitting on a low tree close to the road. . . . Lawrence was immensely moved by the aspect of that bird.-' 3 Date of a farewell note by Lawrence, Lorenzo in Taos (New Yorlc: Knopf, 1932) , p. 106. Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle« p. 623* 5

Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, pp. 101-102.

Evidently he wrote an early version of the poem on the same i

day, since Mrs. Luhan remembers seeing it "that afternoon." An early manuscript version dated October 11, 1922, may be the text she saw. The poem

8

7 grow® from the initial image of "a

•scorched breast, breasting the sun like an answer."

In

the second stanza, subject and setting are made explicit, "an eagle at the top of a low cedar-bush" in the desert; and another aspect of the bird is given, the threat of its curved bill, dark as if dripping blood.

The bird faces

the sun as if in-response, and is a Siller. For the remainder of the poem, the rhetorical struc­ ture is that of address, although the completing "you" clause does not occur until the fifth stanza.

The image

of the bird is intensified with such phrases as "erect, scorched pallid," "erect, with the god-thrust entering him from below,"the threatening aspect with the metaphor "gloved in feathers."

Other aspects are added.

The eagle

looks two ways at once; helis mashed, "sickle-masked with iron" between his eyes. The aspect of looking two ways at once and the z

Ibid., p. 102. Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts, pp. 100-101. Q D. H. Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers (London: Seckor, 1923), PP* 147-14-9• ^

103 scorched "breast are "brought together in the concept that only “the inner eye" of the breast “looks straight at the sun."

Only the breast is light in color; the rest is dark,

as is the bill, which "cleaves down" and is "weapon-hard," in one of the few similes, a relatively trite one for a poised threat, "like a sword of Damocles."

This threatening

of the bill is intensified and the dark dripping is made ex­ plicit: the bill has been dipped into blood many times to temper it. Questions are put to the eagle.

Why does it "front

the sun so obstinately" as if in an old grudge or an old allegiance?

Does it lift the hearts of rabbits or birds

to the sun as the Aztec priests did those of men?

Does

the sun shriek for blood as if "a hovering, blood-thirsty bird?"

Is the eagle the sun’s priest?

Is the continent

still cold from the ice-age "that the sun is so angry," its blood "somewhat reptilian still. . . that the sun" is "greedy for it?" At this point the image of hardness and rapacity towards sacrificial victims is complete.

In the last three

stanzas the poet makes explicit his implied defiance of the eagle, using the first person.

He yields neither to the

bird (now "jowl-faced," as if an obese bully) nor to the sun “that sucks up blood / Leaving a nervous people." He tells the eagle to fly off, reversing its appearance in

104

-

retreat, "a big black back” with a "rust of fire” in its tail.

Then, in the last stanza, defiance mingles with

affirmation: Even the sun in heaven can be curbed and chastened at last By the life in the hearts of men, And you, great bird, sun-st&rer, heavy black beak Gan be put out of office as sacrifice bringer. The poem, then, is a confrontation by the poet of the bird's essential power and deadliness.

Lawrence creates

this essence unflinchingly and so objectively in the first four stanzas that if the poem terminated here, one might think this alone his theme.. But the rhetorical structure has prepared for the poet's entrance in addressing the bird. After the next three stanzas with their direct address and element of challenge, the poem again might be terminated, with the bird and poet plainly confronting- each other. There is no traditional imagery beyond the "sword of Damocles" simile..

The next seven stanzas with their questions further

the effect of confrontation and, of course, complete the image of the bird as sacrlficial-priest to the sun.

Finally,

the last three stanzas might be said to be like a physical movement, as if the poet, after steadily regarding the bird through most of the poem, startles it to flight with his sudden defiance of its hardness.and threat. There is, especially in the early part, a direct apprehension of the bird that constitutes the poem's chief p o w e r .

The poet's reciprocal attitude in its own

105 unrelentingness maintains the hard tone.

This element of

immediate, objective confrontation makes it difficult to say how much of Lawrence's personal feeling about New Mexico and the people he had met enters into the poem.

We

have seen from his comments in letters and elsewhere that he liked the country but felt the people wilful and in­ wardly dead, and this seems to appear in the late lines about "a nervous people.”

The bird probably symbolized

for Lawrence this and the whole problem of reconciling human feeling with the non-human, particularly with the destructively non-human so immanent in the wild landscape and in the terrible sacrificial religion that, as a part of the true American tradition, must be faced.

Death, es­

pecially the sacrificial death, would haunt Lawrence hence­ forward, as the white consciousness yields to the dark. The free-verse technique is typical of the American poems.

The lines consist of complete phrases (and some­

times clauses), varying in length from a single, short phrase like "Masked-one,11 "Erect one," to a long phrase or combination of phrases like "When you pick the red smoky heart from a rabbit or a light-blooded bird."

Punctuation

does not indicate complete sentences, with periods occurring at the ends of sequences of phrases. Length of line is not determined by meter but by the poet's choice of linear arrangement of phrases or clauses widely variant in

io6 length.

The grammatical unit is a determinant. W. H. Auden has said:

". . . S o far as I know,

Lawrence is the only poet on whom Whitman has had a fruit­ ful influence; his free verse is quite new, but without Whitman it could not have been written."9

Of course Lawrence

was impressed by Whitman quite early in his career; even his early "rhyming poems" seemed Whitmanesque to him.

An

early letter shows that he preferred rhetorical stress to metrical stress.^

By the time of the hew Mexico poems he

has abandoned traditional forms altogether.

Perhaps most

like Vs/hitman is the use of a series of parallel clauses, as in the series of questions in "Eagle in New Mexico" and the device of reserving the main clause as a climax.

But

Lawrence’s use is much more incisive and terse than ’Whitman’s rather obviously rhetorical rhythmic organiza­ tion.

Perhaps more of Whitman is to be seen in Lawrence's

frank identification of the poet and use of "I". The "occasion" of another Taos poem, "The Red Wolf," was a visit to the pueblo during which an Indian used the appellation for Lawrence.

With this as a central idea,

he wrote a poem 7/hich extends In meaning and feeling both into the past and the future and was a means of interpreting his position between two cultures.

9 W. H. Auden, "Some Notes on D. H. Lawrence," The Nation, l6ip (April 2o, 19IJ.7 ), p. J4.82. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 155-157-

107 In the early stanzas of the poem,

11

Lawrence sets

up Images of loss and denial (later developed into sym­ bols of loss of traditional Western faith and of denial of admission into the religion of the Indian).

Darkness, in

itself a part of the denial symbol, intervenes between him and an eagle circling over the desert.

The sun on the rim

of the mesa bids the poet "look for a last long time," and sets (a part of the loss symbol).

An Indian wrapped to

the eyes in a sheet tells the poet he is invisible —

which

is again the denial symbol. To the finality of the departed sun image are added the autumnal falling of aspen and cotton-wood leaves, and ponies shut up in the corral.

The poet, in his loss and

in his approach' to an unknown, is symbolized by the coming of a red wolf to the rim of the shadow. The symbolism of the passing of day is extended by being linked to an image of the loss of faith: it has "gone to dust. , . like a white Christus fallen to dust from a cross."

Juxtaposed to this image is one of the Indian

past, "a black crucifix," linked to the early eagle image with "maybe a black eagle with its wings out."

In the

darkness and vagueness of night the traditional has given place to something different. There is a long colloquy between a demon (the Indian Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers. pp. 190-193*

108 tradition) and the poet, the tone dropping to the collo­ quial.

The poet describes himself as "like a homeless

dog" (his own image for himself, the "red wolf" image coming from the Indian). He has trotted "east and east and east till the sun himself went home," leaving him "homeless here in the dark" at the demon*s.door (the direc­ tion links with Lawrence's journey from Europe to Taos via the East, Geylon, Australia, and San Francisco).

The de­

mon asks where his "white God" is, and the poet answers that "he fell to dust as the twilight fell."

The demon

bids the ",thin red wolf" go home, and is answered that he has no home, which is his reason for coming. demon says they take that he does not unasked.

When the

no "hungry stray," the poet

ask him to; "the red-dawn-wolf" has

answers come

The demon, in his last speech, warns of the fangs

of the pueblo dogs, and the poet*8 last unyielding reply is to ask if the "red wolf" has "trotted" so far "to fear a few fangs." In the last stanza Lawrence comments on the colloquy, reaching a defiant affirmation. As for me. . . Since I trotted at the tail of the sun as far as ever the creature went west, And lost him here, I'm going to sit down on my tail right here And wait for him to come back with a new story, I'm the red wolf, says the dark old father. All right, the red dawn wolf I am. In this poem Lawrence,.positing the loss of his

109 traditional, Western-European faith, fronts the Indian culture to which he has recently come.

His hope of finding

a link between the pre-Christian past and the future is evident here; but the poem contains aifeeling of denial of the possibility of entering that past.

We have seen

this idea put explicitly in other places.

Here, in the

texture of the poem, it is put in terms of denial, homeless­ ness, and defiance, a defiance that contains confidence in a dawn, thus linking itself with the image of the departed sun and the night that envelops the ancient pueblo.

12

Evidently “Men in Hew Mexico11

had no “occasion,“

in the sense of taking its origin in an event, but is entirely the expression of a subjective feeling.

Signifi­

cantly, it is grouped with “Autumn at Taos" and “Spirits Summoned West" in a section titled G-hosts.

The book had

grown beyond the simple boundaries of birds, beasts and flowers. Back in 1915 Lawrence had written of a psychic state heif.elt:

"I’ve got again into one of those horrible sleeps

from which I can't wake-. I can't brush it aside to wake 13 up." This came during the conflicting feelings and the anguish the early days of the war brought.

In New Mexico

at Taos a dream-like:, esomnambulistic state is apparently

12

. Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers, pp. 197-198.

^

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 233*

110 induced in many people by altitude and scene.

For Lawrence,

there were conflicting feelings, too. The first stanza sets up an image of sleep: Mountains blanket-wrapped Round a white hearth of desert— To this static image is added one of activity which by contrast develops the idea of frustration.

"While the sun

goes round. . . the desert" the mountains "never get up and walk about" because "they can't wake." linked to the lapsing of a faith.

The sleep is

"They camped and went

to sleep / In the last twilight / Of Indian gods." Idea futility of motion is extended. "No good. "

The Indians dance.

The white man "make gold-mines and the mountains

unmake them / In their sleep."

In the people, there is a

kind of sleep in activity. "The Indians laugh in their sleep from fear" as a sleeper whose "sleep is over" but who cannot wake, screams silently "because his body can't wake up," and "laughs from fear."

Thus the waking sleep of the people is compared with

a semi-conscious state. phorically.

This comparison is developed meta­

The effect is that of "a dark membrane over

the will," in a linking with the early mountain image,

"like

a black blanket." We walk in our sleep, in this land, Somnambulist wide-eyed afraid. "The Penitentes lash themselves" in an effort to awaken, "to tear" the membrane,

The Indians thought the white men

Ill would wake them, hut Instead they too engage In aimless activity. Evidently the central feeling is that of spiritual and emotional emptiness while physical activity goes on. Lawrence had expressed himself explicitly:

". . . There

is no inside life throb here— none— all empty— people in­ side dead, outside bustling (sometimes). Anyhow, dead and 14 always on the move." In the poem he himself is not ex­ cluded, and it is obvious that he feels the somnambulism keenly.

We have seen him elsewhere defiant but feeling

uprooted and denied (as in "The Red Wolf"),

Like some of

the people in the poem, he had ridden horseback in the mountains and desert "away from men." It had been

"a great 15 temptation, because one rather hates mankind nowadays."

The somnambulism was a challenge to Lawrence, eventually producing a detailed answer in. The Plumed Serpent. where the summons is to awake, *

• ■

•t»

•

•■ -

•

The second poem in the Ghosts section, Taos,"

16

•, ■

.

a ~ ■

"Autumn in

moves within the narrative of a horseback ride

down from the mountains to the desert within an autumn setting.

The theme is fear and relief from fear.

The autumn aspens on the "rounded sides" of the Ibid., p. 566. ^ Ibid., p. 562. 16 Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers, pp. 199-200.

112 mountains are "like yellow hair of a tigress brindled with pins." pelt.

Below, the desert,

"my hearth-rug," is a wolf's

These images are the key ones of the poem, to which

other wild-beast images are added. The rhetorical basis of the poem is the narrative of a ride down the canyon, under the pines, through the foot­ hills to the desert in terms of fear and a sense of relief. Among the aspens the poet rides between the "great and glistening-feathered legs of the hawk of Horus" (hawk­ headed Egyptian god of day).

Then he goes slowly under

the pines "as under the hairy belly of a great black bear." He is "pleased" to be out in the foothills "past the otter's whiskers" and onto the "wolf-pelt" of the desert. There he can safely look back at the "jaguar-splashed, puma-yellow, leopard-livid slopes of America The last two stanzas are reassurance addressed by the rider to his pony. Make big eyes, little pony At all these skins of wild beasts; They won't hurt you. Fangs and claws and talons and bea£s and hawk-eyes Are nerveless just now. So be easy. The pony itself affords a contrast to the dominant imagery in that it is a domesticated, defenseless animal,

The

rider, in reassuring it, is in a sense transferring his own feelings, and thus finding relief for them.

113 Why was the poem placed in the section titled Ghosts? Certainly it evokes the ghost-like spirit of a savagery quies­ cent "just-now." not abrogation.

In that phrase lies a sense of suspension, As we have seen, Lawrence felt a latent de­

structiveness in America, stated in Studies in Classic Ameri­ can Literature in terms of a destruction of the "white t

psyche," in a letter in terms of will "turned against all spontaneous life."-*-7

He was fully aware of the Aztec sacri­

ficial horror, and New Mexico annals contained their own' tales of violence.

The poem is much more than an expres­

sion of the sensuous vividness of the Taos autumn, though that is one of its aspects.

It expresses, in a new con­

text, the fear that had lurked in Lawrence since the war. Now, in this un-English landscape and tradition, truly savage by comparison, it is little wonder that he trembled at times. The last poem in the Ghosts section is "Spirits Summoned West."I®

Its "occasion" was arrival of news of

the death of an understanding woman he had loved from the days of his youth in Eastwood, Sallie Hoplcin, the mother of Enid Hilton.

The quality of the relationship is indicated

by his feeling after the elopement with Frieda in 1912, that she was one of the few who would take them into her 1-7 Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . . . " p. 171. 1 O

Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, pp. 201-20!}..

114 19 "heart, together."

In the years that followed, Lawrence

wrote often to her and her husband, Willie Hopkin. The poem is tender and sorrowful, richly nostalgic for the dead past In England, unlike the other early Taos poems with their confrontation of the new, the fierceness of opposing spirits, and the ghostliness dfilack of an inner life.

The key image is contained in the first three stanzas: England seems full of graves to me, Pull of graves. Women I loved, and cherished, like Yet I had to tell them to die.

my mother;

England seems covered with graves Women's graves.

to me,

They also Introduce the savage paradox about which the poem revolves, the need to tell the beloved to die. These women were gentle, loving and loved,

"with the

beautiful eyes of the old days," believing in love and feel­ ing the "sorrow of such belief," knowing the "full doom of lovingand not being able to take back.“

On the graves there

are "pansies and such-like" (a colloquial touch), and there Is silence "where before was a moving of soft-skirted women." Then Lawrence turns to his circumstances, one might say to the point of separation and loneliness from which the sorrow and nostalgia flow. And I, I sit on this high American desert With dark-wrapped Rocky Mountains motionless squatting around in a ring, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 5 0.

115 Remembering I told them to die, to sink into the grave in England, The gentle-kneed women. The image of the mountains, "dark-wrapped and squatting around in a ring," not only contrasts with the warmth of the conception of the living women, but suggests somberness, and watching, thus being keyed to the grave and death image, and perhaps a kind of encirclement, even accusation. A lyric summons begins with the refrain, "Come away,” "Come back."

The women are free now of "divided yearning,"

"husband to cherish like a child and wrestle with for the prize of perfect love," the launching of children in "a world you mistrust."

They are "disemburdened of Man and a

man," "free of the toils of a would-be-perfect love." In a new image of unrealized love, they are overlooked virgins.

In his mother, he alone "saw the virgin . . . that

had no home."

The paradox of the unperceived existence of

virginity in wife and mother receives added irony in the oneline stanza:

"You overlooked her too."

His reason for

telling her to die was that she might "be home at last. . . inside my innermost heart / Where the virgin in woman comes home to a man." At the last the contrapuntal effect of the lyric summons and the unitalicized lines, which might be called a sort of commentary, becomes stronger as the parts are alter­ nated more frequently.

Interwoven, too, are bits of phras­

ing from the early part of the poem.

The last stanza links

virginity with the possibility of reconciliation:

116 For virgins are not exclusive of virgins As wives are of wives; And motherhood is Jealous, But in virginity Jealousy does not enter. The poem reaches far bach into Lawrence's past, in­ deed to the childhood and young manhood out of which Sons and Lovers was fashioned.

There, both in reality and in

fiction, he had seen his mother struggle painfully and un­ successfully for an ideal of love and motherhood.

In what

sense had he told her and the other gentle women of the past to die?

Evidently in his attack on idealism, and

especially the selfconscious attempt at perfect love.

The

story of this conflict alone could be traced all through Lawrence, for example in his emphasis on the inviolability of the individual soul, and a relativity of relationship in which the spontaneous urgings of the soul, even anger, were better than the corrupting tensions of the ideal.

But

the intensity of his feeling that they were disastrously wrong, showed how much he had loved such women and how much he had been hurt by their failure.

Nov/ at Taos, deliberately

severed from England and perhaps harassed by the antagonism between his wife and Mrs. Luhan, both far different from these “ghosts11 of the past, the depth of his feeling re­ vived in a poem which is both requiem and summons. Of the four poems signed as written at Del Monte Ranch on Mt. Lobo, three concern scenes and happenings at the ranch; the fourth is a satirical diatribe.

"The Blue

117 20 Jay"

catches a moment outside the cahin as Lawrence and

his dog, Bibbles, approach. The bird, metallic and turning his back, is hard and superior.

An image of height and subtle sibilance linked

with a Biblical, image, makes possible the contrast, almost as if set in relief, of the bird's "strident laugh" from the tree, to which it has flown.

Into the scene have come

the other participants in the experience, the poet and the dog, which is incongruous in size and posture, and looks up to the tree with "misgiving."

The poet speaks mockingly

to the dog, intensifying its Incongruity of posture, ap­ pearance and attitude, to both bird and tree, and asking why it looks at him, first as if in blame, then perhaps for interpretation and defense.

Then the poet addresses

the bird in humorous defiance. The poem moves with directness and economy from setting to narrative to colloquy.

In its clarity and

singleness of effect, it is one of the most successful; and of those we have examined, it justifies most

H. ’-7.

Auden's observation that the poems in Birds. Beasts and Flowers escape "the anger and frustration which too often intrudeein his descriptions of human beings.

. . j agape

takes their place, and the joy of vision is equal to the 21 joy in writing." Despite the apprehending of jeering 20 Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers. pp. 150-151.

21

"Some Notes on D. H. Lawrence,” The Nation. 16L (April, 19^7), P* ^82.

118 and bullying in the jay there is a tone of playfulness, a complete rendering of the jay in terns of the setting, the dog, and the human beings.

Knud Merrild notes that when one

of them repeated the jay's line, "I ignore those folk who look out," "Lawrence would answer, the outside world has 22 nothing to offer, one must look in, inside oneself!" The poem entitled "Bibbles,"

23

devoted entirely to

the little dog appearing in "The Blue Jay," is a good il­ lustration of the attachments Lawrence formed for animals and hoir his thought and feeling about them could find its way into his art.

The poem contains almost the entire his­

tory of the emotional relationship with the dog.

A good

explication is to be found in Knud Merrild1s A Poet and Two Painters, in which he tells the story of Lawrence's fond­ ness for the dog, his habit of talking to her, her habit of taking up with anyone, her angering of Lawrence by coming to live with them for a while and then, in heat, running off with the ranch dogs, and Lawrence's intense rage and punish­ ment of her which almost led to a physical encounter between him and the Danes.

In the poem the dog'e greedi­

ness for love and her lack of discrimination are linked 22

Merrild, A Poet and-Two Painters. p. 109. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, pp. 179-196.

Zk Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters. pp. 160-177*

119 with Lawrence’s mistrust of the democratic love-for-humanity ideal.

The poem is a monologue in which Lawrence re-creates

the experience and reflects on it while addressing the dog, which is begging for reconciliation and protection.

The

early stanzas set up the image of the dog's unreliability in terms of description, illustrative incident, and "demo­ cratic live-by-love humanity." You love 'em all. Believe in the One Identity, don't you. You little Walt-Whitm&nesque bitch. The loveable, funny, absurd ways and appearance of the dog are presented; but the poem soon returns to her unfaithful­ ness, and the theme becomes the conflict between "Fidelity 1 Loyalty i Attachment 1"

and "LOVE."

The last stanzas deal

with the immediate situation:' the dog, in heat, seeking refuge from the "great ranch-dogs," asking for reconcilia­ tion and protection.

The last stanza reads:

All right, my little bitch. You learn loyalty rather than loving, And I ’ll protect you. In form, the poem is a good example of Lawrence's colloquial technique under less control than elsewhere, though it might be agreed that the subject called for such a handling. 25 The "occasion" of "Mountain Lion" xiras a walk by Lawrence, Merrild and Gotzsche on which the encounter in the poem took p l a c e . T h e

25 26

first stanza swiftly gives the

Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers, pp. 187-189. Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 106.

120 setting in the canyon. tion in staccato:

The next three sketch the situa­

the sudden encounter with men, “the only

animal in the world to fear," the hesitation, the stran­ gers' possession of a gun, the advance to a meeting.

Ques­

tioned about their burden, a trapped mountain lion, one of the strangers “smiles foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong" and is "quite gentle and dark-faced'.'" The eleventh stanza makes clear the .central feeling of the poem, the sense of loss of vitality and beauty. Lift up her face, Her round, bright face, bright as frost. Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears; And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays, hark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face. Beautiful dead eyes. The strangers go on.

The poet finds the lion's lair, its

empty cavity a link with the feeling of loss, and stands where she once moved and watched.

Instead of her, he looks

out at the “dim of the desert, like a dream, never real," and at the rest of the scene. with its meaning implicit.

Here the poem could end

But, as he does too often,

Lawrence comments explicitly at the end: And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion. And I think ine the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans And never miss them. Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost face of that slim yellow mountain lion. In its control and tension, this iscone of the more effective

121 of the New Mexico poems. "The American Eagle,"27 the last poem in the hook, placed outside the section headings, is entirely satirical. Unlike the other New Mexico poems, it seems not to have its origin in a single experience leading to utterance.

The

existence of a manuscript version which immediately follows the text of "Eagle in New Mexico" suggests that the idea may have originated in the latter poem, with its awareness and defiance of an eagle actually encountered.

If so, al­

though Lawrence signed the published version "Lobo," he may have begun it earlier in Taos. The basic incongruity of the satire is the eagle as a symbol of America and the dove as a symbol of democratic ideals of peace and benevolence.

The dove, having hatched

an eagle, scorns all other birds save her offspring, who uncomfortably tries to look like a pelican giving loose feathers to "the new naked little republics."

His mother

tries to teach him "to coo," but he always ends "with a yawp" (one thinks of Whitman’s "barbaric yawp"). symbolism is sustained throughout.

The bird

The eagle must make up

its mind whether it is a dove, a pelican, "a sort of prosperity-gander / Fathering endless ten-dollar golden eggs," or an eagle. The new Proud Republic Based on the mystery of pride.

^

Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, pp. 205-207-

122 Overweening men, full of power of life, commanding a teeming obedience. One curious item, entitled "0 J Americans 1". and pubTHshedn in the linear form of a poem but in style and gram­ matical form sounding like an essay, may serve to conclude this study of the first New Mexico visit.

It was written

on Easter Sunday, as indicated in the text; evidently word had come to Lawrence at the ranch, probably through Mrs. Luhan, of a meeting on Good Friday between the Indians and government officials in which the Indians were told, as Lawrence reported it, to give up their customs, to keep the children in school and away from the ceremonials, not to trust the “artists and long-haired people who pretend to espouse their cause,11 to lease their land to the govern­ ment and receive machinery in return, etc., etc.

Lawrence's

“poem11 is a plea for the Indian and his way of life. . . . when the outside world calls upon America to act in certain ways, perform certain sacrifices, Why should Americans immediately acquiesce? America.will have to find her own way into the future, the old lights won't show the way. But if, taken at its very best, the title American is a patent of nobility, As it must be, taken at its very best, Then noblesse oblige. It is a point of honour. And at the moment, there is an obligation. It is the obligation of the citizens of this country towards the aborigines of their country.2° New Mexico Quarterly Review. VIII (May, 1938), pp. 75-81.

123 The piece was sent to Lawrence*s agent, but evidently was 29 not published at the time. It is significant, however, that Lawrence was sufficiently moved to write a protest and an appeal, for one sees that along with the excoriation went an individual generosity and affection. To sum up:

Lawrence approached America for the first

time with a well formulated philosophy and theory of civiliza­ tion.

It was a foregone conclusion that he would seek in

contemporary America symptoms of the general decadence he found in his era, and that he should be reminded of the failure of the old life from which he fled.

San Francisco

was “noisy and full of the sound of iron.11 The old problem of money (the artist unappreciated by his times) harassed him at the very outset.

The prosecution of Women in Love

reaffirmed his sense of persecution, and reminded him of Amy Lowell's well meant advice and of her opposition to the previous attempt at America.

Life with Mrs. Sterne meant

motoring about the countryside, contact with an arty, sophisticated set, and pressure to be evangelical regard­ ing the Indian.

It ended in abandonment of a first attempt

at an American novel, and in a domestic quarrel, enmity, and further

flight.

Flight and forgetfulness in the "for

ever unpossessed country" were tempting since man was so 29

Lawrence Clark Powell, The Manuscripts of D . £L. Lawrence (Los Angeles, 1937), P* 3$.

124 unsatisfactory.

The “free" modern woman, wilful and resis­

tant, was later to he broken in Lawrence's stories on the sacrificial altar of the Indians (as Lawrence integrated the Indian religion with the symbolism of his philosophy). In general, the people exhibited a "gripped, iron, benevo­ lent will." The satire of modern America ran parallel, in much of the first American work, with Lawrence's search for a pre-Ghristian, prehistoric tradition with which to link his solution of modern problems.

Even the prophet could

not write a totally new tradition; he must have clues and a background.

He found modern New Mexico, with its mix­

ture of "westernity and motor-cars and art and sage and savage" farcical.

But the sound of the Indian dance in­

duced in him nostalgia for a time "when man was dusky and . not individualised." thus fulfilled.

The hope for a link with the past was

But "there is no going back."

of "conscious human blood" flows onward.

The stream

"My way is my

own," wrote Lawrence, thus indicating his future eclectic use of Indian ritual and symbol to integrate past and «

future.

His forecast for modern America is that 11some

terrible convulsion will take place."

His plan is to

feel the way into the new era "by the dark thread of the old vision." Subjectively, confronting his two worlds, Lawrence

125 felt the 8sick” sense' of an unalterable gulf.

He is the

stranger who cannot return, a transitional figure who must struggle to the future through a terrible crisis.

The

mockery he feels in the Indians is a p a r t of the general feeling of threat and fear that permeates much of the Ameri­ can work.

Part of the reason for this probably lies in the

actual violence occurring about him, both in the United States and in Mexico with-her banditry and revolutions. Mew Mexico was still relatively unsettled and wild.

He already

possessed knowledge of the bloody Aztec sacrifices.

But

it seems inescapable that more important than all these reasons for feeling insecure is Lawrence's complete ideo­ logical isolation from the present. man without a country. cepted tradition.

He is not simply a

He is a man cut off from all ac­

Only Mature and the remote, obscure past

can furnish him images and symbols with which to fashion the future.

In this, one should remark, he was only in a

more exaggerated and difficult position than many other modern writers; even a T. S. Eliot, retaining Christianity, turned to ritual and myth. The only obvious American Influence on technique lies in the staccato colloquialism of Studies in Classic American Literature. a style which Lawrence never used again.' As we have seen, an abandonment of traditional form in poetry accompanied his early revolt.

The American poems exhibit

126

•»*

the same free form as the earlier poems in Birds. Beasts and Flowers.

Lawrence's prose style seems to gain in colloquial

ease until it seems effortless, and the reader needs to he reminded that Lawrence habitually worked through three full drafts of everything.

The prophet never completely subdues

the artist. Indeed, Lawrence was working toward an amalgam of philosophy and art.

He was through with the "self-analyti-

cal stunts" ;•of such writers as Joyce and Proust.

Fiction

must "tackle new propositions without using abstractions," presenting "really new feelings" instead of "snivelling about what is and has been."

For Lawrence, indeed, it must

fill the void left by loss of tradition.

His supreme attempt

at the new tradition was to be The Plumed Serpent. As far as major work was concerned, the first New Mexico visit was a fallow season

in which Lawrence stored

up scene and image, person and conflict, that would.emerge later in the texture of stories.

The thread from past to

future existed in Taos, but the quarrel with Mrs. Luhan made staying there unpleasant, and his imagination had been drawn toward Mexico for some years.

Archaeologlcally it

surpassed New Mexico, and it must have seemed to contain less of the anathema that was Europe and the modern.

The sacri­

ficial tradition of the Mexican Indian probably contributed to Lawrence's "fear complex"; at the same time he had already used the symbolism of death and resurrection for loss of

127 traditional faith and the emergence of new vitality and hope.

In much of the ensuing American work, just such, a

death is enacted in terns of Indian rites (not wholly Mexi­ can).

But the interest in Mexico was not merely artistic.

With Lawrence the life and the work are not easily separated. Two kindred spirits and potential disciples had appeared in the Danish artists, Merrild and G-otzsche.

Lawrence hoped

to found in Mexico, with them as nucleus, his long-dreamed of colony.

PART III FIRST VISITS TO MEXICO: THE PAST:

THE PULL OF EUROPE AND A RETURN

CHAPTER I THE LIFE The Lawrences arrived in Mexico City on March 23, 1923.

After trying a "big American hotel,11 which they did

1 not like, they found the rooms in a "little Italian hotel," which were to be headquarters for some weeks.

In the Museum

they saw the Aztec relics, in the streets the excitement and crowds of political revolution.

2

They visited the Pyramid

of the

Sun at Teotihhacah with Bynner and Johnson, as photo-

graphs

sent to friends showed.

After nearly three weeks,

Lawrence could write that they liked Mexico.

The pyramid

was "very impressive," . . . far more than Pompeii or the Forumy The peons, Indians, are attractive, but Mexico City rather ramshackle and Americanized. But there ^s a good natural feeling — a great carelessness.-' This feeling contrasted, of course, with the tenseness and -

Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 264-.

2 Frieda Lawrence, 154-155. 3

"Not IE But the Wind. . . , " pp.

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 571.

129 absence of feeling Lawrence sensed in the United States, and was always associated by him with southern, dark-skinned people. To Merrild in Taos he wrote that "a rich Englishwoman" had offered them-a house in a suburb, but that he would rather be farther away from the city.

He would begin looking for a

house by making a tour to Puebla, Tehuacan, and Orizaba.^ He wrote Merrild from Orizaba, after an illness, that he'd "had enough" and thought of going to Hew York at the end of the month and thence to Europe.^

But immediately,

indeed on the same day if Merrild's dating is to be trusted, back in Mexico City where he received a letter from the Danes, he wrote that he was "still going to look for a place," in­ deed was to see a Dane who had a farm the next day.

He sent

them a note to give a man in Los Angeles if they needed help, and added, "If ever you get really hard up, let me know at once: both of you."

The pillaging and destruction

by the revolutionaries made it difficult and dangerous to L

find a house outside a town, but he would try Jalisco. As Lawrence thus struggled with the difficulties of Mex­ ico, news came from England that J. M. Murry was starting a new magazine, The Adelphi.

Murry proposed that Lawrence return

^ Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 265^ Ibid*, P- 27I4-• 6 Ibid., p. 292.

130 to England and become editor.?

0n April 27 Lawrence, wrote

to him from Mexico City giving him permission to use material from Fantasia of the Unconscious.

He liked Mexico but,

though he was "still uncertain" of his movements, felt sure he would be "in England before autumn." summer here, and write a bit. S'.A. "

He might "stay the

I couldn't- do anything in U.

He added that he was to lunch with the Minister of

Education,

8

and that he found the Mexican government "good

idealists and sensible," but felt himself "as usual outside 9 the scheme of such things." He may have begun to plan the novel The Plumed Serpent. Mrs. Lawrence wrote to the Danes in April:

"We saw a ter­

rible bull fight and ran away after ten m i n u t e s . T h e opening chapter of The Plumed Serpent uses this scene. Late in April Lawrence went to Guadalajara and Lake 11 Chapala. He liked the country, and within a few days the Lawrences were installed at Zaragoza No. 4, Chapala (Jalisco)., Lawrence wrote to the Danes describing the house near the Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage, p. 180. -

8 This was Professor Jose Yasconcelos, who was one of the intellectual leaders of the anti-positivist movement that inspired the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Professor Vasconcelos remembers Lawrence with warmth, but makes no detailed, speci­ fic comment. 9 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 572.

10 Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 293.

11 Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . . ," p. 175.

131 lake and the village of Chapala, two hours from Guadalajara. He thought they would like to paint there, hoped they would come, and, evidently from a sense of obligation and responsi­ bility, sent them fifty dollars for two book jackets 1? had said he had never received. 1

Seltzer

He advised them to get a

guarantee for the check from Will Levington Comfort, if they needed the money quickly.

Merrild tells how, when they called

on Comfort, he greeted them with "So you are the two homo­ sexual lovers that stayed with him in the mountains all win­ ter, do tell me about it."

Merrild and Gotzsche made it quite

clear that there was no basis in their relationship with Lawrence for such a prurient speculation.

Put in his place,

Comfort guaranteed the check, and produced a letter from Lawrence for them, which, they found at the bank, contained another check.1 3 .

Both friendship and a leader’s responsi­

bility for potential disciples seem involved in Lawrence's concern. The Lawrences remained at Chapala through June, 1923. To Murry Lawrence wrote that he did not know why he found it "so hard to come to England" but supposed it was the "in­ digested novel" on which he was working.

It should be

finished "in its first rough form" by the end of June, at which time he planned to start for England via New York, to

12

Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 29I4-

13 Ibid.. p. 2 99-

132 arrive In London “"by early August.” scene" of the novel,

The "first slight

"the beginning of a bull-fight in Mexico

City," was being typed, and he would send it "in two days' time."

It was "complete in itself," and Murry might use it.

At the end of the letter he returned to the problem of Eng­ land.

His reason for staying in Chapala was not that he

was "so very keen on leading a remote country life," and he loathed "the ‘playboy1 attitude to liife. "

But he thought of

England with "profound mistrust." He had been offered a partnership in a "banana hacienda" but supposed he had "bet„1^ ter see England again first." By May 31 he had finished ten chapters of the novel. A comment on Mexico in a letter to Mrs. Lawrence's mother in Germany showed the hope and vision that were taking shape. The people are . . . half civilised, half wild. If they only had a new faith they might be a new, young, beautiful people. But as Christians they don't get any further, are melancholy inside, live without hope, are suddenly wicked, and don't like tov/work. But they are also good, can be gentle and honest, are very quiet, and are not at all greedy for money, and to me that is marvellous, they care so little for possessions, here 4i America where the whites care for nothing celse. ~ Life at Chapala was the source of some of the ten­ sions and some of the people that appeared in the novel. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 57^-575• Frieda Lawrence, 177.

"Not I, But the Wind. . , " pp. 176-

133 The threat of violence was omnipresent.

A man armed with

a pistol slept on the Lawrences* verandah, and it was not safe to walk outside.the village for fear of bandits. Twenty soldiers were stationed in the village.

At one end

of the house lived examples of the undeveloped people in the servants, who were there "not because we want them, but because they seem to have their holes there, like rab­ bits— Isabel, Carmen, Maria, Daniele, Pedra and Francisco. >

Witter Bynner, staying at a nearby hotel with

Willard Johnson, afforded Lawrence an ideological antago­ nist as he wrote.

Johnson was; confided in.by both, and

saw, as he typed their manuscripts, >the Imaginative use each made of their'disagreement.

Bynner saw Lawrence as

a man "without a spui," in a "spirit of evil" choosing the "dark side of the world," and put this conception into his poetry.

To Lawrence, Bynner was the democratic-idealist

gone soft and corrupt, seeking to compensate with sensa1? tion the loss of an integrated life. Bynner and Johnson he portrayed as "Owen" and "Villiers" In The Plumed Serpent. If that novel contains much dialectic, the situation at Sayula was calculated to call it forth. Another American who encountered Lawrence at Chapala, —

Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 301. Bud Vill^rs (Willard Johnson), "D. H. Lawrence in Mexico," The Southwest Review, 15 (Summer, 1930) ^25433 passim.

I3lf Frederic W. Leighton, found Lawrence expressing a "doctrine of cosmic superiority” involving a "select fraternity of ruling spirits. . . destined to rule the world.”

This

accounted for Lawrence's being both radical and conserva­ tive.

Having fought his own way "against the restrictions

. . . imposed by vested interests (economic, moral, social and literary)," Lawrence "asserted the rights of the esoteric ones who command by cosmic patent."

Leighton found this

aspect of Lawrence both fascinating and repelling. About the middle of June, both the Lawrences wrote /

to Merrild and Gotzsche.

Frieda said that Lawrence did

"not want to go to Europe" but was "not sure of what he wants."

She felt that they could all "have a good time”

together at Chapala.

Lawrence, finishing the letter, said

that they were going to look at a farm they might rent. If they took it, he wanted the Danes to help manage it. Business might take him to Hew York for a time, but he planned a return in September.

"It’s an uncertain life—

and things never behave as they should."^-9

At the end of

the month he wrote that they had looked at places, but that expectations of more revolution made living on them risky, and one would build something up "only to have it destroyed." ^ Frederic W. Leighton, "The Bite of Mr. Lawrence," Laughing Horse, D. H. Lawrence Humber (April, 1926), pp. l6-l8 passim.

^■9 Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 30i|..

135 He was giving up the Mexican plan “for the present at least," and they were leaving soon for Mexico City, expecting to be in Hew York by July 15.

He planned now to go to England.

"It is no good, I know I am European, so I may as well go back and try it once more."

However, he was not giving up

the idea of "a life in common once more.11

If he couldn't

"stand Europe," they would return to Mexico and brave the dangers. there.

"But if Europe is at all possible, much better Because the Mexicans are rather American in that,

that they would rather pull life doxm than let it grow 20 up." One of Lawrence's last letters from Chapala, on July 2, to Miss M. L. Skinner, an Australian, indicated the writ­ ing task that was to occupy much of his time in the next months.

It concerned the manuscript of a novel by her,

The House of Ellis. which he expected to find in New York. He would "read it carefully," consider what publisher it should be submitted to, and, if she didn't mind, make "a

21 few suggestions."

The 'Suggestions" grew Into a complete

rewriting by Lawrence, The Boy in the Bush. By July 15 the Lawrences were in New Orleans. Lawrence found that his "old feeling of detestation" returned in the United States.

He planned to stay in New York only

20 Ibid., p. 306.

21

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 576-577.

136 long enough to have the manuscript of the first draft of The Plumed Serpent. typed and to correct the proofs of Kangaroo. Birds. Beasts and Flowers, and his translation of Verga's Maestro don G-esualdo. ~ Then, rather than go to 22 England, he “would like best" to return to Mexico. On August ? in New York he had “almost decided not to go to Europe.’1 He wrote to Merrild and G-^tzsche that he thought, when Frieda had sailed alone in a week or so, he would join them in Los Angeles and “have a talk, about the future."

He

proposed various plans, wintering at Palm Springs or in the hills, going to Mexico, going “packing among the mountains,“ or sailing in the South Pacific, the Danes working as sai­ lors, himself “as cook."

Frieda, he supposed, would want

to join him “at the end of October," and hy that time they 23 could have made definite plans. The new plan represented a breach between the Lawrences.

She wanted to see her children and other rela-

tlves in Europe.

oil

Catherine Carswell says that "on the

quay" they had “perhaps the very worst quarrel" of their 25 lives. There was, of course, the pull of Murry and The Adelphi. but to him Lawrence had written of his editorial 22 23

Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters. pp. 307-308. Ibid., p. 310.

2 k

Frieda Lawrence, "Not 25

I

But the Wind. . ," p. 157*

Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage, p. 190*

137 policy, No, I don't feel we are enemies: why that? I was disappointed with the apologetic kind of appeal in the Adelphi: but you most obviously aren't my enemy in it. And anyhow you make a success of the thing: so what does it matter what I say? He asked Murry to look after Frieda in England.

The de­

veloping difference between Murry and Lawrence is discussed from two extremes by Mrs. Carswell in The Savage Pilgrimage. and by Murry in Son of Woman and Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence. Seltzer had found the Lawrences a house in the country in New Jersey while they awaited her sailing.

To

Lawrence the scene was unreal; the people were “quenched.“ New Kork was "like a house of cards set up."

He liked "it

best down at the Battery, where the rag^tag lie on the 27 grass." He met "practically nobody." He wrote to Amy Lowell, now not far away, of his whereabouts, and later-she was in the midst of the Keats study and in ill health— received an invitation to visit her.

But the visit was

not made despite continued correspondence and even long distance phone calls.

Mrs. Lawrence sailed on August 18.

On the same day Lawrence wrote to Miss Lowell that he was sorry they were not seeing her; he knew of her bad health and hadn't been sure that "she wanted to be troubled by

26 27

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 578-579. Ibid.. pp. 591-592.

138

visitors.11 He felt that he should have gone to England, but his “inside self wouldn't let" him.

In New York he

felt that people had a "sort of pre-determination to jeer," and he was left "with one great desire, to get away from oQ

people altogether," He began his journey toward California at once.

He

stopped in Buffalo, where he stayed with Mrs. Freeman, the companion of the Apache trip during the early days with Mrs, Luhan in the fall of 1922.

Evidently he was curious about

Mrs. Luhan*s early life there, going to see her mother and her old friends.

He told Mrs. Luhan later that "it ex­

plained so much to him."2^

Indeed, Mrs. Luhan was to figure

in his later stories of New Mexico and Mexico. His trip also involved a stop of a day in Chicago, where, perhaps indicative of his desire for isolation, he evidently did not communicate with Harriet Monroe.

Several

months later he wrote to her of Chicago as "a queer big city with a sort of palpitation. I couldn't quite under30 s t a n d . T h e n , on August 30.,- he arrived in Los Angeles, where he was met at the station by Merrild and Ootzsche.^l For a time Lawrence stayed at the Hotel Miramar in 28 29

Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle, p. 639* Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 117*

30 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 59^* ^

Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 312*

139 Santa Monica, since the Danes were working on some murals in that city.

". ♦ . Without Frieda he was restless and 32 in a lonely mood.'* On September 9 they drove to Lompoc 33 to witness the eclipse of the sun next day. There, too, at Point Honde, the party saw the wrecks of seven destroyers which had run aground.

Lawrence noted the one event as

“very impressive,“ the other "depressive."-^

When the job

in Santa Monica was finished, the Danes rented Lawrence a room with light housekeeping on Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, near their own lodgings.

Although they were somewhat skepti­

cal of his plan to go to sea, "Lawrence was actually chasing ships and seeking hire in Los Angeles Harbour, San Pedro and Wilmington," without success.

35

There was some gaiety

and high spirits, a visit to a dance hall where Lawrence, though he chided them at times, grinned when teased for not dancing, a visit to Hollywood Bowl where Lawrence "made jokes" and they'irritated their neighbors, a midnight tea afterward during which noise and laughter brought reprimands 36 from a landlady. From Santa Monica on September 2, Lawrence had 32 Ibid-, p. 313. 33 There is a reminiscence of this event, without much bearing on this study, by Jeanne d'Orge. ih. '

35 36

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 584. Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters. p. 319. Ibid.. pp. 320-322.

140 written to Miss Skinner that he wished to recast her novel, apparently brought with him from New York.-^

This time— -

consuming and difficult task, carried on in the midst of travel through rather wild sections of Mexico, occupied

°8

much of his time until November 15, when it was finished.'' He wrote “it all out again," following her "MS. almost exactly, but giving a unity, a rhythm, and a little more psychic development."

He was not sure that she would ap­

prove his attempt, taking her 11inner cue, to make a rather daring development, psychologically."

39

As we shall see,

this “development" was, in a sense, a projection of Lawrence's own feelings as he struggled to make good his plans for a colony in Mexico and to resist the voices that called him back to England. On September 5, 1923, Lawrence and G-otzsche left Los Angeles to journey down the west coast of Mexico, "to look again for a place to live."

California had seemed "abso­

lutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort."

A stay had rather amused him,

but America exhausted "the springs of one's soul" and lived "to see all real spontaneity expire." 37 38

But it did not "grind

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 583* Ibid.. p. 591.

39 Ibid., p. 590*

141 40 on an old nerve as Europe" seemed to. to accompany•them.

Merrild declined

He felt that without Mrs. Lawrence the

enterprise would he a failure; he preferred the South Seas; 41 and he felt too much under t>he influence of Lawrence. 42 After they had gone, however, he felt regret. Letters from hoth Lawrence and Gotzsche kept him informed of their progress and of their feelings. October 5 from Navajo Lawrence wrote that the west coast was "a little too wild. fulness.

. . . One wants a bit of hope­

These wild lost places seem so hopeless."

He

43 felt as if he "should wander over the brink of existence." Their destination was Guadalajara, and Lawrence was already thinking of the best way for Frieda to get there from Eng44 land. The trip was very uncomfortable and hot, an alter45 nation of slow train, horseback, and car. Merrild felt it probable that the hardships "overtaxed" Lawrence's strength, and that he longed for Frieda. 40

Ibid., p. 585.

41 Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, pp. 322-323. 42

Ibid., pp. 331-332.

43 Ifrid.. p. 333. 44 , ILld.. p. 334. 45 Ibid.. p. 337. ^

Ibid.. p. 339.

142 In a letter to Merrild from Guadalajara October 22, Gotzsche analyzed Lawrence's fluctuating, conflicting feel­ ings.

He found Lawrence, while scorning sentimentality,

full of emotion.

He had not liked going to Japala Ode]

without Frieda, with whom he had seen it in the spring; then when he was there he was deeply moved by a change in the "spirit" of the place, unaware, Gotzsche thought, that "his own mood or frame of mind" determined "his impressions of the moment, or the landscape." He had willed himself into belief that this was the place he loved, and the place to live. He is much more sentimental than he will admit. And then he is offended and cross because Frieda is happy to be in England. She writes it is the best country in the world, and wants him to come, etc. Deepest Inside himself he is proud of England and if it wasn't for his author ideas, he would go back at once. But he wants to start that "new life" away d*om money,"jjU^st and greediness, back to nature and seriousness. He had to agree with Lawrence that the farms they had found were unsuitable.

He felt that Lawrence needed

. . . something else to think about, and something else to do besides his writings. . . . As he lives now, he only writes a little in the morning and the rest of the day he just hangs around on a bench or drifts over to the market place, hands in pockets, perhaps buying some candy, fruit, or something. There are signs enough of trouble in this, but three days later, on October 25, Gotzsche wrote that he was "avoid­ ing Lawrence as much as possible at present, because, a7 48

Ibid., p. 340. Ibid., p. 341.

143 considering all things, he is really insane when he is as 49 now." He felt that Frieda had “influenced his friends in England, because they all. write that he must come back and that England is beginning to be the leading country in culture again."

Frieda was not writing to Lawrence,and

Gotzsche sometimes thought that Lawrence was afraid he 50 would be l£ft alone. Afterward Mrs. Lawrence felt that Lawrence had been right.

“I should have gone to meet him

in Mexico, he should not have come to Europe; these are 51 the mistakes we make, sometimes irreparable." Gn the same day that Gotzsche wrote of Lawrence*s troubled mind, Lawrence wrote to J. M

Murry in England:

"Yes, I think I shall come back now.

I think I shall be

back by the beginning of December. on the Adelphl.

Work awhile with you

Then perhaps we'll set off to India.

Qulen Sabe?11 The letter was essentially one of capitula­ tion to the pressures from England, but in it Lawrence held to his theory.

England might lead the world again, but

she must . . . pick up a lost trail. And the end of the lost trail Is here in Mexico. . ... One hand in space is not enough. It needs the other hand from the dpposite end of space, to clasp and form, the bridge. The dark hand'and the white.*2 ------------

I M d . , P. 343. 50 51 ^

Ibid. Frieda Lawrence,

"Not 1 But the Wind. . . ," p. 160.

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 588.

144 Lawrence and Gotzsche remained in Guadalajara until the middle of N0vember, when Lawrence wrote to Miss Skinner that he had finished The Boy in the Bush and that Seltzer wanted to publish it.

On the seventeenth they were in

Mexico City, where they spent a few days.

On November 22

they sailed from Vera Cruz on a freighter, Lawrence for England, Gotzsche to continue on to Denmark.

After the de­

cision to go to England, Gotzsche. had found Lawrence him­ self again, although he thought a poor excuse the explana­ tion that the changeable air made him 11‘crazy1 once in a 53 while." Lawrence had offered to pay his fare to Europe, and a visit home was a partial solution of Gotzsche1s pro­ blem now that the Mexican plan had failed.

At the last

minute in Guadalajara, Lawrence had wanted to stay, feeling that a visit to England would be fatal to him, then had 54changed his mind the next morning. Merrild, commenting on the irresolution and unpleasantness, felt that Lawrence should not be judged "from his attacks of hysterical out­ bursts or when he was off balance physically or psycholo­ gically, but rather when he was composed and stable. . . ." Then he would be found "the good shepherd and great giant 55 that he really w a s ." 53

Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 34-5.

54Ibid., p. 350.

55 Ibid., p. 34-9.

1 There followed now a European interlude in the American experience.

Lawrence's revulsion and mistrust

followed him throughout the journey to England.

From

Havana on November 25 he wrote that he was "already sick of ship."

Gotzsche reported that Lawrence now hated the

Atlantic Ocean and preferred the Pacific, whereas before he had always said that the Pacific had "no life to it." 58 The ship touched at Plymouth on December 11, where

57

Lawrence debarked and'went by train to London, Gotzsche continuing on to Denmark. Met at the London station by Murry, and an old friend, S. S. Koteliansky, Lawrence was at once confronted by Murry's plan to collaborate in the editorship of The 59 Adelphl. Murry had been estranged from Lawrence since the 1916 episode in Cornwall— an estrangement, he attributed ,6o to "Lawrence's quest of 'mindlessness.'" His desire now for reconciliation had resulted from a series of events. Lawrence had learned of Katherine-Mansfield's (Mrs. Murry's ) 56 57

Ibid.. p. 351. Ibid.. p. 357.

58

Ibid., p. 352. In a letter to Merrild dated Decem­ ber 20, Lawrence said that he had left Gotzsche on the ship at Plymouth nine days ago. 59 J. M. Murry, Son of Woman; The Story of D. H. Lawrence (New York: 1931), pp. 306-309 passim. 60

Ibid.. p. 303.

146 illness in December, 1922, and had sent her Fantasia of the Unconscious, wanting her to read i t . ^

Aftfer her death in

January, Murry read the hook, and its declaration of faith was convincing to him in his "new half-convalescent, half­ confident condition. "

It confirmed his decision to found

T h e .Ad e.Ip lit, which began by publishing chapters from the Fantasia. Lawrence.

His avowed intention was to prepare a place for

62

In his letter to Murry of October 25 Lawrence

had not committed himself to more than working "awhile" with him.

Now in London Murry evidently was not prepared

for Lawrence's thoroughgoing, nihilistic mistrust of the status quo.

Murry reports that Lawrence suggested "that

The Adelphl should attack everything, everything; and ex­ plode in one blaze of denunciation."

When Murry "turned

the notion aside," Lawrence proposed that he "give it all up and go back with him to New Mexico, and there begin the nucleus of a new s o c i e t y . M u r r y discusses the contro­ versy from his point of view in Son of Woman, in which his theme is that in Lawrence "we are witnessing a lapse -from humanity," and disintegration.

In the Fantasia. Lawrence

. . . had seen and admitted that his was a peculiar destiny, a destiny which coming generations must avoid. —

_

.

—

_ g _

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 569. 62 Murry, Son of Woman. pp. 305-306. 63 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 588, 64

Murry, Son of Woman. p. 3°9.

14? To make disintegration a universal necessity w as, in reality, to deny that his disintegration was disinte­ gration, by making himself a forerunner on a path which mankind must follow. This Lawrence was not; he was the very opposite of this. And he could not admit it. Lawrence could not surrender himself. His pride is become a madness. He cannot admit that he is wrong, that he has failed, that he is beaten, even though^his mind is distraught in a chaos of contradic­ tions.55 Here Murry expresses the extreme traditionalist view of Lawrence as totally :&isintegrated.

A defence of Lawrence

in the controversy may be found in Catherine Carswell1s The Savage Pilgrimage.

She finds that Murry was willing

to compromise with readers indignant about the ideas in Lawrence1^ essays, and that the love of success usurped in 66 Murry the desire for courage and significance. Her loyalty to Lawrence and her ultimate confidence in his ideas for the future run throughout her book. Who shall say that Lawrence was wrong? To him it was as clear as in old time it was to Noah or to Lot. It may yet be found that before a new spirit can grow up in the world some men and women will have to get together agd leave their homes in a special kind of faith. One thing is certain.

While Lawrence did contribute

essays to The Adelphl, he did not long contemplate remain­ ing in England..

On December 17, six days after hi a arrival,,

he was writing to Mrs. Luhan

in Taos that he thought he

65 Ibid., pp. 312-313. ^

Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage, pp. 186-189 passim.

67 Ibid., p. 199.

1^8

would be back In America by March. This is a very crucial time for all of us. I feel if we can pull through to 1925, we have saved the situation. Meantime it's hell. England is a tomb to me, no more.— Yet perhaps it's as well I went away from that revolution in Mexico. But I don't belong over here any more. It's like being among the dead of one's previous existence.®^ A reconciliation with Mrs. Luhan had taken place in October, 1923, when, alone with Gotzsche in Mexico, he had received 69 from her what must have been an apologetic letter. Now he asked if they should come to see her in March. Later, if there were no revolutionary trouble, he wanted to go to Oaxaca in Mexico.

70

On December 20 he wrote to Merrild

71 that "our old plans of having a ranch may still mature.” At this time Lawrence felt that Murry wanted to come with him, and "also, probably, Dorothy Brett, who paints, is deaf, forty, very nice, and daughter of Viscount Esher. The plan and his relationship with his English friends reached a dramatic climax during this London visit 73 at a dinner given by the Lawrences at the Oafe Royal. The guests were Murry, Kotleiansky, Mark Gertler, Mr. and Mrs. Carswell, Mary Cannan, and Dorothy Brett.

68 69 70 It

72

^

It was

Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 128. Ibid.. pp. 118-122. Ibid.'. p. 128. Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 352. Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 130. Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage, p. 205 ff.

149 evidently begun as a friendly gesture at gaiety on Lawrence's part.

After wine, a port that Lawrence protested did not

agree with him, and a speech of praise by Koteliansky, Lawrence asked them to come with him to America.

There were

various answers, and Mrs. Carswell records in particular Murry's emotional ,,yes,, and speech that he had "betrayed" Lawrence in the past.but would not again.

74

Murry defends

himself and reports the speech as "I love you Lorenzo, but I won't promise not to betray you," in Reminiscences of 75 D. H. Lawrence. The London visit lasted until January 23, when the 76 Lawrences crossed the Channel to Paris, where they planned to stay a fortnight.

There, refreshed by a few days' rest

he began "to amuse himself by writing s t o r i e s . M r s . Carswell thinks that one story "must have been Jimmy and 77 the Desperate Woman.'" Prom Paris the Lawrences went to Baden-Baden to visit Mrs. Lawrence's mother, arriving 78 February 7 for a two weeks' stay. A letter to Murry put the decision to go to New Mexico up to him.

Lawrence was

annoyed by his Adelphl articles because of a preoccupation ?4

Ibid.. p. 212.

75

J. M. Murry, Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence (New York, 1933), pp. 186-187. 76 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 136. 77 78

Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage. p.. 215. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 601.

150 with self.

"Why make it so Important?

yourself outside yourself?"

Can't you focus

If he wanted "to go to America

as an unemotional man making an adventure, M e n allons Another important matter was pulling Lawrence to­ ward America.

He had heard from Selt&er, his publisher,

only once since leaving Mexico, did not know whether he was depositing royalties in the bank, and was worried about payment of his American income tax.

The Lawrences left

Baden-Baden about the twentieth, stayed a few days in Paris, whence Lawrence wrote of visits to Versailles ("stupid, 80 so very big and flat") and Chartres, and arrived back in " '■ 81 London about February 26. The stay in Paris was pro­ longed in the hope that he would receive a reply to his w 82 cables to Seltzer. He wrote ahead to Mrs. Carswell ask­ ing her tottell no one that he was returning to London, After six days at a London hotel, the Lawrences and Dorothy Brett sailed on March 5 for New York, arriving March 11. On board the Aquitanla Lawrence wrote to Murry that it go

was "good to get away from the doom of Europe."

Next

day in New York he added a postscript describing their 79 Ibid., pp. 602-603. 80 Frieda Lawrence, 81 82 83

"Not

I

But the Wind. . . ," p. 183.

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 603-60if. Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage. p. 216. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 605.

151 arrival and advising Murry to come on a smaller ship by way of Galveston,

Seltzer had met them.

He looks very diminished, and him so small already. Apparently his business has gone very badly this winter, and he has sleepless nights. So, it seems, might I. My money is at present in thin air, but I believe It will materialize bit by bit. The money difficulty of earlier days had returned to haunt him, but there was no recrimination in his attitude. The return to Europe had been a failure at least as far as Lawrence1s assumption of any place in its institu­ tions, even one as small as The Adelphl, was concerned. "The nightmare" of World War I described in Kangaroo had certainly never passed entirely from his consciousness. He had prevailed in a complicated, intense contest of wills and aims, although Murry and others were never to join him. Now he was ready to make another attempt to break with the past and to realize in his daily life, and in his art, chiefly through revision of The Plumed Serpent, the inte­ gration of the "mental" consciousness and the "blood" con­ sciousness needed to save both himself and the world. _ _

Ibid., p . 606.

CHAPTER II THE WORK Not long after M s first arrival in Mexico, in March, 1923, Lawrence wrote a brief essay, "Au Revoir, U. S. A.," which contrasted his feelings for the two countries and in­ dicated the intense interest he took in Mexico and its 1 ancient religious symbolism. He found that the United States "put a strain on the nerves," Mexico a "strain on the temper."

He preferred the latter.

Most of the essay,

after this introductory contrast, which is returned to at the end, reveals his interest in the spirit of place he found in Mexico.

Spanish culture had not penetrated deeply;

churches and palaces seemed "just on the point of falling down."

The peon.was still Indian "behind the Cross" and

had a more "lively light in his eyes" than the northern Indian.1,2 He noted the paradox in the modern young Mexican artist who was personally gentle but produced caricatures hideous and grim like the ancient Aztec carvings.

Despite

what prettiness anthropologists might make of Mexican myths, "the gods bit. Published in The Laughing Horse. No. 8, 1923, a little magazine edited in the United States by Willard Johnson, who was with the Lawrences during the early weeks of the first Mexican visit.

2 p.

105.

Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. ------------------------------------ --- --------

^ All of these impressions appeared later in The Plumed Serpent.

153 There is none of the phallic proocupation of the Mediterranean. Here they hadn't got even so far as hot-blooded sex. Pangs, and cold serpent folds, . and bird-snakes with fierce cold blood and claws .HHe was bewildered by the dead-earnestness, the utter absence of the "amiably comic."

In this lack of concealment of

"the fangs" of the gods he found the reason for his feeling of. exasperation.

Apparently he meant by this that he felt

the antagonism of a constant threat of the human by the non­ human.

In the United States, where white culture had domi­

nated, the same spirit, concealed, produced only a feeling of "unbearable tension."-* It must be remembered that Lawrence had gone to Mexico in the spring of 1923 with the idea of founding, with himself, Frieda, Merrild and Gotzsche as a nucleus, the colony of which he had dreamed since the War days in England.

As he searched for'a place to live, the ancient

Mexican symbolism presented itself as a means of expressing imaginatively the new way of life and the conflicts involved in its attainment.

By the end of June, at Lake Chapala,

he had completed the first draft of The Plumed Serpent♦ His first American months, in Hew Mexico, had been relatively unproductive.

Under the stimulus of.Mexico, where the old

gods seemed near and the modern civilization Lawrence

^ Ibid., pp. 105-106. 5 Ibid-> P- 106•

154 detested seemed only a veneer, easily penetrated, he be- gan to make what is perhapshhis most Important attempt at integration in the novel form.

The book was not finished

until February, 1925, in Oxaca, after the return to England and a second New Mexico- sojourn.

Discussion of it is re­

served for that period of the American experience. Lawrence's chief literary activity after the parting with Mrs. Lawrence in New York was revision of Miss Skinner's Australian novel, The House of Ellis.

He wrote “it all out

again" between early September in California and November 15, 6 1923, in Mexico, making “a rather daring development, psy­ chologically .“

What was there in this laborious task to

interest him besides the chance to help a friend', and to improve a promising bit of work? situation.

One must remember his

He had decided not to return to the past in EngL

land, and had come West to make another attempt to work out a destiny with the help of Merrild and Gotzsche.

Separated

from Mrs. Lawrence, and exploring country new to him, he was in something of the same position as the hero of the novel, a young Englishman x^orking out his destiny in the strange environment of Australia.

Here was a chance to

deal imaginatively once more with his central problem, re­ bellion against the conventions of civilization and the need forformulate new ideas and attitudes.

Under Lawrence's

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. pp. 583, 591.

155 hand, Mias Skinner's chief character, Jack Grant, became a Lawrencean hero, defiant of conventional codes, confused and lost for a time, hut emerging mature and sure of his essential desires. The dominant note of Lawrence's non-conformity is struck early in the first chapter in the description of Jack's Australian mother, whom the hoy loves while he is indifferent to his conventional, English father. She was really the dearest thing imaginable. But the feeling that there was no fence between sin and virtue. As if sin were, so to speak, the un­ reclaimed bush, and goodness were only the claims that the settlers had managed to fence in. And there was so much more bush than settlement. And the one was as good as the other, save that they served different ends. And that you always had the wild endless bush al-1 round your little claim, and coming and going was always through the wild and innocent, but non-moral bush. Which non-moral bush had a devil in it. Oh, yes .' But a wild and comprehensible devil, like bush-rangers who did brutal and lawless things. Whereas the tame devil of the settlement, drunkenness and greediness and foolish pride, he was more scaring.7 Among the Ellis family Jack meets the sisters, Mary and Monica, who become the Lawreneean heroines of his conflict with the conventional world.

Monica has a “dare-devil"

quality but tends to dominate; Mary has potentialities but Q is submissive to conventions. Jack also finds the men who play the most important roles, Lennie and Tom who become Lawrence, Kangaroo. pp. 6-7 ^ Ibid., p. 86.

156 his comrades, and from another branch of the family,Easu, who becomes his enemy.

Jack and Easu become rivals over

Mionica, and they come to represent two kinds of power.

At

one,.; point as Monica looks at them, J.ack is . . . soft and warm with a certain masterfulness that was more animal than human, like a centaur, as if he were one blood with the horse, and had the centaur's horsesense, its non-human power, and wisdom of hot bloodknowledge. She watched the boy, and her brow darkened, and her face was fretted as if she were denied something. She wanted to look again-at Easu, with his fixed hard will that excited her. But she couldn't. The queer soft power of theqboy was too much for her, she could not save herself.-* In part Easu represents Lawrence’s conception of the danger and brutality of conscious will:

Jack contains the subtler,

spontaneous poorer of the blood-consciousness. Midway in the novel, after Father Ellis's death, Tom and Jack, Lennie. refusing to go, make a horse-back trip across Australia that is somewhat reminiscent of Lawrence's and Gotzsche’s journey into Mexico.

As they travel, Jack

struggles with the thought of England. was a strong pivot to all the living.

"In England there But here the centre

pin was gone, and the lives seemed to spin in a weird con10 fusion." Yet what he "had rebelled against in England was the tight grip, the.fixed hold over everything.

He

liked this looseness and carelessness of Australia.

Till

^ Ibid., p. 130.

10 Ibid., P. 237.

157 11

it seemed to him crazy.

And then it scared him."

The

idea of disintegration is then extended into an image of death. One God or the other must take them at the end. -it Either the dim white god of the heavenly infinite. Or else the great black Moloch of the living death. Devoured and digested in the living death.I* Jack thinks that he is going the latter way. Since I am travelling the dark road, let meogo in pride. Let me be a Lord of Death, since the reign of the white Lords of Life, like my father, has be­ come sterile and a futility. Let me be a Lord of Death.13 He hopes for a "defiant, unsubmissive life" and a "violent 14 death," 'The enemies are endless. Always a new one cropping up, along the strange dusky road of the years, where you go with your head up, and your eyes open, and your spine sharp and electric, ready to fight your man and take your woman, on and on down the years, into the last black embrace of death. 3 Thus, in his hero, Lawrence once more worked with the con­ flicts that assailed him, and arrived at the solution of pride, courage, and unsubmissiveness except to death, After his return from the trip, Jack finds that Monica has had a child out of wedlock, ostensibly by an

11 12

Ibid., p. 238. Ibid., p. 239.

13 Ibid. 14 lb id., p. 241. 15 Ibid., p p . 240-241.

158 ineffectual man who is willing to take care of her, hut actually by the brutal Easu. the bush.

He kills Easu and flees into

As he wanders there, lost and dying, he thinks

of himself as a Lord of Death.

Non-conformity in life

means mastery in death. I hope I die fighting, and go into the black halls of death as a master: not as a scavenger servant, like Easu, or a sort of butler, like my father. I don't want to be a servant in the black house of death. I want to be a master.1° Rescued by Tom, Lennie, and Mary, he passes through a long illness.

When he becomes well, he

to a man.

has changed from a boy

It as Has if he had lost his softness in the

other-world of death, and brought back Instead some of the relentless power that belongs there. 17 touch of mockery."

And the inevitable ■ ' •r

Acquitted of murder, since he had shot in self-de­ fence, he claims Monica and marries her.

In her acceptance

of him she must make the choice of the Lawrencean heroine. He would never belong to her. This had made her rebel so terribly against the thought of him. Because she would have to belong to him. Now he had arrived again before her like a doom, a doom she still fought against, but could no longer withstand. . . . It took away from her her own strange and fascinating female poorer, which she couldn't bear to part with. But at the same time she felt saved, because her own power frightened her, having brought her to a brink of nothingness that was like madness. The nothingness that fronted her with 16 Ibid., p. 318.

1

?

Ibid., p.. 327.

159 Percy was worse than submitting to this man beside her. After all, this man was magical.After much hardship, Jack, Tom, and Lennie find gold on their mining claim,

’’Jack wanted to make a place on earth

for a few aristocrats-to-the-bone." But "first he must 19 conquer gold." At the same time Jack inherits some pro­ perty, and reluctantly returns from the Isolation of the mine to Perth and the Ellises to receive it.

In the last

three chapters, he has one more failure and one more triumph in his battle with conformity.

It seems possible

that this ending is related to Lawrence’s situation as he wrote, alone in Mexico while Mrs. Lawrence sought to bring him to her in England. potentiality in her.

Encountering Mary, he feels the old In a conversation with her, a young

friend of hers, Hilda Blessington, and her uncle and aunt, he says: I am faithful to my own inside, when something stirs in me. Gran Ellis said that was God in me. I know there's a God outside of me. But he tells me to go my own way, and never be frightened of people and the world, only be frightened of Him. And if I felt I really wanted two wives, for example, I would have them and keep them both. 0 Later, in a scene with Mary, he proposes that she come with him to be a second wife, and she refuses. feels Justified.

18 1 9

20

Ibid.. p. 335. Ibid.. p.

JkZ.

Ibid.. p. 35A,

Afterwards he

160 He wanted, to pitch his camp in the wilderness: with the faithful Tom, and Lennie, and his own wives. Wives, not wife. And the horses, and the come-and-go, and the element of wildness. Not to he tamed. . . . He wanted to go like Abraham under the wild sky, speak­ ing to a fierce^wild Lord, and having angels stand in his doorway. -

.'

t

There is again, perhaps, a reminiscence of his situation with Mrs, Lawrence, whose recurring desire to see her chil­ dren in England Inevitably brought trouble between them, in a passage on Monica's absorption in her children.

22

On the return journey from Perth, Jack, stopping at an inn, is overtaken by Hilda Blessington.

Symbolic of

their meeting is the attraction and mating between the mare she rides and his red stallion.

She has sought him out be­

cause of the conversation about marriage* She had really a great dread of everything, especially of the social world in which she had been brought up. But her dread had made her fearless. There was some­ thing slightly uncanny about her, her quick, rabbit­ like alertness and her quick, open defiance, like some unyielding animal. ^ In her non-conformity she is the successful Lawrence heroine, unlike Mary.

She dislikes the usual sort of men and the

usual idea of marriage.

"She kept an odd, bright, amusing

spark of revenge twinkling in her all the time.

She felt

that with Jack she could kindle her spark of revenge into 2k

a natural sun."

He feels that she has gone further in

21 Ibid.. p. 371. 22 Ibid*, p. 366. 23 Ifcld.. p. 383. 2k

Ibid., p. 387.

161 rebellion against the world than he himself.

. . Her

fearlessness was of a queer, uncanny quality, hardly human. She was a real border-line being."

(The "border-line" idea

is used later in the short story "The Border Line.")

They

agree that an invitation will be sent her and that she will Join Monica and him by Christmas.

Then they part, he rid-

ing away through the bush "in which he had once been lost."

25

The Boy in the Bush occupied most of Lawrence’s writ­ ing time nearly up to the day he sailed for England, Novem­ ber 22, 1923.

At some time during the summer, he evidently

was commissioned to write a review of A Second Contemporary Verse Anthology which appeared in the New York Evening Post Literary Review September 29, 1923.

In it he found that,

instead of being "the spiritual record of an entire people," as the wrapper boasted, the book was "a collection of pleasant verse, neat and nice and easy as eating candy.". In having a rather witty time with the wrapper's boast, he used some of the metaphors and ideas soon to appear in essays written for Murry's The Adelphl:

the conception of

moderns as like "fish in a glass bowl, swimming round and "•

•'

.

V

•

T> ‘

round and gaping" at their own images; the "pot-bound" consciousness, particularly in America since the European consciousness "still has cracks in its vessel. . , strange roots of memory" (this difference is not apparent to him

25 Ibid,, p. 388.

162

later when he is in England), and his insistence on "the 26 element of danger" in great poetry. Earlier in the year, he had authorized Murry's use in the newly-founded Adelphl of chapters from Fantasia of the Unconscious, and had suggested other things already written.

Apparently, before he sailed from Vera Cruz,

Lawrence began a series of short essays with The Adelphl ' in mind.

One of these, "The Proper Study of Mankind," ap­

peared in The Adelphl in December, 1923, the month of Lawrence's arrival in England.

It was followed in February

and March of 1924 by "On Being Religious" and "On Human Destiny."

Months later, in September, 1924,

Man" appeared.

"On Being, a

(Rather incongruously, these essays, with

the exception of "On Being Religious," also appeared in Vanity Fair for January, May, and June, 1924). Evidence of the probable origin of some of these essays before the return to England is the existence of a manuscript notebook of Mexican origin containing, besides notes for The Boy in the Bush, and notations of Spanish songs, a fragment of what seems to be an early version of "On Being Religious, 11 notes titled "On Being in Love, 11 which .contain key ideas for the essays, a fragment of criticism of the English which is perhaps an early version of "On Coming Home," a brief essay titled "On Taking the Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 322-326 passim.

163 Next Step," and a list of titles,

"On Bglng Religious, "

"On Being a Man," "On Writing a Book," and "On Reading a 27 Book." It is clear that Lawrence planned, and perhaps completed, a whole series of reflective essays beginning "On. . . . " "The Proper Study" begins, of course, with Pope's couplet about not presuming "to scan" God but properly studying only man.

The emphasis on man is "the note of

our particular epoch, " but its wisdom is now "weary to death."

The remainder of the essay is an exposition of

this idea. The Greek commandment "Know thyself" must be obeyed, since man is nothing unless he adventures into the unknown. At present "the only unknown . . . lies deep in the pas­ sional soul."

The writer is attacked for exploring it in

novels, but goes on, since "know thyself" is "the point of all art."

But all knowing eventually Impinges on the in­

finite, and involves more than the self. At this point Lawrence begins the metaphor that unifies the rest of the essay.

In the eighth paragraph he

uses a chemist's analysis of water, with its ultimate "I don't know," as an illustration of the impingement of know­ ledge on the infinite.

The Idea of water leads to the image

of a voyage down the stream of knowledge.

This stream becomes

—

Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts, pp. 203-20^.

164 "the river* of human consciousness," flowing from a source hut eventually, like a river, slowing , silting, and ending in the vastness of the ocean. Pope's commandment, like all "Shalt Nots," must he broken because the "human consciousness is never allowed pQ

finally to say:

'I don't know.'"

BhKrwing oneself leads

inevitably to the "God mystery," the sea at the end of the stream of knowledge.

Once in the "sea of !_ Don't Know. . . ,

if you can but gasp Teach M e ," you can, as if changed into a fish, move in the new element. a new way of knowledge."

Jesus did it and "took on

Eventually "even the most hard-

boiled scientist, if he is a brave and honest man, is landed in this unscientific dilemma." In Greece, India, and Jerusalem, from "various Godaources, " the streams of human consciousness flow until they "pass into the great Ocean, which is the God of the End."

Jesus had been able to turn and "like a salmon '

29 beat his way up stream again, to speak from the source." 7 But "we are in the deep, muddy estuary of our era, and terrified of the emptiness of the sea beyond.

Or we are

at the end of the great road, that Jesus and Francis and

2S Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. K. Lawrence. p. 720. 29

Ibid., p. 721. The figure of the stream and the salmon seeking the source may have been suggested by a description of the salmon run in California sent to him by Mrs. Luhan at about the time of the departure for England. See Lorenzo in Taos, p. 122.

165 30 Whitman walked."

¥e must enter the ocean and learn

there a new relationship with the deity. deity of the inland source.

"Not the specific

The vast deity of the End."

We have exhausted the subjects of man in relation to man, in relation to himself, and in relation to woman.

In

those fields there remains only the literature of perver31 sity and of playboys, short-lived weeds. The new litera­ ture must penetrate to the ocean,

"where the first and

greatest relation of every man and woman is to the Ocean itself, the great God of the End, who is the All-Father of all sources. . . . "

Thus in this essay Lawrence adumbrates

#ery';. -:very gently his belief in the failure of traditional faiths, and in the need to arrive at new conceptions of God. He becomes more specific toward the end by giving a new version of St. Paul Not the St. Paul with his human feelings repudiated, to give play to the new divine feelings. Not the St. Paul violent in reaction against worldliness and sensuality, and therefore a dogmatist with his sheaf of Shalt-Nots ready. But a St. Paul two thousand • years older, having, his own epoch behind him, and having again the great knowledge of the deity. . . which Jesus knew. . . "On Being Religious," published two months later, deals less solemnly and more sharply with tradition.

In

form and style it is more typical of Lawrence on the attack. 30 Ifria., PP. 721-722. 31 Ibid., p. 722. 32 ifcia.. P- 723.

166

The real question is not the existence of G-od hut the attitude taken toward the problem of belief and the nature of G-od.

The man who denies the existence of God is

simply asserting himself by taking the democratic attitude that no one knows better than he does. "either sentimental or sincere."

The believer is

If sincere,

"he refers

himself back to some indefinable pulse of life in him, which gives him his direction and his substance."

If senti­

mental, he implies an agreement to make a favorable arrange­ ment for everyone, the conservative attitude.

The man who

says he does not know, is being crafty and playing both sides, the "so-called artistic or pagan attitude."

All of

these attitudes become boring except that of the sincere 33 believer. Some of the attitudes have been stated as dialogue. Now various of the "sincere believers" are catechized about the "how" of their belief, in very colloquial fashion.

The

first is summarily rejected for saying he believes in good­ ness, the second for saying he believes in love, the third for saying belief makes him more tolerant.

But the fourth

questions the right of the interrogator to examine him, and himself becomes interrogator.

When told that the important

thing is what God does with one, which is to use him "as the thin edge of the wedge," he thinks he might believe in such 33

Ibid.. p. 72k.

167 34 a God "If it looked like fun." Lawrence, the "I" of the dialogue, now comments on it.

Belief must "look like fun."

God has had enough of

"sighs, supplications, prayers, tears and yearnings, " and, as if oh /a great strike," has left heaven empty.

This

idea, Lawrence at once interjects, is not "a deliberate piece of blasphemy. 11 It is a way of stating a truth, that God always exists but that, 35 position in the cosmos."

"as regards man, He shifts His

Change of position becomes the dominant metaphor of the remainder of the essay.

Because of this change, man

feels lost and "let down.“

But he is not justified in so

feeling. As a matter of fact, never did God or Jesus say that there was one straight way of salvation, for ever and ever. On the contrary, Jesus plainly in­ dicated the changing of the way. And what is more, He Indicated the only means to the finding of the right way. This means in the. Holy Ghost, -which is "never a Way or a Word.

Jesus is a Way and a Word.

God is the Goal.

But

the Holy Ghost is for ever Ghostly, unrealizable." It 36 must never be sinned against. In many of Lawrence's stories, his characters feel the promptings of "the Holy Ifcld.. p. 725. 35 ■ Ibid., p. 72?.

^

36 I£ld*, p. 728.

168 Ghost" (the term is used) and struggle to follow them. As it moves toward an ending, this non-conformist essay makes an inevitable development.

"Prom time to time,

the Great God sends a new saviour. . . . There have been other saviours, in other lands, at other times, with other messages." it.

But "for the moment, we are lost.

None of us knows the way to God."

our Way of Salvation."

Let us admit

Jesus "is no longer

Nevertheless,

. . . we go in search of God, following the Holy Ghost, and depending on the Holy Ghost. . . . We hear His strange calling, the strange calling like a hound on the scent, away in the unmapped wilder­ ness. And it seems great fun to follow.3? The essential challenge of the essay is summed up in the last two paragraphs: Myself, I believe in God. But I ’m off on a dif­ ferent road. n Adios ! and, if you like, au revoir "On Human Destiny," which followed "On Being Re­ ligious" in The Adelphi, also argues for a dynamic concep­ tion of ideas.

The first part is taken up with man’s neces­

sity to think.

Modern talk of spontaneity is in itself an

idea, a product of self-consciousness . 3 9 nocent child of nature does not exist. 4 0

"The simple in­ But Lawrence is

37 Ibid., pp. 729-730. 38 Ibid., p. 730. 3 9

D. H. Lawrence, Assorted Articles (New York, 1930),

^

Ibid •, P • 2l]l{..

p. 2^3.

169 not arguing for pure rationality.

At any level of society

man has a mind and passions, which "between them produce :*ne by mind are "just hysterics." Emotions ungoverned 42 Mind by itself is sterile. i d e as.^

Paradoxically, the rebels against "the abhorred old ideal suasion" find themselves "in the same old treadmill, in the reversed direction," The Prince Consort turned us,giddy with goodness, plodding round and round ln:the earnest mill. Kind Edward drove us giddy with naughtiness, trotting round and round in the same- mill, in the opposite direction. So that the Georgian era finds us flummoxed, because we know the whole cycle bac£ and forth. ^ In Russia the complication between the old, barbaric ideas and modern ideas of "equality, serviceableness, productivity . . . had to be cleaned up," and the "bewildering, fascinat­ ing circus of human anomalies" was turned into"the treadmill of the one accomplished idea. What is the solution?

Man is like a plant confined

in a pot, "and the life is leaving him. " He must break 45 out. Most men, knowing that "our civilization has got to smash," take the coward's attitude of "waiting for the 41

Ibid., p. 245.

42 Ibid., p. 246. 43 44 4*5

Ibid., p. 248. Ibid., pp. 249-250. Ibid., p. 250.

170 slow accumulation of circumstance" and living their own lives first.

ii-6

But in the Dark Ages, dfter the fall of Rome, a

"scattered, tiny minority" of Christians "who had found a new way to God" kept "the knowledge burningly a4.ive."

k7

The exquisite delicate light of ever-renewed human consciousness is never blown out. The lights of great cities go out, and there is howling darkness to all appearance. But always, since men began, the light of the pure, Gogj.gknowing human consciousness has kept alight. . . . Keeping!this light going constitutes human destiny.

"To­

day, the long light of Christianity is guttering to go out and wethave to get at new resources in ourselves." It is disastrous to wait for circumstance to bring the debacle.

"The Russians who have ‘escaped1 from the hor­

rors of the revolution are most of them extinguished as human beings."

After such catastrophes, man "is left a

painful, unmanned creature, a thing of shame, incapable i+9 any more." Here it should be noted that Lawrence does not take the nihilistic position that, immediately after the War, tempted him.

He does view civilization as moving

in cycles as ideas rise and perish.

This view is in­

tensified as he nears the end of the essay. ^

Ibid., p. 351. Ibid.. p. 252. Ibid., pp. 252-253.

49

Ibid., pp. 25^-255.

171 . . . Man Is destined to seek God and to form some conception of Life. And since the Invisible God cannot be conceived, and since Life is always more than any idea, behold, from the human conception of God and of Life, a great deal of necessity is left out. And this God whom we have left out and this Life that we have shut out from our living, must in the end turn against us and rend us.-7 At such times, man must seek "the germ of a new idea.

A

new germ of God-knowledge, or Life-knowledge," which will 51 in its turn grow and eventually die. The essay closes on this note of the fatal cycle. Despite knowledge of ultimate death, it would be "con­ ceited cowardice" not to adventure and plant the seed.

As

we saw in The Boy in the Bush, the idea of death w&s very strong in Lawrence at this time as he adventured so far from his English tradition into revolutionary Mexico, where he also felt the menace -of'the Aztec gods.

Counselling

courage and new beginnings, ’which must be fought for, he accepts the cycle and is reconciled. I love the thin sapling, and the first fruit, and the falling of the first fruit. I love the great tree in its splendour. And I am glad that at last,., at the very last, the great tree will go hollow, and fall on its aide with a crash, and the little ants will run through it, and it will disappear like a ghost back into the humus. One is reminded of a very late poem, written not long be­ fore his death,

"The Ship of Death."

Ibid.. pp. 255-256. 51

Ibid., p. 256. I M d .. pp. 257-258.

172 "On Being a Han" did not appear in The Adelphi until September, 192**, but it was published in Vanity Fair in June, and probably was written

some months earlier during

the return to England. The essay begins with the statement, "Man is a thought-adventurer,0 which expresses essentially the same dynamic conception which appears in the other essays.- Here, however, Lawrence attempts a definition of thought-adventure in terms of his long-held belief in the antagonism be­ tween intellect alone and the "blood-consciousness."

Heal

thought is not mere intellect but "an experience," beginning in a "change in the blood" and ending as "a new reality in mental consciousness."

Consequently it involves the double

risk of meeting life and then facing the result in the mind. ^ The self of the body, with its "strange attractions and revulsions" can never be finally known.

On the other

hand, the "‘consciou's ego" has reasons "for everything it does and feels,“ and "tries to steer a sensible and harmless course."

54

Classifying people and things according

to known terms, it is only the partial adventure of "know­ ing and understanding."'^ _

Ibid., p. 22o. 5k

Ibid.. p. 228. 55

Ibid., p. 230.

173 Lawrence uses as his first example an encounter with a person of different origin, selecting from Arab, Negro, "or even a Jew," the Negro, with his "strange •presence." One can simply label him "Nigger," or try to understand him in terms of one’s knowledge of "any other individual," or admit that "the blood is disturbed."

Making.the admission,

one can either insulate oneself, as is usually done,

or

"allow the disturbance to continue, because, after all, there is some peculiar alien sympathy."

But whether re­

stricted or not, the reaction will develop "in dreams and unconsciousness" until it becomes "a new.bit of realisa­ tion, a new term of consciousness." Then Lawrence turns to a “much commoner" example, the marriage relationship.• As long as the "known" selves alone are in contact, all is well; but in blood contact, discord arises between the unknown selves.

The effect is

like a crucifixion, the "so-called real self" crucified on 57 the "bodily self." The remainder of the essay is devoted to this theme. If the husband "forfeits his arrogance," his "Adam

56

Ibid.. p. 231. It is noteworthy that Lawrence does not argue rational, biological racial eg^alitarianism. Yet there is little or no expression of racial prejudice in the ordinary, inimical sense in his work. Theoretically, and usually emotionally, he preferred the "dark" Southern peoples, though he felt in them a threat and at times recoiled from them. 57

Ibid.. p. 233.

17Uobstinacy," the children become the mothers and women of the next generation must beware "the mother's boy." If the mother "forfeits the old serpent-advised Eve from

her nature and becomes the instrument of the man," husbands of the next generation will suffer "the daughter's revenge." In this Lawrence was exploring a problem that dated from as far back as Sons and Lovers. What is the solution?

"The thought-adventure ! We've

got to take ourselves as we are, not as we know ourselves to be."^®

Men and women must accept the risk to themselves

of real contact with each other. great experience of realizing"

;

Men can "slowly make the women have their own "realisa

tion," which knows without thinking.

Men who dare take

thought, risk both the body and the blood first, then the mind, to become a new, unexpected self . ^ 9

it is noteworthy

that Lawrence allots his sex the greater risk. Today men refuse to take the risk, and they repress the body.

But action from the head means that the "unknown

man . . . goes quite deranged." is p s y c h i c . "6°

Thus "all suffering to-day

Self-conscious modern man does not really

feel, though "he becomes extraordinarily acute at recognis­ ing real feelings from false ones, knowing for certainty Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., p. 2 3 7 . k° Ibid., p. 238.

175 the falsity of his own.*1 His denunciation of falsity is 61 made so that he may "triumph in his own greater falsity.11 Daring “anything, except "being a man," out of fear of ex­ tinction he erects "his creed of harmlessness, of relent­ less kindness."

He asserts that there should "be no danger

or friction "while all the time he is slowly, malignantly 62 undermining the tree of life." A discernible thread of continuity runs through all these essays.

One notable thing is that Lawrence could

give such Protean forms to his essential ideas. ample, this conception of is used in the story

For ex­

the relationship of the sexes

"The Captain's Doll."

Besides these essays used by Murry in The Adelohi. Lawrence wrote others that did not appear there or any­ where else.

It is possible that Murry rejected them.

In

August, 1924, some months after the return to England, Lawrence wrote: Murry said to me last year: ‘Come, only come, and do what you like with the Adelbhi.* I came in December. He went green at my first article, and— wouldn’t print it. No, Lorenzo, you’ll only make enemies. — As if that weren't what I want. I hate this slime of^all the world's my friend, my halffriend. . . . 3 What was this first article? ^

It may well have been

ILid., p. 239. Ibid., p . 241.

63

The Letters of D. H, Lawrence. p. 615*

"Qn

1 ?6 Coming Home," evidently never published, which from in­ ternal evidence was written during the first days in England.

Beginning with the landing, and the train-trip

to London, it attacks English complacency and detachment. The trick lies in tensely witholding oneself, tensely witholding one's aura, till it forms a perfect and transparent little globe around one. At the centre of this little globe sits the Englishman, his own little god unto himself, terribly complacent, and at the same time, terribly self-deprecating. He seems to say: My dear man, I know I am no more than what I am. I wouldn't trespass on what you are, not for worlds. Oh, not for worldsJ Because when all's said and done, what you are means nothing to me. I am god inside my own crystal world. . . . If ever men had to think in world terms, they have to think in world terms today. And here you get an island no bigger than a back garden, chock-full of people who never realise there is any­ thing outside their back garden, pretending to direct the destinies of the world. It is pathetic and ridiculous. . . . All that is left to them is to blame the Americans. . . Just because the republican eagle of the west doesn't ehqose to be a pelican for other people's convenience. There exists in manuscript an untitled fragment of an essay that is perhaps an early version of "On Coming Home."

It

attacks the "domesticated clique," and the avoidance of "contact with anybody." You mustn't butt into anybody's feelings, you really mustn't. An occasional innuendo, perhaps, to show that you're not such a fool as you look. An innuendo which will reveal you with a soul as tough and im­ pervious as shoe-leather. ^ Another evidently unpublished essay, "On Taking the

6h

Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of JD. H. Lawrence Manuscripts, pp. 207-208. 65 Ibid*, P* 205.

177 Next Step," contains in stronger form the dilemma stated in "On Being Religious."

Its position in a manuscript

notebook, and a numbering it bears, indicate that it was written after "On Coming Home."

66

Lawrence expounds his

belief that World War I brought civilization to the end

of

. . . democracy, the end of the ideal of liberty and freedom, the end of the brotherhood of man, the end ;of the idea of the perfectibility of man, the end of the belief in the reign of love, the end of the be­ lief that man desires peace, harmony, tranquility, love, and loving kindness all, the while. The end of Christianity, the end of the Church of Jesus. The end of idealism, the end.of the idealistic ethic. The end of Plato and Kant, as well as of Jesus. The end of science, as-;an absolute ‘knowledge. The end of the absolute power of the Word. The end, the end, the end.0 ' : ... . , „... .. . ,. ' The essay does not utter the. call to the future contained in the published essays..

’■

Lawrence’s sense of deadness and confinement, and his longing for release, took* other forms during the European visit .t In •January-'- l$vl»ond6h^V:K£>-->i*ee!eive& a copy .Pf Willard Johnson’s unconventional, mischievous little magazine, The Laughing Horse, with its emblem of the centaur.

He wrote

a letter, which Johnson published in the May, 1924,' issue, expressing his characteristic feelings in terms that were to appear again and again in other work. Two-legged man is no good. If h e ’s going to stand steady, he must stand on four feet. Like the Centaur.

66 67

Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., p. 206.

178 When Jesus was born, the spirits wailed round the Mediterranean: Pan is dead. Great Pan is dead. And at the Renaissance the Centaur gave a final groan, and expired. . . . In modern symbolism, the Horse is supposed to stand for the passions. Pas­ sions be blowedJ . . . Horse-sense, I tell you. That's the Centaur. That's the blue Horse of the ancient Mediterranean, before the pale Gallliean or the extra pale German or Hordic gentleman conquered. First of all, Sense. . . , then, a laugh. . . , After that these same passions, glossy, and dangerous in the flanks. And after these again, hoofs, irresisti­ ble, splintering hoofs, that can kick the walls of the world down."” Indeed, the "Pan" idea seems to have appeared almost at once in a short story.

After leaving London for the

Continent, the Lawrences spent a few days in Paris before moving on to Germany.

Here, encountering bad weather and

feeling tired, Lawrence tried "to amuse himself by writing short stories."

Mrs. Carswell thinks that one of these ■69 "must have been 'Jimmy and the Desperate Woman,'" pub­

lished in October, 1924, in The Criterion.

Perhaps another

is "The Border Line," published in Smart Set in September, 1924, although its use of a return to Germany seems to in­ dicate composition after Lawrence's German visit.

From

internal evidence, It seems probably that one of the stories was "The Last Laugh," unpublished until its inclusion in 70 The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories in 1928.

68 69 70

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 599-600. Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage. p. 215.

D. H. Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (Leipzig, n.d.) pp. 165-187. Examination of these stories is justifiable at this point even if composition, and

179 In "The Last Laugh" Pan returns to England with fan­ tastic consequences.

At midnight in Hampstead (where the

Lawrences*: lived during the London visit), Lorenzo says goodnight at his door to his guests, a man and a girl.

He

calls the snow-covered scene a "new world"; the girl, deaf, her hearing-aid carried hy the man (undoubtedly she is Dorothy Brett) is interested and laughs; the man, sardonic, says that the snow is "only whitewash.:."

There is in him something

of the "faun,and a doubtful martyred expression.

A sort of

faun on the cross, with all the malice of the complication." (He is undoubtedly Murry, whom, in letters, Lawrence scolded for such a "complication.") As the man and the girl go down the street, he thinks he hears laughter.

She, after adjusting the hearing-aid,

hears only his "slightly neighing laugh."

A young police­

man approaches them and is reassured by the girl that her companion is not drunk.

The three begin to search for the

source of the laughter, the policeman assisting the girl, who is aware of him but who has "held herself all her life intensely aloof from physical contact." Now a change is coming over her.

She sees among some

bushes a man she had always known she would see one day. Her companion and the policeman cannot see him, but the 70 con "k*reTlsion took place later in the year in the United States, since they obviously are imaginative renderings of portions of the European experience.

180

former is led on by the laughter and is accosted by a woman who emerges from a house to ask who had knocked at her door. When he asks her if she has been expecting someone, she an­ swers that "one is always expecting. . . that something won­ derful is going to happen."

He enters the house with her

when she says that anyone she "could like" would do. The girl, coming up in time to see him enter the house, now removes her hearing-aid (symbolic of loss of dependence on her companion who has gone to the woman) and feels a new "pride and a new dangerous surety. "

She is no

longer afraid of the policeman as a physical man.

Suddenly

it begins to snow, and the air seems "full of presences, full of strange unheard voices, " which call,, "He's come back J Aha I He's come back 1"

She is amused by the "tame-animal

look" in the policeman's "frightened eyes."

They come to a

church, the doors of which are open so that wind and snow and voices blow through it.

She hears the laughter that her

companion had heard, for the first time and without the hearing-aid.

Pieces of paper and leaves of books whirl out

the windows, and "the organ-plpes like pan-pipes" play "wild, gay, trilling music* " At her house she permits the policeman to come in to warm himself before the fire while she goes to her bed­ room, bars the door, and sleeps through the night.

Next

morning she is gay and laughing in her studio upstairs.

181 Her housekeeper enters to ask disapprovingly if she has called, to Inquire about the young man downstairs, who says he is lame, and to ask if Marchbanks (the companion of the night before) is coming to breakfast.

The girls thinks of

the face she alone had seen, and the strange laughter. laughs longest who laughs last," she muses.

"He

"He certainly

will have the last laugh. . . . How wonderful of him to come back and alter all the world immediately."

She wonders if

Marchbanks, who only heard the laughter, has been altered. She has been in love with Marchbanks "in her head." . . . Now she saw herself and him as such a funny pair. He so funnily taking life terribly seriously, especial­ ly his own life. And she so ridiculously determined • to save him from himself . Oh, how absurd I . . •. Since she had seen the man laughing among the holly-bushes— such extraordinary wonderful laughter— she had seen her own ridiculousness.71 Marchbanks arrives, to be told that he needn't shout now that she can hear.

He speaks to her maliciously.

papers have reported a great storm the night before.

The He

questions her skeptically about what she saw, and says of the change in her that it has left her without a soul. replies,

She

"Oh, thank goodness for that

They go downstairs to see the policeman, look at his lame foot, and find that it "i3 curiously clubbed, like the weird paw of some animal."

When Marchbanks is unable to

see how this could have happened, she hears the laugh again. 71 Ibid.. p. 181.

182 Marchbanks is suddenly stricken with agony and "the horrible grin of a man who realises he has made a final, and this time, fatal, fool of himself," and falls "like a man struck by lightning."

The girl asks if he is dead; the frightened

policeman verifies it; and the last line reads, "There was a faint smell of almond blossom in the air.11 The story is plainly an imaginative use of Lawrence's relationship with Murry and Dorothy, Brett.

Brett used a

hearing-aid, and had been attached to Mrs. Murry (Katherine Mansfield) and Murry.

She.alone of the group of friends

Lawrence asked to come to New Mexico in 1924 made the trip. Of Murry Lawrence wrote on January 9, 1924, to Mrs. Luhan: . . . if we come back into our own, we'll prance in as centaurs, sensible, a bit fierce, and amused.I am sure seriousness is a disease, today.It's an awful disease in Murry. So long as there's a bit of a laugh going, things are all right.72 In the

same letter he spoke of "the Great God Pan.,: who

a bit, and when he gets driven too hard, goes fierce."

grins 73

Marchbanks, the divided man who cannot believe whole-heartedly in Pan, dies under the shock of proof of the god's visit. The donflict with Murry's ideas and attitudes probably furnished also the conception of the titular hero of "Jimmy

74 and the Desperate Woman."

Jimmy is"editor of a high-class ,

72 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, pp. 134-135. 73 ILid.. p. 135. 74 1 Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, pp. 132-164.

rather high-brow, rather successful magazine, and his rather personal, very candid editorials” bring him ’’hosts of ad­ miring acquaintances.”*^

He has the dual nature of March­

banks in ’’The Last Laugh.”

”In his mocking moments, when

he seemed most himself,” his face was ”a pure Pan face.

. .

In his own opinion he was a sort of Martyred Saint Sebastian at whom the wicked world shot arrow after arrow. . .

The

feminine opinion of him is that he is in rather vague ways "fine and strong” but that he needs ”a level-headed woman to look after him.”

He has lost one wife who tired of this

role, is himself galled by it, and sentimentally seeks a ’’really womanly woman.

. , some simple, uneducated girl. . ,

to whom he should be only 'fine and strong.1” Among his reader' correspondence he finds a poem from a miner's wife which is a grim antagonistic interpre­ tation of her husband's hardness, his soul "a strange engine Jimmy does not print this, reflecting that she does not ”sound like one of the nestling, unsophisticated rustic type.”

But another poem she sends is "so splendidly des­

perate” that he prints it and goes to see her, though he has "scarcely set foot north of Oxford” before. Here, on his sentimental adventure, he encounters the ugliness of the country and the hostility of the people. He finds the wife "with that changeless look of a woman who

See also the character, Burlap, in Aldous Huxley's Point Counterpoint, in which Lawrence, as Mark Rampion, is the only integrated character.

184 is holding her own against Man and Fate."

But, though he is

frightened, he is excited by "a gamble in which he could not lose desperately," and asks her to come to live with him. In this he Is "like a man who is drunk— drunk with himself. ...

He was only looking at himself-, inside himself, at

the shadows inside his own consciousness." When she says that the matter must be settled with her husband, he faces the miner, in whom Lawrence creates vividly once more in the manner of such early work as Sons and Lovers, the life in a miner’s cottage with its physicality and tensions.

Here, however, unlike Mr. Morel of Sons and

Lovers. the miner is heroic in his independence and is an utter contrast to the false sentimentality of Jimmy, who shrinks from "the other man’s harsh fightlng-voice."

The

miner has decided that he is only "made use of" both in the mines and at home, and that he will not endure it.

He does

not want his wife writing poetry and always opposing him, and making his child oppose him.

He is having an affair with

another woman because someone must give in to him. Jimmy, in reaction against his feeling of inferiority, reveals his proposal.

When the miner finds that she is will­

ing to go, he turns hard and stoical,

"relentlessly killing

the emotion in him, " and giving her "a blank cheque. " cannot stand the tension.

"He always had to compromise, to

become apologetic and pathetic. Mrs. Pinnegar that way."

Jiihmy

He would be able to manage

While he is fearful of her hardness,

he desires a triumph over the

miner, since he hates the

feeling of “being dominated by the other man. She refuses to go to London with Jimmy at once, but agrees to come in a few days.

He, alone in London, is told

by a friend that he has been a fool, though "no doubt, by playing weeping-willow," he will "outlive all the female storms" he prepares for himself.

Frightened, Jimmy sends

a letter giving the wife a chance to back out. ably she arrives.

He has to

at the end of the story takes

But inexor­

force himself to meet her,but pleasure in the perversity of

his feelings. . .perverse but intense desire for her came over him, making him almost helpless. He could, feel, so strongly, the presence of that other man about her, and this went to his head like neat spirits. That other manJ In some subtle, Inexplicable way, he-was actually bodily present, the husband. The woman moved in his aura. She was hopelessly married to him. And this went to Jimmy’s head like neat whiskey. Which of the two would fa.ll before him with a greater fall— the woman, or the man, her husband?' Of course the true Lawrencean hero is the isolate . male who will not yield to the woman’s will.

The sentimen­

tal Jimmy, perversely getting his way temporarily by yield­ ing, yet facing, ironically, the ultimate scorn of the woman is of course the antithesis to the hero, an antithesis made clear by the perversity of his triumph over the other man, whom he Is unable to face adequately in reality.

There

seem to be overtones here of Mrs. Lawrence’s championship

?6 Ifrid , p. 6*K

186 of the return to England and work with Murry on The Adelphi♦ Like "The Last Laugh," "The Border L i n e " 77 with the death of an inadequate man.

ends

The chief character,

however, is a Lawrencean heroine, "a handsome woman of forty" whose life has failed.

There is a partial identification

with Mrs. Lawrence in her being the daughter of a German baron whose fifteen years of marriage to an Englishman "had not altered her racially," although "like most people in the world" she was a mixture of German, Russian, and French blood. She is travelling alone to Germany, where her hus­ band, Philip, a newspaperman, is working.

Paris, her point,

of departure in the story, and the Gallic sensuousness of the men, remind her of her first husband, Alan, a captain in a Highland regiment, who is the Lawrencean hero of the story in his "bony, dauntless, overbearing manliness."

They had

loved each other but were separated by a Lawrencean conflict (examined, for example, in Kangaroo) between his innate con­ viction of lordliness" and her "amiable, queen-bee" belief that she had "the right to the last homage." After ten years, because of their unyielding pride, they had stopped living together.

She had fallen under the

spell of Alan's friend, Philip, whose "look of knowing" and "feeling of secrecy," along with conveyance of a "sense of

77 Ibid., pp. 107-131.

187

warmth and offering, like a dog when it loves you," made him interesting to women.

(These are much the same quali­

ties aA Jimmy's in "Jimmy and the Desperate Woman.")

Philip

had had an "almost uncanny love" for Alan and called him a "real man," who never let himself he swept away.

This had

irritated Katherine, who was also irritated hy Alan's indif­ ferent tolerance, and occasional

contempt, of Philip.

When

she had assailed Alan for this, he had answered that Philip was "too much over the wrong side of the border."

The

border-line idea becomes the key image of the story.

The

transition suggested by it differentiates Lawrence from merely pessimistic, so-called "lost generation" writers, although at times he shares their desp-etation. When, during the war, Alan had gone to France' with his regiment, she had seen . . . that the whole of her womanly, motherly concen­ tration could never put back the great flow of human destiny. That, as he said, only the cold strength of a man, accepting the destiny of destruction, could see the human flow through the chaos and beyond to a new out-let. But the chaos first, and the long rage of destruction.*" Philip’s idea that the war was a "colossal, disgraceful accident" had soothed her, though she knew that the war was "inevitable, even necessary." When Alan was missing in action, she had married Philip, who during the war had thrown his "weight on the side of humanity and human truth ^

Ibid., p. 112.

188 and peace."

At first she had found the relationship

"pleasant and restful and voluptuous." "a curious sense of degradation."

Later she had felt

She had realized

. . . the difference between being married to a soldier, a ceaseless born fighter, a sword not to be sheathed, and this other man, this cunning civil­ ian, this subtle7equivoc,ator,. this, adjuster of the scales of truth. * This distinction is the central, theme of the story. On the trip she jfs now'making1 , she feels as if she is going to a meeting with Alan.

The train, as it moves

north toward G-ermany,'enters "the ghastly'Marne country, cen­ tury after century digging the corpses of frustrated men into its soil. "

It is "the border country." ,Now her life•

turns Martificial tprhqr. 11 Her "panic-lpve^and "Philip's \ ' * ’* ■ "... * * ■■ salvation were an illusion^.!. . . What1 ;was'life? The grey shadows of death?" At Strasbourg, on the border, night for the train into G-ermany.

she must wait all

Here, in the night with

an icy wind blowing and the spirit of the town seemingly gone, she seeks the cathedral.

She remembers how "her

spirit used. . . to soar aloft with it. 11 Now it looks down "with vast,- demonish menace, calm and. implacable." . . . Dimly, she realised that behind all the ashy pallor and sulphur of our civilisation, lurks the great blood-cfeature waiting, implacable and eter­ nal, ready at last ■to crush our wtiite brittleness and let! the shadowy blood move erect once more, 79

Ibid., p. Ilk.

189 in a new impacable pride and strength. Even out of the lower heavens looms the great blood-dusky •Thing, blotting out the Cross it was supposed to exalt. 0 As she turns to leave, she encounters Alan, and as he silently walks with her, there comes over her again "the feeling she had forgotten, the restful, thoughtless plea­ sure of a woman who moves in the aura of the man to whom she belongs*;"

She wonders why she had fought against it,

and realizes that "her scratching efforts at getting more than this" were "ignominous efforts at self-nullity." The strong, silent kindliness of him towards her, even how, was able to wipe out the ashy, nervous horror of the world from'her body* . . ., the supreme modern terror. 1 Here, in Strasbourg, they part.

She continues her

Journey, passing through the "numbv,dreary kind of neu­ trality" of the occupied zone, feeling in unoccupied G-ermany "the old barbaric undertone of the white-skinned north, under the waning civilisation." looking "hollow and defeated."

Philip meets her,

He is unhappy under the

half-scornful gaiety and teasing of Katherine and her sis­ ter, who refer to him as "the little one." men had been killed off in the war." ningly" triumphed so far.

He had

But now "in

G-ermany, he seemed snuffed out again." 80 Ibid.. p. 119. 81 Ibid., pp. 121-122.

"The defiant "quite cun­

weird post-war

190

The story moves rapidly to a close.

As Katherine

walks in the snow-covered forest she realizes "how very quickly the world would go wild, if catastrophes overtook mankind."

Philip would he inadequate.

She feels among the

trees the strong presence of Alan. Philip becomes ill and is put to bed.

She is ex­

pecting a meeting with Alan, and Philip resents her walks in the forest.

One day Alan meets her in the forest and

takes her "in the silent passion of a husband." she finds Philip seriously ill.

Afterward

Next day, when she, feeling

the call of Alan, wishes to leave the sick man, he tells her that he will die if she leaves him. remains beside his bed.

Reluctantly she

At midnight Philip, saying that

he cannot "bear it," asks her to hold him.

As she begins

to embrace him, Alan enters and loosens the sick man's clinging hands. ‘Philip dies, "on his face . . . grin of a thief caught in the very act."

a sickly

Alan draws her

away in the "passion of a husband come back from a very 82 long journey." For Lawrence the failure of modern life lay in the desuetude and death of old truths and attitudes.

The

death was inevitable, but there must be a struggle for a resurrection and a future based on new truths and attitudes. Philosophically he had arrived at a partial solution, but 82

Ibid,.,., p. 131*

191 to create his vision of the future there must "be symbols. The Indian ceremonials in New Mexico were a start; but it was in Mexico that the vision coalesced in his imagina­ tion.

The veiled threat to man that he had felt in New

Mexico was confirmed openly by the Aztec snake-symbolism. The people, as Christians, were "melancholy inside," lived "without hope," and were "suddenly wicked."

But they were

also "good," "gentle and honest," "very quiet," and "not greedy for money."

"If only they had a new faith they

might be a new, young, beautiful people." Almost immediately Lawrence set out to create this new faith, and after only three months in Mexico had com­ pleted the first draft of the novel later to be titled The Plumed Serpent.

Then he put it aside to begin the

halting, reluctant trip toward England that resulted in a last minute revulsion and quarrel with Mrs. Lawrence in New York,

There followed his lonely journey west, and the

tortured return to Mexico that ended in temporary compro­ mise with the call from England.

Lawrence poured his con­

flict into the unyielding hero of The Boy in the Bush.

The

Australian setting did not matter as long as it provided the means of expression of the fight against the deathli­ ness of the past;,and the new, savage death that lurked in the wilderness of the bush, or in the Mexican and New Mexican mountains.

Man's destiny was to face them and

192

work out his new life amid such extremities.

The fighter's

death was preferable to that of the conservationist of an effete idealism. This conservatism Lawrence felt that he encountered in England in Murry and The Adelphl.

Almost at once he

planned a second leave-taking; indeed there is ground for supposing that he merely came to claim his own.

The essays

written for The Adelphi stated unequivocally his break with Christianity, and hence with the total European past, and his belief in a dynamism that rejected the absolute ideal and accepted a cycle of birth, development, struggle, decay and death. In Paris he began to put into short stories his more intimate feelings about the return.

The Idealistic conser­

vative, perversely seductive of women, becomes the victim both of Pan's laughter and the fighter's unyielding spirit. Only the "bbrder-line11 people, fighting and bravely perish­ ing that the new life may come into being, are worthy.

Thus

Lawrence left England for the second visit to Mew Mexico with the old battle-lines even more firmly drawn.

There

still remained the task of completing the vision of the new life begun in the first draft of The Plumed Serpent.

PART IV RETURN TO NEW MEXICO, 1924 CHAPTER I THE LIFE The Lawrences and Dorothy Brett arrived in New York from England on March 11, 1924.^

After about a week, during

which Lawrence was concerned'with Seltzer’s business diffi­ culties, they began the rail journey westward.

In Chicago

they stopped briefly for the long-postponed meeting with 2 3 Harriet Monroe, and then continued to Taos. After a few days in the main house on Mrs. Luhan’s estate, the Lawrences moved to a guest house, Dorothy Brett taking another near4 5 by. This close arrangement lasted until early in May. Lawrence was glad to be back in the Southwest. wrote to Harriet Monroe:

"...

He

There Is the pristine some­

thing, unbroken, unbreakable, and not to be got under even 6 by us awful whites with our machines. . . . " In a letter to his agent, he remarked of The Plumed Serpent and his The Letters of JD. H. Lawrence. p. 605.

2

Ibid., p. 606.

3 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos. p. 164. 4

Ibid.. p. 167.

^ ^Le Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 609. ^ Ibid., pp. 606- 607.

19* plans:

“I shan't get my Mexican novel finished this year— 7 shall stay the summer, here, I think.1' Mrs. Luhan has dealt in detail with the events of

these first weeks with her.

Lawrence told her, she reports,

that he had brought Dorothy Brett along "to be a kind of buffer between him and Frieda." that he said of Miss Brett:

8

Mrs. Lawrence reports

"You know, it will be good for

us to have Bfett with us, she will stand between us and the world."

Mrs. Lawrence did not really like the arrangement, 9 but decided to try it. Mrs. Luhan found Miss Brett's omnipresence "worse than Frieda's restraining presence.11 She "never saw Lawrence alone any more or had him undi10 videdly." Mrs, Luhan places during this time Lawrence's

writing of the unfinished humorous play, "Altitude," in­ volving a good many Taos people.11

Lawrence disliked the 12 Penitente activities at the nearby Morada. He loved charades but disliked the modern dance and refused to participate.1^

There were gay moments and quarrels.

It

^ Ibid., p. 608.

8 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos. p. 166. ^ Frieda Lawrence, "Mot I. But the Wind. . , " p. 168. 10 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos. pp. 166-167.

11

-

Ibid., p. 183 ff,

12 Ibid., p. 187. 13

Ibid., p. 190.

195 is plain that the tensions of the previous visit were be­ ginning again, and that the life Mrs. Luhan portrays was the kind Lawrence finally would rebel from. Whatever the complicated causes, Lawrence was un1^ easy and longed to go to the mountain ranch at which he had spent the winter of 1922-23.

Mrs. Luhan persuaded her

son, John Evans, to trade the ranch back to her and gave it to Frieda,

15

i

but Lawrence's attitude was that they could

not accept such a gift.

Mrs. Lawrence's sister in Germany

had, not long before, found the manuscript of Sons and Lovers.

It was now given to Mrs, Luhan in payment for

the r a nch.^ On May 5 'tbe Lawrences and Brett moved to the 17 ranch. and, with the help of three Indians and a SpanishAmerican carpenter, began to rehabilitate the long-neglected cabins.

18

Lawrence, in sending Murry good-wisb.es for

his marriage to Violet le Maistre, remarked that on the ranch England seemed "as unreal as a book one read long ago, Tom Brown's Schooldays, or something of that fsicj ♦11 1L 15

16 17

Ibid., p. 191* Ibid.. p. 192. Frieda Lawrence, "Hot

1_

But the Wind. . , " p . loO,

Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Oollection of D, Lawrence Manuscripts. p. 98. 18 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 609.

h.

196

But life at the ranch could he trying— one had "to hear up hard against it"— and the 8,600 foot altitude told on 19 one. Mindful of his plans for a colony, he wrote to Caltherine Carswell, inviting the Carswells to come for a visit.

He planned to stay in New Mexico until October, then

go to Mexico to work on The Plumed Serpent. ing, did not want to write and did not care.

He was not writ­ He recalled

the "fatal evening at the Cafe Royal" du±ing his "coming 20 home," and said: "Never again, pray the Lord." By June 7 the hard work at the ranch was finished, and he felt that he "might even try a.bit of" his "own work again."

21

It seems probable that during the period

of hard work he had written at least one essay, "Pan in America," using the "Pan" theme which had appeared in earlier letters and essays and in "The Last Laugh,"

An

undated note to Mrs. Luhan mentions the essay and his in22 tention to finish the first half that evening; a later note describes it as unfinished because there were "too many things to do, till late evening" and he felt "a trifle 23 discouraged" and did not "want to write." 19

~

Ibid. . PO

21 22

•. '.

Ibid., p. 610. .

Ibid., p. 6ll.

Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos. p. 198. 23 T £bid., p. 200.

197 During a visit by the Luhans', Tony Luhan angered Lawrence by killing a porcupine.

Lawrence's distaste for

hunting appears frequently in his life and work.

Mrs. Luhan

thought this incident the origin of the essay, "Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine."^-

If so, it was used in retro­

spect, since there is evidence that the essay was not writ­ ten -until the return to the ranch from Mexico in 1925* Another incident, however, produced a story at once. During this time, Mrs. Luhan reports, the Lawrences and she, riding horseback from the ranch to Taos, visited the cave on the side of the mountain above the village of Arroyo Seco which Lawrence used in the climactic scene of "The Woman Who Rode Away."

As she describes it, the cave fits

Lawrence's use of it, even to an altar-like ledge with "a faint sun painted high up to the east of it," for the sacri­ ficial climax of the story.

Then too, in keeping with the

conception in the story, Mrs. Luhan had had, during a pre­ vious visit to the cave, an unusual psychic experience in­ volving "terror and doom," loss of normal English speech, the sense of "another language," and "something strong and terrible and not to be forsworn, a floating relic out of the stored past."^ The chronology of events and composition during this

Ibid., p.

20l\..

* Ibid., pp. 209-210.

198 time is confused.

Only a broad outline can be established.

On June* 11, four days after his statement that he might be­ gin writing, Lawrence requested Martin Seeker, the English publisher, to send anything on his list he thought they might like, since there was "nothing to read" on the ranch, and to order "a couple of periodicals" for him, "not high­ brow.. . . , the best of the popular magazines, like the Strand, or Hutchinson1s or the Bystander."

He had not "seen

one for years," and thought "it would be good" for him "to know what popularity is. "2^

Was this a decision, in view

of Seltzer’s Insolvency, to try to earn more money by writ­ ing something popular?

"The Border Line" appeared simul­

taneously in Hutchinson1s and The Smart Set in September, though it may have been written during the European visit, and hardly represents a "popularization."

By June 28 Lawrence 27 could say that he had "written two stories." These cannot be identified with certainty, but they may well have been "St. Mawr" and "The Woman Who Rode Away."

Mrs. Luhan places

her seeing of the manuscript of the latter just before a 28 note of Lawrence’s dated July 7. Life at the ranch had gradually settled into a pat­ tern that permitted Lawrence to write. 26 27

He was up at five

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 611. Frieda Lawrence,

"Not I_ But the Wind. . . , " p. 186.

28 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p.. 239.

199 each morning, with his first chore to milk Susan, the cow, who wandered off into the woods and had to he located by means of opera glasses.

Among the numerous other tasks,

baking,, irrigating, painting, and making cupboards and 29 chairs, he found time to write— out-of-doors, as was al­ ways his custom when weather permitted, and usually in the mornings.

Dorothy Brett typed as he wrote.

The visits,to, and by, Mrs. Luhan continued both the pleasant and the unpleasant side of that relationship.

There 30 were little exchanges of gifts, Indian dances in her etudio, but eventually a climactic scene in Taos involving Lawrence's friendship with one of her visitors called "Clarence" in Lorenzo in Taos.

As Mrs. Luhan reports it, Lawrence and

Clarence became fast friends, and rather secretive and dis­ tant from Mrs. Lawrence and herself.

By questioning Clarence,

she found that Lawrence complained to him of feeling oppres­ sed by her "will. "

Despite explanations on both sides, 31 Lawrence attempting to define for her what he meant, the tensions increased.

She was particularly upset and offended

by his aloof behavior at a dinner she arranged for the Lawrences with George Creel, his wife, Blanche Bates, the actress, and a young Englishman who was her leading man.

Creel was on

his way to Mexico and knew everyone of importance there.

Mrs.

29 Frieda Lawrence, 30 31

"Not I But the Wind.

Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 193. Ibid., pp. 212-214-.

. . ," p. 161.

200 Luhan, having heard Lawrence say he would like to know Calles, G-iamo, and other Mexicans (probably to gain know­ ledge for The Plumed Serpent), thought Creel might give him 32 letters of Introduction. After a distant, strained dinner, she reports, Creel offered the letters, and Lawrence rejected them, saying gloomily that he distrusted reformers and up33 lifters. Evidently it was shortly after this incident that Mrs. Luhan learned from Clarence that Lawrence had been planning that the two men ride off together into the desert 3^ and "never be seen again, 11 These tensions reached a cli­ max, reported only by Mrs. Luhan, one night during an im­ promptu dance to phonograph music. Lawrence, whom Mrs. L'uhan finally persuaded to dance, began roughly bumping Mrs. Lawrence and Clarence.

Afterward Lawrence went off to bed

alone, while Mrs. Lawrence and Clarence walked and talked a while together.

Mrs. Luhan waylaid and questioned Clarence

later, and he reported that Mrs. Lawrence had told him that Lawrence planned to kill her, evidently b y a sort of psychic attrition,

35

A year earlier the Danes had reported that

Lawrence's antagonism to Mrs. Luhan reached a point at which he said he would "cut her t h r o a t . O n

that tangled night

32 Ibid., p. 217 ff. 33 Ibid., p. 220. 3^ Ibid., p. 222. 33 Ibid,, p. 230. Merrlld, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 2k0.

201

Clarence moved from Lawrence's side to Mrs. Luhan's; Tony was upset by Mrs. Luhan’s activities and came to think Lawrence a "very sick man."37

Mrs. Luhan seems not to have been par­

ticularly frightened.

At any rate, before leaving the next

day Lawrence let her read the manuscript of "The Woman Who Rode Away" and warned her not to trust Clarence.

She read

"with great interest that story where Lorenzo thought he finishes me up. "38 Like other storms before it, this one blew over, and quasi-friendly relationships continued between the Lawrences and Mrs. Luhan.

Lawrence, sending for trunks and things

left behind in Mrs. Luhan’s house,39 commented: . . . you know quite well there is no need for either Clarence or Tony to be "mad." I t ’s pure bunk. But you always bring these things about. Think I care about their madness? However, I refuse myself to get "mad." We'll remain friendly at a distance-or at least, I will.4-0 Mrs. Lawrence later said of Clarence's report:

"As to the

destroying stuff, it’s all unreal and unwholesome bunk to me

I

Not true— as if I would let it happen 1 . . . Come and

have a cocktail sometime and don't let your men bunk ’

T7

Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 237.

38 Ibid., pp. 238-239. 39

P- 239. Ibid., p. 2I4.8 .

^

Ibid.. p. 250.

202 For Lawrence another life went on by correspondence. On July 4 he wrote to a young Englishman, Rolf Gardiner, that he was . . . sick to death of the Jewish Monotheistic string. It has become monomaniac. I prefer the pagan many gods, and the animistic vision. Here on this ranch at the foot of the Rockies, looking west over the desert, one just knows that all our Pale-face and Hebraic monotheistic insistence^is a dead letter-the soul won't answer any more. 2 The ideas of "world unison and peace," "oneness," did not attract him. I am essentially a fighter— to wish me peace is bad luck— except the fighter's peace. And I have known many things, that may never be unified: Ceylon, the Buddha temples, Australian bush, Mexico. . . , Sicily London, New York, Paris, Munich. . . . To me, chaos doesn't matter as:..much as abstract, which is mechani­ cal, order. To me it is life to feel the white ideas and the "oneness" crumbling into a thousand pieces, and all sorts of wonder coming through. It is pain­ ful . . . . But there it is. I hate "oneness,." it's a mania. 3 He had:.received;:a copy;, of lE.^'M.hForster1a A Passage to India, perhaps from Martin Seeker, in response to the appeal for 44 reading matter, perhaps from Forster himself. He wrote to Seeker of it*. It's good, but makes one wish a bomb would fall and end everything. Life is more interesting in its undercurrents than in its obvious; and E. M. does 45 see people, people and nothing but people: ad nauseam. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 612. 43 Ibid., pp. 612-613. 44 45

Ibid., p. 621’. Ibid., pp. 613-614.

203 In a later letter to Gardiner, he said: What we need is to smash a few big holes in European suburbanity, let in a little real fresh air. . . . If i t1s going to be Youth, then let it be Youth on the warpath, not wandervogeling and piping imitation nature tunes. . . and pitying itself. . . . ° In the middle of August the Lawrences made a long motor trip with! the Luhans to the Hopl snake c-dance.

On

the return trip, Mrs. Luhan reports, Lawrence wrote in Santa Fe a first account of the trip which she thought a disappoint­ ing, "dreary terre & terre account,"

This narrative appeared

in Willard Johnson's Laughing Horse, in September.

He pro­

mised her to write another "sketch for the Theatre Arts. not for the Horse to laugh at.1'

. . ,

This second, serious,

account of the trip took on importance in his own mind. Sending it to Murry in England, he said of it:

"No doubt

it's too long for you, but read it, anyhow, as it defines somewhat my position. . . . This animistic religion is the 48 only live one, ours is a corpse of a religion.” To the editor of Theatre Arts he wrote that he felt "rather deeply" about the essay, and rather than having it cut, would pre49 fer to write another. In early July Lawrence had received a communication 46 Ibid., p. 614. 47 48 ^

Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, pp. 267-268. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 618. Ibid.. p. 621.

20^ from Edwhrd D” McDonald of the Drexel Institute about the 50 bibliography of Lawrence s works he proposed making. On September 1, 192^-, at the ranch, Lawrence wrote a little Introductory essay, work.

"The Bad Side of Books, 11 for McDonald's

To be the subject of a bibliography.was to receive

an institutional form of recognition that stirred Lawrence to reminiscence of his early struggle. On September

30

the summer's achievement in writing

was partially outlined by Lawrence in a letter to his agent in London.

He was sending him that saine day "St.. Mawr, 11

which, with "The Woman Who Rode Away" and "another story of out here that" he was "doing," "The Princess," would "make a book."

He enclosed also an epilogue to the illus­

trated edition of Movements in European History, requested by the Oxford Press.

51

On the same day, in his diary,

Lawrence noted sending to his agent's representative in Mew York "MSS." of "The Woman Who Rode Away," "The Last Laugh," "Jimmy and the Desperate Woman," "The Border Line," "The Dance of the Sprouting Gorn," and "Indians and Entertain52 ment." Of these items, the first, fifth, and sixth were certainly work of the summer of 192A, along with "The Hopi Snake Dance." 50

Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 242. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 622.

52 Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. Lawrence Manuscripts, p. 98.

205 The second New Mexico visit now $rew to a close. Lawrence wrote to his mother-in-law in Germany of his plans:

"I am glad to go to Mexico.

I always want to travel south. especially at niight."

I don't know why, but

It is already cold here,

The plan was to go to Oaxaca, where

it was "always warm," and where he "would like to finish" 53 The Plumed Serpent. ^ On October 3 in a letter to Murry he added that the high thin air" affected his "chest, bron5^ chially." He was glad Murry liked "the Hopi dance article." Forster "might not 'understand' his Hindu," hut

in A Passage

to India "the repudiation of our white bunk" was "genuine, sincere, and pretty thorough . . . . King Charles must have his head off. man."

Negative, yes.

But

Homage to the heads­

He regretted the turn of their meeting the winter be­

fore. It is time to go south.— Did I tell you my father died on Sept. 10th, the day before my birthday?— The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn. , . . The heart of. the North is dead, and the fingers of cold are corpse fingers. 35 One must note the brief remark about his father's death. Mrs. Lawrence remembers that he did not grieve at his father's death.

Perhaps not, after the storms of Sons and

53

Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . . , " pp. 188-189. 5^4 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 623*

55

Ibid., pp. 623-62^.

206 Lovers and the pain to his mother; hut plainly here in a dying season the past had touched him with something of the despair of the old life at home. By careful management, in the face of Seltzer's bankruptcy, the Lawrences had two thousand dollars for the 56 57 journey. They left the ranch on October 11, Dorothy Brett with them.

She could not remain at the ranch alone, 58 and they did not know what else she could do. If they took a house in Mexico,,she.must have "a little place of

her own.

^

Not be too close."

59

Ibid., p. 626.

Tedloek, The Frieda Lawrence Oolleetion of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts. p. 99I 58 *rieda Lawrence, "Not I, But the Wind» . . ,11 p. 188. 59

The Letters

J2. £L. Lawrence . p. 625.

CHAPTER II THE WORK The second visit to New Mexico was much more pro­ ductive than the first, part.icula.rly the stay at the ranch which afforded Lawrence the semi^isolafcion in which he worked Lest. The unfinished fragment of a play, “Altitude,11 begun as a prank one night at Mrs. Luhan's, with friends and acquaintances of friends as subjects of playful cari­ cature, is negligible, but is an evidence of Lawrence's gift of mimiefy and of his more gentle satirical vein. Indeed, he had in him the potentiality of becoming an able writer of social comedy, as the early plays, “The Married Man," and “The Merry-Go-Round," testify.

The

characterization of Mary Austin indicates his r&bility to poke fun at the solemn approach to the significance of the Indian, and of America. “Pan in America," unpublished until its inclusion in the posthumous papers, rounds out the use of the Pan image in the three stories dealing with the return to Europe.

More important, it makes clear the animistic

vision of life, implicit,

in the early Lawrence, which now

under the stimulus of knowledge of Indian ceremonial, be­ comes a dominant theme.

208 Even in the early days of the gods, Pan was an out­ law, "to be feared, not loved or approached."

Those who

saw him "by daylight fell dead as if blasted by lightning"; but sight of him by night filled "a man with power." Lawrence had used this conception in "The Last Laugh."

Pan’s

children, the nymths and fauns, also dangerous if seen by day, gave power to plants, birds, and trees. The movement to cities caused men to substitute for Pan the display of people, the glory of war, and "the pomp of argument and the vanity of ideas."

Pan became old and

"degraded with the lust of senility," and "his nymphs be­ came coarse and vulgar."

At last he died and became the

Christian devil, responsible especially for "our sensual excesses." He has been reborn in strange shapes.

In the

eighteenth century, "alas," he became the "ism" of the pantheists, such as Wordsworth, sorshipping "Nature in her sweet-and-pure aspect, her Lucy Gray aspect."

In the

United States he became "the Oversoul, the Allness of everything," of Whitman.

The fallacy of this is that

"all Walt is Pan, but all Pan is not Walt."

Pan manifests

himself also in the belief "that there is One mysterious Something-or-other back of Everything," but not "back of the Germans in I9li{-," and not yet demonstrably back of the bolshevists.

"But still, it's back of us, so that’s all

209 right."

Thus Lawrence sums up the views of Pan that he

considers fallacious.

He rejects the Rousseauistic idyll

of Nature, and the chauvinism of "God with us."

Now the

essay turns to an exposition of what he considers the true Pan spirit. He takes as his first image of this spirit, the great pine tree growing near the cabin at Kiowa Ranch. Here his strong sense of vitality and interplay between the forms of life, particularly the non-human forms, evident in his very first novel, expression once more.

‘The White Peacock, finds

Statement is interwoven with obser­

vation of minute details. I am conscious that it helps to change me, vitally. I am even conscious that shivers of energy cross my living plasm, from the tree, and I become a degree more like unto the tree, more bristling and turpentiney, in Pan. And the tree gets a certain shade and alertness of my life, within itself. Of course, if I like to eut myself off, and say it is all bunk, a tree is merely so much lumber not yet sawn, then in a great measure I shall be cut off. So much depends on one's attitude. One can shut many, many doors of receptivity in onerself; or one can open many doors that are shut.1 The method of alternating the vision with the logical, materialistic view is followed in the remainder of the essay. The tree image moves into that of the tree used for a campfire, forced by man to deliver its power to him in 1 Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of JD. H. Lawrence. pp. 25- 26 .

210 this form, smoke and flame returning to the sky whence the tree had stolen "the honey of the sun." atransition to the the fire.

Here there is

Indian and his vision and feeling beside

As he leaves the fire in the morning to hunt,

he propitiates a cliff towering overhead, and moves on in "a weird psychic connexion between hunter and hunted." Among the creatures of Pan there is an eternal struggle for life, between lives. Man, defence­ less, rapacious man, has needed the qualities of every living thing, at one time or other. . . . Tree, stone, or hill, river, or little stream, or waterifall, or salmon in the fall— man can be master and complete in himself, only by assuming the living powers of each of them, as the oc­ casion requires. But man learned to abstract; "he concentrated upon the engines or instruments which should intervene between him and the living universe."

He conquered the "phenomenal

universe," but lost the real relationship and "sits stupe­ fied with boredom upon his conquest." The essay ends with the return home of an Indian hunter with his kill,

bringing the power of the deer,

troubled by the moon, which represents the waiting woman, not bored "because everything is alive and active, and dan­ ger is inherent in all movement." though dying, among the Indians.

Pan is still alive, "It is useless to glorify

the savage," who will himself kill Pan for the sake of a motor-car.

"And we cannot return to the primitive life. . ."

2 IBid., p. 29.

211 Yet "we can still choose between the living universe of Pan, and the mechanical conquered universe of modern humanity" During the summer, Lawrence, further explored the animistic vision in three essays on the Indian, "The Dance of the Sprouting Corn," "Indians and Entertainment," and

3 "The Hop! Snake Dance."

"The Dance of the Sprouting Corn"

deals with the post-Easter dance on April 20 at Santo Domingo Pueblo.

Lawrence is at his most effective, creat­

ing a dynamic interplay of motifs and symbols. The spectator approaches the scene of the dance in terms of a world of drought through which the motor-car "rocks and lurches and churns in sand."

It passes "the mud

church standing discreetly" outside the pueblo, so as "not to see too much," and enters among the "dried mud" houses, mysteriously able to outlive Creek marble.

In the

"dry, oblong aridity" of a street "there tosses a small forest that is alive."

To this dynamic image are added

the thud of the drum and the sound of singing. ■ Gradually, dominantly in terms of movement and sound, with an accretion of descriptive detail, the outlines and facts of the dance become clear.

The women, forming

one group, make a broad impression of costume, flesh, movement, with the "noble, slightly

and

submissive bending"

D* H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico (New York, 1927), pp. 125-138. ?

212 of the head, the bare feet that 11seem to cleave to earth softly/' and the "continuous outward swaying of the pinesprays" in their hands.

The men, as a second group, are

presented in terms of continuous dance movement, inter­ spersed with description of their costumes and appearance. . . . the dancer dances the eternal dropping leap, that brings his life down, down, down, down from the mind, down from the broad, beautiful, shaking breast, down to the powerful pivot of the knees, then to the ankles, and plunges deep from the ball of the foot into the earth, towards the earth’s red centre, where these men belong, as is signified by the red earth with which they are smeared.4 Here the early emphasis on the arid earth is linked with the dance.

A third group of dancehs is formed by the old

men around the drum, who also sway pine-twigs and dance slightly as they sing. A fourth group, the Koshare, has been kept subordi­ nate to this point.

Now the drum changes pitch, and step

and formation change, the shift forming a cue for the pre­ sentation of the Koshare.

Though there is a full paragraph

of descriptive detail, they, too, are presented chiefly in movement. Suddenly as they catch a word from the singers, name of a star, of a wind, a name for the sun, for a cloud, their hands soar up and gather in the air, soar down with a slow motion. And again, as they catch a word that means earth, earth deeps, water within the earth, or red-earth quickening, the hands flutter softly down, and draw up the water,

k

Ibid., p. 131.

213 draw up the earth-quickening, earth to sky, sky to earth, influences above to influences below, ^ to meet in the germ-quick of corn, where life is. The effect of movement, and its alternation, is main­ tained to the last paragraph of the essay.

In it Lawrence

completes the interpretation heretofore interwoven with the dance itself. The sky has its fire, its waters, its stars, its wandering electricity, its winds, its fingers of cold. The earth has its reddened body, its invis­ ible hot heart, its inner waters and many juices and unaccountable stuffs. Between them all, the little seed: and also man, like a seed that is busy and aware. And from the heights and from the depths man, the caller, calls: man, the knower, brings down the influences and brings up the in­ fluences, with his knowledge: man, so vulnerable, so subject, and yet even in his vulnerability and subjection, a master, commands the invisible in­ fluences and is obeyed.© The gestures and symbols of the New Mexico dance ap­ pear in The Plumed Serpent in a Mexican setting.

There, in

the ritual invented by Don Ramon, prophet of a new religion, the gesture with the left hand is to the earth, that with the right is to the'sky.

He invokes "the snake of the

heart of the world" to "send life into . . . feet and ankles and knees, like sap in the young maize,*1,and the eagle of the sky to perch on his wrist to give him "power of the sky, and wisdom . . . , for the rains are here, and it is time ^ Ibid.. p. 135.

6

Ibid.. p. 137.

21k 7 for us to be growing in Mexico.”

Of course there is a

question as to which came first, the symbolism of the novel partly written the year before (but not to be completed until late January or early February, 1925), or that of the essay.

Lawrence might well have acquired knowledge of

New Mexico dances during the first visit, and thus have been able to use it during the first work on the novel, at Ohapala.

On the other hand, he very early insisted that

he must return to Mexico to

complete the boo£, and a com­

plete rewriting followed the experience recorded in the Indian essays. Two other essays may well be considered here, since they deal with essentially the same subject within a period of a few months.

"The Hopi Snake Dance" is without doubt

the last written, while references to the corn song within "Indians and Entertainment" indicate that this essay wa.s written after "The Dance of the Sprouting Corn." T

-

8

"Indians and Entertainment" of "our" form of entertainment.

begins with an analysis

When we go to the theatre,

we detach ourselves from actual existence and "become creatures of memory and of spirit-like consciousness." In a typical Lawrencean thrust, the audience becomes "a D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (New York, 1926), pp. 196-197.

8

Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico. pp. 99-122.

215 little democracy of the ideal consciousness.

They all sit

there, gods of the ideal mind, and survey with laughter or tears the realm of actuality."

This form of entertain­

ment is satisfying as long as one believes in "some supreme, universal Ideal Consciousness swaying all destiny."

A few

"have grown uneasy in their bones about the Universal Mind. But the mass are absolutely

convinced."

Particularly

at the movies, where "the shadow-pictures are thinkings" of the mind, they enjoy an orgy of abstraction. The Indian, on the other hand, has no conception of entertainment.

Most highbrow white people (even Adolf

Bandelier in The Delight Makers) have written sentimentally about him, so that he must be de-bunked.

"The common

healthy vulgar white usually feels a certain native dis­ like.

..."

Both reactions spring from the fact that

the Indian’s "whole being is going a different way from ours: i* Two courses are open:

one,' to detest him; the

other, to fool oneself "into believing that the befeathered and bedaubed darling is nearer to the true ideal gods, than we are."

The latter idea is a lie.

The truth

is that the

two ways of consciousness may not be reconciled, and are destructive of each other. To accept this "great paradox of human conscious­ ness" is to move toward "a new accomplishment." not "be turned into another sentimentalism.

^-t must

Because the

same paradox exists between the consciousness of white men and Hindoos or Polynesians or Bantu. . . .

To pretend that

all is one stream is to cause chaos and nullity."

To ex­

press one in terms of another, "so as to identify the two, is false and sentimental." The only thing you can do is to have a little Ghost inside you which sees both ways, or even many ways. But a man cannot belong to both ways, or to many ways. One man can belong to one great way of con­ sciousness only. He may even change from one way to another. But he cannot go both ways at once. 9 Lawrence turns to examples.

The European peasant

singing ballads "identifies the emotion of the song with his own emotion."

The fishermen of the Outer Hebrides

sometimes sing songs without words, and in this mindless­ ness approach the Indian, still, however, seeing themselves "outside the great naturalistic influences."

The Indian,

on the other hand, does not sing of an "individual, iso­ lated experience." vidual.

"The experience is generic, non-indi­

It is an experience of the human blood-stream,

not of the mind or spirit."

The essay develops now into

a series of examples of Indian songs and dances in which, with something of the technique of "The Dance of the Sprouting Corn," Lawrence creates the effect of mindless­ ness. The final turn of the essay comes in a discussion of the difference between Indian dance and song and Greek 9

Ibid., pp. 105-106.

217 religious ceremony.

The Greeks had a specific deity for

whose gratification the ceremony was performed. To the Indian there is no conception of a defined God. Creation is a great flood, forever flowing, in lovely and terrible waves. In everything, the shimmer of creation, and never the finality of the created. Hever the distinction between God and God's creation, or between Spirit and Matter. The remainder of the essay develops this dynamic concep­ tion.

The Indian's acceptance of Christianity is the ac­

ceptance of "two mysteries,1' one not excluding the other. He has only two negative commandments: the other against cowardice. is:

one against lying,

His one positive commandment

“Thou shalt acknowledge the wonder." The essay ends with a final example, the Indian

races.

The Indians do not run to win, to receive a prize,

or to show prowess. They are putting forth all their might, all their strength, in a tension that is half anguish, half ecstasy, In the effort to gather into their souls more and more of the creative fire, the creative energy which shall carry their tribe through the year. . . , on, on, in the unending race of humanity along the. track of trackless creation, The essential conception of "Indians and Entertain­ ment" also found expression in Lawrence's letters during the summer of 192^.

In the light of the essay, the words

to Rolf Gardiner gain in significance: Ibid.. p. 116. Ibid., p. 121.

. . I am sick

218 to death of the Jewish Monotheistic string. monomaniac. tic vision ”

It has become

I- prefer the pagan many gods, and the animis­ ;

and ". . . 1 have known many things that may

12

never be unified. . . . ”

The adumbration of such a re­

ligion, embodying much of the Indian symbolism, is an im­ portant part of the final version of The Plumed Serpent. The third essay on the Indian, "The Hopi Snake Dance,"

13

written shortly after a ■tfisit to the dance on

August 1?, 192^, brings together the essential ideas of the other two.

Lawrence considered the essay a definition of

his position, and felt "rather deeply" about it. The, long, tiring trip to the Hopi country produced a first, satirical account in a letter to Willard Johnson, published in September in Johnson's magazine, The Laughing Horse.

Lawrence spoke of the "hideous" country, the dif­

f i c u l t y of reaching it, the disheartening ruin" of the houses, and the incongruous crowd of "three thousand on­ lookers piled" into the tiny plaza.

The dance itself was

"like a children's game," without drums and pageantry.

The

armfuls of snakes held by the priests were "like armfuls of silk stockings that they vfere going to hang on the line to dry."

The account culminated in satire of the white

American attitude toward such "a tiny little show, for

12

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. pp. 612-613. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico. pp. 1^1-179*

219 all that distance." Just a show I The south-west is the great play­ ground of the white American. The desert isn't good for anything else. But it does make a fine national playground. And the Indian, with his long hair and his hits of pottery and blankets and clumsy home­ made trinkets, he’s a wonderful live toy to play with. More fun than keeping rabbits, and just as harmless. . . . He sure is cute with a rattler between his teeth. You sure, should see him, boy. If you don’t you miss a lot. Mrs. Luhan thought this first account "a mere realistic recital that might have been done by a tired, disgruntled 15 business man." Apparently she missed, or did not like, the intended satire of the audience and its attitude towards the dance. The essay Lawrence wrote later begins in much the same way as the letter.

The aridity of the country, the difficulty

of the road, the ruins and the

tinyness of the villages

again appear, and, as well, the three thousand people "of all ages, colours, sizes of stoutness, dimensions of curio­ sity . ’’ One point of view tovrard the dance is simply the sensationalhdesire "to see this clrcus-performance of men handling live rattlesnakes that may bite them any minute— even do bite them. cultural.. 14 15

Some show, that i" Another is the

A thirdis the religious.

From the cultural

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 6l?-6l8. Luhan,

Lorenzo in Taos, p. 267.

220 point of view the dance does not have the "Impressive beauty" of the ceremonials at the pueblos of other Indians. Instead, it is "grotesque . . . and rather uncouth in its touch of horror.

Hence the thrill, and the crowd."

Prom

the religious point of view, it is necessary to see that the dance does not represent "the religion of the Spirit" and fraternal communion with the snakes, but the animistic religion with its many spirits. There follows a long discussion of the nature of the Indian religion, much as in "Indians and Entertain­ ment. " . . . the gods are the outcome, not the origin. And the best gods that have resulted, so far, are men. But gods frail as flowers; which have also the godli­ ness of things that have won perfection out of the terrible dragon-clutch of the cosmos. . . . He has to conquer and hold his own, and again conquer all the time. 3-6 This concept of men as gods, frail and conquering "the powers of the cosmos" again and again to preserve them­ selves, appears in The Plumed Serpent.

The conquest is,

in the essay under consideration, not made through science, as in our culture.

". . . To the Indian, the so-called

mechanical processes do not exist.

All lives.

And the

conquest is made by the means of the living will."

Among

the Indians, the Hopi's is the hardest conquest, that of "rocks and eagles, sand and snakes, and wind and sun and

16 Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico, p. 151-

221

alkali."

We have made "the scientific conquest of forces,

of natural conditions." But the other thing fails us, the strange inward sun of life; the pellucid monster of the rain never shows us his stripes. . . . We little gods are gods of the machine only. It is our highest. Our cosmos is a great engine. And we die of ennui.17 The essay now turns to a description of the Antelope dance on Sunday evening, in which the snakes are not handled.

The chant reveals

. . . how deep the men are in the mystery, how sunk deep below our world, to the world of snakes, and dark ways in the earth, where are the roots of corn, and where the little rivers of unchannelled, uncreated life-passion run like dark, trickling lightning, to the roots of the corn and to the feet and loins of men, from the earth's innermost dark s u n . l ® Lawrence presents the ceremony in some detail, with only brief passages of interpretation. On the next afternoon the incongruous crowd reas­ sembles for the culminating ceremony, the snake dance. Lawrence gives a detailed description of the snake-priests, "hot living men of the darkness, lords of the earth's inner rays," and their ritual of carrying the "pale, delicate" snakes in their mouths with the "sacred aim" of harmony. At the moment of final release of the snakes, the crowd is cleared away, and Lawrence and his group follow to the edge of the mesa the runners carrying the snakes into the desert

17 Ibid., p. 153. 18 Ibid., p. 159.

222 to set them . . . free to carry the message and thanks to the dragon-gods who can give and withold. To carry the human spirit, the human breath, the human prayer, the human gratitude, the human command which had been breathed upon them in the mouths of the priests. . . , to carry this back, into the vaster, dimmer, inchoate regions where the monsters of rain and wind alternated in beneficence and wrath. . . , back to that terrific, dread, and causeful dark sun which is at the earth's core, that which . . . sends us food or death, ac­ cording to our strength of.vital purpose, our power of sensitive will, our courage. There follows another long passage on the meaning of the Indian animism.

The compatibility between its

"becoming" and Lawrence's sense of failure in Western in­ stitutions and desire for a new beginning, is clear. To us, God was in the beginning, Paradise and the Golden Age have been long lost, and all we can do is to .win back. To the Hopi, God is not yet, and the Golden Age lies far ahead. Out of the dragon's den of the cosmos,- we have wrested only the beginning of our being, the rudiments of our godhead.^0 The essay ends with a strong contrast between the white American and the Navajos.

The former- "hurry back to their

motor-cars, and soon the air buzzes with starting engines, * like the biggest of rattlesnakes buzzing." away quietly and remotely,

The latter ride

"looking wonderingly around."

The three essays form a triptych marking Lawrence's development of animistic.religion suggested by his encounter 19 Ibid., pp. 171-172. 20

Ibid., p. 177.

223 with the Indian.

But the writing on September 1, 1924-, of

the brief introduction to Edward D. McDonald's A Bibliography

21

of the-1Writings of D. H. Lawrence. glance.

called for a backward

As Lawrence sat out-of-doors in the vast landscape

at the ranch, he did not find much excuse for writing- such ah introduction.

Books to him were "incorporate."

He did

not care about editions or printers' errors, and when he forced himself to remember pa3t publications it was without pleasure.

In retrospect, he went straight to his first book,

.The White Peacock, and his mother. The very first copy of The White Peacock that was ever sent out, I put into my mother's hands when she was dying. She looked at the outside, and then at the title-page, and then at me, with.darkening eyes. And though she loved me so much* I think she doubted whether it could be much of a book, since no one more Important than I had written it. Somewhere, • in the helpless privacies of her being, she had wist- ful respect for me. But for me in the face of the world, not much. David would never get a stone 22 across at Goliath. And why try? Let G-oliath alone P In this brief passage is contained the insignificance of his origin, the overwhelming strength and greatness of the outside world, and the intense love of mother and son. One could do worse than take as a title for much of Lawrence's work:

"Stones at G-oliath."

As for the rest of the family,

his father thought of him as a "sort of eleverish swindler," getting "money for nothing." 21

His sister thought him lucky.

Edward D. McDonald, A Bibliography of the Writ­ ings of D. H. Lawrence (Philadelphia, 1925), PP* 9-l*K 22 Ibid.. pp. 9-10.

22k The voice Inside his boohs was his "forever."

The

copies themselves delivered him "to the vulgar mercies of the w o r l d . W i l l i a m Heinemann, who published The White Peacock, treated him "quite well," but gave him his first experience with "the objectionable" by requesting an altera­ tion, and later rejected Sons and Lovers, calling it "one of the dirtiest books he had ever read,11 Mitchell Kennerley, though generous about revision in the proofs of "The Widow­ ing of Mrs. Holroyd," later made no payment for Sons and Lovers so that nothing was received for it from America. Then Lawrence came to the suppression of The Rainbow.

He

dwelt upon it at some length that September day nearly ten years afterward, and concluded: -Since The Rainbow, one submits to the process of publication as to a necessary evil. ..... I have I believe that only uuc

J.1XXJ.Ww c?

j.c w

!vscui uai. o •

The essay ends on a quiet, .unrecriminating note.

". . . To

every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and. is gone. editions and forty-first are only the husks of it."

2k

First let

it is amusing to save them, for they are like old costumes. In them "we see the trophies once more of m a n ’s eternal fight with inertia." 23 Ibid.. p. 13 Ibid., p. Ik

225 Lawrence's own fight was carried on this summer in the three long stories as well as in the Indian essays. Three earlier stories,

"The Last Laugh, 11 "Jimmy and the

Desperate Woman," and "The Border Line," Just preceding the summer's work, had dealt with an unsatisfactory modern man, though in the last the search of a woman for fulfil­ ment dominated the story.

In "St. Mawr," "The Woman Who

Rode Away," and "The Princess," Lawrence turned his atten­ tion almost wholly to the woman, frustrated by the old . patterns of love and being, and seeking a solution. 25 Of these "St. Mawr" is the longest and most elabor­ ate (a short novel) and probably the first begun, though its completion may have overlapped with composition of the others. The first sentence of the story is thematic:

"Lou Witt had

had her own way so long, that by the age of twenty-five she didn't know where she was." position of this sentence.

The first ten pages are ex­ Lou is American, moderately rich,

her only close relation her mother.

Educated in Europe,

with brief trips to America, she does not "quite b e l o n g , i s at home "anywhere and nowhere."

In Rome she had had an

affair with Rico, son of an Australian baronet, who, in spite of all his surface virtues and amiability, could be suddenly wasteful, spiteful, ungrateful, rude, and detestable.

: ;

The affair ended when "they reacted badly on each other's ^ D. H. L awrence, St. Mawr, Together with the Princess (London, 1925), pp. 7-186.

k

226 nerves."

Later they met in Paris under the eye of Lou’s

mother, Mrs. Witt, who looked at everything "with her queer democratic . . . sort of conceit11 and contempt for modern life.

Lou accepted his proposal over the opposition of her

mother, who was "at the age when the malevolent male in man, the old Adam, begins to loom above all the social tailoring." She would almost have preferred for her daughter "one of the great, evil porters at Les Hailes." Their relationship is "a curious tension of will, rather than a spontaneous pas­ sion, " So that the marriage has become sexless.

Thus

Lawrence sketches Rico as the unsatisfactory modern man, Lou as the young, dissatisfied woman who does not understand the nature of her trouble, and-Mrs. Witt as the disappointed older woman who sees savagely the failure about her. The remainder of the story is imaginative exploration of the Lawrencean pattern of alienation and loss, dis­ covery of clues to a mysterious, regenerative force, rejec­ tion of contemporary European and American euhture, flight from it, and search for integration in a remote, primitive environment.

The chief symbol of regenerative power is the

stallion, St. Mawr, purchased by Lou over the protests of Rico.

He is also symbolic of repression and rebellion, and

has killed two men.

When Lou feels "the vivid heat of his

life come through to her, through the lacquer of red-gold gloss, " an "ancient understanding" seems to fill her soul.

227 Although heretofore her heart has "felt as dry as a Christ­ mas walnut," she cries "as if that mysterious fire of the horse's body had split some rock in her."

Now she cannot

"bear the triviality and superficiality of her human rela­ tionships."

Rico, in whom there is a "central powerless­

ness," becomes a counter-symbol to St. Mawr. Two men are contrasted to Rico.

One is Geronimo

Trujillo, of mixed Mexican^and Navajo blood, who is called "Phoenix" evidently because he has been salvaged by Mrs. Witt after having been wounded during the war.

He moves

through the story as servant and groom with the dark, im­ placable quality Lawrence found in the Indian, and is simultaneously a link with the lost religious past, an ex­ ample of contemporary disintegration,, and a link with America.

He comes eventually to represent only the physi­

cal, sexual half of Lawrence's integration of passion and intellect, darkness and light.

The other man, symbolic

of Lawrence's integration in another way and evidence of his eclecticism of myth and philosophy, is Lewis, the Welsh groom.

His Celtic mysticism rejects the contemporary

world, and he too is an "enemy of the shite camp."

As a

Lawrencean hero, he is a fore-runner of the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley's Lover, though Lawrence never raises him to full stature and mastery but lets him disappear, still aloof and in his place, toward the end of the story.

In

228

moments of intensity he lapses into dialect.

His eyes sug­

gest those "of a wildcat peering intent from under the dark­ ness of some bush where it lies unseen. 11 Physically he is an utter contrast to the elegant Rico, whose beardless face is "perfectly prepared for social purposes" while Lewis has a bush of hair and beard. by Lawrence.

He seems a partial self-portrait

Between Phoenix and Lewis there is "a latent,

but unspoken and wary sympathy." Lawrence gradually builds toward a rebellion by St. Mawr against the mastery of Rico.

This takes

place during

a ride which brings the general alignment of Mrs. Witt, Lou, Lewis, and Phoenix into contrast with Rico and a group of conventional young English people.

The Lawrencean touch is

evident even in the timing of St. Mawr's explosion to the whistling of a new dance tune.

Rico pulls the horse on top

of him and suffers injuries,which will leave him with a permanent limp;

The fall of St. Mawr on his back is sym­

bolic of Lawrence's concept of reversed values in the modern world, also made-explicit at this point.

*

. . . Ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror. But go on saving life, the ghastly salvation army of ideal mankind. At the same time secretly, viciously, potently undermine the natural creation, betray it with kiss after kiss, destroy it from the inside, till you have the swollen rottenness of our teeming existences. .. . Two bad breaks the secret evil has made: in Germany and in Russia. Watch itJ Let evil keep a policeman's eye on evilJ

229 The surface of life must remain unruptured. . . . What*s to he done? G-enerally speaking, nothing. The dead will have to bury their dead, while the earth stinks of corpses. The individual can but depart from the mass and try to cleanse himself. . . . Retreat to the desert and fight. But in his soul adhere to that which is life itself, creatively destroying as it goes: destroying the Stiff old thing to let the new bud come through. Lou now comes to this Lawrencean program, with the possible exception of the fight, which she, not an artist, has no means of carrying on except with the things immediately concerning her. First Lou must decide whether St. Mawr's dangerous­ ness is merely the evil vengeance of the slave, so that he should be destroyed as Rico first insists, or whether it is a courageous struggle for freedom.

In this, as in other

situations in the book, Lawrence explores imaginatively the implications of his nihilistic position.

This tentative­

ness, somewhat substantiating his contention that his philosophy was drawn from the works, gives the story more roundness than a sketchy discussion can indicate adequately. Here Lou sees in Phoenix a plight similar to that of St. Mawr; cruelty, “an aloneness, and a grim little satisfac­ tion in a fight, and the peculiar courage of an inherited despair.

People who inherit despair may at last turn it

into a greater herosim." The forces of conventional society are turned against

26

Ibid., pp. 85- 86.

230 St. Mawr.

The Dean of the church advises shooting him,

and is faced down by Mrs. Witt.

Rico decides to sell him

to one of the young ladies of his set, who will have him gelded, an example of the "sneaking-,' sterilising cruelty" of "our whole eunuch civilisation."

Mrs. Witt circumvents

this by riding to visit some friends, Lewis accompanying her on St. Mawr.

Later she, Lou, Lewis and Phoenix will

take the horse to America.

Lawrencean escape is all that

is left. The ride of Mrs. Witt and Lewis constitutes the Lawrencean situation of the dissatisfied woman who is at­ tracted by the isolate male in possession of "the mystery of power," but who perversely must try to dominate hiim. Lewis expresses the Lawrencean animism in his talk of the Celtic feeling toward nature. Mou'll never make me believe the sky is like an empty house with a slate falling from the roof. The world has its own life, the sky has a life of its own, and never is it like stones rolling down a rubbish heap and falling into a pond. ' Mrs. Witt, despite her sympathy for this, talks of marriage in terms of "give and take," and finds that he would refuse to marry her because he could not give his body "to any woman who didn't respect it." despised.

He will not be mocked and

Although they love each other, he "guarding his

'body' from her contact," Lawrence does not here work out _

Ibid., p. 12k.

231 such ultimate rapport between the classes as he does in Lady Chatterley's Lover.

His mood is evidently that of

Lou, who, when she hears of her mother's consideration of marriage, cannot understand it, since she herself now under­ stands Jesus' "Noli me tangere ."

The phrase appears often

in Lawrence in the ensuing years, and represents both a revulsion and subtleized view of sex with which he is sel­ dom credited.

It seems to have deep-lying psychological

roots reaching back into the conflict of the boy's home and immediately into the conflicts of his marriage.

Symbolically,

it should be noticed, Lawrence's career is in a sense achie-, vement of what his father failed to do.

His mother was

superior, and usurped the place of the father.

Lawrence

married out of his class, and fought a running war for the superior position.

So do many of his male characters.

They

must lead, and the women must respect them. The journey to America of Mrs. Witt, Lou, St. Mawr, Lewis, and Phoenix is significantly in the autumn. go Southl

"To

Always to go South, away from the arctic horror

as far as possible !"

Away from the "idealistic, Christian­

ised tension of the now irreligious North !"

Lawrence used

similar words in letters during the fall of 192lj..

Only in

the Gulf of Mexico is there "the marvellous beauty and fascination of natural wild things," unlike the "horror of man's unnatural life, his heaped-up civilization."

The Gulf

232 Stream, it should be noted, represents exactly the same con­ trast to Lawrence as to Hemingway in To Have and Have Not. and Lawrence's rebellion is far from an isolated phenomenon in modern literature, though more explicit and aggressive than most. In. Texas, there is "something new, something not used up."

Lou

finds in the people "a strange, uninspired

cheerfulness, filling, as it were, the blank of incomplete comprehension," but “the old screws of emotion and intimacy are released."

Lawrence's feeling of a dream-like existence

also appears in her. St.Mawr is easily ridden, and now accepts sex by making advances to a ranch mare.

Years before, during the

war, the childless Lawrence had written to a friend that it was criminal to bring children into such a world.

Only

out of Europe does St. Mawr have his consummation. The stallion and Lewis remain here, and the story moves on without them.

Indeed, the latter part is in many

respects a separate story.

Lou not only continues her

search for a solution to her problems, but ends in tenta­ tive renunciation of sex and the world.

^There is a failure

of unity in the disappearance of St. Mawr and Lewis, the now unfrustrated symbols of power and the isolate male, and in Lou's subsequent renunciation.

The failure seems to lie

in Lawrence's own inability at this time to feel a complete

233 solution possible and true. Lou tires of "the mechanical energy of making good" and the "mystic duty to 'feel good.'"

The women and Phoenix

go to Santa Fe, where Lou and her mother are oppressed by the tourist atmosphere, worse than that in Europe.

Lou de­

cide® to find a place where they can be by themselves. Phoenix and she set out by car to look at a ranch that is for sale. Lawrence is now near his own experience in New Mexico, andbsfore long it takes over the story. -

But first he must

v-

free Lou of the last male, Phoenix, and bring her to full re­ nunciation of the world before she can enter the new life. Lawrence gives the trip itself much space.

Phoenix

now is sure of himself and feels that money is Lou's only advantage.

Lou feels that he desires to become her lover,

then marry her.

She analyzes her position.

In marriage

he would faithfully "stand between her and the world," but his actions as "a private man and a predative alien-blooded male" would have "nothing to do with her."

She would not

be "his own real female counterpart." . . . When he remembered the almost watery softness of the Indian woman's dark, warm flesh; then he was a male, an old, secretive, rat-like male. But be­ fore Lou's straightforwardness and utter sexual incompetence, he just stood in contempt. . . . Never­ theless he was ready to trade his sex . . ^ e white woman's money and social privileges.^ Lou does not judge him "too harshly" because she 28 Ibid.. pp. 159-160.

23k knows that she too is "at fault."

But she wonders if, in

his rootlessness and in "his opinion of himself a 3 a sexual male," he is really superior to Rico.

She knows

that what she really wants if "relief from the nervous tension and irritation of her life" and to "recover her own soul." Even the illusion of the beautiful St. Mawr was gone. And Phoenix, roaming round like a sexual rat in promiscuous back yards !--Merci, mon cher I For that was all he w a s : a sexual rat in the great barn-vard of man's habitat, looking for female rats.29 Thus Lou rejects men and sex from her present life. rejection is linked to acceptance of a higher value. mere sex, is repellent to her."

The "Sex,

She will keep to herself

unless something touches "her very spirit."

She understands

now "the meaning of the Vestal Virgins. . ., symbolic of ... . women weary of the embrace of incompetent men," and turning to "the unseen gods."

She says to herself:

I ought to stay virgin, and still, very, very still, and serve the most perfect service. I want my temple and my loneliness and my Apollo mystery of the inner fire. And with men, only the delicate, subtler, more remote relations. No coming near. A coming near only breaks the delicate veils, and broken veils, like broken flowers, only lead to rottenness.3® Phoenix and Lou arrive at a ranch which is undoubtedly modelled after Lawrence's Kiowa Ranch. jhsid., p . l6l . Ibid., p. l6i|..

Lou decides at once

235 that "this is the place." Now, in a long passage containing the most powerful, vivid imagery of the story, Lawrence tells of the develop­ ment of the ranch from its origin sixty years before.

In

so -doing he adumbrates his theme of the conflict between absolute conceptions and reality, and arrives at a relati­ vist ic, animistic solution, thus gathering together the strands of his thinking during this period. First "a restless schoolmaster11 from the East, look­ ing for gold and finding little, homesteaded the ranch. Then, to pay his debts, the ranch had gone to a trader, who tried to build it up and make it pay.

He brought water for

irrigation two miles across the mountains and, "being a true American. . . , felt he could not really say he had conquered his environment till he had got running water, taps, and wash-hand basins inside his house."

He finally

achieved a bathhouse with a bath-tub, "but here the mountains finished him." His New England wife and he, despite the great cost, tried to make the ranch pay by farming a little, and later by raising goats in order to make and sell "goats' cheese." But though the goats throve, there was little profit. And it all cost, cost, cost. And a man was always let down. At one time no water. At another a poison-weed. Then a sickness. Always, some mysterious malevolence fighting, fighting against the will of man. A strange invisible influence

236 coming out of the livid rock-fastnesses in the bowels of those uncreated Rocky Mountains, preying upon the will of man. . . .31 The wife worked hardest of all, loving the ranch “almost with passion. . . , a sort of sex passion, intensifying her ego,

making her full of violence and of blind female

energy."

To her the beauty at the ranch was "pure beauty

absolute:'beautyv'? :But “while: she revelled in the beauty . .

. , the grey, rat-like spirit of the inner mountains

was attacking her from behind." Horses were struck by lightning.

Chickens were carried off. Finally the sight of

the lightning scar on a t;ree caused her to say, in spite of herself: There is no Almighty loving God. The God there is shaggy as the pine-trees. and horrible as the lightning. Outwardly, she^never confessed this. Openly, she thought of her dear New England Church as usual. But in the violent undercurrent of her woman’s soul, after the storms, she would look at that living seamed tree, and the voice would say in her, almost savagely: What nonsense about Jesus and a God of Love, in & place like t h i s J This is more awful and more splendid. I like it better. . . . There was no love on this ranch. There was life, intense, bristling life, full of energy^but also, with an undertone of savage sordidness. In a long, vividly-colored passage on the flowers at the ranch, even their life “seems one bristling hair-raising tussel.“ Sometimes her love turned into "a certain repulsion." 31 Ibid., p. 169. 32 Ibid., p. 175.

237 Finally, after many years, she admitted that she was glad to leave the ranch in November when snow came, and live in "a more human home" in the village.

When she found that

she did not want to return to the ranch, 11she hid from herself her own corpse, the corpse of her New England be­ lief in a world ultimately all for love.” paradise on earth" had been maimed.

Her "belief in

The war added one more

blow to the attempt at civilization at the ranch, and every­ where else. Every new stroke of civilisation has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the "dragon," in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half-sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win to the next stage. For all savagery is half-sordid. And man is only himself when he is fighting on and on, to overcome the sordidness.33 At last the New England woman's ranch was rented to „a Mexican, "who was slowly being driven out by the vermin." At this point Lawrence returns to Lou. "new blood to the attack."

She is

She buys the ranch, called

Las Ohivas, and takes Mrs. Witt to see it.

On the drive

up, Mrs. Witt looks at everything "with a sort of stony indifference."

At the ranch she sees the failure and aays

of a pack-rat perched on a cabin that he looks "as if he were the real boss of the place." 33

Ibid.. p. 179.

She is sarcastically

238

glad that Lou feels “competent to cope with so much hope­ lessness.11 But when she climbs the slope above the cabins and looks out over the landscape, she cannot “fail to be aroused.11

She questions Lou about her purpose.

Lou an­

swers that “as far as people go,11 her heart “is quite bro­ ken."

As for sex and men, she says:

. . . Either my taking a man shall have a meaning and a mystery that penetrates my very soul, or I will keep to myself.— And what I know is, that the time has come for me to keep to myself. No more messing about,^ There is a spirit at the ranch for her. :

I don’t know what it is, definitely. It's something wild, , that will hurt me sometimes and will wear me down sometimes. I know it. But it’s something big, bigger than men, bigger than people, bigger than religion. I t ’s something to do with wild America. And it’s something to do with me. It's a mission if you like. . , . It saves me from cheapness, mother.. And even you could never do that for me.-'■5

The story ends swiftly as Mrs. Witt, rising and looking at the distant mountains, asks how much Las Ghivas has cost. "Twelve hundred dollars," said Lou, surprised. “Then I call it cheap, considering_all there is to it: even the n a m e . “36 “St. Mawr" is the only story in which Lawrence's plot involves the transition from England to the New Mexico Ibid., p. 185. 35

Ibid., pp. 185-186. Ibid., p. 186.

239 ranch.

The Europe versus America theme appears elsewhere,

but only here does it use so directly this aspect of his adventure.

Beyond the matter of locale, Lou Witt's con­

flict and her solution are also his. Why did he make his protagonist a woman? not an unusual practice for him.

It is

In most of the stories

of this period, as well as in many before and after the American experience, the chief character is a woman.

Often

she represents qualities Lawrence finds inimical; she is destructive of male integrity,, or blind to it, and the resulting conflict is one of his major themes, though in a larger sense the conflict is an aspect of total evil in the modern world.

But Lou is a positive rendering of

woman, as is Constance in Lady Chatterley1s Lover.

She

gives up the deadness and nervous tension, the surface motives of conventional social life, and becomes the Lawrencean seeker.

When she does this she becomes both

Lawrence, and the woman he irngainatively seeks, expressing his own struggle and search and agreeing with his solutions. She also affords him an anonymity and objectivity that he may have found desirable, and needful, as an artist.

He

always felt publication asi.an exposure of the naked self to misunderstanding eyes, and in "St. Mawr," as well as in The Plumed Serpent and other stories, woman as chief character, beyond the interest her problem held for him,

ZkO may well have been an alter ego interposed between himself and the world. Lou's revulsions are Lawrence's.

Love, instead of

being a sacrament, has become a mechanical contest of wills, a cheap flirtatiousness, and a rat-like contact. sation is a hideous dissection of individuals.

Conver­ Social

reform ignores man's need of joyousness and adventure.

In

short, life under the rule of absolute Ideals has become static and perverted.

What is Lou's solution?

It is

first of all the recovery of individual integrity through isolation.

”. . .

myself," says Lou.

The time has come for me to keep to She must participate in, commune with,

the undefined, wild, larger spirit, she feels at the ranch, that saves her "from cheapness." In this Lou represents only one aspect of Lawrence's struggle.

It Is in the passage on the New England woman's

defeat at the ranch that Lawrence adumbrates the dynamic, animistic philosophy expressed that same summer in the Indian essays.

Man,-.must acknowledge that there is a

savage spirit, an evil, opposed to him, and that the ab­ solute paradise cannot be achieved in a static, final sense. Man must fight "on and on . . . to overcome the old, halfsordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win to the next stage."

In Lawrence's contemplation of this

there seems to be a sad awareness of the irony and tragedy

241 of the position.

"Every new stroke of civilisation has

cost the lives of countless "brave men, who have fallen defeated "by the •dragon,1" he writes, and one is reminded of the snake dance of the Hopls, with its winning of "per­ fection out of the terrible dragon-clutch of the cosmos." The irony and tragedy lie in tii.e rejection of the absolute, and hence the inevitability of partial failure.

The values

lie in the courage to make the struggle and to accept the cycle of birth, development, and death, not only of indivi­ duals but of eras of civilization. As for the use of the American scene, it is magnifi­ cent in the passage on the ranch.*

The vast landscape be­

comes a symbol of beauty and of the New England woman1s longing for the absolute.

.Within it the "birds, beasts,

and flowers" move constantly and vividly as images of the struggle against the sordid, savage spirit lying within the mountains.

There is no hint of mere local color.

Every­

thing is integrated with the theme. 37 "The Woman Who Rode Away" came from- the visit with Mrs. Luhan to the mountainside cave between the ranch and Taos.

The cave's altar-like ledge; Mrs. Luhan's information

that the sun, at the winter solstice, shone through the frozen waterfall at the entrance to strike the ledge; her 37

D* H. Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (Leipzig, n.d.).

zkz psychic experience of terror and doom there— all play a part in the story. Again Lawrence's chief character is a woman whose marriage has failed.

Although the setting is not New Mexico

but the wilds of the Sierra Madre in Mexico, country that Lawrence had traversed the year before, many of the details are plainly New Mexican.The husband, twenty years than his wife, is ’’still

older

a little dynamo of energy" who

has accomplished everything alone, Including ownership of the silver-mlnes at which they live.

Her heart quails

before his accomplishment, the naked, ugly mines "in the midst of the lifeless isolation. "

Even the town nearby is "thrice-

dead" with its "great, sundried dead church" and a "hopeless covered market-place," where, the first time she visited it, she saw a dead dog "lying among the stalls." reported such a scene in before.)

(Lawrence

a letter from his trip the year

It was "deadness

withindeadness."

To her husband, essentially still a bachelor, she is another possession to be guarded jealously.

He is also

"a squeamish waif of an idealist" and hates "the physical side of life." "must get out."

Her nerves go bad, and she feels that she A visiting young mining engineer gives

her the idea for her escape.

Curious about what lies

behind the "great blank hills," he questions the husband, who talks disdainfully of "howling and heathen practices."

2^3 It is said that one tribe, the Chilchui, maintain the ancient religion of the Aztecs and offer human sacrifices. The young engineer’s "peculiar vague enthusiasm for un­ known Indians" finds "a full echo" in the wife’s heart. She was overcome by a foolish romanticism more unreal than a girl’s. She felt it was her des­ tiny to wander into the secret haunts of these o q timeless, mysterious, marvellous Indians. . . . There is irony here in her lack of understanding, and per­ haps a touch of satiric allusion to Mrs. Luhan. She finds a pretext to ride alone, silencing the protests of a servant and her son by exerting her will.

In

her break from deadness she is Lawrence's heroine,escaping; but in her exertion of will she is his inimical modern woman who must be broken. On her journey toward the Ghiichuli country, she is not frightened by the natives’ avoiding her, by the "fatalseeming" mountains, or by the carrion birds that hover in the distance. tion. "

Instead she feels at first "a strange ela­

Throughout the details of her journey, Lawrence

builds a sense of foreboding of death and simultaneously an anticipation of something more than death.

As she nears

her destination, the elation at freedom disappears, and she becomes "vague and disheartened."

Having partially lost her

will, she does not care and cannot turn back. 38 Ibid., p. 56.

2kk She is stopped by three Indians, a young man who can speak; Spanish, and two older men.

As she talks to the

younger one, her "assured, American woman's voice" contrasts with his quiet questions in Spanish.

To her the men are

like all natives except for their long hair,

"full of life."

Thus, as with Lewis in "St. Mawr," Lawrence uses uncut hair as a symbol of greater life and religious awareness.

The

Indian, with his "inhuman" eyes, sees her "half-arrogant confidence" but also her "curious look of trance."

When he

transmits her statement that she wants to see the Chilchui "houses and to know their gods," all three Indians accompany her on the trail.

When, in spite of her protest, one insists

on slapping her horse to urge him on, "all the passionate anger of the spoilt white womg.n" rises in her; but she sees in the Indian's eyes that she is not a woman to him but "some strange, unaccountable thing, incomprehensible to him, but Inimical.11 She was "powerless.

And along with her

supreme anger there came a slightthrill of exultation.

She

knew she was dead." Here the meaning is both figurative of the loss of her old self, and of the sacrificial death to follow.

Since

she lives by will, once it is overcome, she has nothing to live by.

Yet this may be a step to a new life.

Echoes of

this death and resurrection theme are contained in Lawrence's correspondence in September with Mrs. Luhan, who had placed

24-5 herself In the hands of a psychiatrist. On the journey to the Chilchui, the old men look at her “as if, perhaps, her whiteness took away all her woman­ hood, and left her as some giant,.female white ant."

They

reach a point where the horse must he left behind, and tra­ verse a narrow path across a cliff, she, unable to trust her riding boots, on hands and knees, the Indians erect and sure-footed in sandals.

She wonders why she does not "hurl

herself down, and have done i The world was beloxv her. “ On the other side she sees, three thousand feet below, a green valley and a village.

The view is rather like that

from Kiowa ranch down into Taos Valley.

Only the white­

ness of the houses is unusual and frightens her.

Probably

the suggestion is of the other-worldly- and, perhaps, of greater purity than she has known. On the descent, through a New Mexico landscape, she sees the bright autumn flowers "as pale shadows hovering, as one who is dead must see them." Near the village they are met by three elders, the chief of whom looks at her with eyes of "extraordinary pierc­ ing strength, without a qualm of misgiving in their demonish, dauntless power."

He looks past her resistance and challenge

"into 6he knew not what. 11 The Indians' eyes and their way of looking at her are a motif all through the latter part of the story, and it is noteworthy that Lawrence often uses eyes as symbols of both blindness to spiritual qualities and perception of them.

"Foolhardily" she tells him that she

2A6 seeks "the God of ..the Chilchui, " and assents, thinking it is what they want, to the idea that she is "weary of her own God.11 Their exultance at this has nothing of the "sensual or sexual" but rather a "terrible glittering purity." The village lands are "a network of little paths, small streams, and little bridges among square, flowering gardens." ' “No hoof of horse nor any wheel" has disfigured the paths.

In the central plaza are two larger houses

which Lawrence describes as much like the main buildings at Taos Pueblo.

She is conducted to a kiva-llke house and

led before the cacique, a very old man "with a far-off in­ tentness, not of this world.". He asks if she brings her heart to the Chilchui god, and when she answers "yes" new clothing is brought her.

At her refusal to change while

the men are present, powerful guards hold her while two old men slit her clothing with knives and-remove it. cacique’s order, her hair is loosened.

At the

Moistening his

fingertips, he "most delicately" touches her breasts, body, and back.

Each time she winces "as if Death itself were

touching her," but does not feel shamed.

Her new clothing

is simple, colorful, embroidered with flowers.

She is led

to a little house where, though kept a prisoner, she is treated with Impersonal solicitousness. The young Indian of the trail is her attendant. From time to time he brings her a strange drink which,

24? though pleasant-tasting, causes her to vomit violently. Evidently this is a purification rite, as is much else. Afterward she experiences a "soothing languor," and her perceptions are heightened so that she feels that she can "distinguish the sound of evening flowers unfolding*" From the young Indian she learns that his forebears have been caciques since before the Spaniards.

He has

worked as a laborer in the United States and has traveled as far as Ghlcago.

When she asks what he did with his

long hair (*a symbol of life) while there, he is tormented, and says that he hid it beneath bandana and hat.

He had

gone only to gain knowledge at the behest of the old men, because he would one day be cacique.

His presence never

makes her self-conscious or sex-conscious, yet she sees "that in some other mysterious way" hecis "darkly and powerfully male." Weeks pass for her in a contentment broken by mo­ ments of horror and uneasiness at loss of "her own power!;" The mere presence of the Indians takes away her will.

Some­

times the drinks brought her are emetics, but they bring her the languor and mystic perception.

Then as the days

grow shorter and colder, her will revives.

When she in­

sists on going out, she is led to the top of the big house on the day of the great dance.

The dance is described

much as Lawrence does the dances in the Indian essays.

248 Evidently he uses elements of a fall dance, perhaps that at Taos Pueblo on San (Jeronimo.

She feels her own death.

In the strange towering symbols on the heads of the changeless, absorbed women she seemed to read once more the Mene Mene Tekel Upharsln. Her kind of womanhood, intensely personal and Individual, was to be obliterated again, and the great primeval symbols were to tower once more over the fallen individual independence of woman. The sharpness and the quivering nervous consciousness of the highly-bred white woman was to be destroyed again. . . .39 Here Lawrence states the theme of the story.

Only the

Sacrifice remains to be told. The young Indian explains the colors of the costumes, the red, yellow, and black over white of the men, and the black of the women.

The men "are the fire and the day­

time, " the women "the spaces between the stars at night." The conception of the relationship of men and women, and a touch of the symbolism, are to be found in such early essays of Lawrence's as "The Crown."

She is terrified by

his adding that when a white woman sacrifices herself to the Indian gods, the Indian gods will take the ascendancy once more.

The return of the Indian gods receives full

scale treatment in The Plumed Serpent. . In a sense, "The Woman Who Rode Away" affords Lawrence a proving ground for the conception. Now the sacrifice is consummated.

39 Ibid., pp. 82-83.

As winter comes,

249 she feels always now the '‘heightened, mystic acuteness and a feeling as If she were diffusing out deliciously into the harmony*of things."

She hears the stars and the snow

speaking, and smells the sweetness of the moon "relaxing to the sun in the wintry heaven." Near December she is taken before the aged cacique, stripped of her clothes, and touched by him as before. She obediently makes the sign of peace and farewell; he makes the sign of peace and is ready to die.

A day of

ceremonial follows.

During it her mystic perception is

further heightened.

She passes more and more into the

"state of passional cosmic consciousness."

She wears

blue because it is the color that retreats and is distant. The blue-eyed people are "messengers from far-away," and must now go back.

It should be remembered that Lawrence

felt that the blue-eyed, blonde people were more abstract and mentally conscious than the dark peoples of the south. She will take a message to the sun, who will return to the Indians when he sees among the Indian women the moon, heretofore held bac£ by the white woman, Lawrence treats the final ceremonies and the sacri­ fice in great detail, not varying the rather deliberate movement of the story.

The elaborate preparation of her as

sacrifice involves perception on her part, though she is in a trance-like state, of "the immense fundamental sadness,

250 the grimness of ultimate decision, the fixity of revenge, and the nascent exultance of those that are going to triumph."

The old cacique and she are carried in litters

to the cave in a procession that Lawrence makes colorful and rich and full of movement. the frozen waterfall,

At the cave she feels most

“a fanged inverted pinnacle of ice."

She is taken into the cave by the priests, the people re­ maining in an amphitheatre below, but participating through the transparency of the ice.

The final suspense comes as

she, upon the altar, and the old cacique, with upraised knife, await the moment when the sun will reach her through the ice.

Here Lawrence leaves them.

fall in the story.

The knife does not

But the final concentration on the spirit

of the priest is, perhaps, more terrible in its sense of relentless intensity.

In the "black, empty concentration"

of his eyes . . . there was power, power intensely abstract and remote, but deep, deep to the heart of the earth, and the heart of the sun. In absolute motionless­ ness he watched till the red sun should send his ray through the column of ice. Then the old man would strike, and strike home, accomplish the sacrifice and achieve the power. The mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race to race. 0 Mrs. Luhan too^ this story personally, as one in which Lawrence thought he "finished" her "up.11 There is little doubt that Lawrence had her in mind; yet it is AO

Ibid.. p. 99.

251 equally clear that she and the cave near Taos afforded him the imaginative means for another statement of a theme that had appeared in his work before he knew her.

Indeed

the conflict between seeking man obstructed by the wilful consciousness of modern woman is present in Lawrence's earliest work, although there it has no philosophic systema­ tization.

As for an element of triumph through imaginative

revenge, it is not unlike that of the stories from the return to England.

In "The Last Laugh" and "The Border

Line" corrupt modern man, bearing a resemblance to Murry, is brought to death. Actually "The Woman Who Rode Away" combines several Lawrencean themes.

The antagonism of the Indian conscious­

ness and the white, and the mystic achievement of control of the forces of the universe, may be found, of course, in the animistic tendency of the summer, expressed in letters and in the Indian essays.

In the story, the

ritual is not only the means of destroying the woman's "sharpness and quivering nervous consciousness" but of bringing her release into a greater life.

The concep­

tion of a victory by the Indian gods over the white gods, and a return to earth of the older gods, brings the story closer than any other to the theme of The Plumed Serpent, not to be revised and completed until the ensuing visit to Mexico.

252 Technically, Lawrence's theme in' “The .Woman Who Rode Away" called for a difficult hiend of reality and fantasy.

He must achieve suspension of disbelief by sug­

gesting the mystic through believable detail.

Perhaps

this accounts for the slow pace of the story through an accumulation of detail.

The detail always suggests the

culminating fate of the woman.

Even her subjection to

her husband accounts in part for the trance-like state that makes believable her increasing acquiescence in her fate.

The potential horror of the saerificex is ameliorated.

The Indians are considerate.

The preparation for the sacri­

fice is slow, impersonal, and calculated to render it less painful.

Nevertheless the movement is inexorable.

It is

this that gives the story its tenseness, inevitability, and doom.

Despite complex detail, Lawrence never relaxes

this unifying tone. As for his use of the American scene, it is eclectic. The setting in the Sierra Madre is more New Mexican than Mexican, and the Chilchui resemble the New Mexican Indians. Lawrence's only concern with factual accuracy is to achieve enough versimilitude to sustain belief. _ hi , "The Princess" was the last of the summer's stories to be completed, on October 8, three days before A2 the Lawrences left the ranch for Mexico. Lil^e "The ^ 189-238. llO

Lawrence, St. Mawr Together with The Princess, pp. *

Tedloch, The Frieda Lawrence Collection Lawrence Manuscripts, p. 99.

of

r\

D. H.

253 Woman Who Rode Away," it has as its chief character a modern woman unintegrated in the Lawrencean sense. The first part of the story sketches her background at great length.

Dollie Urquhart received her informal

title of Princess and her peculiar training from her father, Golin.

Colin, "Just a bit mad," claimed royal blood from

his Scottish family.

He was "one of those gentlemen of

sufficient but not excessive means who fifty years ago wandered vaguely about, never arriving anywhere, never doing anything, and never definitely being anything."

When nearly

forty, he married a Hew England woman of twenty-two.

But

"living with a fascinating spectre" broke her, and, having "no great desire to live," she died when the Princess was two.

Thus Lawrence gives the Princess a double heritage

of other-worldliness, Celtic and Hew England. Her father taught her to 'treat people as commoners. You peel everything away from people, and there is a green, upright demon in every man and woman; and this demon is a man’s real self, and a woman's real self. It doesn't really care about anybody, it belongs to the demons and the primitive fairies, who never care. But, even so, there are big demons and mean demons, and splendid demonish fairies, and vulgar ones. But there are no royal fairy women left. .Only you, my little Princess. . . . You and I are the last. When I am dead there will be only you. And that is why, darling, you will never care for any of the people in the world very much. Be­ cause their demons are all dwindled and vulgar. ^ Thus, even as a child, the Princess was "as impervious as Lawrence, St. Mawr Together with the Princess. p. 192.

25k crystal.11

She seemed 11to understand things in a cold

light perfectly, with all the flush of fire absent."

This

quality brought her violent antipathies from men, 11she was so assured, and her flower of maidenhood was so scent­ less."

A cabman in Rome, "to whom the phallic mystery was

still the only mystery,11 would turn against "the blasphemous impertinence of her own sterility."

She mistakenly attributed

this to her New England mother, not..seeing the truth about herself. When she was thirty-eight, virginal and looking ten years younger, her father died after "fits of violence which almost killed the Princess," to whom physical Vio­ lence was horrible.

His nurse, Miss Cummins, became her

companion. All of this, some nine pages, is preparatory to the Princess’ adventure in New Mexico. "in the raw, vast, vulgar open air."

She is now alone Her passion for her

father has already been transferred to Miss Cummins, so that she herself is empty of feeling.

The abstract idea

of marriage imposes "a sort of spell on her."

She and

Miss Cummins, who is also virginal, decide to go to New Mexico, which seems less vulgar than the Pacific coast. In late August they arrive at a dude ranch in the desert a mile from "San Cristobal Pueblo."

There college

boys, and other men, hint at marriage but fail "before-

255 the look of sardonic ridicule in the Princess1s eyes.*' Only one man intrigues her, Romero, now a guide, but once the owner of the ranch.

His Spanish family has been de­

feated by the white men, the failure of sheep-raising, “and the fatal inertia which overcomes all men, at last, on the desert near the mountains."

He has the static

quality of the Mexican, "waiting either to die or to be aroused into passion and hope."

The Princess sees the

"spark of pride, or self-confidence, or dauntlessness" at the center of his eyes and knoxirs that "his ’demon, 1 as her father would have said," is a "fine demon."

In a fishing

scene, his help causes her to feel in him "a subtle, in­ sidious male kindliness.11 grows between them.

"A vague, unspoken intimacy"

At the same time she feels that death

is not "far from her.11 The Princess and Miss Cummins ride horseback and make camping trips with Romero.

No white man has ever

shown the Princess "this power to help her across a dis­ tance." self."

At times she is "elated into her true Princess But she does not think of marriage,

"It was as If

their two ’daemons' could marry, were perhaps married.

Only

their two selves . . . were for some reason Incompatible." Thus is indicated the essential split between the true self and its realization, and between the Princess and LlLl

Ibid., p. 205*

256 Romero, dramatized in the remainder of the story. She has complained that they never see deer, hears, or lions.

Romero tells her that these are found only in

remote, high places.

With a "naive impulse of reckless­

ness" she wishes to go to a shack far up that belongs to him.

He warns her of the hardships and loneliness, hut

"an obstinacy characteristic of her nature" seizes her and she overrules Romero’s objections. The trip is made through an October New Mexico land­ scape.

Miss Cummins, bringing up the rear, is a rather

ludicrous figure of inadequacy.

The Princess, with

Romero's "black unheeding figure always travelling away from her," feels "strangely helpless, withal elated." As they 'travel upward in the shadow of "San Cristo­ bal Canyon," a chill enters the Princess as she realizes "what a tangle of decay and despair lay in the virgin forests."

When Miss Cummins* horse is lamed, she will

not continue because, despite Romero's assurances,

"the

thought of a hurt animal always put her into a sort of hysterics .

"

The Princess refuses to turn back.

She

looks at Romero squarely and meets "the spark in his eye." (It is as if she made him a promise.)

He accompanies

Miss Cunnlms back as far as the end of the canyon, while the Princess rides on alone, until he can rejoin her.

She

is sure that Romero will not "do anything to her against her will."

She has a "fixed desire . . .

to look:,into

257 the inner chaos of the Rockies." In a valley, she camps to wait.

"soft and delicate as fairy-land," Beyond were "the beautiful, but fierce,

heavy, cruel mountains with their moments of tenderness." Two Indians, riding down from a hunt, join her.

They say

that they have shot nothing, but she sees the hidden bulk 45 of a deer. This is evidently another foreshadowing note of lawlessness.

As they eat the food she provides, Romero

joins them, rests and eats; then the Princess and he ride on alone.

Romero now looks at her "with such a hard glint

in his eyes" that "for the first time she wondered if she was rash." Now an almost invisible trail crosses burned-over forest, and the wind blows "like some vast machine."

Over

the crest there is "nothing but mountains . . . empty of life or soul." life."

The Princess is frightened by the "anti­

They pass evidence of the failure of a gold-miner,

and leave the Forest Service trail.

Romero seems to her

"strange and ominous, only the demon of himself."

On

foot, leading the horses, they slide down a great slope (the approach to the village in "The Woman Who Rode Away" was also downhill), and, after a rest, ride into a valley, arriving at the shack,as the sun is "jnst about to leave it."

45 ^ Such an encounter is mentioned by Dorothy Brett in Lawrence and Brett.

258

Almost all the details of the trip have built atmosphere and mood for the struggle that now takes place. As they make camp, the Princess feels that the shadow will soon "crush her completely. 11 As she gets water at a pool, a bobcat frightens her. she feels cornered.

In the shack with Romero,

She will sleep in a bunk.

pares a bed for himself on the floor.

Romero pre­

Outside Mars seems

to her "the blazing eye of a crouching mountain lion." In the night she dreams of snow.

Awaking, she can­

not bear the cold, and wants "warmth, protection.

. . , to

be taken away from herself." And at the same time, perhaps more deeply than any­ thing, she wanted to keep herself intact,intact, untouched, that no one^ghould hare any power to her, or rights to her. She calls to Romero, and he, when she says that she wants him to, warm her, takes her in his arms. And he was warm, but with a terrible animal warmth that seemed to annihilate her. . . . She had never, never wanted to be given over to this. But she had willed that it should happen to her. \ In

the morning she offends his pride by wishing to go back

at

once.

When she tells him that she did not

had happened the night before, "given him a cruel blow."

she sees that she has

But she does not relent.

wants "to regain possession of all herself."

1^6

kl

Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., p. 228.

like what

She

He says,

259 "You Americans, you always want to do a man down. 11 When she insists she did not "li^e last night," he says, make you."

"I

He throws her clothes, and their saddles into

the water, and disappears with the rifle, leaving her helpless.

In the evening, he returns with a deer (a part

of the male role indicated, for example, in "Pan in America"). He draws her into the warmth of the sun, and, "stony and powerless, 11 she has to submit. Later, when she tells him that he can never conquer her, he looks at her with "wonder, surprise, a touch of horror, and an unconscious pain that crumpled his face till it was like a mask."

After flaying the deer, he

tells her that he will keep her there until she says that she wants "to be with" him. he expends his desire.

"In a sombre, violent excess"

She wishes to be "alone again, ;cool

and intact." On the fourth day she sees two horsemen at the top of the incline.

Romero gets his gun, and when she tells

him not to shoot, asks for the last time if she likes staying with him. the horses.

At her "no," he shoots and hits one of

The Princess, watching Romero crouching behind

a rock wonders why she does not feel sorry. But her spirit was hard and cold, her heart could not melt. Though now she would have called him to her, with love. But no, she did not love him. She would never

260 love any man. Never i It. was fixed and sealed in her, almost vindictively. a This occurs just at the denouement. behind.

Romero is shot from

Forest Service men appear and examine the body

with an offhand carelessness.

When the blanketed Princess

is asked why Romero fired, she lies, saying that he had gone out of his mind. Brought down to the dude-ranch, the Princess is her­ self "not a little mad."

She pretends that a demented man

had shot her horse from'under her. hushed up. tact. "

The real affair is

She departs "the Princess, and a vi-hgin in­

Her hair is gray at the temples, and she is

"slightly crazy." affair.

She tells people her version of the

"Later, she married an elderly man, and seemed

pleased." In this story the conflict has, at first glance, a certain ambiguity.

The Princess seems a Lawrencean

aristocrat in her inheritance of a philosophy of the essential self, varying among people from big and splen­ did to mean and vulgar.

Indeed, the demons of most people

are "dwindled and vulgar.11 Yet it becomes clear, as the story progresses, that her abstraction from the world £eeps her from the Lawrencean synthesis of intellect and feeling, spirit and body.

She has her chance to make it

when she encounters the "fine demon" of Romero, but fails

rwh. Ibid.,

p. 236.

261 when she finds physical love repulsive.

Although she

loses, physical virginity, she keeps intact the "hard and cold" virginity of her spirit.

In so doing, she destroys

Romero, who is the Lawrencean hero proudly refusing to accept her rejection of the physical part of himself even to the extremity of death at the hands of the organized law that protects her. Lou, in "St. Mawr," on the other hand, has known only the physical side of sex without its mystery, and re­ fuses contact until she may know both.

Her revulsion is

from the trivial and promiscuous aspect of the flesh, while the Princess cannot accept its true value when she encounters it.

Against her the man is broken.

In the

third story of the summer, "The Woman Who Rode Away,” the "individual independence" of the woman is broken, her "quivering nervous consciousness" giving way to the "pas­ sional cosmic consciousness." In all this Lawrence himself clearly abhors the personal and the self-conscious, an awareness of self that brings emotional atrophy and death.

Such a state seems

not far removed from what religionists have called "spiri­ tual dryness," although recovery from it involved for Lawrence the more strenuous task of integration, not rejec­ tion of, the physical.

In "The Border Line" he had named

as "the supreme modern terror" an "ashy, nervous horror of

262 the world."

Our "white "brittleness" must "be crushed be­

fore "the shadowy blood" can "move erect once more, in a new implacable pride and strength." disappears from Lawrence's work.

This conflict never

It is implicit in his

earliest writings, and thenceforward, with increasing for­ mulation, finds expression in various forms, images, and symbols, through his very last work. Simultaneously he worked out a solution.

It appears

in the work of this summer in New Mexico most positively in the essays on the Indian ceremonies and beliefs.

Man's

conquest of the phenomenal universe brings boredom.

Only

consciousness of a relationship in which "everything is alive and active, and danger is inherent in all movement," can overcome the boredom.

Thus, the answer for Lawrence,

foreshadowed by the love of flowers and animals, of vitality and movement, in the early work, lay in an animistic view of the world.

In this dynamic world, life was a dangerous

adventure, not in mere survival, or in recovering a lost G-olden Age, but in becoming.

"Out of the dragon's den

of the cosmos, we have wrested only the beginnings of our being, the rudiments of our godhead," In this view, there is no resting place for the alienated spirit.

The flight from England and society

had taken Lawrence not only into a kind of essence of the disorder of modern society in Mrs. Luhan's circle, but to

263

a New Mexico landscape that exhibited its own natural savagery and sordidness. fined as a double one.

Lawrence’s struggle is now de­ Man must both destroy the old

social order and grapple with the cosmos itself to create the new.

Progress can be made by the indomitable fighter,

but the struggle is eternal. hero-god Is complete.

The role of the Promethean

PART V RETURN TO MEXICO:

THE PLUMED SERPENT:

1924-1925 CHAPTER I THE LIFE Lawrence’s purpose in returning to Mexico in October, 1924, was manifold.

His frequent illnesses were

*

usually described by him as colds and flu.

During one

such illness at the ranch that summer he had spit blood, but a doctor summoned over his protests had diagnosed the trouble as bronchial and reassured him that his lungs were strong.'*'

He had a strong dislike for the recession of

vitality in nature which winter brought.

The southern

climates with their warmth and color had become synony­ mous with his thesis of the blood-consciousness. fore leaving the ranch, Lawrence wrote:

Just be­ ■:

1 loathe winter. They gas about the Nordic races, over here, but I believe they’re dead, dead, dead. I hate all that comes from the north.2 Life and the future lay both in the warmth of Mexico and' in the novel which had been interrupted by the return to Brett, Lawrence and Brett, pp. 139-141.

2

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 626.

265 England. In Taos there was a last farewell with Mrs. Luhan

3

who was never to see him again, although they corresponded in the following years, and he read and criticized her autobiography.

In Santa Fe there was a brief visit with

Bynner and Johnson.

By the middle of October, the Lawrences

and Brett reached Mexico City after a train trip through country still pregnant with violence. Lawrence found the city "shabby and depressed, 11 and expected nothing of the intellectuals and artists to whom he had letters of introduction..

". .

I feel they're all

a bit of a fraud, with their self-seeking bolshevism." No more revolutions were expected, but there was news of murder and "messes."

Both of the Lawrences suffered from

"terrible colds. Nevertheless there was quite a round of social activity, for Lawrence, and some lionizing.

The F. E. N.

Club gave a dinner for him ;at which his statement that being men together was more important than nationality or profession failed to achieve his intention.

However,

his friendship with the young Mexican poet, Luis Quintanilla, 3

Luhan. Lorenzo in Taos, p. 278.

k

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 627-628. 5

Reported somewhat differently by Brett, Lawrence and Brett, pp. 162-16^, and Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . . ," pp. 162-163.

266

was begun,^ from which was toremerge the satirical frag­ ment,

"See Mexico After."

Weston, the photographer.

He met, and sat for, Edward Weston found him "frankly up­

set, distressed" on this second Mexico visit after having 7 been "thrilled" by the first one. Lawrence found the British Consul "very attentive." The Vice-Consul, whose brother was a priest In the Cathedral Chapter at Oaxaca, recommended the climate there. His 8 brother would "sponsor" them. Later Weston, in a visit to Brett, Lawrence and Brett, p.. 164. 7

.

Edward Weston, "Lawrence in Mexico," The Carmelite. Ill (March 19, 1930), ix-xi. Looking back on this in 1930, Weston surmised that Lawrence was in a "highly neurotic state" and found evidence of this in The Plumed Serpent, where "trivial inaccuracies persist, and form a wrong or one-sided impression of Mexico. Lawrence was bewildered, he was frightened, but he over-dramatized his fear." De­ spite fine passages, it is "a book on Mexico which could have been written only by a neurotic Anglo-Saxon." Weston attributed the neuroticism to Lawrence's bad health, al­ though he admitted that Anglo-Saxons in normal health feel awe of the Mexican landscape. In Mexico City, after publication of the novel, Weston found the artists and writers laughing over it. "Covarrublas cartooned Lawrence at his desk, writing, triple outlines around him to in­ dicate shaking with fear." Weston offered his remarks not as literary criticism but as his "intense reactions." He was more acute in dealing with Lawrence's interest in drawing and painting. Showing Lawrence drawings and photographs, and reading in The Plumed Serpent the remarks on Rivera's frescoes, he felt that Lawrence had no plastic sense and that his later "venture in painting must be a carrying on of his literary viewpoint in paint." What Weston did not note about The Plumed Serpent was that, despite a present and localized nervous state In Lawrence, the novel contained Lawrencean themes of long standing, as we shall see.

8

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 627- 628.

267 Oaxaca, found that the brother, Padre Ricardo (Richards), had been arrested and deported to Mexico City. Apparently 9 this was after Lawrence’s stay, but hints of the coming religious-civil war could not have failed to impress him as he replaced Christianity with the religion of Quetzalcoatl i‘n The Plumed Serpent. The Lawrences and Brett left Mexico City November 8 and arrived m

Oaxaca on November 10

10

after a long, slow

journey on a train bearing armed guards.

After a week in

the Hotel Francia, the Lawrences rented a room with patio and garden from the priest, Richards, Brett remaining in the hotel.'1'1 The sojourn in Oaxaca lasted from November 10 to late February, 1925.

Here in landscape and flowers, and

in the market-place, were the color and strangeness that stimulated Lawrence.

In the Zapotec Indians, "quite fierce,"

he found again raw material for the vision of The Plumed Serpent.

Again he noted the overlay of modern materialism

that disturbed him. The Indians are queer little savages, and awful agitators, fsic! pump bits of socialism over them and make everything just a mess. . . . The SpanishMexican population just rots on top of the black Weston, pjD. cit.. p. xi. Weston found Lawrence's name on the register of the Hotel Francia, but did not meet him again. Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection .of £. H. Lawrence Manuscripts, p. 99* 11 Brett, Lawrence and Brett, p. 173 ff.

268 savage mess. And socialism here is a farce of farces: except very dangerous, ^ As he thought of trying to finish the novel that winter, he felt again the bitter contrast of natural beauty with mankind. The world gives me the gruesomes, the more I see of it. That is, the world of people. This country is so lovely, the sky is perfect, blue and hot every day, and flowers rapidly following flowers. ^ The conflict with Murry was revived by an exchange of letters.

Lawrence wrote to him:

The Adelphl was bound to dwindle: though why not fatten it up a bit. Why~in the name of hell didn t you rouse up a bit, ls.st January, and put a bit of gunpowder in your stuff,- and fire a shot or two? But you preferred to be soft, and to go on stirring your own finger in your own vitals. . . . Spunk is what one wants, not introspective sentiment,1^ Of his own conflict, he wrote that sometimes, when America got on his nerves, he wished he had gone to 11Sicily or South Spain for the winter."

After a few months, if he

still felt “put out by the vibration of this rather malevolent continent," he would try "the mushiness of Europe once more, for a while." Fancy, even a Zapotec Indian, when be becomes governor, is only a fellow in a Sunday suit grin­ ning and scheming. People never, never, never change: that’s the calamity. Always the same mush. 12 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 630-631. 13 ^ Ibid,. p. 631. 14 Ibid. 15 Ihld.. p. 632.

269 Lawrence found subjects for short essays in the vil­ lage and country life about him, broadly observed and in intimate contact, as with the mozo of his own household. Despite warnings against bandits, there were walks into the countryside, and even use of the shade of a bush in the 16 desert as a place to write. . By January 10, 1925, he was able to send to his agent the four articles originally titled as a unit, "Mornings in Mexico.M

He was "getting

ahead" with the novel, and, if heaven were with him, "should finish it this month." He hhd "a good deal done 17 from last year." As for changes in that portion, he said to Dorothy Brett, who typed as he wrote:

"Chapala

has not really the spirit of Mexico; it is too tamed, too 18 touristy. This place is more untouched." While the scene of the novel remained Chapala, the life he found at Oaxaca entered by transposition. As the work went forward, there were, besides the strains of a daily life restricted by fear and regulations, tensions between the Lawrences and Brett.

These had be­

gun at the New Mexico ranch,„-but now reached.a crisis. Mrs. Lawrence felt that Brett "was becoming too much part" of their lives and wished her to leave.

Lawrence at first

Brett, Lawrence and Brett. p. 192. ^

Tbe Letters of jD. H. Lawrence. p. 633*

xs

Brett, Lawrence and Brett, p. 181.

270 19 thought Mrs. Lawrence "a jealous fool,” hut when she insisted, Brett returned City.

to New

Mexico

by way of Mexico

Lawrence wrote toher in a vein typical of his

haru.

dl ing of'love ‘-in s t orie s and e s say s: Love is chiefly bunk: an over-exaggeration of the spiritual and individualistic and analytic side. . . . I do not want your friendship, till you have a full relation somewhere, a kindly relation of both halves, not In part. as all your friendships have been. That which is in part is in itself a be­ trayal. . . . I refuse any more of this “dedicate friendship1' business, because it damages one's whole­ ness. Nevertheless, I don't feel unkindly to you. In your one half you are loyal enough. But the very halfness makes your loyalty fatal. . . . Try and recover your wholeness, that is all. Then friendship is possible, in the kindliness of one's heart. The ties with Europe were another source of con­ flict.

Mrs. Lawrence felt that she must see her aged

mother in G-ermany and her children.

Lawrence's sister

in England, under the stress of their father's death, wished to see him.

If all went well with the. novel, 2l Lawrence planned to be in England by March. At times he thought with homesickness'of the beauty of ah English spring, which he had not seen for years.

He felt also 22 the need of supporters, who might be found at home. But Frieda Lawrence, "Not 20

21 ^

I

But the Wind. . . ,“ p. 165.

The Letters of D. H . -Lawrence. pp. 635-636.

„

Ibid.. p. 633, Brett, Lawrence and Brett. p. 198.

271 letters from Murry again reminded him of the fiasco of the previous return.

He wrote to Murry that if he returned, he

wanted to see only his sisters and his agent. was once too many."

“Last time

As for Murry's relationship with him, he

said, "You can’t betray me, and that's all there is to that.

Ergo, Just leave off loving me. 23 that Judas-Jesus slime."

Let's wipe off all

The letter to Murry was dated January 28, and the Lawrences were planning to leave Oaxaca in a fortnight. But a serious illness, at first thought to be malaria, forced a change of plan.

Lawrence fell ill as he was oh

finishing The Plumed Serpent.

When the local native

doctor would not attend him, he was nursed by Mrs. Lawrence, generously helped by the little colony of Englishmen and Americans.

Lawrence felt he would die in Oaxaca, but he

slowly became a little better and was taken to Mexico City. There a specialist told them that he had tuberculosis. Evidently this was the first such diagnosis and came as a 25 shock. He had a "year or two at the most." March 11 Lawrence wrote to his agent that he must not risk the voyage to England or the English climate.

His only al­

ternatives were Mexico or the ranch, and he chose the The Letters of D, H. Lawrence. pp. 636-637. oil

Mrs. Lawrence thought this had some effect on the ending., For a discussion, see the analysis of the novel in the next section. pC Frieda Lawrence. "Hot I But the Wind. . pp. 165167. ------------------

2?2 latter.

"This is rather a blow indeed, it's been a series

of blows lately. The journey back to New Mexico, difficult at best, was complicated at the border by the immigration laws, Mrs. Lawrence reporting that the immigration officials "made all the difficulties in the ugliest fashion to prevent us from entering the States."

Only intervention by the Ameri­

can Embassy made entry p o s s i b l e . I n d e e d , Lawrence had resorted to rougeing his cheeks to simulate health, both at El Paso and earlier in Mexico City, where he could not stand the stares of people in the streets.^®

By early April

he had begun a slow convalescence at the ranch.

^

betters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 638.

Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . .," p. 167. The immigration laws operated against those with such a disease as tuberculosis. Bond might be permitted to insure that the ill person would not become a public charge. Brett, Lawrence and Brett, pp. 2l£-2l6.

CHAPTER II THE WORK At some time during this Mexican visit, perhaps in Mexico City, Lawrence produced the bit of satire titled "See Mexico After, by Luis Q . 1,1 most mischievous.

It is Lawrence at his

Taklng the United States tourist slogan,

"See America First," he weaves about it, from the point of view of a Mexican, fantastic satire of the exploitation, egotism, and shallowness of Mexico*s northern neighbor. "Luis Q . " is evidently intended to be Luis Quintanilla, the young poet Lawrence met in Mexico City.

Later, in the

Mexican diplomatic service, Quintanilla must have looked on Lawrence's rendering of his complaints with mingledfeelings. Lawrence *s major work at Oaxaca was, of course, revision and completion of The Plumed Serpent.

But he

found stimulus and time to do the four Mexican sketches, originally titled by him "Mornings in Mexico, " finally retitled for publication in the book of that name,"Corasmin and the Parrots," "Walk to Huayapa," "The Mozo," and "Market Day,"

They date roughly from the beginning of

the Oaxaca sojourn in October, 192L, to January 10, 1925, when they had been typed and were sent to his agent. 1 Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. pp; 111-116.

274 "Corasmin and the Parrots” may be dated by its reference to "Christmas next week.”

In something of the

manner of the poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Lawrence contemplates the relationship of the parrots, Corasmin, the dog, Rosalino, the servant, and himself. The opening paragraphs cut away the conventional and the pompous.

The setting in the patio is given with

deliberate bareness that substantiates the thrust. All it amounts to is one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the page of his exercise book. It is a pity we don’t always remember this. . . when books come out with grand titles, like The Future of America or The European Situation. . . Perception of this particular morning follows in terms of scents and sounds, the latter leading to the whistling of the parrots on which the essay is. focused. First the birds imitate the whistling of Rosalino, who is sweeping the patio. when his masters are about.

It is unlike him to whistle His appearance, with his

head "rather dropping and hidden," makes one laugh, as does the parrots’ exaggeratedly exact imitation. The birds begin imitating a human calling the dog, Corasmin, and pour over the human voice "a suave, prussicacid sarcasm."

Then they "yap" like Corasmin, who moves

^ D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico (New York, K-----------

1927), P. 4.

3 I M d . , p. 3 .

275 "with slow resignation" to the shade. signed, " he is "not humble.

"Unspeakably re­

He does not kiss the rod."

The birds continue to torment him with "antediluvian malevolence. . . rippling out of all the vanished, spite­ ful aeons;" but he remains master of his soul without the "lust of self-pity" of such "human bombast" as Henley's "Invictus."

Such self-pity belongs "to the next cycle

of evolution.11 The mention of past ages, and evolution, prepares for reflection on the origin of the relationship of parrots, man, and dog.

The Aztec idea of "worlds successively

created and destroyed" pleases Lawrence's "fancy better than the long and weary twisting of the rope of Time and Evolution."

He likes to think of the end of the world

of lizards and the beginning of the world of birds, humming birds, flamingoes, parrots, peacocks, and apart from them "unwieldy skinny-necked monsters;"

then the end of. this

with the carrying over to the world o f 'animals of a few parrots*, peacocks*, and flamingoes* eggs. animals was ''curly, little white Corasmin. "

Among the In this

world of new sounds, the birds felt superseded, only the larks and warblers cheering up to sing.

The parrot, among

others, felt particularly bitter, and began to jeer at and mock Corasmin. Then, according to the Aztecs, out of the floods

2?6 that destroyed the previous Sun "rose our own Sun, and little naked man."

Corasmin "began to answer thecall

of

man, and the parrot began to jeer and imitate this call too.

The monkey,

"cleverest of creatures," but unable

to imitate man, now only gibbers . . . across the invisiblegulf in time, which is the "other dimension" that clever people gas about: calling it "fourth dimen­ sion, " as if you could measure it with a footrule. . . . Corasmin recognizes the other dimension, as does his master.

The parrots wriggle "inside the cage of the

other dimension, hating it."

Even Rosalino, looking

up "with his eyes veiled by their own blackness.

. . ,

hiding and repudiating" is separated by "the gulf of the other dimension."

He can- imitate his master.

And I have to laugh at his me, a bit on the wrong side of my face, as he has to grin on the wrong side of his face when I catch his eye as the parrot is whistling him. With a grin, with a laugh we pay tribute to the other dimension. But Corasmin is wiser. In his clear, yellow eyes is the selfpossession of full admission. The Aztecs said this world, our Sun,, would blow up from inside, in earthquakes. Then what will come, in the other dimension, when we are superseded?-? The entire sketch evolves from the little scene in the patio and from Lawrence's acute non-mechanistic sense of individuality among the forms of life. ^ Ibid.. p. 15. 5 Ibid., p. 18.

It:.is as

277 though the consciousnesses of parrots, dog, Indian, and white artist, impinged on each other without blurring. Parrots and dog are saved from anthropomorphic sentimen­ tality by the aggressiveness of the first and the lack of self-pity in Corasmin.

Lawrence1s' fascination with the

moment and the contact, unambiguous as so many human relationships were, is plain.

The Aztec “Suns11 live

brilliantly and sharply without the boredom and desuetude he felt in the historical and scientific framework. He himself uses the term “fancy," and it is clear that he is not advancing any sort of material explana­ tion.

He is trying to capture the qualities of a drama

involving consciousnesses separated by a dimension other than the measurable; hence the refusal to use the Einsteinian "fourth dimension" as completely analogous.

Despite an

air of improvisation, the essay grows steadily from the initial setting and tone and is highly unified. In "Walk to Huayapa" both tone and encounter with the "other dimension" are continued.

On Sundays one must

"go somewhere," though Lawrence would prefer to remain in the patio with Corasmin and the parrots. Humanity enjoying Itself is . . . Rosalino,

"...

a dreary spectacle."

asked if he wishes to go, answers iirith hs

eternal, indefinite "How not, Senor."

A few steps take

them outside Oaxaca to plain and mountains, which dwarf

278 the tiny efforts of men.

There is a note of irony, and

perhaps exasperation, in "?I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my strength.'

At least one can

always do that, in Mexico."

Two tiny, ephemeral towns

are visible in the distance.

Rosalino cannot identify

them.

"Among the Indians it is not becoming to know any­

thing, not even one's own name. . . .

Americans would call

him a dumb-bell." Thus, on the walk that follows, Rosalino is the Indian consciousness puzzling and frustrating the white consciousness, but somewhat closer to it, as companion, than the totally strange Indians encountered.

The

farthest village is chosen as destination because it is "so alone and, as it were, detached from the world in which it lies."

Even when one approaches a big city like

Guadalajara, his "heart gives a clutch, feeling the pathos, the isolated tininess of human effort." Indian women encountered on the road avoid the little party as if they "were potential bold brigands." Rosalino, catching his master's grin, laughs in derision. A hawk swoop's so low they can hear the hiss of its wings. Cattle tended by two boys approach, and a young bull eyes them "with some of the same Indian wonder-and-suspicion stare."

in this brief scene Lawrence introduces a

complementary physical note in the "rich physique" and

279 dark ""bluish hair" of one of the boys.

This, with the

different consciousness, distinguishes the Indians. At Huayapa the grandiosely-named streets are only tracks, and no one is visible.

There is "a sense of

darkness among the silent mango trees, a sense of lurking, of unwillingness." and its plaza.

For orientation, they seek the church

"The great church stands rather ragged, in

a dense forlornness, for all the world like some big white human being, in rags, held captive in a world of ants.1^ Under a shed the men of the village are gathered amid a silence that is "heavy, furtive, secretive." is reluctant to tell what they are doing.

Rosalino

Inside the

church they find a "Gulliver's Travels fresco" and a Christ "wearing a-pair of woman's frilled knickers." An Indian prays with his "back stiff, at once humble and resistant," and. reveals himself as Verger when he "child­ ishly, almost idiotically" removes the candles. Back in the plaza, they find that the men are being canvassed for votes.

The system of voting arouses

Lawrence's satlBe of democracy. My dear fellow, this is when democracy becomes real fun. You vote for one red ring inside another red ring, and you get a Julio Echegaray. You vote for a blue dot inside a blue ring, and you get a Socrate Ezequiel Tos. . . . Independence:; Government by the

6

Ibid., p. 3d-.

280 People, of the People, for the People: We all live in the Calle &e la Reforma, in Mexicol? Now the little party tries to buy fruit, visible on trees.

Lawrence builds their frustration to a comical

climax, as they are turned away by person after person. Finally they are told to see Ruiz, and find him to be a man who had turned them away before. to the ruling race for nothing.

"But we don't belong

Into the yard we march."

With a few oranges and limes, costing more than the market price, they seek high ground outside the vil­ lage, where the water will be safe.

They pass gangs of

men leaving the plaza who eye them as if they were a zopilote, and a white she-bear." 'like a roll of cannon shot." woman at an orchard, Rosalino,

"coyote,

The men's "Adios" is

When they encounter an old "getting bold," asks for.

fruit and is told it is not ripe.

They eat lunch beside

a i-fater-channel above the gully in which the water used for bathing runs.

Hearing a sound Lawrence investigates

and sees. . . . a woman, naked to the hips, standing washing her other garments upon a stone. She has a beautiful full back, of a deep orange colour, and her wet hair is divided and piled. In the water a few yards upstream two men are sitting naked, their brown-orange giving off a glow in the shadow, also washing their clothe s.g Their wet hair seems to stream blue-blackness. 7 I M d .. p. 37.

8

Ibid., p . k6.

281 This use of color to Indicate separateness of the native from the white increases toward the end of the sketch. There is an incident with the old woman of the orchard, who now offers them fruit free, with her eye on the bottle holding their lemonade.

Rosalino’s laughing prediction

that the fruit is no good later turns out to be true, bat she had obtained the empty bottle, which to her was "a treasure."

There is a last encounter with a bather.

. . . I thought again what beautiful suave, rich skins these people have: a sort of richness of the flesh. It goes, perhaps, with the complete absence of what we call "spirit."9 The next and last paragraph ends the essay on a note of repose and satisfaction in the immediate moment.

". . .

Even the next five minutes are far enough away, in Mexico, on a Sunday afternoon." The negative resistance of the Indian, and the positive value of richness of physique are both used thematically Plumed Serpent. Also used are the tremendous distance, the overwhelming landscape, and the pathos of "the isolated tininess of human effort." The narrative thread of "The Mozo" extends from "Waikato Huayapa."

In,the latter, and in "Corasmin and

the Parrots," Rosalino is obliquely portrayed in both his separateness, as an Indian, and in his intimate re­ lationship with his masters. 9 Ibid., p . Ip9.

0

In "The Mozo" he becomes

282 the center of attention. He may have Indian blood other than Zapotec, or he may be "only a bit different," the difference lying “in a certain sensitiveness and aloneness, as If he were a mother’s boy."

There follows a brief fantasy on the

Aztec gods to account for the usual hardness of the Indian made, contrasted with Rosalino. The goddess of love is goddess of dirt and prostitu­ tion. . . , blatant and accessible. And then, after all, when she conceives and brings forth, what is it she produces? What is the infantgod she tenderly bears? Guess, all ye people, joy­ ful and triumphant I You never could. It is a stone knife. . . . To this day, most of the Mexican Indian women, seem to bring forth stpne knives. . ., sons of incomprehensible mothers, with their black eyes like flints, and their stiff little bodies as taut and as keen as knives of obsidian.10 The tone of the passage mingles distaste for this native concept and a satirical thrust at Ideal religion, an irony that appears elsewhere. There is a difference in Rosalino’s size, In his eyes, not "glaring, " ana. in his awareness of other beings. "Usually, these people have no correspondence with one at all."

Such a lack of correspondence had been explored

in "Walk to Huayapa." There follows a long passage on how the white man appears to the Indian.

10

He is "a sort of extraordinary

PP- 5^-55

white monkey that, by ounning, has learnt lots of semimagical secrets of the universe, and made himself "boss of the show. 11 Horrible to the Indian are the white man's notion of “exact spots of time," of distance, money, and honesty.

To the Indian "... . the before and the after

are the stuff of consciousness.

The instant moment is for­

ever keen with a razor-edge:of oblivion, like the knife of sacrifice.^’ He is not naturally dishonest or avaricious. "He doesn't care. 11 But- "he has to learn the tricks of the white monkey-show."

Here Lawrence thrusts at "the strange

monkey virtue of charity" as opposed-to the Indians' simple sharing and explains the Indians' incomprehension of medi­ cine by their lack of concern for all but the moment.

They

adapt themselves "so long as the devil does not rouse" in them, seeing the white men "get the work out of us, the sweat, the money, and then taking the very land from us, . 112 the very oil and metal out of our soil," All this is somewhat in the nature of a digression in which Lawrence lashed at exploitation and other things he dislikes in white civilization.

The essay then returns to Rosalino,

who also finds the "white monkey-tricks" amusing. The details of Rosalino's life are now given a simple, bare enumeration, leading to his retirement, when _

Ibid., p. 59.

1?

Ibid., p. 62.

ZQk his duties are over, to a "bench, his bed, in the open entrance-way;.

His anomalous position between the two

civilizations is made clear.

He studies Spanish, the

futility of which is illustrated by his writing out a Spanish love-poem which has no meaning for him.

After two

more years of night-school he may be able "to read and write six intelligible sentences" and return to his native village to become, perhaps, alcalde.

More Important to him

than his meager salary whould be the glory of ".being able to boss." There follows the sequel to the walk to Huayapa, and a further explanation of Rosalino's anomalous posi­ tion in the Mexican world.

After the return from Huayapa

he suffered a revulsion from the happiness and association of the walk and fell into hatred and "the Indian gloom." We had some devilish white-monkey trick up our sleeve; we wanted to get at his soul, no doubt, and do it the white monkey's damage. We wanted to get at his heart*, did we? But his heart was an obsidian knife. * Through several days he fluctuated between wishing to return to his village and to stay.

What had struck him,

on the visit of Huayapa, was "the black Indian gloom of nostalgia." The Mexican who had helped find a replacement, 13 I^ld.. p. 69.

eventually not needed, added another bit of information. Recruited in the last revolution, Rosalino, having a "horror of serving in a mass of men" that was like Lawrence1 had refused to leave the village and had been beaten and left for dead by the soldiers. refusal to move furniture.

The Injuries explained his

The mozo of the Mexican friend

had fared even worse because a cousin had given informa­ tion to the losing side.

Imprisoned, and then carried

away, he had reappeared with his neck horribly swollen from torture by hanging. Is it any wonder that Aurelio and Rosalino, when they see the soldiers with guns on their shoulders marching towards the prison with some blanched prisoner between them— and one sees it every few days— stand and gaze in a blank kind of horror, and look at the-patron, to see if there is any refuge? Not to be caughtJ Not to be caught 1 It must have been the prevailing motive of Indlan-Mexico life since long before Mgntezuma marched his prisoners to sacrifice. This brutality, with its accompanying fear, is also used thematically in The Plumed Serpent. In "Market! Day," the last of the sketches, the continuity of character of the other three is lost, but continuity of tone and interpretation is partially main­ tained.

The first three sentences present the time as

one of transition, the "last Saturday before Christmas," Ibid., p. 77.

286 the old year nearly gone, and a momentous one coming. The fourth sentence initiates the transitional movement and imagery which pervade the rest of the essay.

"Dawn

was windy, shaking the leaves, and the rising sun shone under a gap of yellow cloud." Despite the cloud, the sun touched "at once" yellow flowers, the magenta of the hougainvillea and the red of poinsettia, which in Mexico takes the place of holly-berries.

Yucca is blossoming; coffee-berries are

turning red; there are hibiscus, and a tree of "the acacia sort" puts up "fingers of flowers" with a circular motion in the wind.

Later this image of motion is linked to

the movement of people coming to market. There is a brief reflection on this "wheeling and pivoting upon a centre" and upon the anomaly of concep­ tions of straight lines "when space is curved, and the cosmos is sphere within' sphere. 11

"The straight course

is hacked.out in rounds, against the will of the world." A transition to the plain leading from the mountains is made by the sentence: along the road.

"Yet the dust advances like a ghost

. . ." Every image is in terms of move­

ment as the natives travel townward, accelerating gradually to a run.

The slow movement of oxen forms a contrast.

The reflection on circular movement is returned to in mention of the Serranos, Indians from the hills, who have

287 "no goal, any more than the hawks in the air, and no course to run, any more than the clouds," and will simply return home tomorrow. The market itself follows, first in terms of noise after the continuous movement of the first part.

The

purpose of the market is "to exchange, above all things, human contact. "

Market and religion are "tx-ro great ex­

cuses for coming together to a centre." The unity of sound continues in the swift bargain­ ing, in dialogue, for flowers, in which the vendor "had had one more moment of contact, with a stranger, a per­ fect stranger. 11 The arrangement of the market is sketched swiftly, the assault of the serape men is safely passed, and there follows another bargaining in dialogue, terse and sharp, for huaraches. The essay approaches its end in a description of the natives as a group, like the other essays in terms of "brown flesh," "wild, staring, eyes," "black hair" gleaming "blue-black," and falling "thick and rich over their foreheads, like gleaming bluey-black feathers." Some will spend the night in town, but many will begin an exodus that night. There is no goal, and no abiding place, and nothing is fixed, not even the cathedral towers. The cathedral towers are slowly leaning, seeking the curve of return. As the natives curved in a strong swirl, towards'the vortex of the market. Then on a strong swerve of repulsion, curved out and away

288 again, into space. . . . Everything is meant to disappear. Every curve plunges into the vortex and is lost, re-emerges with a certain relief and takes to the open, and there is lost again. Only that which is utterly intangible, matters. The contact, the spark of exchange.•'*■5 Thus Lawrence contemplated the life at Oaxaca in four integrated sketches.

In the first he accounted

imaginatively for the jeering of the parrots in terms of another dimension, a lingering from a different cycle of life.

A clmracteristic of his perception, from his very

earliest work, is the rendering of sharp impingement and conflict of individualities, both human and non-human. It is clear that this is one of his important qualities as a person and as an artist, bringing him vitality and greshness.

He loved the new and strange, and preferred

- the clean break of cycles of life to a chain of continuity that, to him, brought a sense of weariness and decay, qualities he came to identify with the Institutions of western civilization in his time.

There is an important

personal reason, not emphasized heretofore in this study, for his love of immediate vivid life.

That reason is

the continual•precariousness of his health.

There is

little doubt that his aggressiveness and worship of vitality is linked with his constant fight against the threat of illness, and increasingly in revolutionary, disease-ridden Mexico, against the imminence of death. 15 ILid.. pp. 95-96.

289 In "Walk to Huayapa" Lawrence contemplated the dif­ ferent, resistant consciousness of the Indian. in creating Vividly the contretemps.

He succeeds

He participates in

the frustration and exasperation of the white conscious­ ness, yet is more sympathetic with the Indian than with the church "held captive" hy him, satirizes the mechanics of democracy, and is drawn irresistibly by "the richness of the flesh" which "goes, perhaps, with the complete absence of what we call ‘spirit

The essay ends in

repose and satisfaction in the moment. "The Mozo" is most filled with the unresolved con­ flict.

In the passage on the Aztec goddess of love and

her bearing "a stone knife," there is both repulsion and a touch of parody of Christian hymns.

This is followed

by satire of the white man as a monkey performing charitable acts, practicing methodical medical cures, and exploiting labor.

It is apparent ths.t to Lawrence neither civiliza­

tion is entirely satisfactory, but he inclines heavily to the Indian.

As for the modern Mexican revolutions and

their ideologies, Rosalino and Aurelio have suffered tor­ ture from the zeal to reform.

A threat hangs over every­

thing, and "the prevailing motive of Indian-Mexico life since long before Montezuma" must have been, "Hot to be caught.11 Lawrence had felt keenly in his own civilization such fear, however much more the coercion of the individual

290 had been refined.

In Mexico he found it again in a more

violent essence. In "Market Day" the brief contact, "the spark of exchange," within the flux of movement in curves without fixed goal, is important to the natives.

How much more

so to Lawrence, cut off from the ordinary aims of his culture, despising the fixed and static, loving movement, vitality, rich color? The essays are little flashes of the■Mexican- ex-

-

perience, but the synthesis of Lawrence's experience on the American continent was 'being worked out in The Plumed Serpent.

His chief protagonist was again a woman, Kate

Leslie, struggling with the doubts and conflicts of her "white" consciousness and her relationship with men.

She

finds at least a partial resolution of her-problems in a revival of the "dark" gods, who are not a factual equivalent of the Aztec gods but Lawrence's conception of a vital synthesis.

The Lawrencean heroes are Don Ramon, prophet

of the new religion, and Don Cipriano, his lieutenant, and soldier of the movement, whom Kate eventually marries. All other characters are subordinate to these three, throw­ ing into relief their struggle. Kate begins as a Lawrencean heroine who is already in rebellion against the values and relationships of modern Europe and Mexico,

let she fears the manifestations of

ancient Mexico with its primitive forces, and approaches with much resistance and many revulsions the modern incarna­ tion of those forces in Ramon and Cipriano. Her will and individuality must he lost in a vaster world of feeling and participation.

As the rebellious, and hence warrior-

woman, she must take her place beside a warrior-husband whom she is to sustain.

The focus of the novel is on her

inner tensions as she struggles to mahe the transition. Her problem is a major Lawrencean problem, stemming from the artist's own need.

It can be observed in his very

early work, and, as we have seen, it occupied him in the summer of

1 9 2 b

in “The Woman Who Rode Away,1' in “The

Princess,11 and in “St. Mawr," where the questing woman, Lou, is left in withdrawal from the world. of his own marriage..

It.was an aspect

When Kate feels that she must return

to the children by a former marriage, and to her mother > one recognizes the long-standing difficulty of Mrs. Lawrence* children by her first marriage, and the tie to her.aged mother in Germany, whom ■Lawrence loved and admired.

In­

deed, Mrs. Lawrence's return to Europe in 1923 had brought a separation which illustrated the conflict more vividly, perhaps, than any other event in their relationship, in­ terrupting.' as it did both the plan for a colony in Mexico and completion of The Plumed Serpent.

It seems inescapable

that much of Lawrence's handling of women in his stories

is symbolic action.

In "The Woman Who Rode Away" he de­

stroys his prototype of the inimcal woman, as once in real life he had threatened to hill Mrs. Luhan.

In "The Princess"

he gives up that fantastic abstraction o'f a woman, aloof, and untouchable, to the force of one of his "primitive" men, although she breaks him with her will and escapes * less damaged than he.

It is as though the Lawrence of the

mother-complex, hating a brutal, lower-class father, yet seeing at length his humiliation and despair, and seeking to reverse the pattern, had created an imaginative world in which the superior woman, both of class and ego, must be brought to subjection.

Lawrence's heroes are usually

lower-class men of subtle, primitive power, as in "The Fox," and Knud Merrild believes,the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterlev's Lover to be a partial portrait of Lawrence's father.

In

The Plumed Serpent Kate shares the common fate of the woman in opposition to the Lawrencean philosophy and direction, and marries at last the pure Indian, Cipriano, full possessor of the "dark" forces of sex. But Kate's conflict contains much more than this. She is in many ways Lawrence himself, coming from the spiritual fear and failure of Europe to an unformed country where primitive physical fear and forces are dominant. While both Ramon and Cipriano know Europe and the failure of European culture in Mexico, it is chiefly Kate's scruples,

293 individual will,

and repulsions that must be resolved.

Her perception of the violence proceeding from lack of realization, of the opposition and lack of sensitive re­ sponse to other individuals, and her overwhelming sense of fear and death, are Lawrence* s , I t

is true that Ramon

feels these things too, but not dominantly, for he is the propounder of the solution, the prophet.

Cipriano feels

them far less, for he is the man of action, warrior and administrator.

All three characters are, in a sense, alter

egos to Lawrence as he creates his own experience and works with his own conflicts.^ The line of descent is clear.

The novel stems from

the announcement of belief in a superior, pre-Flood civili­ zation in Fantasia of the Unconscious through the search for traces of thisr civilization in the journey eastward to the complete newness and lack of tradition of Australia, created in Kangaroo, to the discovery of a link with the past in the Indian religion of New Mexico and Mexico, with the challenge of a modern overlay and corruption.

In the

next to the last chapter, Kate, still struggling with the “great change . . .being worked in her," feels in the life and scene about her "the old prehistoric humanity, the dark-eyed humanity of the days, perhaps, before the glacial period."

Sometimes this feeling is so strong that

she begins "to approximate to the old mode of consciousness,

294 the old, dark will, the unconcern for death, the subtle, dark consciousness, non-cerebral, but vertebrate."

As

Lawrence works with her thoughts, he makes a prophetic statement in the vein of the earlier, American essays as if, in a loss of point of view, he has momentarily for­ gotten that his story concerns the attempt to realize such a prophecy: That, which is aboriginal in America still belongs to the way of the world before the Flood, before the mental-spiritual world came into being. In America, therefore, the mental-spiritual life of white people suddenly flourishes like a great weed let loose in virgin soil. Probably it will as quickly wither. A great dea.th come. And alter that, the living result will be a new germ, a new conception of human life, that will arise from the fusion of the old blood-andvertebrate consciousness with the white man's present mental-spiritual consciousness. The sinking of both beings, into a new being. ° £ate knows that this fusion is what Ramon Is trying to effect, and the Indian Cipriano's role is "the leap of the old, antediluvian blood-male into unison with her." The plot in the sense of action is closely knit as Kate moves toward acceptance of Clpriano and the Ideology of the men of Quetzalcoatl as formulated by Ramon; yet there is a constant element of ambiguity in the pro­ longation of her conflict to the very last paragraph, where even then she must depend upon Clpriano's'immediate presence and power to hold her.

Her conflict tends to

proceed along a single, fluctuating, somewhat weary line, *!

D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (New York. 1926), p. 415.

295 rather than rise to a climax and a resolution.

But this

prolonged tension is the very essence of Lawrence’s art, the real theme about which all his incident and imagery cluster, the governing force of his imagination.

^ate*s

duality and doubt are the quality of Lawrence's world, intensified and heightened by the .experience on the Ameri­ can continent. There are echoes of such earlier work as Studies in Classic American Literature in Kate.Js wondering . . . whether America,really was the great deathcontinent, the great No .1 to the European and Asiatic and even African Yes i . . . Plucking, plucking at the created soul in a man, till at last it plucked out the groiving germ, and left him a creature of mechanism and automatic reaction, with only one inspiration, the desire to pluck the quick out of every living spontaneous creature.1 * Lawrence's experience of this automatism is revealed in such New Mexico poems as "Ghosts,11 and seems allied to the hatred of the status quo that filled him during the. war, and to the necessity in his development, of the death of traditional idea and feeling before re­ generation could be accomplished.

Primitivism and

death might be terrifyingly thorough-going.

Kate,

as she contemplates this threat, is reassured by Ramon's words: Mexico pulls you down, the people pull you down like a great weight I . . . ^aybe they draw you down as 17 Ibid.. p. 73.

296

the earth draws down the roots of a tree, so that It may be clinched deep in soil. Men are still part of the Tree of Life, and the roots go down to the centre of the earth. . . . To me, the men in Mexico a.re like trees, forests that the white men felled in their coming. But the roots of the trees are deep and alive and forever sending up new shoots. . . .S o on the dark forest will rise again, and shake., the Spanish buildings from the face of America. The cyclical theory of renewed civilization implied here appears throughout the earlier American work. Again and again Kate recoils from the threat, a Lawrencean saint in seasons of spiritual dryness, and is reillumined and confirmed.

As she journeys to her

first meeting with Ramoh' at Sayula, after'her removal from the modern horrors of Mexico; City, she. seems, . . . in the great seething light,Hpf the lake, with the terrible blue-ribbed mountains of Mexico beyond.. . . , swallowed by some, grisly skeleton, in the cage of his death-anatomy. She was afraid, mystically, of the man crouching there in the bows with his smooth thighs and supple loins like a,-snake:,- and his black eyes watching.,.A half-being, with a will to disintegration and^death.1?o, '

- 'f

r

‘1 ; '

- t i

•

- ''

But

she feels that there is "no fixed evil" in the men

who

accompany her,that they can "sway both ways." So in her soul she cried aloud to the greater mystery, the higher power that hovered in the interstices of the hot air, rich and potent. . . . As the boat ran on, and her fingers rustled in the warm water of the lake, she felt the fulneB's descend

18

Ibid.. p. 76.

19 Ibid.. p. 103.

297 into her once more, the peace and the power. . . . She thought to herself: "Ah, how wrong I have been not to turn sooner to the other presence, not to take the life-breath sooner! How wrong to be afraid of these two m e n . ” 20 Immediately her vision of the people and the scene about her changes from the ugly and repulsive to the vivid and rich.

Much of the structure of the novel depends upon

this alternation. At Sayula Kate hears "a new sound, the sound of a drum," and is attracted to the singing and dancing of the men of Quetzalcoatl.

She is given a leaflet bearing

the first of the free verse poems which, written by Ramon, serve as the hymns and the propaganda of the new religion.

In image and symbol the leaflet tells of the

passing of Jesus the Crucified back to the source, "the womb of refreshment," and the return of his brother, Quetzalcoatl, to earth and a bride, Mexico.

In it is

Lawrence's belief in the desuetude of the Christian era, and his dynamism, the recurring cycle of birth, maturity, and death. Jesus the Crucified Sleeps in the healing waters The long sleep. Sleep, sleep, my brother, sleep. My bride between the seas Is combing her dark hair, _ Saying to herself: "Quetzalcoatl."21

2 0 I M d - , P . 10i|.. 21 Ibid., p. 117-

298 The wounded physical self of Christ is contrasted to an Image of wholeness and fulfilment. The dying god is to he replaced hy an old god recreated and modified in Lawrence1s imagination. Kate Is hoth attracted and repelled, attracted hy the “strange nuclear power of the men," repelled hy "the silent, dense opposition to the pale-faced spiritual direction." An old man speaks of Quezalcoatl, his words arranged in prose form, hut his voice reminiscent- of the sound of the drum, now silent.

He tells of Quetzalcoatl1s

growing old and heing withdrawn;, hy the sun, and of how M s place was taken hy the dead god of the white men, whose priests have now grown old, and who will now give way to the returning Quetzalcoatl, the Morning Star. The prophetic recitative is followed hy the sing­ ing of a hymn, "really the music of the Old American Indian."

Gradually the entire crowd Joins in.

Dancing

follows, strongly reminiscent of that of the New Mexico Indians.

The peons also join in it, Lawrence creating a

sense in them of recovery of something lost.

At last the

women, too, are drawn into the dance, even to Kate when she is chosen as partner hy one of the men.

As she dances

she feels "a virgin again, a young virgin." How strange, to he merged in desire heyond desire, to he gone in the hody. heyond the indi­ vidualism of the hody, with the spark of contact lingering like a morning star between her and the

299 man, her woman's greater self, and the greater self of the man. 2 In her first visit to Ramon’s hacienda, Kate hears the sound of a drum and learns that he has "brought two Indians from the north" to teach its use.

She finds

also that in opposition to him is his wife, Dona Carlota, a devout Catholic, drawn by Lawrence as the "spiritual" woman who is inimical to the male power. In contrast to the women's doubt and opposition, Lawrence presents Ramon's activity and purposiveness. Withdrawing to his room, and darkening it, he prays until he has broken "the cords of the world" and is "free in the other strength."

Then,"taking great care . . . not

to disturb the poisonous snakes of mental consciousness," he wraps himself in a blanket and sleeps. On awakening, he first enters into the life about him by hearing the sounds of activity.

At the sound of

the women still talking, he lifts "his breast again in the black, mindless prayer, and the sense of opposition" and his rising anger depart.

He inspects, now, the

hacienda, over which his spirit is spread "like a soft, nourishing shadow."

At the smithy, a petal symbol is

partially completed, an eagle inside a seven-pointed sun. In the secrecy of a barn-loft, Ramon visits a 22 Ibid* > P* !28.

300 sculptor who Is making a head, in wood, of Ramon. sits for a while,

He

"throwing out the dark aura of power,

in the spell of which the artist worked."

The pose is

with the right arm above the head, reaching to the sky, the left arm hanging by the side, toward the earth.

At

Ramon's command, the artist, too, assumes the pose, his face taking on "an expression of peace, a noble,motion­ less transfiguration."

Here Lawrence uses the New Mexico

Indian gestures and appeals to earth.' and sky as symbols of integration. Then Ramon visits a family spinning and weaving the serapes of the men of- Quetzalcoatl, rich in symbols, the chief one being the eagle and sun of the iron-work.

He

goes to the upper terrace of the house and, naked to the waist, begins a summons on the drum. about him.

Seven men gather

Together they sing "in the strange blind

infallible rhythm of the ancient barbaric world." Ramon utters a>.long prayer containing the symbolism of the "snake of the coiled cosmos," out of whose sleep "worlds arise as dreams, and are gone as dreams."

The form of

the prayer, in short prose verses, is somewhat Biblical. It ends with the Lawrencean emphasis upon the immedia.te moment in the dynamic flux. For each dream starts out of Now, and is accomplished in Now. In the core of the flower, the glimmering, wakeless snake.

301 And what falls away is a dream, and what accrues is a dream. There is always and only Now, Now and I Am. There follows a song employing rhyme rather tightly hut Irregularly, and using lines irregular in length and rhythm, though; some can he scanned.

Then Ramon

speaks, as if in a sermon after a religious service, but in much the prophetic, symbolic manner of prayer and song. We will he masters among men, and lords among men. But lords of men, and masters of men we will not he. • Listen I We are lords of the night. Lords of the day and night. §pns of the Morning Star, sons of the Evening Star. ^ The speech, too, expresses Lawrence’s dynamism and animism, using New Mexico Indian symbols.

In the midst of flux,

the creative moment counts. There is no giving, and no taking. When the fingers that give touch the fingers that receive, the Morning Star shines at once, from the contact, and the jasmine gleams between the hands. . . . The star between them is all.2-? Nothing may be possessed. Say of nothing: It is Mine. Say only: It is with me.2fe This is true of land, love, life, peace.

The attitude of

acceptance applies to sorrow, loss of strength, and death. 23 Ibid.. p. 176. 2 k

lb id.. pp. 177-178. Ibid., p. 178. 26 Ibid., p. 179.

302 And say to thy death: Be It so J I, and my soul, we come to thee, Evening Star.. Flesh, go thou into the night. Spirit, farewell, *tis thy day. Leave me now. £76° 3-as'k nahedness now to the nahedest Star. An older "carelessness" is also to he found In The G-olden Bough. As her friendship with Ramon and Giprlano develops, Kate hears more of the movement and observes more of its ritual.

The president of the republic, Ciprano says,

"has the cravings of a dictator."

He has bounded Gipriano

for loyalty and been told by Gipriano that he cares only forrRamon and Mexico.

The president's answer expresses

the difference between Lawrence's philosophy and the dominant materialistic programs. I want to save my country from poverty and unen­ lightenment, he wants to save its soul. I say, a hungry and ignorant man has no place for a soul . . . Ramon says,- if a man has no soul, it doesn't matter whether he is hungry or ignorant. 0 However, he has given Clpriano his word that he will not have Ramon "interfered with." Gipriano suggests that Ramon try for political power, and is answered, "I must stand in another world, and act in another world."

As the discussion continues,

Ramon, angered by the opposition of Kate and Dona Carlota, is tempted to nihilism, saying to Gipriano,

"Wouldn't

it be good to be a serpent, and be big enough,to wrap one's 27

Ibid.

28 Ibid., p. 189.

303 folds round. . . the world, and crush it like an egg?“ It would "be "one good moment." saying, " . . .

But then he rejects it,

What could we do but go howling down the

empty passages of darkness.

What's the good, Gipriano?"

Alone in his room, he prays until his rage is gone in "the greater, dark mind, which is undisturbed by thoughts." There follows a religious ceremony, reminiscent of the fertility rites of the New Mexico Indians, invoking the first rain of the rainy season. •To the summons of the drum, the people gather in the courtyard.

Ramon prays to

"the serpent of the earth" to send life into feet and .ankles.

Then, raising his right arm, he invokes the eagle

of the sky to send power and wisdom, the symbolism involving the perching of the eagle upon his hand, the coiling of the serpent about the lowered left arm.

As he speaks, the wind

rises. Then the people are seated, and Ramon, in his natural voice, gives what might be termed -a sermon on the new faith, ending: The earth is stirring beneath you, the sky is rushing its wings above. Go home to your homes, in front of the waters that will fall and cut you off forever from your yesterdays. G-o home, and hope to be men of the Morning Star, Women of the Star of D a w n . ^ 9 With the hastening away of the people, Lawrence mingles the wind and movement of the coming storm. 29

Ibid.. p. 199.

It is clear

304 that not only the coming of rain is involved but a purifi­ cation of spirit. Later Kate finds her servants reading leaflets bearing the Hymns of Quetzalcoatl. One tells of the replacement

of

the old tired Indian gods by Christianity, Jesus promising the retiring Quetzalcoatl: I will bring peace into Mexico. And on the naked I will put clothes, and food between the lips of the hungry, and gifts in all men's hands, and pea.ce and love in their hearts. A second hymn tells of the return of Quetzalcoatl.

To

him the defeated Jesus says of the people of Mexico: They are angry souls, Brother, my Lord. They vent their anger. They broke my Churches, they stole my strength, they withered the lips of the Virgin. They drove us away, and we-crept away like a totter­ ing old man and a woman, tearless and bent double . with age. . . . We seek but rest-, to forget forever the children of men who have swallowed the stone of despairs.-5 Quetzalcoatl answers the statement that Mexico does not want his return: . . . I am lord of two ways. I am master of up and down. I am as a man who is a new man, with new limbs and life, and the light of the Morning Star in his eyes. Lo J I am I .' The lord of both ways. Thou wert lord of thepone way. Now it leads thee to sleep. Farewell r Evidently Lawrence means by Jesus' one way, asceticism,

30 Ibid.. p. 221. Ibid., p. 226. 32 Ibid.. p. 227.

305 resignation, and the negation of death.

By Quetzalcoatl1s

two ways he evidently means the unity of spirit and flesh, life and death. Kate's relationship with Cipriano develops to a point at which he asks why she should not "be the woman in the Quetzalcoatl pantheon. . . , the goddess," and his wife. A new Hymn of Quetzalcoatl chides the Mexicans for their angry, inert hearts.

In this free verse poem, Quetzalcoatl,

on his return, appears above Mexico, looks at the people, calls to them, and blows upon them, without securing at­ tention, until he throws the "stone of change"into the lake. To the two men of Quetzalcoatl who lool£ up he gives his in­ structions, saying in part: ' • Let us have a spring cleaning in the world. For men upon the body of the earth are like lice, Devouring the earth into sores. . . . Tell the men I am coming to, To make themselves clean, inside and out. To roll the grave-stones off their souls, from the cave of their bellies, To prepare to be men. 33 Or else prepare for other things. Also, in a foreshadowing of the burning of church images, they are ordered to "send Jesus his Images back." Despite Hamon's intention “to keep free from the taint of politics/' the Church, the Knights of Cortes, and "a certain 'black' faction" are antagonistic to him, though he has not much to fear with Cipriano and his army behind 33 Ifeid., p.

Zkl.

30 6 him.

But he tells Cipriano that he “had better abandon

everything" rather than “be pushed in the direction of any party."

Cipriano advises a conference with Bishop Jiminez.

Y/hen he asks Ramon what, if he were successful in Mexico, his attitude toward the rest of the world would be, Ramon answers, seeing "in Cipriano*s eye the gleam of a Holy War": I would like . . . to be one of the Initiates of the Earth. One of the Initiators. Every country its own Saviour, Cipriano: or every people its own Saviour. And the First Men of every people, forming a Natural Aristocracy of the World. One must have aristocrats, that we know. But natural ones, not artificial. And in some way the world must be organically united: the world of man. But in the concrete, not in the abstract. . . . Only the Natural Aristocrats of the World can be inter­ national, or cosmopolitan-, or cosmic. . . . The peoples are no more capable of it, than the leaves of the mango tree are capable*of attaching themselves to the pine.— So if I want Mexicans to learn the name of Quetzalcoatl, it is because I want-them to speak with the tongues of their own blood . ^ He then goes on to enumerate the ancient religions in whose terms the various peoples might think, Thor and Wotan in the Teutonic world, the Tuatha De Danaan in the Druidlc world, and so on.

Thus Ramon expresses Lawrence's

eclectic use of many things to symbolize his belief, his real desire to be a religious prophet, his anti-democratic belief in the inability, of the masses to understand fully, and the need of an aristocracy to lead and unify.

3

Ibid., p. 246.

His

307 ultimate goal was a world “organically united," as he united it imaginatively in his work.

The prophet rejected

politics; hut in The Plumed Serpent politics were necessarily involved.

The individual and the social again clashed.

Kate dislikes "masses of people" and hence joining movements.

Since childhood she has thought of people as

monkeys performing.

Ramon, too, despises masses, but says

that "one must be able to disentangle oneself from persons . . . ,

and turn beyond them to the greater life."

This

is, as we have seen, one of Lawrence's own major problems. .

t

Now, as they discuss the monkey aspect of mankind, Ramon groxfs bitter, and there is a long analysis of his thoughts. Men and women should know that they cannot, absolutely, meet on earth. In the closest kiss, the dearest touch, there is the small gulf which is none the less complete because it is so nar­ row, so nearly non-existent. They must bow and submit in reverence, to the gulf.35 He becomes "sad with the sense of heaviness and inadequacy." Hig third Hymn has been angry; his ideas have been burlesqued by someone who has replaced the sacred images of a church with "the grotesque papier~mach£ Judas figures" used at Easter; Gipriano has slipped back into personal ambition; and now Kate has brought "this center of sheer repudiation" in her satirical view of people.

When they are Joined by

Gipriano, and talk of Kate's role as goddess, Ramon speaks 35

Ibid., p. 250.

308 bitterly and sardonically, and rushes away.

Kate returns

home. That same day Ramon writes his Fourth Hymn of Quetzalcoatl, containing a bitter attack on. foreigners in Mexico and the machines they introduce, and a threat of revenge and death.

He takes this himself to the printer

in the city, and then Gipriano1s soldiers distribute it to the "recognized Reader of the Hymns" in each town. In thus accentuating-Ramon*s bitterness, the aggressive­ ness of the Fourth Hymn, and the machinery of distribu­ tion, Lawrence prepares for the encounter with the Ghurch that follows.

The Church has begun to move, though

gingerly, since it is already under governmental re­ strictions.

The priests have forbidden the people to

participate in the Quetzalcoatl movement, but President Montes has given it protection. How Ramon and Cipriano have an interview with Bishop Jiminez.

In the Bishop, Lawrence creates a

shrewd, somewhat furtive, old man playing an equivocal game.

Ramon asks for peace.

. . . The time has come for a Gatholic Ghurch of the Earth, the Gatholic Ghurch of All the Sons of Men. The Saviours are more than one, and let us .pray they will still be increased.'. . . I would speak about Quetzalcoatl in Mexico, and build his Ghurch here.3° Yet he has already ifcold the Bishop of his Intention to

36 Ibid., p. 263.

309 remove the images from the church at Sayula and replace them with those of Quetzalcoatl,

Thus, reasonably, there

is an ambiguity in Ramon's plea; the peace would be rather one-sided, except in its aim at avoidance of bloodshed. The Bishop accuses Ramon of nthe madness of pride."

After­

ward Cipriano describes him as an "old Jesuit," wanting "to keep his job and his power, and:prevent the heart's beating."

It is rumored that already his Knights of

Cortes have sworn to assassinate Ramon and Cipriano. There follow events leading to the taking over of the Sayula church by the men of Quetzalcoatl.

Ramon

is angry and weary and wonders why he "started this Quetzalcoatl business."

Then, putting himself aside, he

asks Kate if she will marry Cipriano.. When she says that they could not meet half-way, he ponders his Pwn failure with Carlota.

They could not meet because they had not

met in their souls, but had engaged in ravishment.

She

had turned to Christ, he to his "uncrucified and uncrucifiable Quetzalcoatl, who at least cannot be ravisehd." He says to Kate: I am a man who has no belief in abnegation of the blood desires. I am a man who is always on the verge of taking wives and concubines to live with me, so deep is my desire for that fulfilment. Ex­ cept that now I know that is useless— -not momen­ tarily useless, but in the long run— my ravishing a woman with hot desire. . , . Wine, women and song — all that— all that game is up. Our insides won't

really have it any more. ourselves together.

Yet it is hard to pull

He feels that it would he easy for him to make the mistake of becoming "arrogant and a ravisher" or of denying him­ self and making "a sort of sacrifice" of his life.

Yet

if he had to end in a mistake, he would prefer being a ravisher, attacking "the hateful, ignoble desire" men have to be ravished.

The conflict betxireen hatred of the

status q uo and exaltation and creation is plainly Lawrence1 Ramon'"s doubts, -and particularly the problem of attack, are a prelude to the scene at the church which follows. Recently a sermon has been preached against the m e n

o f

Quetzalcoatl.

Soldiers are present in the town.

Lawrence contrasts the impressive exterior of the church with the blatance and barrenness of the interior.

The

worship is "a sort of numbness and letting the soul sink uncontrolled," rather than a gain in integrity.

The

church has been closed for several weeks before the Sunday on which the men of Quetzalcoatl enter it. First a leaflet is distributed bearing a little rhymed poem titled, "Jesus1 Farewell."

Then Ramon arrives,

accompanied by a young priest in his clerical garb.

The

entrance into the church and the carrying thence of the images is described in great detail, with the grotesque

37 Ibid.. p. 2?1.

3X1 irony of a reversal of the usual religious processions. The priest himself officiates at this repudiation, and it is he who carries the heavy crucifix to the boat that transports the images to an island for burning.

Indeed,

Lawrence’s chapter title, “Auto de Fe," is ironically reminiscent of inquisitional practices.

As a last rite,

the priest removes his vestments, casts them into the flames, and stands revealed in the garments of a man of Quetzalcoatl.

As Bamon returns to Sayula to loch the

doors of the church, there is, perhaps, a touch of Bibli­ cal miracle in the clouding of the shy “for the thunder and the rain.” The crowd scattered in the wind, rebozos waving wildly, leaves torn, dust racing. Sayulaqfi was empty of God, and, at heart, they were glad.*^ There follows a melodramatic attempt on Bamon1s life by the Knights of Cortes, vividly created by the Lawrence who later at the New Mexico ranch could not shoot a porcupine xtfithout much soul-searching. violence and death involves~his' synthesis.

His treatment of After the bloody

fight, Bamon has the quality in his face of a boy, . . . very pure and primitive, and the eyes underneath had a certain primitive gleaming look of virginity. As men must have been, in the first awful days, with that strange beauty that goes with pristine rudimen­ tariness. 39 38

Ibid., p. 285.

Ibid., p. 29^.

312 Here violence is a part of the fighting nature of the male, but it is also retrogressive, though accompanied by purity and beauty.

Kate, who is present during the attach and

helps Ramon, afterward contemplates the dead bodies of the attackers. For a pure moment, she wished for men who were not handsome as these dark natives were. Even their beauty was suddenly repulsive to her; the dark beauty of half-created, half-evolved things, left in the old, reptile-like smoothness. . . . If only the soul in man, in woman, would speak to her, not always this strange, perverse materialism, or a distorted animalism. If only people were souls, and their bodies were gestures from the soul Here violence is associated with his concept of an unformed past, of which the Indian is a modern remnant.

Attraction

to the primitive, as a part of the needed synthesis and re­ vulsion from it in the felt need of an upward rising spiral of being, .are again the Lawrencean pattern. The experience serves to draw Kate into a closer relationship with the men of Quetzalcoatl.

Afterwards,

she feels that “the common threads that bound her to humanity'1 seem "to have snapped."

She Is plunged into

"a wan indifference, like death. . . . Away inside her a # little light was burning, the light of her innermost soul," lighted by Ramon.

Here occurs something of Lawrence's

death and resurrection theme, reminiscent of his revulsion during World War I. 4-0

Ibid., p. 302.

313 As for Clpriano, she feels him "casting the old, twilit Pan-power over her," and feels herself "submitting, succumbing.11 It is "the ancient phallic mystery, 11 and she can "conceive now her marriage" with him,"the supreme passivity, like the earth below the twilight. . . .

. Ah,

what an abandon. . ., of so many things she wanted to abandon.", Ramon sees at once the change in her. to her indecisions, he counsels:

In answer

"Something happens in­

side you, and all your decisions are smoke.— Let happen what will happen."

When they talk of the possible success

of the movement, and Kate considers Cipriano1s trustworthi­ ness, Lawrence; makes a distinction, in a subtlety that often seems to the reader an ambiguity.

To her Cipriano

is "that old, masterless Pan male, that could not even conceive of service" but sees only "the black mystery of glory consummated."

Thus his trustworthiness is limited.

He is a lesser creature than Ramon. When they talk of the attack of Ramon, and the betrayal by a servant, Kate feels that "there will always be a traitor,"

One is reminded of Lawrence's

sense of betrayal, and of his controversy with Murry with its "Judas" theme.

Hamon will continue the movement.

Soon Cipriano, as First Man of the warrior god, Huitzilopochtli, will join him in the new pantheon.

Then they must

314 have a goddess, and Ramon suggests her as the First Woman of "Itzpopolotl, just for the sound of the name. " (The name is not retained. )

He laughs at her idea that

she would feel shame. There must be manifestations. We must change back to the vision of the living cosmos; we must. The oldest Pan is in us, and he will not be denied. . . . I am the First Man of Quetzalcoatl. I am Quetzalcoatl himself, if you like. A manifesta­ tion, as well as a man. I accept myself entire, and proceed to make destiny.^1 She sees Ramon as "like a messenger from the beyond.

. . ,

remote from any woman,11 whereas Cipriano has opened to her "the world of shadows and dank prostration, with the phallic wind rushing through the dark."

Thus at this

point the distinction between the two men is not only that of prophet and warrior, but of the spirit and the physical. Kate goes now with Cipriano to a town at the end of the lake.

The journey is imaginative preparation for

their physical consummation, Lawrence packing the scene with life and movement through which she moves without sense of time.

Cipriano finds a room for her as his

esposa, and takes her as his wife. She fused into a molten unconsciousness, her will, her very self gone, leaving her lying in molten life, like a lake of still fire, unconscious of everything save the eternallty of the fire in which she was gone. . . . And Cipriano the master 41

Ibid., p. 314.

315 of fire. The Living Huitzilopoehtli, he had called himself. The living firemaster. The god in the flame; the salamander. Afterwards Cipriano takes her to weavers working for the men of Quetzalcoatl.

They buy especially-designed serapes

for Cipriano and Ramon, Lawrence describing them in great detail.

Among the serapes in one designed for the god­

dess who will one day join them.

A new dress, too, will

be made for her. Their ceremonial marriage by Ramon follows. Lawrence treats it with elaborate symbolism. part takes place out-of-doors in the rain. "the rain fbom heaven."

The first The man is

The woman:'is "the earth," to

"be strength to him, throughout the long twilight of the Morning Star."

Then, indoors, they bathe and anoint

their bodies, for the final ceremony.

Ramon’s final

words concern not only faithfulness between man and wife but between man and man. . . . The star that is between all men and all women, and between all the children of men, shall not be betrayed. Whosoever betrays another man, betrays a man like himself, a fragment. For if there is no star between a man and a man, or even a man and a wife, there is nothing. But whosoever betrays the star that is between him and another man, betrays all, and all is lost to the traitor. Where there is no star and no abiding place, nothing is, so nothing can be lost. * 42

43

Ibid.. p. 318. Ifrid., p. 330.

316 Immediately after the marriage, Ramon opens the church for the rites of Quetzalcoatl,

Armed men give

Kate passage through the crowd to the side of Cipriano. She feels as if she is to he the victim in a saarifice. Then Ramon appears in the doorway and begins the service, the Guard repeating his words, which end with a warning to these who will not follow not to watch. the Guard enter the church.

Then he and

Cipriano tells the crowd

that it may enter, women to the center, men to the right and left, with no kneeling to the new god. The interior has been decorated in bright, ' symbolic colors. A wooden statue of Quetzalcoatl dominates the altar, which is of stone with a small fire upon it. Ramon sits on a low throne.

Kate and the other women

crouch on the floor as the men salute Quetzalcoatl. speaks in a free verse passage beginning,

Ramon

"I am the living

Quetzalcoatl.11 Then the drum beats, and candles are kindled at the altar fire.

There follows a little cere­

mony, the symbolism of which is uttered by Ramon: And save I take the wine of my spirit and the red of my heart, the strength of my belly and the poxtfer of my loins, and mingle them all together, and kindle them to the Morning Star, I betray my body. I betray my s o u ^ I betray my spirit and my God who is Unknown. Thus the ceremony indicates the integration Lawrence de­ sired to make. Ail,

Ibid., p. 3^0.

317 An interruption comes from Carolota, who, clad in black, works her way forward on her knees, appeal­ ing to Mary and Jesus, and calling upon God to take Ramon’s life and "save his soul."

Ramon stands adamant, and it

is she who collapses in a convulsion, Gipriano carries her out, and Ramon continues the service with a Hymn of Quetzalcoatl. After the hymn, Gipriano and Kate visit the dying Csxlota, into whose room comes the sound of the service. Gipriano defends Ramon from her accusation of murder, and says that she has never been really married to Ramon, and that she kills herself. I tell you the water of charity, the hissing water of the spirit, is bitter at last in the mouth and in the breast and in the belly, it puts out the fire. You would have put out the fire, Dona Carlota.— But you cannot. You shall not. You have been charitable and compassionless to the man you called your own. So you have put out your own fire.^3 When she speaks of her children, he says: It is good for you to steal from them no more, you stale virgin, you spinster, you born widow, you weeping mother, you impeccable wife, you just woman. You stole the very sunshine,out of the sky and the sap out of the earth. ^ Kate’s reaction is mixed.

Her "primeval" self

laughs, but the modern self causes her to sit through ii-5

Ibid., p. 345. 46

Ibid., p. 3^ 6 .

the day with Garlota while the sounds of the drum and dancing come from outside.

Cipriano returns with "the

Song-Sheet of the Welcome to Quetzalcoatl," hearing four line stanzas Irregularly rhymed. Tie my spotted shoes for dancing, The snake has kissed my heel. Like a volcano my hips are movlngu„ With fire, and my throat is full. ' As she listens to the voices outside, "the people had opened hearts at last.

she feels that They had rolled

the stone of their heaviness away, a new world had begun. Peeling .'frightened, she finds refuge in Cipriano. With the new religion formally established and welcomed, Lawrence turns to Cipriano's approach to assumption of the divinity of Huitzllopochtli.

Cipriano

is in favor of advancing the new religion as the official one of the state; but Ramon insists that it spread of it­ self, and writes open letters to the clergy calling for a greater Catholicism, and to socialists and agitators urging them to put away grudges for living.

Meanwhile

Cipriano struggles to discipline his army, Lawrence devoting much space to his varied devices. Discipline is what Mexico needs, and what the whole world needs. But it is the discipline from the inside that matters. The machine, discipline, from the outside, breaks down.^° There is a long passage on Cipriano's use of the warrior ^7 Ibid., p. 3*1-9. 48 Ibid.. p. 363.

319 dance. Ramon presses him "openly to assume the living Huitzilopochtli.“

In a ceremony with Cipriano, he in­

duces in him the mystic darkness, until both men pass Into "perfect unconsciousness, Cipriano within the womb of undisturbed creation, Ramon in the death sleep,"

This

is evidently a ritual symbolic of the renewal of the gods.

49

Afterward Cipriano calls on Kate, to tell her that he has been "where there is no beyond,, and the darkness sinks 49

W. Y. Tindall says that this initiation and "the spiritual exercises of Don Ramon, . . are based upon the initiation described by" James M. Pryse in The Apocalypse Unsealed (1910). Thus Tindall finds a mixture of theosophy, the Atlantis legend, and Aztec symbol. "Among the anthro­ pologists . . . consulted for this novel was Lewis Spence, authority on Atlantis and Rosicrucian of Los Angeles. ("Transcendentalism in Contemporary Literature, The Asian Legacy and American Life. edited by Arthur E. Christy (New York, 1945) , PP* 186-188.) It is not the purpose of this study to trace in detail Lawrence's sources. Tindall has over-emphasized his reliance on modern occultism. It is evident that he read quite widely among the anthropologists. As early as 1916 he said that he preferred Edward B. Tylor:' s . Primitive Culture to Frazer 's The Golden Bough and the work of Gilbert Murray. (Letters. p. 348’.") Tylor devoted seven out of nineteen chapters to animism. Here, surely, Lawrence's developing animism found impetus. Tylor pointed out that later allegorical and moral interpretations of myth were corruptions of the animistic spirit. Tylor also challenged the status quo. "To impress men *s minds witty.-a doctrine of development, will lead them in all honour to their an­ cestors to continue the progressive work of past ages. , . . It is a harsher, and at times even painful, office of ethnography to expose the .remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction.11 (II, 453.) Among the many studies of the Indian, Lawrenee may have known such works of Lewis Soence as The Myths of the North American Indians (1914), The Myths of Mexico and Peru (1917). The Civiliza­ tion of Ancient Mexico (1912),Mexico of' the Mexicans (1917).

320 into the water, and waking and sleeping are one thing.” He asks her to be Malintzi, the bride of Huitzilopochtli. The Huitzilopochtli ceremony follows, taking place at night and beginning in front of the church.

Prom a cen­

tral fire, Cipriano throws brands to his dancing men, who kindle four others, in the corners of the churchyard.

When

the fires die, the dance ceases, and the "First Song of Huitzilopochtli” is sung.

It is the male warrier song, the

last stanza reading: I am the sleeping and waking Of the anger of the manhood of men. I am the'leaping and quaking Of fire bent back a g ain. 50 Then Cipriano, followed by five prisoners, comes from the church to a platform.

He speaks, in free verse,

of punishment: From the liars, from the thieves, from the false and treacherous and mean I see the grey dogs creeping out, where my deer are browsing in the dark. Then I take my knife, and throw it upon the grey dog. And lo! it sticks between the ribs of a manlbl Then "The Song of the Grey Dog” is sung, calling for the killing of ”a traitor, a thief, a murderer of dreams." The prisoners are led forward, and their guards are interrogated were

by

Cipriano abouttheir crimes.All

involved in the attack onRamon. £° Ibid..

p.

373-

51 Ibid.,

p. 375-

A man and woman,

321 servants of Ramon, hence guilty of betrayal, are garrotted. The four men who attached from without are permitted to draw twigs, three black for death, one green, “the green leaf of Malintzi who pardons once."

The three who draw

black are stabbed by Cipriano. Now the men enter the church, where a statue of Huitzilopochtli stands beside that of Quetzalcoatl. five dead bodies lie at its feet. at the altar.

Ramon meets Cipriano

Blood from the three who were stabbed is

sprinkled on the fire. Ramon saying:

The

The souls are given to Quetzalcoatl,

" . . . Make peace now with the sun and wind

and waters, and go in courage, with the breath of Quetzal­ coatl around you like a cloak."

The ritual is in prose

dialogue. Thus the "grey-dog" spirit is exorcized. sing a song titled,"Huitzilopochtli's Watch."

Two guards At the end

of the ceremony, Ramon speaks in free verse of the journey of the dead.

The goddess, Malintzi, has already played the

role of pardoner.

She, and Quetzalcoatl, are the reconcilers.

When the blue wind of Quetzalcoatl Waves softly, When the water of Malintzi falls Making a greenness: Count the red drains of the Huitzilopochtli Fire in your hearts, Oh. men. And blow the ash a w a y . Now Kate is made the goddess, Malintzi.

52 Ibid., p. 384.

She has been

322 shocked and depressed by the executions. . . . beep in her soul came a revulsion against this manifestation of pure will. For herself, ultimately, ultimately she belonged elsewhere. Not to this terrible, natural will which seemed to beat its-wings in the very air of the American continent.-^-5 It has another, x^onderful, aspect to her.

“But where was

woman, in this terrible interchange of will? subservient, instrumental thing her conflict at great length.

Truly only a

Again Lawrence analyzes

The hardest thing she must

face is loss of individuality. It meant a submission she had never made. It meant the death of her Individual self. It meant abandoning so much, even her own very foundations. For she had believed truly that every man and ^ every woman alike was founded on the individual. In the midst of this doubt, Oipriano appears.

She

sees now in him, the executions once over, the “flame of virgin youth.

Now, not will at all. . . . The living, flicker­

ing fiery Wish.

This was first.

The Will she had seen

was subsidiary and instrumental, the Wish in armour."

She

goes to the church with him, where they stand before the statue of Huitizilopoehtli, and she agrees to be Malintzi, bride and goddess.

In ritual they salute both gods, fill

the lamp, take two candles and blow them out, then sit side by side on the throne.

Kate, "watching the bud of her life

53 Ibid.. p. 385. 5k Ibid., p. 388.

323 united with his. . , and feeling his dark hand softly hold­ ing her own, with the soft, deep Indian heat," feels "her own childhood coming back on her." So, when she thought of him and his soldiers, tales of swift cruelty she had heard of him: when she remembered his stabbing the three helpless peons, she thought: Why should I judge him? He is of the gods. And when he comes to me he lays his pure, quick flame to mine, and every time I am a young girl again, and every time he takes the flower of my virginity, and I his. . . . What do I care if he kills people? His flame is young and clean.55 With Kate as Malintzi, one might suppose her con­ flict to be resolved, and £he climax of Lawrence’s theme to have been reached. three more chapters.

But her conflict continues through In contrast to her, and to the dead

Carlota, Lawrence creates as a wife for Ramon the shy, gentle, loyal Teresa, who has "an almost uncanny power, to make Ramon great and gorgeous in the flesh," while she her­ self becomes "inconspicuous, almost invisible, save for her great black eyes."

Kate hates what seems to her Teresa's

subjection. The trouble was, that the power of the world, which she had known until now only in the eyes of blue-eyed men, who made queens of their women--even if they hated them for it in the end--was now fading in the blue eyes and dawning in the b l a c k . 3° Clearly the problem of woman's relationship to man has become

^

Ibid., p. 393.

&

Ibid., p. 399 .

324dominant in Lawrence's imagination, extending itself beyond the problem of man's relationship to the world.

Kate realizes

that all her "handsome, ruthless female power" is "secondrate" compared with Teresa's "own quiet, deep passion of connection with Ramon," and Ramon she Knows "to be a greater man than Cipriano."

As symbolic action, this may be

Lawrence's answer to Mrs. Lawrence.

Recently she said that

she thinks Lawrence was not quite convinced by Ramon's mars-*riage to the young girl; she seems to think that he is speaking to her in it— "he had to hand me this." Kate determined not to submit, makes plans to leave Mexico.

Cipriano is at first angry, but she sees "the

stoic indifference, the emotionlessness of centuries, and the stoic kind of tolerance" come over him, and fears losing "his contact."

He goes to Jamiltepec, and, left alone-,

she thinks of the future, and struggles with the desire for individuality, the gratification of the ego, to be unlimited, one becomes horrible.

"If one tries

Without Cipriano to

touch, me and limit me and submerge my will, I shall become a 57 horrible, elderly female." She has seen her friends lose "all their charm and allure" and become "real grimalkins, greyish, avid, and horrifying, prowling around and looking for prey that became scarcer and scarcer. they went to pieces." —

Ibid.. p. 4-39.

As human beings

32£ ' At Jaxniltepec she finds the men singing to the drum. The hymn concerns the relationship of men and women. A man cannot tread like a woman, Nor a woman step out like a man. The ghost of each through the leaves of shadow Moves as it can. But the Morning Star and the Evening Star Pitch tents of flame Where we foregather like gypsies, none knowing How the other came. 5° She goes to the men "to make a sort of submission." But even this is handled by Lawrence with the irony of con­ tinuing conflict.

As she says that she wishes to stay,

she rebels at Ramon's gentleness and feels that she is a fraud.

Ramon.tells her sternly to listen to her "own best

desire."

But Cipriano tells her that she is not Ramon's,

to be advised, and asserts his desire and mastery. she pleads, "You don't want me to go, do you?"

When

his speech

of desire "sounded so soft, so soft-tongued, of the soft, wet, hot, blood, that she shivered a little.

'You won't

let me go'.' she said to him."^9 Kate's final conflict overshadows and dwarfs Lawrence's conclusion to the movement of the men of Quetzalcoatl.

A "kind of war" arrays the Church and the

Knights of Cortes, against the men of Quetzalcoatl. and his army defeat one opponent. Ibid., p.

^

1\)\P

.

^Lid., p . l\l\S •

Ciprano

Then President Montes

326 outlaws the Ghurch and makes the religion of Quetzalcoatl the national church.

But there is little emphasis on this

triumph. Nevertheless, Lawrence had pushed his imaginative triumph to its ultimate conclusion.

In marrying Kate to

Cipriano, he had not only subdued the antagonistic woman but had symbolically united his Europe, and .his-America, the blue-eyed with the black-eyed, the fair-skinned with the dark-skinned, the abstract and ideal with the physical source from which it had divorced itself to its threatened extinction.

He had linked his moribund present with a

revivifying^past that shone dimly and inehoately through the Indian.

He had found a tradition from -which to adum­

brate his vision of the future.

He had met the temptation

to retrogressions to the primitive, with its brutality and ugliness, and had withstood it, at least as far as his con­ scious synthesis was concerned.

Only in Ramon's despair

and anger at human limitations, and his temptation to nihilism, does the prophet lose patience and wish to merge all in the black source in death. The images and symbols of Lawrence's solution have gathered throughout the American experience, although the underlying philosophy has its origin much earlier. introduces into Mexico, in combination with some Aztec symbolism, and with some reference to his favorite Greek

He

327 god, Pan, the animistic religion of the New Mexico Indians, which drew him so strongly with its mindless, non-Individual sense of universal life, and with its impression of ancient continuity.

Christianity is decadent; he will replace the

dying god, as did Frazferi'4.-- primitive peoples, with another god, but not with a totally new one, nor entirely with a revivified Quetzalcoatl.

One misses the point if one does

not see the importance of the incarnation in Ramon, Cipriano, and Kate.

Human beings, in the animistic communion, pos­

sess godlike

p o w e r

wrested from the unformed forces of the

universe, and hence become gods.

But human beings, eras,

and gods are subject to decay and death.

One must accept

the cycle, but the total struggle is ever upward. At the time, Lawrence believed The Plumed Serpent to be his "most important novel so far," and he said that he thought “most of it.“

It was his most direct, politically

challenging, imaginative triumph over the real world. Its program of an elite leadership, though he never quite abandoned it, came into question later as Europe moved V toward fascism. In 1928 while he was putting the finishing touches on Lady Cha.tterley1s Lover, he wrote to Witter Bynner, with .whom he had quarreled over democracy during the initial stages of The Plumed Serpent, that he thought him right about "the hero" of the earlier novel. The Letters of £. H. Lawrence. p. $kk.

328 The hero is obsolete, and the leader of men is a back number. After all, at the back of the hero is the militant ideal: and the militant ideal, or the ideal militant seems to me also a cold egg. . . . The leadercum-follower relationship is a bore. And the new relationship will be some sort of tenderness, sensi­ tive, between men and men and men and women, and not the one up one down, lead on I follow, ich dien sort 51 of business. So you see I ’m becoming a lamb at last. .. . As we shall see, the return to Europe and what he felt to be ’’■the spirit of place11 there was partially responsible for his shift.

Pre-eminently in America he felt the antagonism

of vast, raw forces which must be conquered. 61 Ibid., p. 719.

PART .71 LAST VISIT TO NEW MEXICO (1925) CHAPTER I THE LIFE At the ranch Lawrence showed the surprising re­ cuperative powers which characterized his recurrent strug­ gles against ill health.

During his convalescence his

intense vitality, with its accompanying restlessness, al­ lowed him no real quiet.^

Letters concerned with important

personal and professional problems appear in the very first days of this period.

By the latter part of May the long 2 play David was ready for the typist. By mid-June he was beginning to feel himself again and was engaging in the chores of the ranch, milking, irrigating, chopping wood.

3

By June 23 he was able to promise a corrected typescript of 4 The Plumed Serpent to his agent. He embarked on a series of essays, to appear in December of the same year (1925) as Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. A continuing personal problem was the relationship 1

✓ See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 16, for an early example of this. 2 Ibid., p. 642. 3 Ibid., p. 644. 4 Ibid.. p. 645.

330 with Dorothy Brett.

(Mrs. Luhan and he avoided each other;

so that old conflict was not renewed.)'* Sent away from Oaxaca, she had gone to the ranch.

Very soon after his

arrival, Lawrence wrote her a note expressing his concep­ tion of the flaw in their friendship. It *s no good our trying to get on together— it xron't happen. Myself— I have lost all desire for intense or intimate friendship. Acquaintance is enough. It will be best when we go our separate ways. A life in common is an Illusion, when the instinct is always to divide, to separate indivi­ duals and set them one against the other. And this seems to be the ruling instinct, unacknowledged. Unite^with the one- against the other, and it*s no good. Though Lawrence continued, over.the next years, to show in­ terest in ideas of group activity, extensions of the old dream of’a communal life, in his work there is no longer such an attempt as that of The Plumed Serpent to conceive of, and create, a total social solution.

More and more

salvation is the object of the individual's isolated struggle. Brett remained on the scene, taking a cabin at Del Monte Ranch below the Lawrence ranch.

She saw Lawrence oc­

casionally, typed for him, and now and than braved the displeasure of Mrs. Lawrence by visiting. were brief reconciliations.^

At times, there

Lawrence recognized the

"* Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p . 281. 6 , The Letters of D. H, Lawrence, p. 639* 7 Brett, Lawrence and Brett. p. 225

331 responsibility for her he had assumed when she threw up the old life in England to Join him in another effort toward the ideal community— an effort not Joined by others who during the last English visit had promised it would be. Mrs. Lawrence's tiring of the relationship, and sense of interference with her own, is humanly understandable, as is Brett's dogged hero-worship and discipleship.

The

strained situation continued'through the summer, aggravated by Mrs. Lawrence's desire for closer relationship with her children, opposed by Lawrence.

In the fall Lawrence, it

seems clear, was forced to take the initiative in working out a solution for Brett, now that he was going to England. He called her aside, attacked her indecision and fear of travel because of her deafness, and settled it that she would go to Capri, with a letter of Introduction to his friends 8 • Earl and Achsah Brewster. Altogether it was a kindly move on his part; and his concern for Brett's welfare was to continue through the remainder of his life. As we have seen in the earlier chapters of this study, these strains involving friendship and the relation between husband and wife were of long continuance.

What cumulative

effect, in combination with the artistic and ideological struggle, had they had on Lawrence the man?

A tentative

idea of this may be gained by the report of Friedl Jaffe 8 I*>id.. pp. 236-237.

332 (now Jeffrey), Mrs. Lawrence's nephew, who visited the ranch that summer and saw Lawrence after the lapse of some years.

In an interview in 19^7 he told me that at the time

he had felt that Lawrence had changed greatly since the ill­ ness, and that he was irritable, held people off, and seemed fighting what had assailed him so seriously.

Perhaps he

knew for the first time that he was really ill.

Mr; Jeffrey

remembered the earlier Lawrence for his vigor and joy in life.

He had gone out to people, and had sought to draw

out the value he saw in them, at the same time openly assail­ ing what he felt was weak in them. the Illness had changed that.

The post-war years and

As for the central relation­

ship with Mrs. Lawrence, Mr. Jeffr.ey felt that after the illness Lawrence was too weak to hold her in check. must conjecture much of what he meant by this.

One

It is

plain that the relationship of the Lawrences had always been one of violent alternations:

the conflicts, during

which Lawrence seems never to have yielded, succeeded by a rapport precious to both of them. Certainly Mr. Jeffrey Q witnessed quarrels. Perhaps Lawrence was no longer able to. maintain so tenaciously the male mastery he had always considered essential,

let as one views the remaining

years, there is no evidence of complete capitulation.

It

is true that the search for Utopia in the present, opposed 9 Ibid.. p. 232.

333 by "the wife in Kangaroo and Kate in The Plumed Serpent. was to he abandoned, although Lawrence did not yield theoretical interest in it.

It is true that he nox? returned

to the England he had rejected on the previous visit, and that the remaining years of his life were spent in a search for health and a chance to live and write in Southern Europe.

But this is a limitation of activity rather than

a final break of strength and courage.

Perhaps most

significant in his later work is an increasing emphasis on sex.

The idea of the importance of sexual freedom (or

freedom in sex, never license) had originally come from Mrs. Lawrence via a young disciple of Freud.

Mrs. Lawrence's

advocacy was triumphant in Lady Chatterl.v1s Lover, at least as far as dominance of theme was concerned, though once again modern woman must put all the false gods of ego be­ hind her. The recuperating Lawrence had also to cope with pro­ fessional problems.

After only a week at the ranch, he

wrote, on April 15, to his agent, Curtis Brown, to defend ■

r

himself from an attack by Norman Douglas

10

‘ on his portrayal

of Maurice Magnus in the long introduction to Magnus's Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, edited by Lawrence with •* i

considerable labor.

He left* it to Brown's discretion whether

or not to publish, as a defence, a letter from Douglas. R' S* Lawrence and Maurice Magnus: Better Manners.

11

A Plea for

11 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 639.

33k By May 26, no longer "sore” as he was during the sickness of April, Lawrence did not care what was said and did not wish to engage in controversy, '’neither pamphlets nor articles.” He thought "public 'controversies' infra dig . , anyhow In a letter to Miss Nancy Pearn in the Curtis Brown office, who was entrusted with the detailed handling of his work, Lawrence expressed disappointment at not having been able to come to England.

He concealed the fact that

his illness was really tuberculosis, as he did from then on even, apparently, to himself, referring to it as a combina­ tion of malaria, typhoid, and 'flu.

There was recognition

of his estrangement from conventional taste in his con­ gratulations on her handling of "those difficult stories." The subject of "Mornings in Mexico," not yet sold, brought him to the old problem of .relationships with Murry.

He was

"not so very keen" on giving them to Murry for The Adelphi. He felt that often he could "see Murry's words coming out" against him "through people who frequent him."

He did not

like "that kind of friendship," but she might use her own judgment.13

"Corasmin and the Parrots" appeared in The

Adelphi in December, but no others appeared there until 1927, when two were printed.

12 I£id-, p. 6if2. Ibid. . p. 6ij.O.

As for future work, he told

335 Miss Pearn, with regard for her difficulties, that he wished he “did some nice popular little stories.11 He would have to see how the summer went with him.

With prophecy he felt 14it would he "a long time" before he wrote another novel. In a letter to Dr. Trigant Burrow, xtfhose The Social

Basis of Consciousness he reviewed several years later, there was a flash of Lawrence's philosophical, crusading self. I am in entire sympathy with your idea of social images. In fact, I feel myself that the Jewish consciousness is now composed entirely of social images: there is no new-starting "reality" left. Hothing springs alive and new from the blood. . . . [Old racesj lose the faculty for real experience, and go on decomposing their test-tubes-ful of social images. One fights and fights for that living something that-stirs way down in the blood, and creates consciousness. But the world won't have it. To the present human mind, everything is ready-made. . . . ^ To the relatively unpublished Burrow, from whom he had two reprints of articles, he mentioned the lack of success of his own "Unconscious things."

His statement that he was

“not going to bother any more about that side of things" obviously arose from the anger of the moment. . The essays written that summer were full of the old themes and the old crusade. By the latter part of June, the corrected typescript l4 3-5

Ibid., p.

6M>,

Ibid.. p. 6^3.

336 of The Plumed Serpent, ready to he sent to his agent, brought to his letters his estimate of that climactic American effort in,* the statement to the faithful Catherine

16 Carswell:

“It's very different.

But I think most of it."

The reservation (assuming a strees on "mosli) indicates that Lawrence did not consider the book final and absolute truth.

But it was to him his "most important novel, so far,"

Later, as we have seen, he rejected the hero-leader theme. More than any other of his friends Mrs. Carswell represented home and England, and there is in this letter to her a nostalgia which seldom found expression in his letters but which was noted by people in contact with him. Even then it came through in:an offhand manner and in under­ statement: Lovely to think of cherry trees in bloom: here the country is too savage, somehow, for such softness. I get a bit of a Heimweh for Europe* We shall come in the autumn— D.V.— and winter somewhere warm/' Late in August Lawrence wrote to M. L. Skinner, the Australian writer whose The Boy in the Bush he had revised Ibid.. p. 644. The judgment was repeated to his agent along with a wish to show it "to a Mexican friend in Mexico City, and have his opinion" before publication. He was afraid, however, to send the manuscript there, evidently fearing its loss. I have not been able, so far, to identify the friend. Mrs. Lawrence thinks this may be a reference to Witter Bynner, but the description as "Mexican" does not fit. The strongest possibility is Luis Quintanilla.

17 Ibid.

337 so drastically, concerning the death of her brother.

It was

essentially a letter of consolation in which Lawrence identi­ fied himself with the man who, to him, had no luck, and "at the bottom of his soul . . . preferred to drift penniless through the world" and had "lived his life and had his mates wherever he went."

He added, "so many old bourgeois people

live on and on, and can11 die,, because they have.never been in life at all."

At the end his thoughts turned to

their common interest in writing: . . . One can live so intensely with one's characters and the experiences one creates or records, it is a life in itself, far better than the vulgar thing people call life, jazzing or motoring and so on. No, every day I live' I feel more disgusted at the thing these Americans call life. Ten times better die penniless on a gold-field.-^g But be sure of my sympathy. Preference for the imaginative life is rather un­ usual in Lawrence, at least in expression.

Like many

Lawrence letters, this was written to meet a specific situa­ tion; yet there is no doubt of his own vivid imaginative sharing in his characters' lives, however "unrealistic" these lives were at times.

Much more characteristic is the

scorn of "the vulgar thing people call life."

He identi­

fied it, though not exclusively by any means, with the United States. "Lft

Ibid., pp. 646-6^7*

338 In September the fortuitous stay at the ranch came to an end.

Lawrence had apparently recovered.

On Septem

ber 25, 1925, "two days at sea, he wrote to his mother-inlaw that he “was quite glad to be out of that America for a time. . . , so tough and wearing, with the iron springs poking out through the padding.“

As if in answer

to a question, he said: can:

“I don't feel myself very Amerl19 no, I am still European.“ He was not to return to New Mexico, though he

sometimes longed to.

The problem of quotas and legal

red-tape, and fear of the hard life in the high altitude of the ranch, were too much.

The few years of his life

that remained were to be spent chiefly on the Mediterran­ ean— in Italy and Southern France. —

Frieda Lawrence, p. 192.

“Not I_ But the Wind. . . ,"

CHAPTER II THE WORK The three-act play David was an old project.

During

the previous summer, Ida Rauh, the actress, had "become a friend of,the Lawrences.

The story is that when Lawrence

asked her what kind of play she liked best, she answered that she preferred stories from the Bible.

When asked

how she liked the story of Michal and David, she thought it perfect, and he promised to make a play of it for 1 her. Prom the first, he had her in mind for the role of Michal, who becomes a complex Lawrencean woman.

(There

is a pathetic sequel in her feeling, on reading the play, that she was too old for the part.) delayed.

But composition was

On October 29, from Mexico City, he wrote to

Mrs. Luhan in general disgust with his situation, that there was "not a play-word" in him.

If he could "sit still

in Oaxaca,11 he would "probably pull off a play. 2 sabe i"

But quien

Lawrence followed the Bible story rather closely (whole sentences are used intact, as are some of the Psalms), and it is only gradually that the reader becomes aware of his shift of emphasis and meaning.

At first, Saul's doom,

1 Brett, Lawrence and Brett, p. 60.

2

Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 280.

conveyed by Samuel, echoes the Biblical mood. strikes a different note.

Only Michel

She is a mischievous Lawrencean

woman from the very first scene, in which she leads her maidens in mockery of the captive enemy Agag, and in de­ light in the spoils of battle.

When Saul tells her that

Samuel will take the spoils and curse her youth, she answers That he shall not ! Oh, Merab, you got the blue shawl from me i Run i Maidens ] Run J Farewell, King Agag, your servant thanks your lordship 1 r--Caw J— Nay, he cannot even say caw F As the play advances, one begins to get, however, not so much the love of Michal and David, as Lawrence’s ideological slant.

The advent of David does not mark the

coming of a glorious era.

Rather it symbolizes the be­

ginning of the evils of the; modern era.

Jonathan is torn

between father and friend: The Lord sees fit to split me between King and King-to-be, and .already I am torn asunder as be­ tween two wild horses straining opposite ways. Yet my blood is my father’s. And my soul is David's. The Lawrencean split between blood and soul should be noted. As for Saul, he becomes not merely the lamenter of vanished glory but the prophet of a godless future. Yea, David, the pits are digged even under the feet of thy God, and thy God shall fall in. . . . The world shall be Godless, there shall no God walk on the mountains, no whirlwind shall stir,

3

Lawrence, The Plays of D . H. Lawrence, p. 188.

3^1 like a heart in the deeps of the blue firmament. And God shall he gone from the world. Only men there shall he, in myriads, like locustg, click­ ing and grating upon one another. . . . At the end, as Saul casts himself down in helplessness on «

the hill before the prophets, a soldier says: Oh, it is good to live now, with the light of the first day’s sun upon the hreast. For when the seed of David have put the Lord inside a house, the glory will he gone. . . . Jonathan, in the last speech, sums up the Lawrencean theme.

His heart, and Saul's, yearn over David, hut David,

in his triumph of intellect over strength, exemplified in the encounter with Goliath, knows "no depth of yearning." Take thou the kingdom, and the days to come. In .the flames of death where Strength is, I will wait and watch till the day of David at last shall he finished, and wisdom no more he goxfaced, and the hlood gets hack its flame. Michal, of course, is subordinate to this larger theme. :But Saul is in conflict also with his womenfol^. When David advises him to pluck out this problem, as if it were a thorn, Saul answers:

"But is it easy to pluck out 7 a rancorous woman from the heart?" At times Saul laughs

at Michal's impertinence, hut when David finds her voice

r J

Ibid.. P. 259. Ibid., p.

6 7

306.

Ibid.. p. 312. Ibid.. p. 215.

342 sweet, he says that "at times it is snarling and "bad."

8

Michal,I.of' course, forsakes father for husband and the new order.

She, like David, is clever and outwits Saul.

In

her relations with David, she is the Lawrencean woman who finds love all-sufficient, unable to conceive of a higher activity.

When she asks David if he will not seek her for

herself, and he replies that he will for himself "and for the Lord's own self in me, 11 she comments: 9 puttest the Lord between me and thee."

"Ever thou

In the David story, Lawrence's theme of the split between blood and intellect producing the modern era, found new incident and symbol.

Setting and atmosphere stemmed

both from the Bible and from New Mexico and Mexico.

The

courtyard of Saul's house is a "sort of compound with an adobe house beyond." place in the village.

In Bethlehem the scene is "an open An old man on a roof calling aloud

and kindling a signal fire."

In some of the singing and

dancing there seem to be hints of Indian ceremony and pageantry.

The king's room at G-ilgal is a "bare adobe

room, mats on the floor," with a "little open hearth." That part of the setting not plainly New Mexican is con­ sistently pastoral.

There may be an echo, of Mexico in the

"round, pyramid-like hill, with a stair-like way to the

8

Ibid.

9 Ibid.. pp. 273-274.

3^3 top, where is a rude rock altar.11 The chanting of the prophets may he linked to the Indian ceremonies.

That

Lawrence intended to use still more Southwestern atmos­ phere is indicated by a note on the manuscript of an early version of the play:

"Must be kept simple.— plain—

naive— villagers" and "tune the church-bell tune of the Indians."10 notation.

For the latter Lawrence made his own musical The play was produced in England in 1927 without

much success. The six essays which date from this last stay at the ranch are all essentially the re-embodiment of old themes. The continuity and unity of Lawrence's thought is indicated by the fact that these essays were published with "The Crown," written in 1915 during the war. note, Lawrence said:

In a prefatory

"I alter The Crown only a very little.

I t says what I still believe. 1,11 In "The Novel"

12 _

Lawrence applies his belief In the

"passional" truth of the blood-consciousness.

"The novel

Is the highest form of human expression so far attained" because "it is so incapable of the absolute."

Any attempt

at the absolute in the novel is didacticism, and the

10 Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts, p . 124. 11 Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. 12 Ibid.. pp. 103-123.

3kk didactic parts of a novel do not constitute its essence, which is the relativeness of everything.

Most great

novelists— such as Tolstoi, Hardy, and F-lauhert— have a purpose or a philosophy (didacticism); hut this purpose must not he "at outs with the passional inspiration. "■ He illustrates this conflict hy attaching what he considers the overwhelming of the passional hy the purposeful in Tolstdi's Anna Karenina.

The attack demonstrates further

how little Lawrence's essential ideas and convictions changed over the years, since an identical attack occurs 13 in the essay on Thomas Hardy written during the War. Lawrence1s hete nolr. society, is the cause of Anna and Vronsky's failure— an opinion shared hy Thomas Mann, with the difference that Mann credits Tolstoi with an attack on society— that, and the lovers' cowardice. was social, not phallic at all."

"The monster

Inevitably one thinks

of the similarity of the elopment with Mrs. Lawrence to the situation in Anna, although the sequel was quite dif­ ferent. Protection for the reader does lie in the fact that the novel, unlike other forms, shows up the false imposi­ tion of purpose; hut the writer should follow his "passional inspiration."

In full iconoclastic swing, Lawrence applies

his paradox to such names as Socrates, Jesus, and the 13 Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. P. 398.

345 writers of the Gospels— -as for the latter, his preference is for the Old Testament, in which the "purpose was so big, it didn't quarrel with . . . passional inspiration."

The

tone is playful and satirical, the effect that of improvisa­ tion.

Even Dante and Petrarch come in for a share of the

satire; Beatrice and ^aura are spiritual concubines, not wives. Toward the end Lawrence returns to his own defini­ tion of the novel. . . . If you put a theosophist1in a novel, he or she may cry avauntJ to the heart's content. But a theosophist cannot be a novelist, as a trumpet cannot be a regimental band. A theosophist, or a Christian, or a Holy-Roller, may be contained in a novelist. But a novelist may not put up a . fence. The wind bloweth where it listeth. . . . ^ The essay ends with a critical principle often used by latter-day critics: Oh, give me the novel I Let me hear what the novel says. nAs for the novelist, he is usually a dribbling liar. Lawrence's attack on the didactic poses a problem .C for his critics.

In The Plumed Serpent. for example, it is

apparent to one who has read much Lawrence, that his charac­ teristic problems and themes dominate the book.

But to

Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. pp. 120-121. This avowal is made game of by W. X. Tindall in D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow, p. 148, who feels that Lawrence does not adequately acknoxtfledge his own theosophical sources. Tindall, in his penchant for theatrical satire, does not really attack the problem posed by Lawrence's statement.

15 IkM- > P- 123 .

346 what extent do they, springing from a surprisingly fertile and tenacious intellect, gather about themselves the passion that should, according to his theory, go to the characters in all their relativity?

There is a kind of relativity

in Kate's intellectual uncertainty, and in her emotional ap­ proach to and withdrawal from the other characters, who themselves, at times, partake of this individual, relative quality.

In a sense, this is the working out of the artist's

own uncertainty in imaginative experience.

Yet undoubtedly

Lawrence's ideas are the criteria for events and symbols, and they even intrude themselves in exposition, sometimes lengthy exposition. than Lawrence.

In that way, no writer is more didactic

Superficially the difference between his

method and one more acceptable esthetically lies in the difference between the implicit and the explicit, which intrudes into the imaginative experience and is a mixing of two forms.

Certainly every creative mind must have some

criteria by which to interpret experience.

Lawrence's cri­

teria, one feels, have become highly systematized, even dogmatic, though retaining the power to evoke passionate in­ tensity. In "Him With His Tail in His Mou t h " ^ Lawrence took .

as his point of departure the serpent symbol for eternity.

17

Ibid.. pp. 127-141. 17

For this as a theosophic symbol, see W. Y. Tindall, D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow, p. 135*

3^7 From Moses and Plato to Bergson, thinkers have sought to put the tail of the serpent of creation into its mouth; that is, they have evolved monistic systems.

Modern science,

in its finding of a basic unity in atom or electron, attempts the same thing. know?

To Lawrence, this is “bunk."

"How do you

How does anyone know, what always was or wasn't?

Bunk of geology, and strata, and all that, biology or evolution."

18

But there is such a thing as "life, or life

energy," which men want inside them.

"...

That which is

good, and moral, is that which brings into us a stronger, deeper flow of life and life-energy: impairs the life-flow."

evil is that which

This flow cannot be had by turning

to seek it, but by going ahead, the difficulty being that we do not know which way is ahead.

However, we are sure

that in our present direction the life-flow becomes weaker. Plato's "perfect!Idea" has become deathly. come graves."

"All goals be­

To Lawrence, the difficulty is that "there is

too much automatic consciousness and self-consciousness in the world."

The characteristic Lawrencean view is now

apparent. Susan, the cow, and other ranch creatures are used as illustrations as Lawrence begins to explore his theory of individuation and the equilibrium resulting from recogni­ tion of individuation.

18

Individual identity lies in a

Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. p. 129.

348 fourth, dimension

19

of creation in which difference, not

unity, is the rule.

The Greeks, who were “sane,1* x^ere

“pantheists and pluralists.11

"So,“ says Lawrence, “am I."

Susan and the Rhode Island Red hen are in this dimension goddesses, not to be

comprehended anthropomorphically.

The Greek idea of "equilibrium1' is "just a bit mechanical," and it became, as the Greeks attempted to equilibrate themselves with animals, anthropomorphic.

This

idea leads him, in ending the essay, to art, including the early Greek, which kept alive "the spark between . . . stranger and stranger."

This spark may be found in

Egyptian art, and in the.bison drawn by the cavemen of Altamira.

Lawrence's concluding paragraph returns to the

old animosity -toward the ideal: As for ideal relationships, and pure love, you might as well start to wa,ter tin pansies with carbolic acid (which is pure enough, in the anti­ septic sense) in order to get the Garden of Paradise.20 Again Lawrence's philosophy appears in new symbols and form.

The struggle for equilibrium in difference, the

strong repugnance to the threat to individuality of the ideal and absolute, reveal themselves.

Again one remembers

the man who at times rushed headlong into intimate friend­ ship, only to suffer strong revulsion. 19

One also remembers

A term linked by Tindall with theosophy.

20 Ibid.. p. 141.

3^-9 that this feeling and conception must he responsible for the unique insight of much of Lawrence's best work, the sensu­ ous, powerful rendering of individuation, which appears at times even amidst the declamation of the essays. Like Shaw, Lawrence could not resist the mischievous 21 paradox. In "Blessed are the Powerful," the Beatitude is reversed as Lawrence expounds his belief that the age of democracy and love is waning, and that an era of power must succeed it.

It is the theme, not new in Lawrence even in

1925, which received fullest expression some years later in his Apocalypse. Although Lawrence contemplates a "twilight" period of transition between eras, he avoids nihilism.

The nature

of power must be looked into-, to avoid anarchy and blunder­ ing.

He rejects the Nietzschean, Germanic "will-to-power"

and. the Hebraic "ethical will of God." attribute of the ego.

Will is only an

True power, on the other hand, comes

"to us, we knottf not how, from beyond."

It is "life rushing

into us, . . ; the exercise of power is the setting of life in motion."

Lenin, Mussolini, Hindenburg, Lloyd George,

Hivera, are failures, from whom we cannot get power ("to be able to"), might ("to bring about that which may-be"), glory, honor, or wisdom.

These must be qualities of the

people before they can be expressed in politics. Ibid., pp. 1^5-158•

350 The remainder of the essay is an expatiation on the nature of power.

"Courage, discipline, inward isola­

tion. . . are the conditions upon which power will abide in us."

It is not only "power to do" but "the power to de­

stroy."

The fascination of the latter for Lawrence may be

seen in the statement: . . . Between those who, with a single impulse, set out passionately to destroy what must be destroyed, joy flies like electric sparks, within the communion of power. The "power" theory is also linked to his opposition to democracy, for men possess power in different degrees. ". . . The communion of power will always be a communion-in inequality."

Faced with the problem of integrating his

conception of love with that of power, he takes "the act of love" as itself "an act of power."

(For an expression

of this in Lawrence's fiction, see "The Captain's Doll," written years earlier.) Thus the idea that love rules is false, since it stems from power. The mystery of power has become the power of money, of human greed and envy, of materialism.

Conversely, past

ages must have been better; living in terror under Peter the Great must have been superior to being "a member of the proletariat under Comrade Lenin." When Lawrence enumerates examples of power, the

22 Ibid., p. 153*

351 breadth of the list is rather astonishing. There is physical strength, like Samson’s. There is racial power, like David's or Mahomet's. There is mental power, like that of Socrates, and ethical power, like that of Moses, and spiritual power, like Jesus' or li£e Buddha's, and mechanical power, like that of Stephenson, or military power, like Napoleon's, or political p o w e r , like Pitt's. These are all true manifestations of power, coming out of the unknot'irn.23 Nevertheless, at the end of the essay Lawrence is drawn to the power that is destructive.

At least one-half of what he

felt to be his own mission was to wield such power. Even Attile., the Scourge of G-od, who helped to scourge the Roman world out of existence, was great with power. He was the scourge of G-od: not the scourge of, the League of Nations, hired and paid in cash. ^ In ". . . Love Was Once a Little Boy"

25

Lawrence

turned to the problem which, seen through the life and work, seems most central and personal to him.

The need of iso­

lateness to avoid loss of integrity, and simultaneously the need of relationship, with woman, society, and the universe, are implicit everywhere in him.

The conflict be­

tween these two needs is the focal point of the essay.

11. .

Love, as a desire, is balanced against the opposite desire, 26 to maintain the integrity of the individual self." 23 Ibid'., p. 15?. o h

Ibid.

25 Ibid., pp. 161-189. ofi

Ibid., p. 162.

352 Modern man, living in an age of individuality, yet calling himself the servant of love, enacts "a perpetual paradox." Struggle between egos is inevitable. Alluding to the Greek idea of equilibrium, as he had done in "Blessed are the Powerful," he finds balance neces­ sary.

The balancing of such abstractions as "citizen against

a citizeness, Christian against a Christian" is easy, but not the balancing of the living man and woman.

At this

point he turns, in illustration, to his "equilibration" with Susan, the ranch cow, sketching vividly her recalci­ trance, always an annyoing actuality. of individuality versus equilibrium.

She is an example Yet a relationship

without absolute equilibrium is possible. She knows my touch and she goes very still and peaceful, being milked. I, too, I know her smell and her warmth and her feel. And I share some of her cowy silence, when I milk her. There is a sort of relation between, us. And this relation is part of the mystery of love: the individuality on each side, $ine and Susan's,, suspended in the relationship.2 ' To illustrate a false relationship between man and the non-human, he turns to satire and burlesque of Wordsworth's anthropomorphic identification of himself with the prim­ rose, which "ousts the primrose from its own individuality." Men and women in love are also individuals who will assert themselves despite the lies -of romantic love, and Ibid.. pp. 167-168.

353 oppose both the dominance of one ego and the dominance of abstract equality.

He illustrates this with the c.ock and

the hen who, as "loyal subjects" of the ranch, are theoreti­ cally equal but who in themselves demonstrate the individuality and the relationship, a "peculiar togetherness,11 that cannot be called love.

A discussion of the quality of femaleness

in the hen brings him to his conception of the central role of sex: It is her sex, no doubt: but so subtle as to have nothing to do with function. It is a mystery, like a delicate flame. It would be false to call it love, because love complicates the ego. . . . But in the frail, subtle desirousness of the true male, towards everything female, and the equally frail, indescribable desirability of every female for every male, lies the real clue to the equating, or the relating,. of things which otherwise .are.in­ commensurable. In a conception of "streams of desire," Lawrence finds his solution to the conflict. the individuals remain apart* idea of Perfect Love.

The streams .meet while

Hence the absurdity of the

He sees in modern times a failure of

desire because of the failure to recognize the difference between desire and love.

The result Is a "stagnant unity"

called "democracy, and the reign of love."

He inveighs

against modern woman's Insistence on equality, her thinking like man and her attempt to beat him at his own game. "Every woman he has ever met" has made this mistake. Actually the streams of desire do not often meet. Ibid., p. 176.

354 The modern rush into relationship is "a sort of prostitu­ tion."

He returns to his duality— the defence hy every­

thing of its individuality, and its reaching forth in de­ sire.

As if aware that the paradox he has sought to

resolve, still remains, he attacks individualism based on the ego, for example, such a shout of independence as that in Henley's "Invictus."

Plainly, if true individuality is

not egoistici it must come from "the unseen." The powers that enter me fluctuate And the desire that goes forth from me wanes. Sometimes it is weak,' and I am isolated. Sometimes it is strong, and almost carried atiray.2°

and ebb. waxes and almost I am

"Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine"

30

uses

as its frame of reference an incident at the ranch that summer.

31

porcupines.

Lawrence had already encountered, and disliked, Now the pain of a dog from whose nose he must

remove quills aroused him so much that, when a porcupine was found nearby, he, who had never "shot at any live thing," found himself able to kill.

In creating this part of the

essay, Lawrence is at his descriptive, narrative best. The remainder of the essay develops from the realiza­ tion that one "must be able to shoot and kill."

There is

irony in remembering that this comes from the man who had ^ Ibid., p. 186. 30 Ibid.. pp. 193-219. Brett, Lawrence and Brett. p. 244-.

vicariously recognized and created the necessity of killing in The Plumed Serpent and other stories.

“One

suddenly realizes again how all creatures devour, and must devour the lower forms of life.11 Examples of this are now apparent all about him at the ranch, and he creates them, in the essay, in his most vivid manner, ending with Timsy, the ce„t, and 11the dilation of the strange, vacant arrogance of power": in her eyes. This conception of power leads him to his view of life as moving “in circles of power," each circle maintain­ ing “its orbit upon the subjection of some lower circle," which must be mastered before there can be a higher one. There is .no use lamenting over, or trying to reform this, as does the Buddhist.

"The only thing to do is to realise

what is higher, and what Is lower. . . . " For Lawrence, the higher is the “more vividly alive, the final test being, “Gan thy neighbour finally overcome thee?"

It is “the truth behind the survival of the fittest.

Fitness for mere survival means survival “only to supply food or contribute in some way to the existence of a higher form of life, which is able to do more than survive, can really vive, live."

which

Thus Lawrence attempts to reconcile

his metaphysical world with material “fact," the key dis­ tinction lying here between-“survival" and "living." He seems to be diverted, at this point, by another

circumvention of the unpleasant.

The devouring of one

species by another is in terms only of "species, of types, of races, of nations, not of single individuals, nor of beings."

Each individual, in the fourth dimension,, that of

being, is "incomparable and unique."

He now proceeds to

enumerate the parts of "the inexorable law of life":

1.

the perfection and uniqueness of the individual in. the fourth dimension; 2. in the time-space dimension the pos­ sibility of destruction of every species (not to the detri­ ment, he implies, of the individual being of 1), by "a more vital cycle of existence"; 3* the vitality "which is the determining factor in the struggle for existence" is also de­ rived from the fourth dimension, "the ultimate source of all vitality";

in existence the primary source of vi­

tality is "living creatures lower than ourselves"; the ways of obtaining it are many, for example, food, love, and best, "a pure relationship.

. . , which allows the transfer

to take place in a living flow, enhancing the life in both beings"; 5* "no creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to 32 the sun, the entire living cosmos."-^ Lawrence then acknowledges "the tangle of existence and being," only to be gotten out of by sacrificing one to the other, which is useless.

Being is not ideal (Plato)

32 Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine. pp. 210-211.

357 "but is "a transcendent form of existence, and as much material as existence is.1* The dualism that began with a dislike for killing and yet recognition of the necessity of killing here becomes the mind-body, spirit-flesh, ex­ istence-being dualism, and Lawrence resolves the conflict by denying the dualism.

Integration is reached at the

expense of romantic and religious sensibility, yet with a £ey conception of being as transcendent and governing survi­ val which is non-materialistic.

Involved are a stoic hard­

ness, and even ruthlessness, qualities to be found in Lawrence 1s fiction. The essay concludes in sermonic style with the finding o f .inspiration and glory in the acknowledgment of the necessity of growth, cycle, conquest. the perfected relation, there is peace: mension.

But there is getting there.

is the process of conquest.

“In heaven, in in the fourth di­

And that, for ever,

Things are perfect and in­

comparable there; but “every man, in the struggle of conquest towards his own consummation, must master the inferior cycles of life, and never relinquish his mastery.*1

Even

individual perfection “will but serve a perfection which still lies ahead, unrevealed and unconceived."

One is

reminded of the struggle for mastery by Ramon in The Plumed Serpent. 33 Ibid., p. 217.

358 Having attacked "democracy," Lawrence was forced to explain his adherence to such an archaic term as 'zh.

"aristocracy."

In the essay of this title,

his defini­

tion is formed amid many ideas found in the other essays of this New Mexico summer.

Thus he begins with the rela­

tiveness and relatedness of all living things, and with his concept of the cycles of creation.

"Among men, the differ­

ence in being is infinite." Decline from the recognition of nobleness among men began with the Christian era.

Christ's equating of purity

and poverty was the idea of "a noble manhood," but it left "the scramble for money and power to the impure."

Lawrence's

remoteness from the materialistic basis of modern reform is evident in his dislike of the objection, "Not much King­ dom of Heaven for a hungry man."

When the pure said this,

“the Soul began to die out of men." Lawrence attempts to define a "natural aristocracy" (one thinks of Jefferson's "natural aristoi").

He rejects

an aristocracy of birth, though it is better than one of money.

Natural aristocracy tests not only what a man is,

but what he can do, the question being "what kind of thing can a man do?"

The function of the true aristocrat is the

bringing of more life and the release of "the fountains of vitality." Ibid.. pp. 223- 2^ 0 .

359 Using this test, he finds Caesar and Cioero early aristocrats.

Stephenson, the inventor, did not accomplish

this-^while Galileo and Newton did.

With them Lawrence

names suGh diverse figures as Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Voltaire,, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, and Rousseau. He satirizes what he considers the modern over­ emphasis on the importance of man to man, and to woman, the result of making “man the measure of the universe." In "the great ages" man had "vital relation" with all of his world and universe.

Now a "stuffy little human fool

sitting in a chair and wearing lambs-wool underwear" thinks that "Amon, Mithras, Mistletoe, and the whole Tree of Life were just invented to contribute" to his "complacency." The Englishman has lost his mystic relationship to the oak, turning instead to "golden boughs." As in others of these essays, Lawrence turns for illustration of relationship to Susan, his cow, the ranch fowls, and the mountain pine. neuter.

Only a machine can be

All else is actively related.

At this point he

becomes almost preoccupied with the sun and the night, relationship to which is "the greatest and final relation." The supreme moment of "active life" is the relation to the sun, that of "quiescent life" to the night. 35

Something of

In "Blessed are the Powerful," however, Stephenson is listed as a true manifestation of power.

360

this conception had occurred in his fiction as early as The Rainbow, in which the man moves outward in day life from the "night" of love and sex.

Here, in the essay,

The sun makes a man a lord: an aristocrat: almost a deity. But in his consummation with night and the moon, man knows for ever his own passing away. But no man is man in all his splendour till he passes further than every relationship: further than mankind and womankind, in the last leap to the sun, to the night.-55 At the end of the essay aristocracy becomes "the aristocracy of the sun," a term and symbol now to appear many times in his work, particularly in the sardonic Pansies several years later. a manifesto.

His last paragraph is a call to arise,

The evangelistic spirit was not lost from

Lawrence after The Plumed Serpent. or ever lost. Lawrence's illness wrought no great transformation , in the work.

The writer who rose from his sick-bed hurled

the same challenges, manipulated much the same symbols, and found in the life about him at the ranch and in his civili­ zation the same conflicts as before.

The answers he found,

and the advice he gave, were much the same. era began a decline, not an advance.

The Christian

With David, a fox­

like shrewdness replaced the ancient manhood, conqueror by strength and ruler of its women.

Strength and the blood

and its flame must wait in "the flames of death" until the cycle begun by David is ended. 36

Ibid.. pp. 237-238.

361

The; novel, Lawrence still insists, despite evidence that his own practice did not entirely follow his theory, should express the ‘'passional inspiration" of the author and not have a "didactic purpose*" contradict the latter.

Indeed, the former may

Thus not the novelist, hut the

novel, is to he trusted. In life, the important thing is not "factual" knowledge ("hunk of geology, and strata, and all that") hut a "stronger, deeper flow of life and 1ife-energy," which depends upon an animistic, not a mechanical, view of the universe. of life.

Power works reciprocally with the floxv

Christian meekness and the rule of love have

resulted in the corruption of modern democracy.

Life

exhibits circles of power, each mastering that 3ust hene&th it, the highest heing that most vividly alive.

There is

inspiration in the struggle toward a "perfected relation,£ a "fourth dimension," which will hring peace; hut the process of getting there is "the process of conquest.." What is wanted is a "natural aristo.cracy," which can re­ lease "the fountains of vitality."

Christian meekness

leaves power to the impure; modern materialism walls out the transcendent universe. The change in the man, noted hy Mrs. Lawrence's nephew that summer, seems to he the result of an accumula­ tion of strains dating from the War rather than a sudden

362 irritableness and withdrawal.

Jeffrey remembered a Lawrence

in love during the days of elopement and often full of the sensibility and joyousness that seems to have become the more infrequent of the two moods Lawrence's friends remarked in him:

this, and a grim, sardonic, destructive one. The role of America during this period had been to

furnish, at first with the infuriating impersonality and inconsiderateness of immigration laws, a temporary refuge

37

in which to convalesce,, and, at the ranch, symbols and examples to illustrate the essays and provide setting and atmosphere for the play. 37 The visa was for only six months. Richard AdTdington, H* Lawrence. Portrait of a G-enlus B u t . . . (Hew York, 1950) » P- 357.

PART VII CHAPTER I AFTERMATH IN EUROPE Lawrence's friends, and above all the New Mexico ranch, often beckoned him back to America.

But the in­

creasing problem of maintaining his health, his distaste for the legal difficulties of entry, the restlessness and dynamic philosophy which forbade returns and prompted him to move in new directions,1 and other factors in the complex that were the man and the career, kept him in Europe.

He

found England and the ghost of his past there unbearable, and sought almost at once the warmth of Southern Italy. Most of the few years remaining to him were spent along the Mediterranean, except for several visits to England and Germany.

America appeared in his work only in retro­

spect, or in bits of "property" in story and essay. In April, 1926, Willard Johnson published a D. H. Lawrence Number of his little New Mexico magazine, The Laughing Horse (on this occasion issued from Mrs. Luhan's Finney Farm in the East) to which Lawrence contributed a poem, "Mediterranean in January1 ," and three short essays, "Paris Letter," "A Little Moonshine with Lemon," and He wanted to visit Russia, and studied the language.

3 6k "Europe versus America."

All reveal aspects of Lawrence's

transition from America to Europe. 2 "Mediterranean in January" reveals in the verse form approaching humorous and careless doggerel that was to characterize much of his next poetry, Lawrence's sense of nervousness and loss among the Americans of the West contrasted with the perennial flowering of an anemone on the Mediterranean and the sense of continuity of days there, a renewal from an ancient past. "Paris Letter"^ is one of those brilliant bits of combined travelogue and doctrine that Lawrence could make seem so easy, as if struck off conversationally without conscious effort.

He begins by stressing the monumental,

man-made beauty of Paris, beside which the Seine and the trees of the city are poor and insignificant.

His wife

longs for grandeur; but the grandeur is faded, and "de­ mocracy has collapsed into more and more democracy," the men collapsing with it into "rather nice and helplessly commonplace little fellows."

In the galleries of the

Tuileries, dominated by nude-Statues, there is no wicked court, but only the admiration of the statues by a. fat bourgeois whose wife knows he will not ;really stray from -

Also in Collected Poems. 3 Also in Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. pp. 119-122.

365 her.

The French seem worn out “with the pink .nudities

of women" and another mistress, the dinner table.

To this

point, Lawrence has sketched swiftly, using descriptive detail and anecdote. ment.

The remainder is an explicit state­

He no longer believes in democracy or in the old

aristocracy, but rather in "the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside the man, and he lived in a simple wooden house."

Such monuments as those of Paris

make a museum both for dead life and the living. The natural aristocrat has got to fortify himself inside his own will, according to his own strength. The moment he builds himself external evidences, like palaces,,he builds himself in, and commits his own doom. Lawrence's anti-democratic theme had frequently aroused the opposition of his American friends, for example, both Willard Johnson and Witter Bynner in Mexico during The Plumed Serpent period.

The D. H. Lawrence Number of The Laughing

Horse contained critiques by Frederic Leighton and Idella Purnell which opposed Lawrence's stand, in a good-natured, appreciative way. "A Little Moonshine, i^ith Lemon," which eventually ap­ peared as the last essay of the book, Mornings in Mexico. is a beautiful creation of nostalgia bridging two worlds, and is hardly doctrinaire at all.

Beginning with the

moon-lit night of the feast of St. Catherine on the b

Ibid., p. 121.

366 Mediterranean and the drinking of wine, Lawrence wonders what is going on at the New Mexico ranch.

The moon there

balances the Italian moon, and re-creates the winter scene at the ranch.

Interrupted by an Italian voice, he turns

to the Mediterranean night, reiterating the theme of "Mediterranean in January." The Mediterranean, so eternally young, the very symbol of youth! And Italy, so reputedly old, yet forever so child-like and naive i Never, never for a moment able to comprehend the wonderful, hoary^ age of America, the continent of the afterwards. He turns once more to the ranch, where, instead of a choice of wine there would be moonshine with hot water, lemon, sugar, and cinnamon before bed.

Again Italian voices in­

terrupt, and he gives up the imaginative return— to choose vermouth.

In all this there is a deft, delicate creation

of nostalgic atmosphere, and perfect unity of movement and symbol.

The paradox of America as the older continent, in­

tellectual, conscious, haunted by ghosts, unlike the naive, child-like Mediterranean, is an idea he had used long be­ fore in his study of American literature. Lawrence really came to grips with his latest change of place in "Europe versus America."^

He begins with

disgust at a young American1s saying he should like to see Europe^"and have done with it." 5 f\

Europe is better and

Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico. p. 186.

Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. pp. 117-118.

367 more important than something one can be "through with," to use an American trick of speech.

Lawrence now believes

that the things one is sick of in Europe are really in one­ self.

European civilization is "more tense" in Americans

than in Europeans. The Europeans still have a vague idea that the uni­ verse is greater than they are, and isn't going to change very radically. . . . But the Americans are tense, somewhere inside themselves, as if they felt that once they slackened, the world would really collapse. ' The consequence is that Europe is younger than America in spirit. In the people here there is still, at the bottom, the old, young insouciance. It isn't that the young don't care: it is merely that, at the bot­ tom of them there isn1t care. It isn't till we .grow old that we grip the very sources of our life with care, and strangle them. This grip of care in the American distinguishes him from the ~European.

Lawrence now acknowledges that he, like the

young American, was a fool in assuming that he could be through with Europe.

Europe is "squeezing the life out

of herself, with her mental education and fixed ideas" but is not nearly so far gone as America.

He feels it "a

relief to-be by the Mediterranean, and gradually let the tight coils inside oneself come slack."

The antithesis

to "care" is "insouciance," a term to appear often in his 7 Ibid., p. 117.

8

Ibid., p. 118.

368 remaining work. That some such relaxation was actually taking place in Lawrence is indicated by the tone of his correspondence and by the direction his work took almost immediately after his arrival in Italy.

'In "Sun" he worked with the strong

sensuousness that in his earlier work had antagonized the prudish and the prudent.

The same note appears in "The

Virgin and the G-lpsy," in which old restraints are vio­ lently broken.

He began that series of Iconoclastic nude

paintings which were later to arouse the Epglish censor­ ship.

Even in more conventional stories, the themes of

husband-wife antagonism, bullying, and the loss of true feeling or its re-dlscovery, achieve a new liveliness and softness, compared with the American stories. Lawrence's resolve not to risk the strain of another long work, led to an occasional review in the next few years.

Among these Was a review of William Carlos Williams' 9 In the American Grain, and one of Nigger Heaven by Carl

Van Vechten, Flight by Walter White, Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos, and In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway.'1'0 Williams' distinction, via. Poe, between the national and the local is compatible with Lawrence's own "spirit of place."

(The distinction bears on the question of why 9 Ibid.. PP- 33^-336.

10 XLId.. pp. 361-366.

369 Lawrence could not settle down dfter Sons and Lovers to exploit the color of the miner's life in England, or in Taos to exploit Indian and landscape.)

The local is

"the very opposite of the parochial, the parish-pump stuff."

But "all creative art must rise out of a specific

soil and flicker with a spirit of place."

There is more

Lawrence than Williams in To bring a few American citizens into American consciousness— the consciousness at present being all bastardized European--is to form the nucleus of the new race. To have the nucleus of a new race is to have a future: and a true aristocracy. It is to have the germ of an aristocracy in sensi­ tive tenderness and diamond-like re si stance. Lawrence's dualism--one almost says dual personalityappears in the qualities needed on a continent that is like "a woman with exquisite, super-subtle tenderness and re­ coiling cruelty" (Williams* conception, Lawrence notes). Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, Lawrence thought to be "a false book" written by an author who wanted to "make a sensation— and, of course, money." he finds a theme for his review.

With White's Flight.

In White's book, and

others on the Negro, the Negro is "an absolute white man, save for the colour of his skin," One likes to cherish illusions about the race soul, the eternal Negroid soul, black and glistening and touched with awfulness and with mystery. One is not allowed. . . . His soul is 11 Ibid., P. 335.

370 . . . what the white man's soul is, just tha same, a gramophone grinding over the old records.-^ The heroine, having passed the color line, tires of her white husband and reverts to Harlem, but she will, says Lawrence, tire of "Nigger Heaven" and move again.

All

of the books he is reviewing involve flight, from no­ where to nowhere.

Manhattan Transfer involves many such

flights, but Dos Passos, a "far better writer," knows this and "gets a kind of tragic significance into the fact."

Lawrence understands Dos Passos1 technique, and

finds the confusion . . . genuine, not affected; it is life, not a pose. . . . What makes the rush so swift. . . , is the wild, strange frenzy for success: ego­ istic, individualistic success. The war brings collapse, and the book ends with a finalbit of flight, to nowhere.

1^ Hemingway, Lawrence finds

flight without illusions "about landing anywhere."

Nick

is in the contemporary world the "remains of the lone trapper and cowboy," to be met in the wilder sections, who is in "a state of conscious, accepted indifference to everything except freedom from work and the moment1s Interest."

It is clear that Lawrence found in Hemingway

attitudes and an honesty compatible with his own rejections and hatred of sentimentality. 12 Ibid., p. 362. 13 I M d ,. p. 364.

371 . . . Krebs, in that devastating Oklahoma sketch. . . , doesn't love anybody, and it nauseates him to have to pretend he does. He doesn't even want to love anybody. . . . He wants just to lounge around and maintain a healthy state of nothingness inside him­ self, and an attitude of negation to everything outside himself. And why shouldn't he, since that is exactly and sincerely what he feels? If he really doean1t care, then why should he care? Any­ how, he doesn't.1^ In Lawrence's own fiction, the American experience made Itself felt from time to time. In "Mother and 15 Daughter" .a lost lover, who has married an American, figures in the battle of the daughter against her mother'a dominance and scorn of love.

In "The Lovely Lady,"1^

that devastating portrait of the dominating mother who preserves a strange youthfulness into her seventies as long as she can hold her son and render him incapable of love of another woman, mother and son pore over old Mexican legal documents that contain an account of the seduction 17 of a nun. "The Blue Moccasins" takes its title from the chief bit of property and symbolism.

The heroine,

possessor of a loveless marriage to a younger man, refuses the "shoes" to.her rival-when they are needed for a play, and at that psychological juncture loses him.

.pIbid., p. 366. 15 Lawrence, The Lovely Lady.

16

Ibid.

17 Ibid.

Again in

372 Lawrence deadness and negation of will are replaced by passional affirmation.

In "Things"!^ two uew England

idealists, strongly reminiscent of Lawrence’s American friends, Earl and Achsah Brewster, though he denied this in a letter to them, pursue fad after fad, ideal after ideal, in dilettante fashion, as long as their money holds out, and then return home, where at last "the job," long held out against, closes in on the man. "inside the cage." Lawrence.

He is finally

The tone is that of the sardonic

Most American of all is "None of That,"19 in

which Lawrence in almost Hemingwayesque fashion portrays the modern "bitch."

He may well have had certain aspects

of Mrs. Luhan in mind— or so Mrs. Lawrence thinks.

This

woman who seduces men and then scorns the sexual act (she will have "none of that") meets her defeat, and subsequent death, at the hands of a bullfighter in Mexico, where Lawrence had felt the presence of death so strongly.

One

recalls Hemingway’s later Death in the Afternoon and its fascination with the elaborate ritual of danger, courage, and death.

Lawrence's inimical woman, who must always be

converted or conquered, is conquered indeed. is Mexican.

His narrator

Setting and incident are consummately done,

18 Ibid. 19

Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (Leipzig: Tanchnitz), pp. 265-2(37 •

373 and Lawrence refrains from comment, a technique rare in his immediately preceding work. In his own life, Lawrence was not given to complete breaks.

He continued to correspond with Mrs. Luhan, and

when she sent him the first sections of Intimate Memories, gave her advice about publication.

When, late in 1928,

only about a year before his death, she asked him to write an article on Hew M e x i c o , h e responded with what he con­ sidered "quite a beautiful" one.

Doing it, he wrote to

her, gave him . . . a real longing to be back— and I should like to come in spring (sicl even If only to stay the six months allowed oy the passport. Brett sug­ gests creeping in unnoticed, but if I feel I have to do that I shall be spitting in everybody's eye. I'm not given to creeping in, and USA isn't para­ dise anyhow.21 The obtuse, vulgar reactions of two American girls to the art of Florence prompted Lawrence to an outburst of anger. They've negated and negated and negated till there's nothing— and they themselves are empty vessels. . . . And it's largely the result of an affectation of "freedom" from old standards, become a fixed habit and a loathesome disease. . . . I feel I'd rather go and live in a hyena house than go to live in A m e r i c a . 22 But correspondence with Mrs. Luhan about a return 20 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, pp. 338-339* 21 Jbid-, P* 339* 22 Aldington, D. H. Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius But. . . pp, 378-379*

374 continued through 1929.

Lawrence was afraid of the old

difficulties (". . . Won't somebody or other begin doing one dirt?11)

His concern for the ranch and the manuscripts

there, tended by Brett, who had returned to New Mexico in 1926 after seeing Lawrence in Italy, is that of a man unconsciously writing his will.

He was ill, and apparently

badly shaken by the censorship of Lady Chatterley1s Lover, the paintings, and the poems Pansies.

For a time, he

considered selling the ranch, "a bit remote and strenu23 ous when one is not well." Then he decided, Mrs. Lawrence reported, that he did not want "to lose the con2 if.

nection" in America.

■

He himself wrote with a note of

resignation repeated in such a late poem as "The Ship of Death," . . . The cycle of the greater year still goes round, and as it turns, it will probably bring us back. One has to wait for the auspicious day. I find one has to lean a great deal on destiny, when one's own will has been so thoroughly curbed by Illness and things, and one^finds one can't do anything, hardly, as one likes. * In January, 1930, only about a month before his death, he was writing hopefully of two months of "absolute care," after which he "ought to be well enough to come to New

23 Ibid., p . 341.

2k 25

Ibid., p. 347. Ibid.. pp. 349-350.

375

26

Mexico and there get quite strong." The essay,

"New Mexico," published posthumously,

27

was Lawrence's last real comment on the American experi­ ence.

New Mexico was “the greatest experience from the

outside world" that he had ever had, and it changed him "for ever."

The Buddhism of Ceylon "had not touched the

great psyche of materialism and idealism" that dominated him.

Years "among the old Gree£ paganism" of Sicily

"had not shattered the essential Christianity on which" his "character was established." of dream or trance.

Australia was "a sort

. ., the self remaining unchanged."

Tahiti and California had repelled him. magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico.

But "in the . . , a new part

of the soul woke up suddenly and the old world gave way to a new."

The sun and the landscape "had a splendid

silent terror, and a vast far-and-wide magnificence. beyond mere aesthetic appreciation."

. .

Paradoxically the

greatest modern political democracy gave one "the greatest sense of overweening, terrible proudness and merciless­ ness. "

These qualities had- been stressed in the New

Mexico stories and poems. In New Mexico "the human being is left stark, 26 Ibid., p. 351. 27 Survey Graphic, May, 1931* Phoenix: the Posthu­ mous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, pp. Ikl-Uvf.

376 heartless, hut undauntedly religious."

The latter quality

was a revelation to the Lawrence who had I'looked over all the world for something" that to him would he religious. He had felt it fleetingly in a native dance in Ceylon, hut he had no "permanent feeling of^religion" till he encountered New Mexico and "the old human race-experience there."

He

recapitulates the experience reported long before in the Indian essays, with something of the same sensuous detail, eschewing naivete and sentimentality,, as before, by acknow­ ledging the existence of the bad Indian, disintegrated from the tribe and its religion.

But where the tribe has re­

tained its religion . . . there is a tribal integrity and a living tradition going back far beyond the birth of Christ, beyond the pyramids, beyond Moses. A vast old religion which once swayed the earth lingers in unbroken practice there in New Mexico, older, per­ haps, than anything in the world. . . . What Lawrence had found in New Mexico was the most significant evidence of a golden age, belief in which he had expounded in 1921 in the Foreword of Fantasia of the Unconscious.

The disinherited pilgrim through the waste­

land had found a tradition outside Western Europe for his intuited belief.

The contemporary heretic had circled far

back and become the preacher of a greater orthodoxy which, in the cyclical yet upward

movement of human destiny, must

—

Ibid.. pp. 1A4-1^5»

377 prevail again in heightened form.

There is no harshness

in "New Mexico," but in the concluding paragraph Lawrence repeated once more his belief in the cycle. The sky-scraper will scatter on the winds like thistledown, and the genuine America, the America of New Mexico, will stajjt on its course again. This is an interregnum. 29 p.. 14-7.

Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ! “

CHAPTER II CONCLUSION To the very young Lawrence, America was a conven­ tional symbol o‘f escape and new beginnings. earliest work involved that theme.

Some of his

In his youthful read­

ing, American transcendentalism delighted him with its eclectic freedom, confidence in life, and intuitions of an indwelling spirit in nature; and pragmatism appealed to him with its empirical approach to an evolving life for the individual.

He wrote Whitmanesque verses explor­

ing the forbidden'subtleties of sex and love, and in them and in more realistic prose struggled toward individua­ tion and integration..

G-radually he outlined a gospel of

intuition expressing his own unique vision off the world, a theory of knowing through the blood, with all that that implies of irrationality, darkness, and even death, as well as intellectual synthesis, struggle toward the light, and life. He found in Frieda the chance of freedom from the painful tie to his mother and from the puritanical scruple and obscene repressions of his boyhood. she was of the upper classes.

Significantly

He called upon her to

recognize the superiority of his genius, and took her from a middle-class marriage as if he were indeed "the fox

379 of the story of that name.

With her he set about achieving

an equilibrated life and recording the contest for it in his work. But society intervened with the problems of divorce, ties between her and the children of the first marriage, equality of the sexes, public taste and censorship of too unconventional work, and then, elimacticalljj war with its total disregard of individual struggle for delicate, poetic spiritual and physical equilibrium.

To the Lawrence who

had already moved out to the periphery of Western culture, his world came to an end.

The only thing left to do was

to hasten the death and to struggle for a new, difficult beginning. Lawrence became the archetype of the modern artist alienated from his culture.

Joyce rejected home, church,

and country for the creative, freedom of his art. generation" gathered in Paris.

The ’’lost

Hemingway, turning his

back upon his native land, gave up the old abstract words with their unrealized ideals and explored in concrete terms nothingness of soul and the sharp actualities of violence, death, and stoic suffering.

Dos Passos' three

soldiers were crushed by a world they never made, and his U. S. A. became a deadly pandemonium.

Fitzgerald

celebrated "the brave young men" and a G-atsby whose dream was a fantastic bubble amid froth.

T. S. Eliot sang the

swansong of the genteel, dilettante Prufrock, contrasted a sterile modern wasteland with a spiritually fruitful past, and presented his thirst at the fountainhead of .Christianity in a conservative spirit. others, were akin to Lawrence.

They, and many

But in his negations he

encompassed them all; and in his affinflations he was the most daring, versatile, and revolutionary in a sense involving the inner life.and apart from Marxism, which he rejected along with all materialism save that curious psychological connection he felt throughtthe blood.

Eliot’

heretic, he rejected not only the1church but the whole Christian era and G-reek philosophy just preceding it, turfiing for any acceptable tradition at all to evidences of a superior pre-historic world. The developing young writer had established closer ties with America through Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell,

“Imagism,

and Harriet Monroe and her Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. America, indeed, had turned out to be a better market for his work than England.

There was a long precedent for the

flight of Europeans in that direction.

In the midst of

the war Lawrence, having given up trust in the mass of society, turned to hope in superior individuals and grasped at the idea of a remote haven in America where natural and communal life for such individuals might proceed in harmony and vivid life as a nucleus for a new society.

There a

381

resurrection might follow the death of all his English past within him. Frustration after frustration of this plan followed, driving Lawrence farther towards nihilism and revenge.

The

idea of essays on American transcendentalism originated as a means of entree.

As he studied the abstractions made by

American writers from Franklin to Whitman, it occurred to him that these men were not young and new but ultimate extensions of European intellectualism and decadence. America became for him the ultimate destruction of feeling, of the spontaneous life of the blood.

Evidence for this

lay in the massive industrialism, the signs of neuroticism, and the ancient sacrificial death urge of the Mexican Indian.

Inevitably sharing in the modern realistic spirit,

Lawrence found the primitivism of Rousseau and Chateaubriand naive, failing before the naturalistic forces and the decadence that must be realized.

But for the alien seek­

ing a tradition and a home, the Indian loomed larger and larger as a link with a pre-historic past from which the Christian era was a decline. After the war, as he formulated his philosophy in Fantasia of the Unconscious and announced his theory of a pre-historic era which had contained his integration, he received the invitation to New Mexico.

He voyaged first

to the East, seeking traces there of the ancient religion,

382 thence to the utter newness and rawness of Australia, where he made further rejections of the present and was tempted to forgetfulness, through the decadent remnants of the past in the South Seas, and finally to New Mexico and his feeling of an authentic link there. In New Mexico three worlds were juxtaposed:

modern

culture with its aimlessness, frivolity, and concealed destructiveness; the Indian world in powerful contrast, decaying, but a thread from a past to which one could not return but from which one might learn the way to the future; and in the country Itself a primitive, naturalis­ tic world of powerful forces pulling down man and his aspirations.

This was not enough to move Lawrence to a

major expression.

To the south lay the fertile warmth

of Mexico, where the Christian churches stood like ghosts in a land which retained the legend of the return of Quetzalcoatl, where under a thin modern overlay lurked the fierce, unformed nature of the Indian, brutal but fascina­ tingly powerful, crying out to be molded and saved, where the catchwords of democracy, socialism, and fascism spoke hypocritically of materialistic brotherhood for the masses, where ferment and revolution were in the air.

Lawrence^

desire to change his world, to be a prophet, even a god, to it, was brought to fever heat amid debate with ideal­ istic Americans and with the wife, the eternal woman,

383 realistic, doubting, limited, who must he persuaded of her husband's leadership and wisdom.

The amalgam was The

Plumed Serpent, which pulled Into its texture all the themes, images, and symbols of the American experience which had appeared in minor works, and ended in the triumph of a hero-god, a Promethean savior. The rest of Lawrence's career was in a sense anti­ climax and epilogue.

Slowly and tentatively, but only

tentatively, the miner's son gave ;up his godly throne, retreating into the more human warmth and tenderness of the Mediterranean, into the gypsy-gamekeeper seer of the later fiction, still aiming his "silent bullets" through essay, poem, and story, with a climax in Lady Chatterley1s Lover, but never again making the full assumption.

His

real apotheosis was in America. It has been the tendency of many who write on Lawrence to discount the. philosophy, as Aldington does in his recent biography, to accentuate his apparent in­ consistencies without explaining their sources, and to treat him as the source of a florlleglum of fine passages, of penetrating bits of psychological.insight, of poetic phrasing.

The philosophy is in many respects unpalatable.

To the anthropologist the Atlantis, golden-age legend is no more than a legend, an intellectual position without adequate evidence.

The physiology and psychology of the

blood-consciousness theory at times seem personal, vn

381; unscientific combinations of the wildest sort.

Prom the

pen of a man who was not an artist, much of the structure would justifiably be dismissed as on the level of theosophical, irrational drivel, as Tindall sees it.

The

approach to America with its negation of the achievements of modern technology, of humanitarianism, and of demo­ cratic processes, seems on one side monstrous, except to the hard-bitten student of social realities.

But even

the student of the social sciences relies upon more ration­ ality, more intellectuality, to ameliorate a bad situation. Although some see the atomic age as an ultimate deathly extension of technology, there are others who hope yet for wise, rational control of the new forces.

Almost

none would be interested in trying to practise Lawrence's religion.

Nevertheless, without the philosophy there

would be no Lawrence. Despite his own disregard for art as art, it is as the artist with unique insights and world of imaginative form and significance that Lawrence is of value.

The

philosophy is in one sense an efflorescence of his artis­ tic vision, an attempt to explain that vision both to himself and to the world.

In another sense, so far as it

adequately expresses his unconscious, the philosophy must be equated with his artistic vision.

It governs his

-selection Of character, incident, image, symbol; it is

385 the key to the multiplicity and conflict of both his art and his life. In this study, we have seen Lawrence1s Imaginative world take shape in sensitive response to", the pressures of the real world.

It so happened that America was a

major pressure and condition, so that a climactic synthe­ sis was reached in The Plumed Serpent. traced a rising line of development.

Thus we have

Yet there is reason

for supposing that a similar development would have taken place in an altered context.

Lawrence's philosophy runs

in a straight line through his work, bringing his environ­ ment into adjustment with it.

The filings around the

magnet arrange themselves into different patterns, but always in relationship to the same force. the man is an absolute In a relative world.

The vision of

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY A.

BOOKS

Aldington, Richard, D. H. Lawrence. Portrait of -a. Genius But. . . . New York: Buell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950* Brett, Dorothy, Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship. phia: Lippincott, 1933.

Philadel­

Carswell, Catherine, The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of H* Lawrence♦ New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932. Damon, S. F., Amy Lowell. A Chronicle. Mifflin Company, 1935.

Boston:

Ford, Ford Madox, Portraits from Life. Mifflin Company, 1937-

Boston: Houghton

Hughes, Glenn, Imagism and the Imaglsta. University Press, 1931* Keynes, John Maynard, Two Memoirs. Kelley, 19^9-

Houghton.

Stanford: Stanford

New York: Augustus M.

Lawrence, D. H., Assorted Articles. Knopf, 193^»

New York:

_______________ , Birds. Beasts and Flowers. 1923.

Alfred A,

London: Seeker,

_______________ , The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence. New York: J. Cape and H. Smith, 1929- 2 vols. _______________ , Fantasia of the Unconscious. Boni, 1930. _______________ , Kangaroo.

New York:

New York: Seltzer, 1923.

_______________ , The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. edited by Aldous Huxley. New York: The Viking Press, 1932. 3**d printing, 1936. _______________ , The Lovely Lady.

London:

_______________ , Mornings in Mexico. Knopf, 1927.

Seeker, 1932.

New York: Alfred A.

388 Lawrence, D. H., Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. edited by Edward C. McDonald, New York: The Viking Press, 1936. ________________ , The Plays of D. H. Lawrence. Seeker, 1933* _______________ , Knopf, 1926.

The Plumed Serpent.

New York:

London: Alfred A.

________________ , The Prussian Officer and Other Stories.. London: Duckworth, 191L. ________________ _ Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Philadelphia: The Centaur Press, 1925. ________________ , St. Mawr. Together with The Princess. London: Seeker, 1930* ________________ , Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Boni, 1930. The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. Leipzig: T&uchnitz, n.d. ______ , Women in Love. New York: The Modern Library, n.d. Lawrence, Frieda, “Not I, But the Wind. . . ." The Rydal Press, 1 9 3 % . Luhan, Mabel Dodge, Lorenzo in Taos. Knopf, 1932.

Santa Fe:

New York: Alfred A.

McDonald, Edward A., A Bibliography of the Writings of D, H. Lawrence. Philadelphia: The Centaur Book Shop, 1925. Merrild, Knud, A Poet and Two Painters. Viking Press, 1939.

New Yor3$:: The

Moore, Harry T., D, H. Lawrence1s Letters to Bertrand Russell. New York: Gotham Book Mart, 19^8 . Murry, J. M., Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence. Holt, 1933.

New York:

_____________ , Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence. New York: J, Cape and H. Smith, 1931*

389 Pattee, Fred Lewis, “A Call for a literary Historian,1* The Reinterpretation of American Literature, edited by Norman Foerster. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928. Powell, Lawrence Clark, The Manuscripts of D. H. Lawrence: A Descriptive Catalogue. Los Angeles: The Public Library, 1937. Russell, Bertrand, Mysticism and Logic. 1929.

New York:

Norton,

T.E., (Jessie Chambers) D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record. . New York: Knight Publications, 1936. Tedlock, E. W., Jr., The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1948. Tindall, W. Y., D. H. Lawrence and Susan Eis Cow. Columbia University Press, 1939-

New York:

______________ , "Transcendentalism in Contemporary Literature," The Asian Legacy and American Life, edited by Arthur E. Christy. New York: John Day, 1945. Tylor, Edward B-., Primitive.Culture. Lauriat, 1874. 2 vols. B.

Boston: Estes and

PERIODICAL ARTICLES

Aldington, Richard, "D. H. Lawrence as Poet." The Saturday Review of Literature. 2:7^9-750, May 1, 1926. Anonymous, "Censorship Beaten in New York Court," Publisher1s Weekly. 801-804, September 16, 1922. . "Important Censorship Case," Publisher* s Weekly. 463-464, August 5 , 1922. __________ , "More Censorship," Publisher'sWeekly. 118, July 15, 1922. __________ , "Notes," Poetry: A Magazine January, 1914.

ofVerse. 3*151,

Auden, W. H., "Some Notes on D. H. Lawrence," The Nation. 164: 482, April 26, 1947*

390 Gregory, Alyse, review of Studies in Classic American Literature. The Dial. 70-71, January, 1924. Hueffer, Ford Madox, "Impressionism— Some Speculations," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 2:220-221, September, 1913. Lawrence, D. H., "Gertain Americans and an Englishman," New York Times Magazine, 3, 9, December 24, 1922. _______________ , "0 I Americans !" New Mexico Quarterly Review. 8:75-81, May, 1938. ; _______________ , "Studies in Classic American Literature"— (vii) "Nathaniel Hawthorne," English Review. May 1919. Leighton, Frederic W.,"The Bite of Mr. Lawrence," Laughing Horse. D. H. Lawrence Number:16-18, April, 1926. Lesemann, Maurice, "D. H. Lawrence in Mexico," The Bookman. 59:30, March, 1924. Pound, Ezra, review of Love Poems and Others. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 2:149-151, July, 1913* Tietjens, Eunice, review of Amores. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 9:264-266, February, 1917. Troy, William, "The Lawrence Myth,." Partisan Review. 4: 3-13, January, 1938. Villiers, Bud (Willard Johnson), “D. H. Lawrence in Mexico," The Southwest Review. 15:425-433, Summer, 193°. Weaver, Raymond M., review of Studies in Classic American Literature. The Bookman. 58:327-328, November, 1923. Weston, Edward, "Lawrence in Mexico," The Carmelite. 3 : ix-xi, March 19, 1930.

UKtvcsaiiy of Soutfsrri California U b n tfl