D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity 9781501340000, 9781501340024, 9781501340031

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Title
Copyrights
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
Notes on Contributions
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Chronology
D. H. Lawrence’s Long Passage from a Rural to an Industrial World Nick Ceramella
“Colliers is a Discontented lot”: “The Miner at Home” in the Nation and the 1912 National Coal Strike Annalise Grice
D. H. Lawrence Among the Early Modern Bohemians Katherine Toy Miller
D. H. Lawrence and “The Machine Incarnate”: Robots Among the “Nettles” Tina Ferris
“Men No More Than the Subjective Material of the Machine”: Lawrence, Machinery, and War-time Psychology Andrew Harrison
To Produce, or not to Produce, That is the Question: Technology, Democracy, and War in Women in Love Gaku Iwai
Hierarchy, Beauty, and Freedom: D.H. Lawrence’s Response to Techno-Industrial Modernity Colin D. Pearce
“The Art of Living ”: D. H. Lawrence’s Technologies of the Self Jeff Wallace
Engineering Away Humanity: Lawrence on Technology and Mental Con sciousness in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Pansies Andrew Keese
Lawrence’s Allotropic “Gladiatorial”: Resisting the Mechanization of the Human in Women in Love Thalia Trigoni
Green Lawrence? Consciousness, Ecology, and Poetry Fiona Becket
D. H. Lawrence and Film: Recon sidering Fidelity in Ken Russell’s Women in Love Earl G. Ingersoll
Poetics of Technology: D. H. Lawrence and the Well-Tempered Counterpoint Indrek Männiste
Trains in D. H. Lawrence’s Creative Writing Helen Baron
On Entertainment: The Lassitude of Lawrence’s Dead Novel Dominic Jaeckle
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

D. H. LAWRENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND MODERNITY

D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity

Edited by Indrek Männiste

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Indrek Männiste and Contributors, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover images: Remington No. 7 from “Barnes’ Complete Typewriting Instructor”, 1907 © Marcin Wichary / Flickr.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mèanniste, Indrek, editor. Title: D. H. Lawrence, technology, and modernity / edited by Indrek Mèanniste. Description: New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018059678 | ISBN 9781501340000 (hardback: alk.paper) | ISBN 9781501340031 (epdf) | ISBN 9781501340024 (xml-platform) Subjects: LCSH: Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885-1930–Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PR6023.A93 Z623447 2019 | DDC 823/.912–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059678 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4000-0 PB: 978-1-5013-6756-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4003-1 eBook: 978-1-5013-4001-7 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

They talk of the triumph of the machine, but the machine will never triumph. —D. H. Lawrence

Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Foreword Michael Bell Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Chronology Introduction Indrek Männiste

ix x xiii xvi xvii xx 1

D. H. Lawrence’s Long Passage from a Rural to an Industrial World Nick Ceramella

11

“Colliers is a Discontented lot”: “The Miner at Home” in the Nation and the 1912 National Coal Strike Annalise Grice

25

D. H. Lawrence Among the Early Modern Bohemians Katherine Toy Miller

37

D. H. Lawrence and “The Machine Incarnate”: Robots Among the “Nettles” Tina Ferris

51

“Men No More Than the Subjective Material of the Machine”: Lawrence, Machinery, and War-time Psychology Andrew Harrison

73

To Produce, or not to Produce, That is the Question: Technology, Democracy, and War in Women in Love Gaku Iwai

85

viii

Contents

Hierarchy, Beauty, and Freedom: D. H. Lawrence’s Response to Techno-Industrial Modernity Colin D. Pearce

101

“The Art of Living”: D. H. Lawrence’s Technologies of the Self Jeff Wallace

115

Engineering Away Humanity: Lawrence on Technology and Mental Consciousness in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Pansies Andrew Keese

127

Lawrence’s Allotropic “Gladiatorial”: Resisting the Mechanization of the Human in Women in Love Thalia Trigoni

137

Green Lawrence? Consciousness, Ecology, and Poetry Fiona Becket

149

D. H. Lawrence and Film: Reconsidering Fidelity in Ken Russell’s Women in Love Earl G. Ingersoll

161

Poetics of Technology: D. H. Lawrence and the Well-Tempered Counterpoint Indrek Männiste

175

Trains in D. H. Lawrence’s Creative Writing Helen Baron

191

On Entertainment: the Lassitude of Lawrence’s Dead Novel Dominic Jaeckle

203

Bibliography Index

219 231

Illustrations 1 “The Country of My Heart” © David Amos 2 “Eric the Robot.” Newspaper photo (1928) in Robot Universe by Ana Matronic (New York: Sterling, 2015), 160 (grayscale plate) 3 Maschinenmensch from Metropolis © Ufa/Kino International, The Complete Metropolis directed by Fritz Lang, 1927 (New York: Kino International, 2010), DVD cover detail 4 Torso in Metal from “The Rock Drill” © The estate of Sir Jacob Epstein (Tate, London) in A Chronology of Art edited by Iain Zaczek (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2018), 227 (color plate) 5 Mark Gertler, “Merry-Go-Round” (1916) © Tate, London; © Gaku Iwai 2017–2018 6 Bernard Partridge, “Cain,” in Punch, or the London Charivari, February 13, 1918. 7 Picture postcard depicting Kaiser Wilhelm II quoting “Ich habe es nicht gewollt.” 8 Picture postcard depicting Kaiser Wilhelm II quoting “Ich habe den Krieg nicht gewollt.” 9 “In a Dorian kind of Mood” by James Weaver © Courtesy of James Weaver

20 58 58 58 90 94 96 97 178

Notes on Contributors Helen Baron is Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Hull, UK. She has co-­edited (with her late husband, Carl Baron) Cambridge University Press editions of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1994) and Paul Morel (2003). Fiona Becket is Head of School and Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Leeds, UK. She works primarily in the area of literary modernism with particular reference to D. H. Lawrence, language, and modernist poetics. She has written several books on D. H. Lawrence, including D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (1997), and The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence (2002). More recently she has written on contemporary poetry, with a special interest in British and Irish poetry, and eco-­poetics. Michael Bell is Professor Emeritus at The University of Warwick, UK. His research focus is European fiction from Cervantes onwards with a special focus on the modern period, including D. H. Lawrence. He has published extensively on D. H. Lawrence, including his book D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (1992), and the essay, “D. H. Lawrence and Modernism,” in the Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence (2001). Nick Ceramella is currently Vice President of the D. H. Lawrence Society in the UK. He has taught English and American Literatures, ESP (English for Specific Purposes), and Translation Studies at the Universities of Trento, l’Orientale (Napoli), La Sapienza (Roma), Roma Tre, Foreigners (Perugia), l’Aquila, School of Interpreters/Translators (Roma). He has been Visiting Professor at the Universities of Moscow and Alagoas (Brazil). Tina Ferris is an independent scholar from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, USA, living in Southern California. She is the Webmaster for the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America and the D. H. Lawrence Review. She co-­authored, with Dr Virginia Hyde, the National Historic Register nomination for the D. H. Lawrence Ranch. Her essay “D. H. Lawrence and the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration” was published in the James Caird Society Journal and in “Terra Incognita”: D. H. Lawrence at the Frontiers. Annalise Grice is Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She is currently working on a monograph entitled D. H. Lawrence and the Literary

Notes on Contributors

xi

Marketplace: The Early Writings, and is a volume editor for the Edinburgh University Press Critical Edition of the Works of May Sinclair. Andrew Harrison is currently President of the D. H. Lawrence Society in the UK. He is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Nottingham, UK, a founding editor of The Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, and Director of the D. H. Lawrence Research Centre in Nottingham University’s School of English. He has published extensively on Lawrence, including his books D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism: A Study of Influence (2003) and The Life of D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Biography (2016). Earl G. Ingersoll is Emeritus Distinguished Teaching Professor and Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York at Brockport. He is the author of D. H. Lawrence, Desire, and Narrative (2001) and more than twenty articles, essays, and chapters. He is also a co-­editor of three collections of essays on Lawrence, as well as a former president of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America. Gaku Iwai is Professor of English at Konan University in Kobe, Japan. He is a co-­editor and co-­translator of the Japanese version of the Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence and a co-­author of several books on Lawrence and twentieth-­ century British writers. Dominic Jaeckle is a writer and editor based in London, UK. A doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Jaeckle’s current research focuses on American Transcendentalism with particular emphasis on the interpolation of creativity and capitalism in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Jaeckle’s work has appeared in Nexus: The International Journal of Henry Miller Studies, Minor Literature(s), 3: AM Magazine, and others. He is the co-­founder and editor of Hotel, a magazine for new approaches to fiction, creative non-­fiction, and poetry, providing a platform for experimental reflection on literature’s role as “art” and cultural mediator. Andrew Keese is an instructor of English at Texas Tech University, US. He has written a chapter about hybridity and religion in The Plumed Serpent for a collection titled D. H. Lawrence: New Theoretical Perspectives and Cultural Translation (2016), and an article about the animal poetry in Pansies for The Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (2012). Indrek Männiste is Researcher of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He has worked as Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK, and is the author of Henry Miller: The Inhuman Artist (2013), co-­editor (with James M. Decker) of Henry Miller: New Perspectives (2015), and

xii

Notes on Contributors

a contributor to D. H Lawrence: New Theoretical Perspectives and Cultural Translation (2016). Katherine Toy Miller is Lecturer at the University of Nevada, US. She writes scholarly narratives on D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Georgia O’Keeffe, mutual friends who all lived briefly in Taos, New Mexico, a tricultural community that is Miller’s permanent residence. Colin D. Pearce is Professor at the Clemson University, US. He has published in a number of journals, including the Canadian Journal of Political Science, The Journal of the History of Ideas, Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, Studies in Literary Imagination, and many others. He was William Gilmore Simms Professor at the University of South Carolina in 2004 and is past president of the South Carolina Political Science Association. His article, “Two Metaphysicians: D. H. Lawrence and Martin Heidegger Compared,” appeared in 2009. Thalia Trigoni is Lecturer in English Literature at Homerton College and St Edmund’s College at the University of Cambridge, UK. She currently works as Visiting Lecturer at the University of Athens. She is working on her book The Intelligent Unconscious in Modernist Literature and Science for Cambridge University Press. She also has published an article, “Lawrence’s Radical Dualism: The Bodily Unconscious,” in English Studies (2014). Jeff Wallace is Professor of English at Cardiff Metropolitan University and current Chair of the British Association of Modernist Studies. He is the author of D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (2005), Beginning Modernism (2011), and of numerous essays articulating Lawrence with modern science, philosophy, and aesthetics. He is currently working on a study of abstraction as a critical concept.

Foreword Lawrence is well known to have been a man of strong convictions to which he often gave hyperbolic, or, as some might think, intemperate expression. This may be why there has been, as Indrek Männiste points out in his “Introduction,” no volume devoted in quite this way to his treatment of technological modernity. The theme seems on the face of it too obvious: his readers know what he makes of the machine and can readily cite memorable episodes from across his oeuvre. But therein lies the danger: that his understanding of these matters will be too readily assumed and monumentalized. For, while driven by powerful conviction, his creative insight is subtly flexible and relative, as the essays in this volume seek to show. The thrust of the volume is to examine more closely the complexities of man’s relation to the machine in Lawrence’s writing by indicating its less conscious seductions and internalizations. In her close reading of episodes in which Lawrence uses the railway train as a narrative device or circumstance, Helen Baron analyzes passages from Mr Noon. On a train journey in Germany just before meeting Gilbert Noon, Johanna Keighley is very nearly seduced by a casual acquaintance. To be sure, such a journey provides a naturalistic occasion for this possibility but Baron looks more closely at how the moment by moment sensation of the train is internalized within Johanna’s consciousness and feeling. The train is an impersonal power by which she is carried along, and almost carried away. At one point she feels the train, and she with it, to be “spinning.” Baron neatly catches the mixed resonances of this word. Spinning is a characteristically mechanical function iconically associated with industrialization since the invention of the “spinning jenny” replaced a traditionally female activity. Indeed, at a purely verbal level this expression turns a woman into a machine. Yet in the more subjective domain of bodily sensation spinning induces dizziness and we speak of “spinning” out of control. The word suggests, therefore, how Johanna ambiguously yields herself to the power of the circumstance. Is she carried away or is she submitting herself? At this point one might note another, older association of spinning as the activity of the mythical fates. The idea of fate has had a powerful role in human culture. It represents what cannot be escaped or changed. Yet as the obverse of free will it can also be an alibi for abnegation of responsibility. Fatalism is the seductive yielding to, or embracing of, circumstance so that it indeed becomes fate. The episode from Mr Noon, when looked on in this light, might be taken as an epitome of the relation to the machine not just in Lawrence but in modernity at large. Technology is an inescapable destiny of modern man but the degree and

xiv

Foreword

manner of its internalization is open to choice: a choice that has a metaphysical, if not religious, dimension. For the relation to technology is itself governed by the relation to the world. The cosmic relation can be conceived instrumentally. If the world is there purely for human use then the potential catastrophe of global warming, for example, produced by modern technology, may admit of a technological solution. But Lawrence would rather say, along with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, that the modern relation to technology is itself a symptom rather than the cause. The evil lies in the instrumental relation as such: the loss of what Heidegger called Being and Lawrence called the “fourth dimension.” It is not the technology as such, in other words, but the meanings with which it is invested. The essays in this book variously seek to unpack these ambivalences, and several examine the question of film, which is particularly interesting in the way it bears out this general point. It is once again well known that Lawrence expressed a blanket hostility to the relatively new medium of film. But his remarks are often quoted unhistorically and without context. In reality, we do not know what Lawrence might have made of the great achievements in this medium later in the century and across the world. It seems to me that his critique was aimed at a form of popular entertainment characterized by a corruptively passive sentimentality to which the medium of film, with its magnified illusionism, especially lends itself. His critique focuses, to be sure, on the specific technical aspects of film, such as the close-­up, but that is because this gives him an analytic grip for his psychological observation. The technology is serving what he considered a dehumanizing function. Whether those same technical properties could be made to serve a better purpose is not a question he considers and it would be unwise to assume his hostility to all the later achievements in the medium. In her discussion of Lawrence’s “robot” poems, Tina Ferris also discusses the representation of robots in Fritz Lang’s classic film Metropolis (1927), which Lawrence could conceivably have seen. The film itself embodies the spiralling paradoxes and ambivalences of the human relation to technology. Its dark representation of human submission to a mechanized collectivity is produced by virtue of the most characteristic technological medium of twentieth-­century modernity: the film. Moreover, one of the central figures in the film is the robot Maria who is indistinguishable from a beautiful living woman, just like the actress by whom she is played. The ambiguities of objective reality and emotional projection do indeed make the head spin. In so far as she is a robot she invites commentary along the lines of Heinrich von Kleist’s dialogue “On the Marionette Theatre” (1810). Kleist’s principal spokesman character, a professional dancer, argues that marionettes have advantages over human beings with respect to dancing gracefully. Human beings have self-­consciousness, which makes it difficult to avoid affectation. The human dancer strives for expression, while the marionette simply follows the laws of gravity without knowing them. The concern with self-­consciousness as the essential fall of man

Foreword

xv

is highly Lawrentian and Kleist’s thought can be extended to acting: the marionette may represent a human more fully than a human actor can because the actor is always there expressing the part and is inescapably separate from the character represented. The puppet by contrast is a figure on which the spectator projects a complete human individuality. As a friend remarked bemusedly after a puppet performance of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, “the Venus was so sexy!” He was bemused, perhaps, because the physical wooden puppet would seem to prevent such a response but its true effect is rather to give full space to Shakespeare’s words in which the erotic imagination is given full rein. For the puppet, of course, like the physical presence of the actor, does not in reality diminish the emotional effect: it rather signifies its aesthetic status as performance rather than illusion. Maria, however, is not a puppet either for her male admirers within the action or for the cinema audience. Her seductive power over the former is not given the aesthetic condition of either puppetry or conscious performance. And that returns us to Lawrence’s critique of the film star as one who arouses a sentimental response to an illusion except that this critique is being made within the film and indeed by the paradoxical self-­ consciousness of the medium itself. Since Lawrence’s time, the lines between the human and the technological have become even more uncertain. Computers are increasingly accredited with the potentiality for independent thought; prosthetic replacements in the body are becoming ever more integral; even the human individual as such is the product of a genetic blueprint. Lawrence considered these questions at a specific phase of modernity, neither Victorian nor post-­modern, but he did so as one in the vanguard not the rearguard of his own time. Perhaps the most famous of all his letters is that written to Edward Garnett on June 5, 1914 in which he makes his notable, one might say inaugural, rejection of the “old stable ego” in favor of an impersonal understanding of the human as an “inhuman” phenomenon. This is a radical appropriation of modernity and the scientific outlook; it is already the outlook now sometimes called the “posthuman.” Yet in the same letter he goes on at length to warn of losing the human dimension; the gross error he sees in the Futurists. A century or so after he wrote these words we live in a world of strident voices adopting one side or the other. In this clash of world views Lawrence remains significant for his exemplary, moment by moment negotiation between them. Michael Bell, University of Warwick, UK

Acknowledgments The editor of this volume would like to thank all the contributors for their trust, swift cooperation, and wonderful ideas. He also thanks Haaris Naqvi and Katherine De Chant of Bloomsbury for the smooth running of the project, and the anonymous reviewer for his excellent suggestions. He would like to extend his special gratitude to Michael Bell for inspiration and encouragement over the years, for his Foreword, and for all the additional help with the book. He also wishes to express his appreciation to Andrew Harrison, Earl G. Ingersoll, and Annalise Grice for their professional advice and help in the various stages of the book’s progress. He is grateful to Sven-Hannes Vabar for stepping in at the last minute and helping him out with the Bibliography. He also says thank you to everyone in Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham, UK, for providing foremost help with the Lawrence sources. In addition, he would like to acknowledge the Estonian Research Council grant, PUT 1494, for providing financial support for his research and editorial work. The editor is greatly indebted to Jaak Tomberg for his continuous support, razor-­sharp insights, and friendship during the process. He is also immensely grateful to his other colleagues: Sven-Hannes Vabar, Janek Kraavi, and Agnes Neier for the friendly banter around the office in the days of exhaustion, hesitation, and self-­doubt. Last but not least, the editor wishes to thank Eteko Jõela for moral support and friendship.

Abbreviations Letters of D. H. Lawrence Letters 1 Letters 2

Letters 3

Letters 4

Letters 5

Letters 6

Letters 7

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume I, September 1901–May 1913, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II, June 1913–October 1916, eds. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume III, October 1916–June 1921, eds. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume IV, June 1921–March 1924, eds. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton, and Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume V, March 1924–March 1927, eds. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume VI, March 1927–November 1928, eds. James T. Boulton and Margaret Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume VII, November 1928–February 1930, eds. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Works of D. H. Lawrence A AR EELS EME FLC FUPU FWL

Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?” The Egoist 2, no. 5 (1915): 75–6. England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, eds. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The First ‘Women in Love,’ eds. John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

xviii IR K LAH LCL LEA LG MEH MM MN PEH

PM PO Poems PPP PS R RDP SCAL

SEP SL SM STH

Abbreviations Introductions and Reviews, eds. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Lady Chatterley’s Lover and A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The Lost Girl, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). “Passages from Ecce Homo,” in Alvin Sullivan’s “D. H. Lawrence’s Poetry—The Unpublished Manuscripts,” D. H. Lawrence Review 9, no. 2 (1976): 266–77. Paul Morel, ed. Helen Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The Poems, Two Volume Set, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (New York: Viking Press, 1936). The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1987). The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Reflections of the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Studies in Classic American Literature, eds. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, Simonetta de Filippis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Sons and Lovers, eds. Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Abbreviations TI WL WP WRA

xix

Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Women in Love, eds. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, eds. Dieter Mehl and Christa Janshon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Chronology 1885

David Herbert Lawrence born on September 11 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, to Arthur and Lydia Lawrence (née Beardsall) 1889–98 Attends Beauvale Board School 1898 Attends Nottingham High School 1901 Leaves Nottingham High School; works as a clerk with J. H. Haywood Ltd. (a surgical appliances manufacturer) in Nottingham; friendship with the Chambers family, and Jessie Chambers; falls ill with pneumonia Works as a Pupil-­teacher at the British School, Eastwood 1902–5 1905–6 Works as an uncertified assistant teacher at the British School, Eastwood 1906–8 Student at University College, Nottingham 1907 “A Prelude” wins a short story competition and is published in the Nottinghamshire Guardian under Jessie Chambers’ name 1908–11 Works as a certified assistant teacher at Davidson Road School in Croydon, Surrey 1909 Meets Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), the editor of The English Review; a sequence of Lawrence’s poems, “A Still Afternoon,” is published in the review 1910 Lydia Lawrence dies on December 9 First novel, The White Peacock, is published; The English Review 1911 publishes “Odour of Chrysanthemums”; resigns post as schoolteacher due to illness; begins friendship with Edward Garnett, who becomes his literary mentor 1912 Meets Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), the wife of his former college professor Ernest Weekley, and starts an affair with her; leaves England with Frieda for Metz; The Trespasser is published; travels extensively with Frieda in Germany and Italy 1913 Love Poems and Others and Sons and Lovers are published; meets Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry; travels with Frieda in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy; Frieda’s divorce hearing in London; Ezra Pound proposes Lawrence for the Polignac Prize in Poetry in December 1914 Frieda is granted decree absolute in her divorce case; meets Wyndham Lewis; married to Frieda at the Kensington Registry Office; meets Lady Ottoline Morrell; establishes friendships with Richard Aldington, Catherine Carswell, Hilda Doolittle, E. M. Forster, Amy Lowell; The Prussian Officer and Other Stories 1915 Introduced to Bertrand Russell; spends a weekend in Cambridge with Russell and meets John Maynard Keynes, G. E. Moore, and

Chronology

xxi

G. H. Hardy; The Rainbow is published; The Rainbow is prosecuted for obscenity at London’s Bow Street Magistrate’s Court and 1011 copies (out of 1250) are seized and burnt as a result; moves with Frieda to Cornwall; establishes friendships with Dorothy Brett, Mark Gertler and Aldous Huxley 1916 Writes First ‘Women in Love’; catches cold and grows seriously ill; Twilight in Italy 1917 Ordered out of Cornwall under the Defence of the Realm Act; seeks permission from War Office to return to Cornwall but is refused; meets John Galsworthy; friendship with William Henry Hocking; Look! We Have Come Through! 1918 Applies for assistance from Royal Literary Fund and receives £50; New Poems published in USA 1919 Collapses with influenza; Frieda departs for Germany; meets up with Frieda in Rome and moves to Capri; establishes friendships with Norman Douglas, Reggie Turner, and Maurice Magnus 1920 Breaks ties with John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield; The Lost Girl; moves to Sicily and rents Fontana Vecchia in Taormina; visits Malta; Women in Love is published in USA (in England 1921) 1921 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious is published in USA (in England 1923); Movements in European History; begins correspondence with Mabel Dodge Sterne (later Mabel Dodge Luhan); Sea and Sardinia 1922 Leaves Sicily for Ceylon; travels to Sydney and settles in Thirroul; visits New Zealand, Cook Islands, and Tahiti en route to USA; settles in Taos, New Mexico at Mabel Dodge Sterne’s estate; winters with two Danish painters (Kai Gøtzsche and Knud Merrild) at Del Monte Ranch; Aaron’s Rod; England, My England and Other Stories; Fantasia and Unconscious 1923 Visits Mexico City, Chapala, and Guadalajara; arrives in New York; takes trips to Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Los Angeles; leaves for Mexico; leaves for Europe and stays in London; Studies in Classic American Literature; Kangaroo; Birds, Beasts and Flowers 1924 Visits Paris and stays with Frieda’s mother in Baden-Baden; travels back to Taos with Frieda and the painter Dorothy Brett via New York and Santa Fe; Mabel Dodge Luhan gifts Frieda her ranch at Lobo (the ranch is later renamed as Kiowa Ranch); Arthur Lawrence dies on September 10; visits Mexico again; The Boy in The Bush 1925 Diagnosed as tubercular; cancels his return to England on doctor’s advice and goes back to New Mexico; leaves for England; visits friends in Nottingham, Ripley, and London; leaves for Baden-Baden; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays; St. Mawr 1926 Stays in Spotorno, Italy; visits Rome, Assisi, Perugia, Florence, and Ravenna; moves to Villa Mirenda in Scandicci (Florence); The Plumed Serpent 1927 Aldous and Maria Huxley visit at Villa Mirenda; Mornings in Mexico

xxii 1928

1929

1930

Chronology Travels to Les Diablerets, Switzerland, rents Chateau Beau Site; returns to Villa Mirenda and extends rent on it for a further six months; stays in Switzerland, then leaves for Baden-Baden; Lady Chatterley’s Lover is privately printed in Florence and distributed by post; The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories; Collected Poems Travels to Paris and stays with the Huxleys in Suresnes; signs agreement with Edward Titus for Paris Popular Edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; visits Barcelona and Majorca; back in Florence and very ill Leaves for sanatorium in Vence, France in February; Nettles; stays at the Ad Astra sanatorium; H. G. Wells visits; the Huxleys visit; leaves the Ad Astra for the Villa Robermond on March 1; dies on the evening of March 2

I ntrodu ction Indrek Männiste

“What is a man to do?” D. H. Lawrence asks in one of his poems, “[w]hen the vast masses of men have been caught by the machine into the industrial dance of the living death . . .” (Poems, 545). Dance is a recurrent motif in Lawrence’s work and not least in Women in Love, the novel that deals most directly with industrialism. Several contributors to this book note the importance of Mark Gertler’s painting “The Merry-­go-Round” (1916). Lawrence’s use of the dance image in this remark recalls his eloquent response to his friend’s painting in which the supposed occasion of fairground pleasure has trapped the occupants into a joyless circling. The men in the picture are in military uniform suggesting their subjection to the machine is in some unknown measure by consent: that the accommodation to the machine is partly willed, as Lawrence hints about the miners who work for the Crich family. In this indirect, internalized, and unconscious way, the machine permeates much of modern life as depicted by Lawrence throughout his oeuvre. It could even be said Lawrence’s whole oeuvre arises from an outcry against industrial modernity. His complex and poetic vision of modernity is powered by this underlying urgency felt, as Keats put it, “upon the pulses,”1 for he himself, with his extraordinary sensitivity toward his surroundings and his special responsiveness to the natural world, was “a figure in an industrial landscape.”2 Lawrence would not normally be thought of as an exponent of the Brechtian alienation effect, but in so far as this refers to defamiliarization as a condition of all artistic creativity he maintained his unjaded ability to experience the “strangeness of his own existence”3 and the “destitute times” of late industrialism. Indeed, much like Hölderlin and Rilke, Lawrence felt that our age is the age “for which the ground fails to come”4 and that therefore we “hang in the abyss.”5 As a poet disparaging of the industrial “present,” Lawrence, too, was “a poet in a destitute time.”6 At the same time, Lawrence’s work presents us with a world quite different from our own, a particular phase in the development of industrial society. Today, in the age of technics, we can probably never fully understand what it must have felt like when a first telephone rang, a noisy train stormed through the countryside of “Robin Hood and his merry men” (LEA, 287) or when a colliery was built next to the ancestral farm. We would struggle to sympathize

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D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity

with another English writer, Grant Allen, who in the 1890s already worried about data overload: there were now “several morning and evening newspapers, two postal deliveries a day, telegrams that could shatter the calm at any time, and new kinds of transport that travelled far quicker than the natural rhythms of the horse.”7 While Allen’s concerns may now seem quaint, we must understand that a large part of the nineteenth century technology landed onto a society which “was not made to receive it . . .”8 In reading Lawrence, therefore, we should keep in mind this aspect of the historical context and mental outlook in his fiction. He paints his literary canvas in such a manner so that his readers would find it extremely difficult to ignore the technical reality underlying his particular narratives or storylines. It would seem that Lawrence wanted to make it absolutely clear that the type of technology that comes to surround his characters, “far from being merely in time, properly constitutes time”: the modern age is essentially that of modern technics.9 Persistently and idiosyncratically, then, Lawrence integrates technology-­related themes and motifs, even when he does not always discuss them in great detail, in the back of his characters’ minds. Very often his characters’ engagements with technology express at once anxiety and dread as well as bewilderment and unfamiliarity; but then also admiring fascination with technology’s undeniable appeal and mastery. He truly is one of those modernist writers whose works “chronicle the advent of modern technology . . .”10 Nicholas Daly has recorded how anti-­industrialist sensibilities in mid-­ nineteenth-­century literature often took rather sensationalist forms; often overemphasizing physical shock in the encounters of people and machines.11 By contrast, Lawrence typically depicts engagements with technology and industrial modernity less overtly and brutally but the more significantly for being internalized and largely unconscious. The shock is just as great but is more psychological and metaphysical in nature. That is why, although the issues of mining, war, modern city life, new means of transportation—and his characters’ complicated relations to them—do form a considerable part of his novels, these problems never constitute the central narrative focus of his novels. He never wrote a mining novel as such. Indeed, mines, trains, and modern cities are only a symptom, and not the cause. As Michael Bell has put it, Lawrence’s vision was most significantly directed towards “a philosophical statement about Being rather than a historical statement about cultural development . . .”12 And this helps to explain his characteristic optimism. Despite his dark analysis, Lawrence continued to believe that a better form of life was always possible after all, that there is a way to turn away from the “abyss”: “. . . we still have the course of destiny open to us,” he says in one of his later essays (LEA, 22). In this, Lawrence reminds us of Hölderlin’s realization that, while the ideal or absolute in the technological age is “near, and hard to grasp,”13 it is not completely out of our reach. As Lawrence insists, one must “search one’s soul, for a way out into a new destiny” (ibid.). Indeed, as Hölderlin puts it in his poem “Mnemosyne”:

Introduction

3

. . . Mortals would sooner Reach toward the abyss. With them The echo turns. Though the time Be long, truth Will come to pass14 Hölderlin’s lines are famously enigmatic and provide no practical solution. Lawrence, too, despite the importance of his legacy, offers no “final achieved figuration of the truth of the world, but only one art-­language among others . . .”15 For this reason, the contributors to D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity believe it is worth exploring his legacy with regard to technology as one of the “key factors in defining the twentieth century culture and literature.”16 While there has till now been no book-­length study specifically dedicated to Lawrence and technology, his responses to industrialism and modernity have always attracted scholarly attention. This more or less started with F. R. Leavis’s celebratory treatment of Lawrence as “arch-­proponent of ‘Life’ against the mechanisation and dehumanisation endemic to the ‘technologico-Benthamite’ civilisation of modern society”17 and continued with Raymond Williams’s much discussed readings of Lawrence’s “social writings” as harkening back to “the nineteenth century tradition” and Thomas Carlyle’s critique of industrialism in particular.18 While the views of Leavis and Williams remained influential for decades, and in some ways continue to do so, a number of more nuanced studies on the various aspects of industrialization and Lawrence have emerged since. For example, Marko Modiano’s Domestic Disharmony and Industrialization in D. H Lawrence’s Early Fiction (1987) offers a valuable reading of how industrialization causes a breakdown in family relations in Lawrence’s early works.19 Modiano traces the social disharmony apparent in Lawrence’s works to “a conflict between the ideals of eighteenth-­century England and the industrial socioeconomic structure”20 and critically engages with the legacy of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris, and their impact on Lawrence. Earl G. Ingersoll dedicates a lengthy chapter on Lawrence in his Representations of Science and Technology in British Literature Since 1880 (1992) and explores Lawrence’s “mythology of Man vs. the Machine” by analyzing his major novels.21 Jeff Wallace’s study, D. H. Lawrence, Science and The Posthuman (2005), revisits our preconceived notions about Lawrence, science, and technology, and suggests that applying the posthuman perspective to these issues offers a clearer understanding of “Lawrence’s encounter with science of his time.”22 Beatrice Monaco offers a Deleuze-Guattarian reading of “machinic processes” in Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce in her Machinic Modernism: The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce (2008).23 Of more recent studies, Anna Louise Burrells dedicates a chapter to a philosophical reading of Lawrence’s Women in Love, which she sees as “an early intervention into the debate about mechanisation and individuality” in her doctoral dissertation “Inter-­war Modernism and

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D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity

Technology 1918–1945” (2010).24 Stewart Smith’s Nietzsche and Modernism: Nihilism and Suffering in Lawrence, Kafka and Beckett (2018) approaches Lawrence via Nietzschean diagnoses of nihilism as heuristic tools to remap his fictional landscape and relationship to modernity. In the 1990s, there seemed to emerge a specific interest, noticeably lively to this day, in reading Lawrence’s works in the light of Martin Heidegger’s highly influential philosophy of technology. Shifting away from Leavis’s and Williams’s tradition of treating technology as man’s invention gone bad, Heidegger’s ontological vision of modern technology as “revealing” of Being paved the way, one way or another, to several full-­length studies such as Michael Bell’s D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (1992), Anne Fernihough’s D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (1993), and Fiona Becket’s D. H Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (1997), and numerous book chapters and journal articles.25 While not specifically focusing on technology or modernity, a number of edited volumes also provide helpful insights and serve as essential reading to anyone interested in Lawrence and modernity. D. H. Lawrence (ed. Peter Widdowson, 1992), for example, presents treatments from Marxist readings to feminism, post-­structuralism, and postmodernism.26 The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence (ed. Anne Fernihough, 2001), too, includes chapters on Lawrence and modernism, psychoanalysis, and other themes, which help to contextualize Lawrence’s work in a wider realm of modernity. In a similar vein, New D. H. Lawrence (ed. Howard J. Booth, 2010) presents Lawrence as “sharply critical of modernity and its consequences” and offers vivid analyses from modernist ethics and Marxist criticism to war and machine in Lawrence.27 Naturally, it is not possible or even practical to attempt to list every relevant source on the subject here but, rather, to offer only a short overview of the most pertinent ones whereupon the reader is directed further. The chapters in this book have been organized more or less thematically: similar topics next to each other. However, given the wide amplitude of themes that fall under the book’s title, it was not always possible to find a perfectly suitable partner to each and every chapter. To give the reader a very general guideline, the book starts with more introductory themes which deal with Lawrence’s biographical background relevant to his later ideas and then progresses toward more detailed and specific treatments of his oeuvre in relation to the book’s overall themes. In Chapter 1, “D. H. Lawrence’s Long Passage from a Rural to an Industrial World,” Nick Ceramella shows, through a discussion concentrating on The White Peacock (1911), Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) how Lawrence approached the change from the agricultural world to an industrialized one. He suggests that this ideal literary chain accompanies Lawrence’s life and career from the beginning till the end, showing that, although he went abroad into voluntary “exile,” he never really left “the country of his heart.”

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In Chapter  2, “ ‘Colliers is a discontented lot’: ‘The Miner at Home’ in the Nation and the 1912 National Coal Strike,” Annalise Grice contextualizes Lawrence’s little-­known sketch “The Miner at Home,” which documents a bitter domestic argument between a miner, Bower, and his wife Gertie, who hold very different views on the strike. As well as providing a reading of the text as it appeared in the Nation, Grice argues that, by using his knowledge of conditions in Eastwood (where he was living at the time) in order to produce topical sketches, Lawrence explored ways of breaking into journalism at a time when he needed to increase his public exposure and earn money to sustain his emergent career. In Chapter  3, “D. H. Lawrence Among The Early Modern Bohemians,” Katherine Toy Miller argues that through connections provided by three significant women in his life—Frieda Weekley, Lady Ottoline Morrell, and Mabel Dodge—D. H. Lawrence lived among bohemian early Modernists (1901–30) in and near Munich, Germany; London, England; and Taos, New Mexico, who shared his passions against militarism and mechanization and for nature and spirituality; primitive, exotic, and peasant cultures; and honest expression of sexuality as proclaimed in his work. In Chapter 4, “D. H. Lawrence and ‘The Machine Incarnate’: Robots Among the ‘Nettles,’ ” Tina Ferris takes a historical approach to examine Lawrence’s use of the word “robot,” and related terms like “automaton” and “mechanical man,” in his cluster of about three dozen poems from “The ‘Nettles’ Notebook,” written in 1929. It discusses the origins and influence of the robot concept in relation to early twentieth-­century social issues; beginning with Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots, 1921). Three main events built upon the robot theme enhancing its popularity: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Britain’s first electric-­powered robot named Eric (1928), and the philosophy of the Italian Futurist Movement. Against this backdrop, Lawrence’s robot “Nettles” joins the debate regarding the impact of the Industrial Revolution on humanity. By analyzing his poetry sequence (both as drafts and as parts of a whole that culminate in “The gods! the gods!”), Ferris argues that we better appreciate Lawrence’s role as a modern poet experimenting with form. In Chapter 5, “ ‘Men No More Than the Subjective Material of the Machine’: Lawrence, Machinery, and War-­time Psychology,” Andrew Harrison considers war-­time psychology in Lawrence’s writing, focusing on the novel beauty of mechanical warfare and the kinds of satisfaction which soldiers and civilians gleaned by serving the machine. Engaging with Lawrence’s article “With the Guns,” the poem “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?” and several other important sources, Harrison concludes with fresh readings of the 1915 version of “England, My England” and “Tickets Please” as short stories dealing with the war spirit on the Western and Home Fronts respectively which concentrate very closely on the attraction to machinery and the blurring of the line between the human and the mechanical.

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D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity

In Chapter  6, “To Produce, or Not to Produce, That is the Question: Technology, Democracy, and War in Women in Love,” Gaku Iwai deals with the development of the plot of Women in Love which is bound up with the duality of production and barrenness, which are respectively embodied by Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin. Putting their contrast into the social and political context of the time when the novel was produced, Iwai analyzes the text in terms of the development of modern technology, democracy, and New Liberalism, and the First World War. Iwai aims to uncover a new dimension of this complex text, which was created during the period that witnessed the development of technology and experienced the devastation wrought by the Great War. In Chapter 7, “Hierarchy, Beauty, and Freedom: D. H. Lawrence’s Response to Techno-Industrial Modernity,” Colin D. Pearce explores three aspects of D. H. Lawrence’s art. First, the author discusses the moral basis of Lawrence’s rejection of modern civilization. Second, Pearce engages with the matter of Lawrence’s rejection of modern science as a premise of that civilization. And third, he addresses Lawrence’s alleged “Fascism” or “Nazism” as the corollary of his rejection of modern morals and modern science. In Chapter 8, “ ‘The Art of Living’: D. H. Lawrence’s Technologies of the Self,” Jeff Wallace engages in the analysis of two Lawrence short stories, “The Witch à la Mode” (1911) and “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman” (1924). Wallace argues that the stories share a set of motifs and characteristics that might be related to what Michel Foucault called “technologies of the self.” Modifying the concept of technology with reference to the work of Gilbert Simondon and Brian Massumi, the chapter contends that Lawrence’s fictional technologies of the self represent a therapeutic drive in his work that Lawrence elsewhere signalled as an interest in “the art of living.” In Chapter 9, “Engineering Away Humanity: Lawrence on Technology and Mental Consciousness in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Pansies,” Andrew Keese analyzes Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and Pansies (1929) in which Lawrence worries about humankind’s constant shift toward mental consciousness, often to the detriment of what he called “blood consciousness.” In both works, Lawrence presents an extreme version of “mental consciousness” via imagined future technologies that would make aspects of the physical side of humans irrelevant. He pleads for balance and presents the love affair between Connie Chatterley and Oliver Mellors as an example of what people should strive for in their lives. Lawrence’s brief use of futuristic technologies precedes that of his friend Aldous Huxley’s expanded treatment of similar concepts. Keese argues that, for each of the writers, advances in technology pose risks that should be fully considered before being fully deployed. In Chapter  10, “D. H. Lawrence’s Allotropic ‘Gladiatorial’: Resisting The Mechanization of the Human in Women in Love,” Thalia Trigoni focuses primarily on the gladiatorial scene of Women in Love through the lens of Lawrence’s appropriation of the scientific concept of allotropy to describe the

Introduction

7

constituent elements of human nature. Lawrence describes a battle between two conflicting worldviews: between Birkin on the one hand, who stands for the spontaneous, the dark, and the unconscious, and who is associated with the industrial element of coal; and Gerald on the other, who embodies the spirit of industrialization and mechanization, and is associated with the diamond, that is, with the world of light and consciousness. This battle, Trigoni maintains, is an allotropic gladiatorial whereby the hostility of the one against the other is juxtaposed to an inner and subtle unity between them in the form of an organic connection. It is on this allotropic relation between technological mechanization and the spontaneous and organic that the essay concentrates, in order to provide a nuanced picture of Lawrence’s attitude toward the tectonic cultural shifts that were taking place during his time. In Chapter 11, “Green Lawrence? Consciousness, Ecology, and Poetry,” Fiona Becket offers a reappraisal of Lawrence’s “nature” poetry and argues that the easy binaries of nature/technology, spirit/science, are more complex than has been thought in Lawrence’s work. Poems from Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) underpin a critique, which demonstrates the extent to which studies of “green” modernism are impoverished by not taking into account the serious project of the poetry. While not “politically” green, there are grounds in Lawrence’s poetry for discerning a challenge to familiar habits and hierarchies of thought. This begins, Becket argues, with Lawrence’s anti-Cartesian metaphysic and ends with the radical estheticization of the more-­than-human world which is itself suggestive of a new kind of humanities, one which attends to radical difference across species and is, therefore, constitutive of an ethics of care and respect for that which is conventionally below the ontological horizon. Only in this context, Becket maintains, can we properly talk of a “green” Lawrence. In Chapter  12, “D. H. Lawrence and Film: Reconsidering Fidelity in Ken Russell’s Women in Love,” Earl G. Ingersoll engages with Jason Mark Ward’s monograph The Forgotten Film Adaptations of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories (2016), in which Ward exploits issues of fidelity in Jane Jaffe Young’s D. H. Lawrence on Screen (1999) and Louis K. Greiff ’s D. H. Lawrence: Fifty Years on Film (2001). Ingersoll finds that Ward exaggerates the emphasis upon “fidelity” in both forerunners of his project to argue in favor of “the fluid text” he finds in John Bryant’s monograph of that title. Ingersoll believes that the time is right to recuperate, at least in part, the criterion of “fidelity”—the current anathema of film adaptation theory and criticism—by exploring Ken Russell’s film adaptation of Lawrence’s masterpiece, Women in Love. In Chapter  13, “Poetics of Technology: D. H. Lawrence and The WellTempered Counterpoint,” Indrek Männiste explores Lawrence’s literary responses to modern technology by analyzing his most typical poetic ways of representing technology-­related themes in his works. Männiste shows that technology, in its various industrial modernist forms, has been idiosyncratically depicted as being against, or outside of, Lawrence’s characters. He proposes that this againstness or perceived externality of technology can be explained by way

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of the concept of literary counterpoint. He argues that the contrapuntal approach to describing technology forms a distinctive literary device for Lawrence in an effort to communicate the “polyphonic” experiences of everyday technical consciousness and thereby synchronizes the readers more effectively with the realities of industrial modernity. While adopting the counterpoint for tracing the technicity in Lawrence promises no overarching solutions, Männiste believes that it still provides a viable literary model, and a novel perspective, for exploring “the dynamic interplay of tensions and contradictions” that technology typically triggers in the poetic creation of the experience in his texts. In Chapter 14, “Trains in D. H. Lawrence’s Creative Writing,” Helen Baron analyzes Lawrence’s frequent usage of trains in his novels, stories, and poems. The chapter investigates how Lawrence’s enthusiasm for travel in general and his vast experience of train-­travel in particular enabled him to heighten the dramatic impact and the revelation of character in his creative writing. Baron leaves aside the topic of autobiography and, instead, asks questions more related to Lawrence’s literary techniques, artistic stylistic methods, intentions, and effects. In Chapter 15, “On Entertainment: The Lassitude of Lawrence’s Dead Novel,” Dominic Jaeckle considers Lawrence’s confrontation of a developmental literary canon in his essay of 1923 “The Future of the Novel [Surgery for the Novel—or a Bomb],” to address the inferential view of the novel’s speculative history interred and essay the need for a reconsideration of Lawrence’s seat as a proto-­conceptualist. In his evaluation of the novel-­as-medium—and his emphasis on the necessary “operation” of a text—Lawrence is portrayed as a thinker at work on analyses of the novel’s diagnostic powers. Jaeckle finds that, if we are to allow his various views on entertainment and critical autonomy to coalesce, Lawrence’s portrayal of literary culture sits in an expanded field, encouraging reflection on the technological status of novelistic media, and antedating recent treatises concerning the futurity of literary-­critical study.

Notes 1 John Keats, Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 123. 2 John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 29. 3 Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 6. 4 Martin Heidegger, “What are Poets for?,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperPerennial, 2001), 90. 5 Ibid. 6 Heidegger, “What are Poets for?” 94. 7 Cited in Roger Luckhurst, “Modern literature and Technology,” https://www. bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/modern-­literature-and-­technology.

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8 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 4. 9 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 27. 10 Sara Danius, “Technology,” in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, eds. David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 67. 11 Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10–34. 12 Michael Bell, “Lawrence and Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181. 13 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Patmos,” in Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, sel. and trans. James Mitchell (San Francisco: Ithuriel, 2004), 39. 14 Friedrich Hölderlin: Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santer (NY: Continuum, 1990), 273. 15 Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge Classics), 75–6. 16 Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture (Malden: Polity Press, 2011), 2. 17 Peter Widdowson, ed., D. H. Lawrence (London & New York: Longman, 1992), 2. 18 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960), 214. 19 Marko Modiano, Domestic Disharmony and Industrialization in D. H. Lawrence’s Early Fiction (Uppsala & Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1987). 20 Ibid., 13. 21 Earl G. Ingersoll, Representations of Science and Technology in British Literature since 1880 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1992), 99. 22 Jeff Wallace, D. H. Lawrence, Science and The Posthuman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 6. 23 Beatrice Monaco, Machinic Modernism: The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 24 Anna Louise Burrells, “Inter-­war Modernism and Technology 1918–1945: Machine Aesthetics in the Work of Ezra Pound, Francis Picabia, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Green and Wyndham Lewis”, PhD thesis (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 2010), 122. 25 See, for example, Colin D. Pearce, “Two Metaphysicians: D. H. Lawrence and Martin Heidegger Compared,” https://ssrn.com/abstract=1372835 (2009); Dawid W. De Villiers, “Lawrence’s ‘Metaphysic’ of the Heart: Destiny without Determinism?” English Studies in Africa, 55, 2 (2012): 69–84.; N. S. Boone, “D. H. Lawrence Between Heidegger and Levinas: Individuality and Otherness,” The Free Library (January 1, 2016); Indrek Männiste, “D. H. Lawrence: Nature, Technology and The Sense of Enframing,” in D. H. Lawrence: New Critical Perspectives and Cultural Translation, ed. Simonetta de Filippis (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 55–77; Youngjoo Son, “Why Matter Matters: Things and Beings in D. H. Lawrence,” in D. H. Lawrence: New Critical Perspectives, 95–122. 26 See Widdowson, D. H. Lawrence 27 Howard J. Booth, ed., New D. H. Lawrence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

D. H . L awrence’ s L ong P a s s age from a R u ral to an I ndu strial W orld Nick Ceramella

Man invented the machine and now the machine has invented man. —D. H. Lawrence, “Men and Machines” (Poems, 552) Perhaps it is an exaggeration to describe Lawrence as an artist “anticipating the vision of deep ecology,” as Paul Delany does in one of his writings.1 Yet, the “deep ecology movement,” representing an area of criticism that is still evolving, shares with Lawrence the awareness that we are One and Interconnected with the Universe. In fact, he was very critical of mankind’s irresponsible behavior on “breaking [the] laws of natural harmony”2 which, through the spread of industrialization, ravaged the environment, and caused the loss of traditional values and individuals’, identities. He thought that could be opposed by regaining the pleasure of living close to nature in that mysterious union of Lawrentian “ritual” rebirth. The aim of this essay is to show, through a discussion concentrating on The White Peacock (1911), Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), how Lawrence approached the change from an agricultural world to an industrialized one, which led to the above-­mentioned situation, and how this lifelong literary itinerary ended, after his voluntary “exile” abroad, where it had originally started, in what he called “the country of my heart” (Letters 5, 592). After an initial favorable response to industrialization, intellectuals began to consider it inhumane. One of the most critical was Thomas Carlyle, who addressed his time as “the Mechanical Age” in which “Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.”3 Besides him there were Ruskin, Morris, Dickens, and Hardy who had a strong influence on Lawrence, which makes us agree with Raymond Williams’s opinion: “. . . the inherited criticism of the industrial system was obviously of the greatest importance to [Lawrence]. It served to clarify and to generalize what had otherwise been a confused and personal issue. It is not too much to say that he built his whole intellectual life on the foundation of this tradition.”4 Indeed, the Victorian intellectuals

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had already established dichotomies such as Nature/Culture, Country/Town, and Agrarian society/Industrial society, which, besides arousing Lawrence’s interest, were going to be some of the aspects characterizing the “ecological consciousness” of the Modernists’ appeal for the environment from their early days in the 1960s. Concerning that, it must be emphasized that Lawrence showed a sense of responsibility for our natural world5 well ahead of time, which he saw as part and parcel of our existence, but also as a symbolic expression of mankind’s consciousness. So, although he was arguably the least experimentalist among the modernists, he introduced new themes and attitudes and did not just attack mechanization but was a forerunner of today’s sensibility to environmental issues. In fact, a key theme in Lawrence’s writings is the opposition between the vitality of nature, following its seasonal cycles, and the mechanized repetitiveness of coal mining, forcing colliers to live through an unnatural long night. Yet, they were happy to work all together, as Lawrence says in one of his best essays, “Nottingham and The Mining Countryside”: So that the life was a curious cross between industrialism and old agricultural England of Shakespeare and Milton and Fielding and George Eliot. . . . The people lived most entirely by instinct, men of my father’s age could not really read. And the pit did not mechanise men. On the contrary . . . LEA, 289

That transition led from a semi-­rural to a totally industrialized condition where the natural environment underwent a profound change caused by the ugly settlements and the mechanization of the mines. Lawrence detested all that because he thought it could lead people into a dangerous impulse of independence from nature. It is not incidental, then, that the whole body of his works still represents an admonition of the problems we were going to face.

The White Peacock Lawrence hardly mentions the mines in The White Peacock (1911) but indulges in the description of nature and farm-­life that represented an important part of the days of his youth. He had an instinctive passion for nature, as Mrs. Gertrude Neville, one of his neighbors, the sister-­in-law of his close friend George Henry, told me once: “Bertie passionately loved the countryside. He knew the name of all the flowers.”6 It is no wonder then that in The White Peacock nature is perceived as moving rhythmically and participating in people’s lives to an extent that it permeates the whole novel. As Claude Sinzelle says in his seminal book: There is no clear division between the human plot and the evocation of the natural surroundings of the characters. The life of nature which pervades the structure of the book and gives it organic rhythm flows through the characters.7

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13

This is true especially when readers feel as if they were before an animistic scene where the brooks whisper tales, trees cry, and even animals have a soul. Hence The White Peacock, a poetical poem of Nature, as Sinzelle defines it, opens with an idyllic description of Nethermere (i.e. Moorgreen Reservoir), located in a valley north east of Eastwood, that is Bestwood in the novel, where Lawrence used to go for long walks. The thick-­piled trees on the far shore were too dark and sober to dally with the sun, the reeds stood crowded and motionless. . . . Only the thin stream falling through the mill-­race murmured to itself of the tumult of life which had once quickened the valley. WP, 1

It is self-­evident that the Nethermere valley, as suggested by its name (“going under”), has lost its vital flare through the years and has reached a phase of stagnation and decay determining the novel’s three-­part structure. The first two are limited to Nethermere, and the first part in particular is based on the walks of the characters to and from Strelley Mill Farm (i.e. Felley Mill, now demolished), which represents a hub to all of them. There, they celebrate some sort of nature-­ based rites by adorning themselves with flowers almost to exorcise the violent side of nature. That bucolic atmosphere is recalled by Lawrence as an idealized Arcadia, despite the imposing presence of Brinsley mine: To me, as a child and a young man, it was still the old England of the forest and agricultural past; there were no motor-­cars, the mines were, in a sense, an accident in the landscape, and Robin Hood and his merry men were not very far away. LEA, 287

Felley Mill was a happy island, where nature prospered, separated from the nearby industries and mines, which created a metaphoric opposition between a garden and a jungle, anticipating the contrast between soul and mind of later works. The garden was menaced within by the invasion of wild rabbits that symbolized the implacable advancing mechanization coming from outside. In the second and third part of the novel, the Saxtons too, just like everybody else, had to abandon their farm and emigrate to Canada. George Saxton was the only member of his family not prepared to go away. Although he was aware that the farm was falling apart, when asked by Cyril why he had not emigrated like everybody else, he said: “ ‘Oh, I don’t know. There are a lot of little comforts and interests at home that one would miss. Besides, you feel somebody in your own countryside, and you’re nothing in a foreign part, I expect’ ” (WP, 64). On the business front, Leslie Tempest, the forerunner of Lawrence’s industrialists, expresses his disapproval of the farmers’ way of life and language, and reproaches Lettie for “ ‘flirting with a common fellow’ ” (WP, 19) like George.

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Eventually he convinces her to marry him instead. She accepts, thinking she can solve her problems by climbing the social ladder. But, to her disappointment, the miners, on seeing her walk near the mine during a strike, show her their dislike and make her extremely upset. Thus, by highlighting the contrast between two social classes, Lawrence underlines the contrast between people of flesh and blood and those who have detached themselves from living a natural lifestyle. Emily, unlike the other characters, manages to avoid an unlucky end because she genuinely loves nature and decides to marry a farmer. “Emily had at last found her place, and had escaped from the torture of strange, complex modern life” (WP, 319). Yet, realistically, if on the one hand isolation cannot protect from progress for long, on the other hand the expulsion from Nethermere cannot but cause alienation, which is expressed with extreme exasperation by Cyril while he is living in Norwood (i.e. Croydon), a suburb just south of London: “I suffered acutely the sickness of exile in Norwood . . . Since I left the valley of home I have not much feared any other loss . . .” (WP, 260). Later, toward the end of the novel, during a visit back home Cyril says: I rode slowly on, the plants dying around me, the berries leaning their heavy ruddy mouths and languishing for the birds, the men imprisoned underground below me, the brown birds dashing in haste along the hedges. WP, 318

It is clear that the destructive effect of industrialism had already begun, and it would continue quickly and inexorably. Men were living like animals underground and the little signs of nature were dying out. In the meantime, while the British economy was enjoying a boost, the workers realized that the masters were becoming richer while they themselves were becoming poorer. Consequently, there was a very tense situation between 1910 and 1914.

Sons and Lovers It was in the midst of that very tense situation that Sons and Lovers was published in 1913. The book opens with a description of “The Bottoms” (SL, 9), a poor residential development built for the miners’ families in Bestwood (i.e. Eastwood). The Lawrences lived in the Breach (i.e. The Bottoms), at what is today 28 Garden Road, between 1887 and 1891: “The dwelling room, the kitchen, was at the back of the house, facing inward between the blocks, looking at a scrubby back garden, and then at the ash-­pits” (SL, 10). The bourgeois Mrs Morel paid more than everybody else to have that little garden, a piece of nature, representing to her a substitute human lover to own and love, and a status symbol. She fought all her life to free her children from the brutal social conditions and the squalor that the industrial society was imposing on people.

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Her husband did not understand her because there had never been any organic rhythm in his life. His days were spent in the unnatural darkness of the mines, while the nights were spent drinking at the local pub, the “Moon and Stars” (i.e. the “Three Tuns”). He was a victim of the mechanical, ugly world of the collieries, while their son Paul, too, during a visit to Nottingham to look for a job, felt trapped by the industrial system: “Already he was the prisoner of industrialism . . . His freedom in the beloved home valley, was going now” (SL, 114–15). But at first the landscape had been hardly altered by the small gin-­pits: “The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle, round a gin” (SL, 9). As Sinzelle points out: Lawrence dealt with the colliers in a kind of impersonal, detached way. In fact, out of the 500 pages or so of the novel, the descriptions of the collieries could be gathered in three or four pages at the most.8

Those few pages include the fact that, about 60 years later, “a sudden change took place” when “The gin-­pits were elbowed aside by the large mines of the financiers . . . new mines were sunk, until soon there were six pits working . . . six mines like black studs on the countryside, linked by a loop of fine chain, the railway” (SL, 9–10). Apart from that, “there is not a single reference to the ugliness of the mines.”9 In any case, this “marriage” between mines and railway, which contributed to create what Lawrence later called his “coal-­blasted countryside,” and affected the psycho-­emotional balance of the community, leads us straight to The Rainbow.

The Rainbow Lawrence’s biographer Mark Kinkead-Weekes stresses how accurate Lawrence is about historical details when describing the social changes that took place in Britain between 1840 and 1905. In accordance with the tradition of Thomas Hardy, Kinkead-Weekes says that Lawrence thought he could write a better beginning of The Rainbow “by setting his characters against a ‘great background’, archetypal yet also precisely located in space and date on the Notts–Derby borderland he knew so well.”10 And, in fact, this is what we find in the fourth and final version of The Rainbow, written between November 1914 and March 1915: The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm . . . About 1840, a canal was constructed across the meadows of the Marsh Farm, connecting the newly opened collieries of the Erewash Valley . . . The Brangwens received a fair sum of money from this trespass across their land. A short time afterwards, a colliery was sunk on the other side of the canal, and in a while

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D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity the Midland Railway came down the valley at the foot of the Ilkeston hill, and the invasion was complete. R, 9, 13

This is how the new world enters into the Brangwens’ property and breaks the equilibrium between three generations of their family and their land. As Lawrence says from the opening sentences of the novel, they became conscious of the existence of “something unknown, about which they were eager” (R, 9). But, while the men continued to respect the pulsing of the seasons, the women wished to come into contact with the “spoken world beyond” (R, 10). Tom Brangwen, the youngest in the family, is just beginning to be aware that “[t]here was a life so different from what he knew it” (R, 25), and also that his beloved agricultural world was in a process of dissolution. Finally, the last section of the novel deals with Ursula’s upbringing. She becomes a teacher and finds her independence only through her profession. Therefore, after three generations, she makes the dream, which had been also Lydia’s and Anna’s, come true. But to her disappointment this change makes her lose her identity. So, like Birkin in Women in Love, she returns to nature as a consolation for her disappointment. But, most importantly, it is through her that the transformation of society from a rural into an industrial one is completed. At a practical level, this radical change is represented by the use of different means of transportation as technological progress advances: Tom used to go to the market place by cart, Skrebensky went to Ursula’s by car, and she travelled to Ilkeston by electric tramcar. This shows that there was a gradual and harmonious detachment from nature, appropriate to the naturally rhythmic farm environment, as was the case with the close connection between the intimate physical world and the exterior natural world during the first generation: “They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels . . . Their life and inter-­relations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil” (R, 10). Indeed, nature, which had been a shelter in The White Peacock, took an even more active role in The Rainbow, whereas the mine became an overwhelming presence detached from the mansion of the colliery-­manager with which the only link was economical. Colliers hanging about in gangs and groups, or passing along the asphalt pavements heavily to work, seemed not like living people, but like spectres . . . The pit was the great mistress . . . The pit was the main show, the raison d’être of all. R, 320, 324

In that ghastly scenario, so clearly described by Ursula, the miners are resigned to be slaves of their work, while the women have accepted their men as they are and become used to the problems created by the capitalist system that prevails even over sentiments. She knows that the person responsible for that ghostly

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reality is her uncle and, when she tells him that perhaps they could do without the mines, he retorts, “ ‘They [the miners] know they are sold to their job’ ” (R, 324), meaning that the mines have a charming, destructive attraction to them. “There was a horrible fascination in it—human bodies and lives subjected in slavery to that symmetric monster of the colliery. There was a swooning, perverse satisfaction in it. For a moment she was dizzy” (ibid.). Nevertheless, Ursula, after expressing all her hatred for the hypocrisy of an exemplary representative of the modern life-­destroying system like her uncle, concludes on a note of mystical hope and joy as “she saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away . . .” (R, 459). In Roger Ebbatson’s words: The apocalyptic moment of Ursula’s vision of the rainbow . . . may stand as a moving epitome of Lawrence’s reconciliation of scientific and romantic apprehensions of Nature upon the anvil of his creative will.11

Women in Love Women in Love (1920) is a sequel to The Rainbow, following the love stories of Ursula and her sister Gudrun. From the opening pages, when they are walking in Beldover (i.e. Eastwood), we are introduced into that world described at the end of The Rainbow, which Lawrence would like to be “swept away.” But Gudrun is strangely fascinated by that and says to her sister: ‘It is like a country in an underworld,’ . . . ‘The colliers bring it above-­ground with them, shovel it up. Ursula, it’s marvellous . . . The people are all ghouls, and everything is ghostly . . . It’s like being mad, Ursula.’ WL, 11

When Lawrence visited his sister Ada in Derbyshire, in December 1915, he saw for himself that the colliers were depressed by production and salary problems, resulting from the clash between two opposite forms of capitalism: the paternalistic and humanitarian vs. the modern money- and production-­ minded, as represented by the old industrial magnate Thomas Crich, and his son Gerald, respectively. But, as Bridget Pugh quite rightly remarks, the change was far from abrupt as it results from Lawrence’s interpretation aiming “to emphasise Gerald’s inhumanity.”12 Gradually Gerald got hold of everything. And then began the great reform . . . The electricity was carried to every mine. New machinery was brought from America, such as the mines had never seen before . . . Everything was run on the most accurate and delicate scientific method, educated and expert men

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D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity were in control everywhere, the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments. WL, 230

In reality, when Lawrence was writing Women in Love, the bourgeois power was introducing a new method of oppression: the proletariat was deprived of its traditions, creative capability, and culture, while the new bourgeois values were imposed on the workers, such as making money and productivity. It is not incidental, then, that Lawrence, in his Study of Thomas Hardy (1914), wonders: “Do we use the machine to produce goods for our need, or is it used as a muck-­rake for raking together heaps of money?” (STH, 36). Meanwhile, the myth of the machine was arising and people found themselves crushed by a social system created by a few. One of them was Gerald, who lost his humanness in the oppressor–oppressed dichotomy, in which he enjoyed the only thing he had left—the sadistic pleasure of running his terrible game. Thus, he becomes the character who carries the weight of the destructive modern nihilism, as exemplified by his death from freezing in a glacier in the Alps. Very different from him is Birkin, Lawrence’s alter ego, who hates the modern world and cannot find a place for himself. One night he takes Ursula for a ride, and, as he slows down, she whispers: “ ‘Where are we?’ ” He replies: “ ‘In Sherwood Forest.’ It was evident he knew the place.” Then he stopped. “ ‘We will stay here,’ ” he said “ ‘and put out the lights’ ” (WL, 320). John Alcorn comments: Birkin has at last located the modern English Eden: it is the forest home of the pastoral ballad hero-­rebel, Robin Hood. . . . Birkin knows that this is the pastoral place of freedom, the setting of Genesis . . . In the darkness of Sherwood Forest, in the Book of Genesis, when the ‘earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’13

Eventually, towards the end of the novel, Birkin asks Ursula to go with him to his cottage at Strelley Mill (i.e. Felley Mill). Thus “they decided, when they woke again from the pure swoon, to write their resignations from the world of work there and then” (WL, 316). Except for them, all the other characters are unable to withdraw into nature and avoid the destructive forces of history; therefore, they are more frustrated than those we have met in the previous novels. In Women in Love, Lawrence faces the problem of alienation as a distinctive element of modern society, which is why it is the only novel without a pastoral figure. Despite that, there is sometimes a personified connection with nature, which is an integral part of it and not a mere embellishment. That is the case when Ursula wonders what the trees and flowers think of the “ ‘strange motion in the air’ ” (WL, 22), caused by the bells ringing at Gerald’s sister’s wedding, or, when Gudrun is fascinated by “the motion on the bosom of the water” (WL, 47), created by Gerald swimming in the lake. But Women in Love is the last novel in

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which we can still detect the influence of the Nature tradition, going back to Hardy and Jefferies, even if it is not as strong as in The Rainbow. Be that as it may, after the inexhaustible search for “blood consciousness,” Lawrence, in the last years of his life, wrote works such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “marking an imaginative return to this tradition.”14

Lady Chatterley’s Lover After the General Strike of May 1926, the British Parliament passed a law allowing longer working hours and lower pay. Again, Lawrence visited his family and saw for himself the effects of the social turmoil that followed, which he wrote about soon after in “Return to Bestwood” (i.e. Eastwood), saying, “I feel a doom over the country, and a shadow of despair over the hearts of the men, which leaves me no rest . . .” (LEA, 22). This hopeless vision of the reality made him feel so distressed and nostalgic about the places of his youth, as he acknowledges in a letter to Rolf Gardiner, dated December 3, 1926: Go to Walker St . . . Then walk down the fields to the Breach, and in the corner house facing the stile I lived from 1 to 6 . . . When you’ve crossed the brook, turn to the right (the White Peacock farm) through Felley Mill gate, and go up the footpath to Annesley . . . That’s the country of my heart. Letters 5, 592

When Lawrence wrote that, he had already returned to Italy. He was in Scandicci (Florence), where he began the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. That was like closing a circle to him. After spending a lifetime travelling the world, he set his last novel back in the Eastwood area, just where he had begun with The White Peacock. Both novels not only share the same setting, they have other aspects in common, such as a gamekeeper, a wood, and a woman who has to choose between an industrial magnate and a “natural man.” Yet the two stories are so different in their respective developments. In The White Peacock, Lettie chooses Leslie, the entrepreneur, and not Annabel, the gamekeeper; in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie goes for the gamekeeper, Mellors. These characters reflect the contrast between two opposite environments, which still coexist in the same district: “There was no communication between Wragby Hall and Tevershall village—none . . . Gulf impassable, and a quiet sort of resentment on either side” (LCL, 14). In fact, there is economic and social hostility between the mining village and the master’s mansion, Wragby Hall. The miners detest Sir Clifford in Lady Chatterley, just like they hate Gerald Crich in Women in Love, because both of them introduce electrification to the mines, thus creating a surplus of colliers who would lose their jobs. Most importantly, the story in Lady Chatterley takes place within a few miles in a Lawrentian microcosm, symbolizing Western civilization, which had

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Figure 1  “The Country of My Heart” © David Amos

degenerated into a mere mechanical and economic relationship. Lawrence acknowledges this as late as 1929: “The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-­made England is so vile” (LEA, 291). But as well as the men above, the excavations down in the pits undermine Sherwood’s soil, while the flora and fauna are gradually disappearing because the venomous fumes and the smuts falling down from the sky menace them. Nevertheless, in the “sacred” Lawrentian wood, the mystery of life goes on through the annual fertility cycle of the trees, flowers, and animals, embodied in the relationship between Mellors and Connie. With reference to all that, here is an illuminating citation from an ecocritically-­centred essay by Terry Gifford: When Constance Chatterley tries to describe to her sister the experience of her relationship with Oliver Mellors, she says that their love makes her feel that she is living ‘in the very middle of creation.’ To an ecocritic this is a striking image of a fulfilled human life that is fully integrated into the wider life of nature as an organic part of a larger whole.15

Most interestingly, if we compare the first two versions of the novel, where the industrial world imposed itself, with the third version, we find that in the third there is a certain pastoral mood or, rather, a fairytale atmosphere, featuring Mellors as a some sort of Prince Charming, who lives alone in an idyllic shelter in the wood, and conquers his master’s wife. He and Lady Chatterley, like their counterparts, Gudrun and Birkin in Women in Love, search for salvation in isolation and intimacy with nature, away from a degraded society, but away also from the real problems of everyday life. In contrast, Clifford and Gerald, the two industrial magnates, are a perfect match, responsible for the overall decay; they are the typical supermen, for whom Lawrence is indebted to Nietzsche and

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Carlyle. Both of them, on becoming slaves to their machines, reach their self-­ destruction, while alienating their colliers whom they see as mechanical “things” to be manipulated as they wish. Clifford has virtually lost any sense of humanity, so we never see him as a man who has suffered, and hence, deserving of our sympathy. Unlike him, Mellors is full of humanity and lives immersed in the wood, which is a spatial metaphor of the natural order. This reminds us of what Lawrence says in “Pan in America”: What can a man do with his life but live it? And what does life consist in, save a vivid relatedeness between the man and the living universe that surrounds him. MM, 160

Sherwood Forest is a place of regeneration for Lady Chatterley too. Actually, she goes from Wragby (death) to the hut (life), just as was the case in Sons and Lovers with Paul, going from Bestwood to Willey Farm. But she does not avoid contact with the miners, she even asks to be driven through the colliery district to see for herself what the situation is like. She is filled with anguish on observing the colliers and the forlorn nature, and says: “Ah God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men?” (LCL, 153). Then she remarks that “The industrial England blots out the agricultural England . . . And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical” (LCL, 156). This anticipates Mellors’s conclusion when, on observing the surrounding industrial environment, he concludes that it represents the cause of all the evils and problems of modern society: The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines . . . there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. LCL, 119

Although Mellors is worried about the future, he finds the energy to envisage a new life for himself and Connie. So, at the end of the novel, he writes her a letter presenting his utopian message of salvation also for the masses: “If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend, they could manage very happily on twenty-­five shillings” (LCL, 299).

Conclusion The novels analyzed above are certainly effective in their picturing of British society in transition. Lawrence offers a personal view of life through a vivid impression of human relationships against the social background of his time,

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where a deracinated group of individuals supplanted the close community lifestyle. But he was an incorrigible lifelong dreamer who, a few months before dying, wrote what sounds very much like an act of faith: I was born nearly forty-­four years ago, in Eastwood, a mining village . . . To me it seemed, and still seems, an extremely beautiful countryside . . . To me, as a child and a young man, it was still the old England of the forest and agricultural past; there were no motor-­cars, the mines were, in a sense, an accident in the landscape, and Robin Hood and his merry men were not very far away. LEA, 287

On a personal note, when I visited the “country of my heart” in 2017, I realized it still looks semi-­industrial, fields alternating with buildings. It contains in itself, as Lawrence thought, the key change of modern Britain: the passage from agricultural openness to an industrialized habitat. But, as prophetically as ever, he foresaw the damage looming ahead and tried to convince mankind to regain contact with the beauty and serenity of Nature. With regard to that, the Rev. J. A. Bramley pointed out: “these were the only real things to him in a world that he found otherwise unendurable.”16 Notably, after 1973 when the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess coined the term “deep ecology” and helped to describe its theoretical basis, this interest in searching for an intimate relationship with Nature and the awareness that it was about time to begin to respect all living creatures led to a rapidly growing environmental concern which has even made ecology change its perspective from a strictly scientific to a more socially and even literary one. So, researchers such as the Swedish Anne Odenbring Ehlert have developed an ecocritical approach in their interpretation of literary texts. Ehlert has analyzed some typically Lawrentian thematic elements, involving primitivism as opposed to a highly scientific world, which in her words helps her to illustrate: how Lawrence’s texts convey a visionary philosophy which rests on the cornerstones of modern ecological thinking . . . holism, anti-­anthropocentrism and a shift towards a more ethically informed view of life.17

As an accompaniment to that, it is equally interesting to note what Ehlert had written only a few years earlier: The anthropocentric laissez-­faire attitude which disclaims all responsibility for the earth is seen by modern ecologists as the main reason for our present situation of ecological imbalance.18

Unfortunately, all of Lawrence’s admonitions have been virtually ignored, and the planet’s ecological balance has been nearly broken. Therefore, we cannot but

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acknowledge the continuous relevance of the questions he attempted to raise, the warnings he tried to sound about all the problems that industrialism was going to create, and the alternatives he tried to explore. We can only hope it is not too late to get new bearings and start to experience our own lives as an integral part of the living earth, and also respect all the other species, systems, and natural processes within Lawrence’s polyphonic consonance of the “living universe.”

Notes 1 Paul Delany, “D. H. Lawrence and Deep Ecology,” An Official Journal of the College English Association, 55, 2 (1993): 29. 2 Leo Salter, “Lawrence and the Environment; the Poetics of Honesty and Despair,” Études Lawrenciennes, 14–15 (1997): 175–86. 3 Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” in The Selected Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. F. Randolph Ludovico (Padova: Biblioteca Cakravati, 2014), 13, 15. 4 Raymond Williams, “D. H. Lawrence.” Culture & Society 1780–1950. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, 1960), 213–30. 5 Fiona Becket, “Ecological Concerns: A Poetics of Responsibility in D. H. Lawrence,” Études Lawrenciennes, 29 (2003): 23–38. 6 The citation is taken from my personal communication with various people I interviewed in Nottingham, as it appears in my unpublished post-­graduate thesis (Rome, 1975: 205). 7 Claude Sinzelle, The Geographical Background of the Early Works of D. H. Lawrence (Paris: Didier, 1963), 47. 8 Ibid., 60. 9 Ibid., 65. 10 Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 167. 11 Roger Ebbatson, Lawrence and the Nature Tradition: A Theme in English Fiction 1859–1914 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980), 260. 12 Bridget Pugh, “Lawrence and Industrial Symbolism,” Renaissance and Modern Studies, eds. James T. Boulton, Richard A. Cardwell, Peter Coveney, XXIX, 34 (1985): 34. 13 John Alcorn, “Lawrence: A Version of the Pastoral,” in The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence (London: Macmillan, 1977), 97. 14 Ebbatson, Lawrence and the Nature Tradition, 242. 15 Terry Gifford, “Flowers as ‘Other’, then ‘other,’ in The White Peacock and Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 3, 3 (2014): 71. 16 J. A. Bramley, “The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence,” The Hibbert Journal, 58 (1959): 284. 17 Anne Odenbring Ehlert, “Feeding a Fire of Change: The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Sweden,” in The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Europe, eds. Christa Jansohn and Dieter Mehl (London: Continuum, 2007), 242. 18 Anne Odenbring Ehlert, “There’s a Bad Time Coming”: Ecological Vision in the Fiction of D. H. Lawrence (Philadelphia: Coronet Books Inc., 1999), 182.

“C ollier s i s a D i s contented L ot ”: “ t he M iner at H ome ” in the N at i on and the 1 9 1 2 N ational C oal S tri k e Annalise Grice

As D. H. Lawrence began making the transition from full-­time schoolteacher to professional writer in February 1912, he turned his attention to dramatizing the industrial communities of the English Midlands, producing a series of at least four “journalistic” sketches (Letters 1, 376) in response to the 1912 National Coal Strike.1 To date, minimal critical attention has been paid to Lawrence’s engagement with newspaper journalism, yet reading texts in the context in which they were first published allows us to gain a deeper insight into their appeal to a contemporary readership.2 This chapter contextualizes Lawrence’s little-­known sketch “The Miner at Home,” which documents a bitter domestic argument between a miner, Bower, and his wife, Gertie, who hold opposing views on the strike. As well as providing a reading of the text as it appeared in the London Nation newspaper, it argues that, by using his knowledge of conditions in Eastwood in order to produce topical sketches, Lawrence explored ways of breaking into journalism at a time when he needed to increase his exposure in print and earn money to sustain his emergent career. Assisted by advances in printing technologies and the growth of syndication, in the last three decades of the nineteenth century the expanding market for short fiction printed in newspapers helped to increase press circulation figures, and writers had a greater number of opportunities to supply copy addressing the latest social, industrial, and political issues. This chapter does not intend to explore Lawrence’s mercurial political viewpoints on strike action (this subject has been discussed by Macdonald Daly in relation to “The Industrial Magnate” chapter of Women in Love, and Touch and Go).3 Rather, I am interested in Lawrence’s attentiveness to the requirements of the print marketplace. By February 1912 D. H. Lawrence had published four short stories and several poetry sequences and reviews in the respected literary journal the English Review.4 The White Peacock had been published by Heinemann and Duffield in London and New York in January 1911 and, with the assistance of Edward Garnett, two poems (“Lightning” and the dialect verse “Violets”) had appeared in the Nation on November 4, 1911. Lawrence’s literary career had

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begun well but was progressing fairly slowly; he had written much more than he had been able to publish and he was keen to open up new and varied publication opportunities for his work. So when his poetry was printed in its pages he was particularly “pleased to get a footing in the Nation. It is a sixpenny weekly, of very good standing” (Letters 1, 324).5 Shortly after a visit to Garnett’s home, The Cearne, on the weekend of November 18 (when Garnett had set up a meeting between Lawrence and R. A. Scott James, literary editor of the Daily News), Lawrence became ill with double pneumonia and his doctor advised him against continuing his teaching career (Letters 1, 328, n. 1). On February 28, 1912 he resigned from his teaching post in Croydon and returned to Eastwood, living in Queen’s Square with his father, Arthur, his sisters, Ada and Emily, Emily’s husband, Sam, and their young daughter, Margaret (Peggy). Almost overnight, Lawrence lost his teaching career and his full time wage; on February 4 he had also broken off his engagement to Louie Burrows, citing his poor health, lack of stable income, and concern that they were “not well suited” (Letters 1, 361). Croydon had offered him close proximity to London, where he had socialized among literary circles since Fall 1909. Now dislocated, he would have to work much harder to maintain his literary connections, which is why Garnett’s practical advice was so important. Since Lawrence now had to rely solely on his income from writing, with Garnett’s encouragement he turned to writing short sketches while he made late-­stage revisions to The Trespasser and worked on his “Colliery novel,” then entitled “Paul Morel.”6 Lawrence’s return to Eastwood coincided with the National Coal Strike, which offered him the chance to exploit his skills in observational realism and draw on his intimate knowledge of mining life. The first sketch, “The Miner at Home,” was written by February 14 and sent immediately to Garnett. Lawrence hoped his mentor might be able to use his connections to place it with Liberal “clubland” newspapers the Nation or the Saturday Westminster Gazette (whose target readers were gentlemen relaxing in their clubs after work). Lawrence commented that “The colliery one à propos the Strike, might go down” (Letters 1, 366). Garnett had reviewed fiction for the Nation under the editorship of H. W. Massingham since 1907. The paper was launched that year in order to support Liberal party politics after the Liberals’ success in the 1906 General Election. The Nation accepted Lawrence’s sketch for publication in a regular column entitled “Short Studies” on March 16, 1912. An outline of the historical background to the sketch is necessary to better understand the meaning it held for its first readers. In 1900 the coal industry provided over 90 per cent of Britain’s energy requirements and accounted for 45 per cent of total exports. In 1911, 264 million tons of coal were produced, at the expense of the lives of 1700 miners.7 The National Federation of Miners passed a resolution in 1910 that employers would be petitioned “to demand a fair living wage to be paid to all miners working in abnormal places.”8 Men working difficult, “abnormal” seams were paid at the same rate as men in easier places, and, due to explosions, falls of ground, and shaft accidents, injuries were

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much more frequent underground than on the surface. There was no uniformity in working conditions and earnings depended more on the physical character of individual pits than on the efficiency of miners. The existing piece-­rate system of pay, in which miners were paid a set amount for their productivity, satisfied the coal owners but disadvantaged men working on challenging seams and those who were older or less physically able. The resolution would be to achieve a fixed minimum daily wage for all, which became the focus of the 1912 National Coal Strike. The country was in a revolutionary fervor: demonstrating dock and transport workers and rail strikes in 1911 had shown the effect that direct action could have on employers anxious about their profit margins. A national shutdown of the mines could bring the country and its economy to a standstill: factories, mills, private and public utilities, shipping, and the railways were all coal powered.9 In January 1912 the Federation balloted all of its members: “Are you in favour of giving notice to establish a minimum wage for every man and boy working underground in the mines of Great Britain?” It could take as long as three months before a strike was declared official, during which time the union’s officials attempted to negotiate a settlement. Coal owners were concerned about how to quantify a “fair day’s work” and argued that a minimum wage would discourage efficiency, but a majority in favor of strike action was reached. Three weeks later, on February 7, a meeting between the Executive of the Federation and coal owning representatives met at the Westminster Palace Hotel in London. It ended in deadlock. From February 12 to 14 the Federation issued its strike notices and the Liberal Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, intervened to suggest that agreements could be reached at district level. This proposal was thrown out and strike action was enforced, beginning on February 26 at Alfreton in Derbyshire and reaching Eastwood by February 28.10 By March 1 the national stoppage was complete and more than a million men were out. According to Roger Moore, the Nottinghamshire Miner’s Association (NMA, founded 1881) “followed a policy of cautious moderation”; they had been keen to secure total union membership of the county’s workforce, but in the years up to 1914, between 13 and 20 per cent of the workforce remained outside the union.11 The reaction of the Nottinghamshire miners was less forceful than in regions such as Yorkshire and South Wales; the issue of “abnormal places” was less of a problem in the Nottinghamshire pits, where pay rates already exceeded the 5 shillings per day fixed by the National Federation. Although Nottinghamshire voted strongly in favor of strike action (17,086 for, 5,386 against), the majority was below the four to one average for the Federation as a whole and approximately 30 per cent of the membership failed to vote.12 In Yorkshire and Wales the majority stood at six to one and five to one respectively.13 Lawrence, then, wrote “The Miner at Home” in the midst of these tensions, just as the strike notices were being circulated. It was published in the Nation three days before Asquith introduced the Minimum Wage Bill for its first reading in the House of Commons on March 19. Lawrence therefore wrote the

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sketch without knowing how long the strike would last and what would come of the action. It would have been read at a time when the Government was in a vulnerable position, with coal owners and miners at bitter stalemate, and the country at a standstill. Staging a domestic argument about the strike between a miner, Bower, and his wife, Gertie, “The Miner at Home” records a set of very specific social and domestic concerns that both characterize and transcend the Eastwood region of its setting. Read alongside further articles and letters debating industrial action in the pages of the Nation, its concerns were of urgent importance to every household in Britain. The objective style in which the sketch is written mimics the measured stance that the Nation took on the strike action. In its “Diary of the Week,” published alongside Lawrence’s sketch, the Nation outlines the situation to its readers: We cannot report either that the strike is over, or that there is an evident prospect of a speedy close. It has indeed now entered on a stage which seems to promise a lengthened and detailed consideration of the miners’ schedule, and a result under which the strike will end district by district rather than en bloc. As the accumulated stocks of coal are large, there is still no urgent national pressure on masters and men, though towns which depend vitally upon coal supplies, like Cardiff, Stoke, and Dudley, are clearly suffering, and it seems that about half a million workers outside the miners’ industry are unemployed. With one or two exceptions order has been admirably preserved . . . The Government are doing all they can.14

The Nation’s adoption of a relatively impartial, Liberal stance angered some of its readers. In a “Letter to the Editor” from Emrys Hughes, “a regular reader” of the Nation and “an inhabitant of a mining village in the heart of the South Wales coalfield,” the newspaper is lambasted for its meek response: “It would be more just, more honorable, and more courageous if the more democratic journals were to encourage the miner in his fight, if only by a few words of kindly sympathy.”15 In the same number in which Hughes’s letter appears, the economist J. A. Hobson argues for State nationalization of the mines: “a private firm, competing for a ‘living’ profit, may be forced to such damaging economies” as employing workers on an insufficient wage, yet “miners are not natural anarchists, but ordinary working Britons, ready to do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”16 According to Hobson, miners would have fewer grievances if they worked in “properly administered” public service rather than for private business. Lawrence offers a similarly even-­handed approach. He gives equal voice to Bower and Gertie using the form of a dialog, as they respectively put forward arguments for and against the strike. The exchange is presented in broad dialect, which was perhaps deliberately estranging for a middle-­class London readership; Lawrence demonstrates just how much of an outsider the

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metropolitan reader is to the complex social reality of these debates. The dialog gradually takes over the sketch so that the narrator becomes almost redundant, which allows Lawrence to refrain from inflecting third-­party moral commentary and to maintain its engaging dramatic qualities, giving the reader an immediate response to the characters’ arguments. The sketch begins, however, with Bower’s silence. He has returned home from the mine and sits eating his dinner while Gertie attends to their three young children. The narrator tells us that Gertie is quietly mindful of her husband’s mood: she had “ascertained, by a few shrewd glances at his heavy brows and his blue eyes . . . that he was only pondering” (LAH, 123).17 Although focalized through the narrator, the reiteration of the passage of time (“He smoked a solemn pipe until six o’clock . . . ‘Don’t you want to wash yourself?’ she asked, grudgingly, at six o’clock.”) is Gertie’s observation, as she seeks some response from an inert and brooding Bower. We are told that he is “really a good husband,” but he does not notice when Gertie is tired and “irritable at the end of the long day” (ibid.). Domestic life is fraught with danger: the “kicking” baby is “barricaded” on to the sofa with pillows, and we view Gertie from six-­year-old Jack’s perspective as she towers over him with her “grey eyes flashing,” holding “a great panchion” (ibid.) full of scalding water for Bower’s hearthside bath. Gertie is so exhausted by her domestic duties that she becomes careless of her children’s safety, and is criticized by Bower for ladling boiling water into the panchion before adding any cold. She is resentful of the energetic children, threatening to squash Jack with the panchion and repeatedly drawing her head away from the “cruel little baby-­clasp” (LAH, 124). Gertie washes Bower’s back with one hand while holding the baby, and the narrative concentrates on his appealing physicality: “The red firelight shone on his cap of white soap, and on the muscles of his back, on the strange working of his red and white muscular arms, that flashed up and down like individual creatures” (ibid.). Any tenderness that may develop between the couple is interrupted by the children, and Bower appeals to Gertie for her full attention: “ ‘Canna ter put th’ childt down an’ use both hands’ ” (ibid.). As Gertie removes his pit dirt, his mood brightens; she “rubbed her husband’s back till it grew pink, whilst Bower quivered with pleasure” (ibid.). The moment of intimacy prompts Bower to open up to his wife about the slip of paper he has received from Bill Andrews, the union representative. It reads: February 14th, 1912. To the Manager — I hereby give notice to leave your employment fourteen days from above date. Signed—LAH, 125

The date given on this strike notice records when Lawrence wrote and sent the sketch to Garnett; the Eastwood miners did indeed officially go on strike

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fourteen days later, so Lawrence must have written the sketch immediately after hearing about the ballot. Gertie is opposed to any suggestion that the miners should go on strike, and makes her stance immediately clear to Bower: “ ‘tha’rt not goin’ to sign it.’ ” She points out that “ ‘This, ill ma’e th’ third strike as we’ve had sin’ we’ve been married; an’ a fat lot th’ better for it you are, arena you?’ ” (ibid.). The collieries of the Barber Walker Company had been closed from January to March 1908, and June to November 1910, which had created “ ‘that much bad blood . . . atween th’ mesters an’ th’ men as there isn’t a thing but what’s askew’ ” (ibid.). The general perception on both sides was that there was little for the Nottinghamshire miners to gain from taking action. As the owners of five pits in the area at that date (Brinsley, Underwood, Moorgreen, High Park, and Watnall) employing a total of around 2,750 staff, Barber Walker were, according to historical accounts, among the more progressive of coal owners.18 They employed popular managers, built better quality housing stock, and created a paternalistic “company town” model based on the idea that social investment was better for business. The Company funded the building of the Eastwood and Greasley Mechanics’ and Artizans’ Institute that was to boast a well-­stocked library and meeting space, they established a Collieries’ Cricket Club, gave money and coal to Sunday Schools, and held high public profiles, becoming involved in local politics: the Chairman from 1897, T. P. Barber (considered to be a model for Gerald Crich in Women in Love), stood as a Conservative candidate on the Nottinghamshire County Council, taking over the Newthorpe seat from his uncle in 1904.19 The Company’s General Manager, Edward Lindley, was elected to the Urban District Council in 1905; on his death six weeks later, Lawrence’s friend the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser columnist and well-­known socialist Willie Hopkin became his successor and encouraged a miner, Thomas Ball, to stand for election.20 As a result of T. P. Barber’s reforms, in 1905 the company invested in new coal-­cutting machinery (replacing hand holing) and installed a £20,000 power station at Moorgreen; this led to considerable changes in working conditions and pay, and strike action broke out in early 1907.21 Although mining had been a flourishing industry in Eastwood, and the colliery owners had brought beneficial infrastructure to the area, by 1908 the industry was suffering from the effects of recession and prices of coal fell by 13 per cent between 1908 and 1910.22 As a result of ongoing arguments about the coal-­cutting machinery (which made large numbers of “holers” dispensable), in June 1910 Barber Walker issued termination of employment notices to 1500 employees.23 When discussions about further strike action ensued in early 1912, miners and their families had already faced five years of almost continual industrial unrest and were deeply frustrated and financially straitened. These circumstances allow us to better understand the arguments set out in “The Miner at Home” in which, for Gertie, strike action could only be the cause of more resentment and struggle. Bower is cowed by the strength of her reaction, arguing that regardless of his individual vote, “ ‘t’others will’ ” opt to

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come out (LAH, 125). He “squirm[s] uneasily,” but then finds a counterargument, making recourse to the national rather than the regional to stress that the matter really is out of his hands: “ ‘It’s not on’y here; it’s all ower th’ country alike,’ he gloated.” Gertie retorts with her knowledge of national developments: “ ‘Yes; it’s them blessed Yorkshire an’ Welsh colliers as does it. They’re that bug nowadays, what wi’ talkin’ an’ spoutin’, they hardly know which side their back-­ side hangs’ ” (ibid.). Growing increasingly irate, Gertie “thrust[s] the baby into his arms,” (ibid.) removes the bowl of black suds and mends the fire, returning to expand on her argument. “ ‘Ben Haseldine said, an he’s a union man—he told me when he come for th’ union money yesterday, as th’ men doesn’t want to come out—not our men. It’s th’ union’ ” (LAH, 126). Indeed, a column in the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser of January 12, 1912 accused the NMA officials of being responsible for stirring up strike action, and, after the strike notices were handed in by the men, the Advertiser claimed on February 16 that “another stoppage is viewed with awe by those who know full well that the district has not yet recovered from the previous dislocation of trade.”24 Gertie initially states that “ ‘colliers is a discontented lot, as doesn’t know what they do want,’ ” (LAH, 125) but then she moves from distancing herself from the men to converging with them, referring to “ ‘our men’ ” (LAH, 126). She involves herself directly in the concerns of the community of mine workers, at the same time as she draws attention to regional differences in attitudes toward taking national action. Gertie’s inclusion of wives into the conversation, along with the revelation that she has been speaking to Haseldine about the possibility of strike action and its political context, riles Bower. He denies her a part in it, and ignores the fact that she has been getting her information from a man: “ ‘Tha knows nowt about it, woman. It’s a’ woman’s jabber, from beginnin’ to end’ ” (LAH, 126). Now the argument has become a gendered matter and the power relations between the two are emphasized, with Bower attempting—and failing—to silence Gertie. Her indomitable candor is notable in the context of the sketch’s publication in the Nation, which was pro-­suffrage. An article entitled “The Prospects of Woman Suffrage” of March 2 argued that women should get the vote “at once” and should be “eligible for Parliament and the highest offices of the State.”25 In 1912 militant suffragism was at its peak, which may account for the sense of danger and discontent surrounding Gertie as she performs her daily chores. That year, a hesitant Prime Minister Asquith was pressed to allow a free vote on an amendment to a pending reform bill to give women the vote, but the amendment was deemed to change the nature of the bill and was later withdrawn, which served as further provocation for the suffragettes. Gertie responds, “ ‘You don’t intend us to know. Who wants th’ Minimum Wage? Butties doesn’t. There th’ butties ’ll be, havin’ to pay seven shillin’ a day to men as ’appen isn’t worth a penny more than five’ ” (LAH, 126). Here, Gertie voices the arguments of the “mesters,” which sets her apart from her husband and his friends: rather than taking the ideal wifely role of intimate confidante,

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Gertie appears to Bower as yet another owner of his body, pressing him into hard physical labor. The passing of the children between the two of them symbolizes both their necessary cooperation and the weary weight of their arguments: while Gertie feels enslaved to the domestic labor of childbirth, childrearing, and keeping house and husband, Bower is dominated by the requirement to provide for his family by subjecting himself to rulings from above and appeasing his wife and colleagues, whose opinions often diverge. The unity conventionally ascribed to coalmining communities simplifies a far more complex reality. In the face of Gertie’s well-­informed arguments, which indicate that she has heard of developments in other mining regions, Bower can only assert that she has “ ‘got it off ’am-­pat . . . Tha talks like a woman as knows nowt.’ ” Arguing that “ ‘We want a livin’ wage,’ ” he then focuses the argument on Gertie’s own living conditions: “ ‘Who does more chunterin’ than thee when it’s a short wik, an’ tha gets ’appen a scroddy twenty-­two shillin’?’ ” (ibid.). Bower discloses the irony that her “pay” from his wage packet is also non-­standardized and insufficient. Economic affairs dominate the household and both partners realize that the domestic sphere is inseparable from Bower’s workplace concerns; neither of them ultimately have the power to change these conditions. While Bower feels that Gertie should therefore act in solidarity with the miners and the national movement instead of viewing him as merely a cog in a machine, Gertie resents his lack of consideration for her domestic labor (from which she cannot go on strike) and asserts that he cannot control her opinions: “ ‘Tha thinks ’cause tha gi’es me a lousy thirty shillin’ reg’lar tha’rt th’ best man i’ th’ Almighty world. Tha mun be waited on han’ an’ foot, an’ sided wi’ whativer tha’ says. But I’m not!’ ” (LAH, 127). Both make appeals for the other to recognize their individuality and their attempts to claim some agency from powerless positions. They are vulnerable to decisions taken from above and play out their anxieties with one another. The difference is that Bower can put on his boots and go out, presumably to the public house where his likeminded colleagues are waiting for him, whereas Gertie, a solitary figure, “rock[s] herself with vexation and weariness” (ibid.). In this scene two responses to industrialism are played out: on the one hand, cooperation with the employer in order to retain a much-­needed job (submitting to the patriarchal aspirations of the “company town” model), and on the other, confrontational uprising. Within their own scenario of domestic bondage, Gertie can talk back to Bower, but still she advocates cooperation. In writing “The Miner at Home,” Lawrence likely made use of similar arguments debated between Lawrence’s father (then aged 64 and working part time as a dayman at Brinsley colliery) and sisters. Back in January 1911, in the aftermath of the 1910 strike action, Lawrence had appealed to the Reverend Robert Reid to intervene on his behalf when “trouble” began between Ada and Arthur: “Last week he earned 28/6, and of this kept 6/8 . . . This week he has done only 2½ days’ work, so will have very little money” (Letters 1, 219–20). The industrial action was a continued source of heated debate among the family: in a

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letter to Garnett of April 1, 1912, Lawrence writes that, although Arthur “enjoys” the strike atmosphere, “Father has just come in with his strike ballot. He’s balloted for . . . My two sisters are raving because the meeting was rowdy, and many of the men balloted ‘against’ ” (Letters 1, 379). Until the job losses at Brinsley in 1910 Arthur had been a butty who contracted work out to holers and loaders and was responsible for apportioning their pay; he had therefore held a higher status position than the majority of miners. According to Moore, as well as having the potential to earn more and afford slightly better housing, some butties tended to “worship apart from other miners, very often in the Congregational Chapel, which . . . became known locally as ‘the butty’s lump.’ ”26 In the second ballot there was a very narrow majority against resuming work and only 50 per cent of voters turned out.27 By March 29, 1912, 150 distress cases had been addressed to the Central Relief Committee within one week (with 90 cases across the parish of Eastwood alone) and so the general attitude was one of low morale.28 By April 4 it was agreed that a two-­thirds majority was needed in order to sanction further action and the strike was effectively over; all Britain’s mines were back in production by the end of the month. The action created legislative success: the Minimum Wage Act was passed, but agreements would be negotiated at district level under the scrutiny of new Minimum Wages Boards.29 Lawrence’s own opinion on the strike action was far less impartial than his sketch implies, although he does appreciate both sides of the argument. In the letter to Garnett of April 1 he rages against his sisters: “every evil that could be urged against a working man is urged by his woman-­folk. They are all aristocrats, these women, to the back-­bone. They would murder any man at any minute if he refused to be a good servant to the family. They make me curse” (Letters 1, 379). And yet Lawrence was never in favor of the strike. When the men were first out on February 28, Lawrence hoped “they’ll soon go back” (Letters 1, 370); on April 2 he told Louie that “we shall be glad when the strikers go in” (Letters 1, 379). That day, he went “round with a friend delivering Relief tickets” (Letters 1, 380). That friend could have been Hopkin, in his position as a local councilor. “It’s not that the actual suffering is so great,” Lawrence continues . . . —though it’s bad enough—but the men seem such big, helpless, hopeless children, and the women are impersonal—little atlases under a load that they know will crush them out at last . . . They aren’t conscious, any more than their hearts are conscious of their endless business of beating. They have no conscious life, no windows. It makes me ill. ibid.

It is, finally, the relationship between men and women within the context of industrial struggle that concerns Lawrence, with resilient but “impersonal” women figured as managers of the household who (perhaps due to their disenfranchisement from the public sphere) replicate domestically the power relations of the workplace and make “servant[s]” of men.

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The appearance of “The Miner at Home” in the Nation indicates Lawrence’s desire to open up publishing opportunities for his work at a crucial time in his newly professional career. Experienced advisers such as Violet Hunt recognized the relevance of Lawrence’s working class writings for the literary marketplace within the climate of industrial and social uprising: she noted that his Eastwood plays “might have taken quite well, while collieries are in the air.”30 As Daly concludes, owing to “a crisis in [Lawrence’s] social and political identity” we are more accustomed to reading a strongly opinionated—even politically reactionary—Lawrence.31 On this occasion, however, the non-­partisan approach to the strike that he dramatized in the sketch aligned with the Nation’s political stance. Since Lawrence held the Nation in high regard after his poetry was printed within its pages, and because he had an existing connection with it through Garnett, he may have strategically written the sketch in a manner that he judged might appeal to its editorial staff. Lawrence was aware that Garnett aimed to make his own work suitable for particular newspapers. On April 3, 1912 he wrote to Garnett: “I like your Dostoievsky review in the Daily News today. They won’t have you much oftener, I’m afraid, altho. you’ve tried to put a sort of ‘liberal’ complexion on it” (Letters 1, 380). Reading the sketch within the context in which it was first published allows us to better appreciate its significance as a very topical sketch of immediate national interest. Rather than dismissing it as a minor example of Lawrence’s early work, we might instead see it as a rich, controlled, and balanced text that dramatizes the stresses and anxieties apparent in working class homes and communities, and which, placed in dialog with editorials, essays by economists, and correspondence from the general public, helped to bring these issues to the attention of a large readership situated in London and beyond.

Notes 1 “The Miner at Home,” “A Sick Collier,” “Her Turn,” and “Strike-Pay.” 2 I have touched upon Lawrence’s engagement with journalism in “Journals, Magazines and Newspapers,” in D. H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Andrew Harrison draws attention to the number and range of articles Lawrence produced throughout his career in his The Life of D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). 3 Macdonald Daly, “D. H. Lawrence and Labour in the Great War,” The Modern Language Review, 89, 1 (January 1994): 19–38. 4 The short stories were “Goose Fair” (February 1910), “Odour of Chrysanthemums” (June 1911), “A Fragment of Stained Glass” (September 1911), and “Second-Best” (February 1912). 5 I describe the Nation as a “newspaper” since it was registered at the General Post Office as such. 6 Lawrence uses the term “Colliery novel” in a letter to Garnett, April 3, 1912 (Letters 1, 381).

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7 Historical information on the national strike is taken from David Powell, The Power Game: The Struggle for Coal (London: Duckworth, 1993), 43, 44. 8 Powell, The Power Game, 49. 9 Powell, The Power Game, 63. 10 See Explanatory note 125:8 in LAH, 239. 11 Roger Moore, Community and Conflict in Eastwood: A Study from the Nottinghamshire Coalfield Before 1914 (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 1995), 15. Moore is indebted to A. R. Griffin, Mining in the East Midlands 1550–1947 (London: Frank Cass, 1971). 12 Moore, Community and Conflict, 20. 13 See Explanatory note 125:35 in LAH, 239. 14 “Diary of the Week,” Nation, March 16, 1912, 967. 15 Emrys Hughes, “A Plea for the South Wales Collier,” Nation, March 9, 1912, 949. 16 J. A. Hobson, “The Nation and the Mines II,” Nation, March 9, 1912, 946–7. 17 Although I am reading “The Miner At Home” as it appeared in the Nation, I take quotations from LAH since the copy-­text used in this edition is the Nation text and is therefore identical. 18 Moore, Community and Conflict, 31. 19 Moore, Community and Conflict, 37. 20 Moore, Community and Conflict, 51. 21 See the Explanatory Notes to WL, 557 and Lawrence’s description of Gerald’s reforms, WL, 231. 22 For figures on the recession see Griffin, Mining in the East Midlands, 208. 23 The report on job losses was given in the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, June 3, 1910, 3. 24 Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, January 12, 1912, 2; February 16, 1912, 2. 25 The Nation’s stance is quoted in a “Letter to the Editor” from E. L. Hoyle of Macclesfield, entitled “Adult Suffrage,” Nation, March 9, 1912, 948. 26 Moore, Community and Conflict, 13. 27 Moore, Community and Conflict, 20. 28 Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, March 29, 1912, 3. 29 Powell, The Power Game, 67. 30 Lawrence cites Hunt’s assessment in a letter to Garnett (See Letters 1, 381). 31 Daly, “D. H. Lawrence and Labour in the Great War,” 20.

D. H . L awrence A mong the E arly M odern B ohemian s Katherine Toy Miller

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries bohemian enclaves thrived in Europe and America, a response to strict Victorian moral and behavior codes and the “iron cage” of modernity with its bureaucracies, standardization, mechanization, and loss of individuality, autonomy, and freedom. In Germany, England, and America D. H. Lawrence lived among bohemian early Modernists (1901–30) through connections provided by three significant women in his life who shared the passions he is most known for: against militarism and mechanization and for primitive, exotic, and peasant cultures; nature; sexual liberation; and spirituality. The path he was inclined to was strengthened by these contacts, especially the counterculture philosophical and experiential dowry of his wife, Frieda, which permeates his work. “I believe the spring of his being was love for his fellow men, love for everything alive, and almost all creatures were more alive to him than they actually were. He seemed to infuse his own life into them,” Frieda wrote after Lawrence died: It exasperated him to see how boring most people’s lives were and how little they made of them, and he tried with all his might, from all angles to make them see and change. He never gave up, he did not get discouraged like most reformers. Always he took a new sprint. He was not tragic, he would never have it that humanity, even, was tragic, only very wrong, but nothing that true wisdom could not solve.1

According to Lawrence’s friend and admirer, Aldous Huxley, for Lawrence “there were two great and criminal distractions. First, work, which he regarded as a mere stupefacient, like opium.” Second, Lawrence was also appalled that people could “forget all the delights and difficulties of immediate living.”2 “What can a man do with his life but live it?” Lawrence asks in “Pan in America.” “And what does life consist in, save a vivid relatedness between the man and the living universe that surrounds him? Yet man insulates himself more and more into mechanism, and repudiates everything but the

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machine and the contrivance of which he himself is master, god in the machine” (PPP, 27).

Bohemian Enclaves: Precursors to Early Modernism “Bohémien” was the fifteenth-­century French name for the Romani people thought to have arrived through Bohemia (presently the western Czech Republic). Also called “gypsies” because they were thought to have come from Egypt, they are now known to have their roots in the lowest caste of Hindus in India. Conservative in their religious and marital beliefs, they were persecuted outcasts who traveled in bands through the European countryside and lived on the outskirts of European cities, though England and France entitled them to privileges other wanderers lacked.3 Romanticism (1798–1832), a revolt against the Industrial Revolution and the conservative values of the Enlightenment, emphasized many bohemian values: subjective individual experience, the sublime or otherworldly, looking to the past, and nature. In the 1820s Romantic, Hindu, and other Oriental ideas were embraced by the American Transcendentalists Lawrence is associated with. The Transcendentalists believed people were at their best not under repressive systems of government and religion but when self-­reliant and independent. They saw God not in terms of judging good and evil but as an oversoul that all was contained within. Lawrence, disillusioned by organized religion during college,4 is thought to have read of the Buddha in the epic 1879 poem “The Light of Asia” by Sir Edwin Arnold, as reflected in Lawrence’s 1911 letter: “There still remains a God, but not a personal God: a vast, shimmering impulse which wavers onward towards some end, I don’t know what—taking no regard of the little individual, but taking regard for humanity” (Letters 1, 256, n. 1). “Bohemian” was first used in the early 1800s for the unconventional group living of impoverished artists with anti-­establishment political or social views and few permanent ties. In 1845 this was presented in Henri Murger’s semi-­ autobiographical collection of stories romanticizing life in the Latin Quarter of Paris, Scènes de la vie de bohème, which formed the basis of Giacomo Puccini’s popular opera La Bohème (1896). English Victorian writer William Makepeace Thackeray, who lived a bohemian life of poverty, popularized the bohemian lifestyle in his novel Vanity Fair (1848). In 1862 the Westminster Review wrote: “The term ‘Bohemian’ has come to be very commonly accepted in our day as the description of a certain kind of literary gipsey, no matter in what language he speaks, or what city he inhabits . . . A Bohemian is simply an artist or littérateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art.”5 By the early modern period, in Chelsea, Fitzrovia, and Soho in London; Montparnasse and Montmartre in Paris; Schwabing in Munich; Monte Verità

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in Ascona, Switzerland; Greenwich Village in New York; Provincetown on Cape Cod; the French Quarter, New Orleans; Monterey and Carmel near San Francisco; Santa Fe and Taos in New Mexico; and elsewhere, artists, writers, and intellectuals worked near each other, often in poverty, sometimes communally, usually amid diverse cultures or peasant cultures, often drawing on these or the exotic or primitive for their inspiration. Most urban locations featured inexpensive bars and cafes, prostitution, dance halls, cabarets, and theaters, while rural locations featured spectacular natural settings.

Eastwood, Haggs Farm, and All Things German: The Formation of an Early Modern Bohemian “ ‘Different and superior in kind.’ . . . A being, somehow, of another order, more sensitive, more highly conscious, more capable of feeling than even the most gifted of common men . . .” Huxley said of Lawrence.6 Walking through the countryside, Lawrence could convey his otherworldly sense of nature to his companions as he did to his readers. “He seemed to know, by personal experience, what it was like to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or even the mysterious moon itself. He could get inside the skin of an animal and tell you in the most convincing detail how it felt and how, dimly, inhumanly, it thought.”7 Born September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, a grimy, dark, coal mining town 126 miles from London, Lawrence had a nearly illiterate coal miner father and a more cultured mother who fought her husband and their economic reality to raise their five children to middle class standards, piously making sure they went regularly to the Eastwood Congregational Chapel, a center of culture and higher morality. Lawrence, a frail, sickly, sensitive child who loved nature, roaming the fields and woodlands, drawing, painting, and literature, got much attention for his ability to copy paintings he admired, giving some away as gifts. His sister Ada remembered “ ‘days of such care-­free joy with Bert that I know I can never experience again. It seemed inevitable that Bert should spend his life creating things.’ ”8 From 1901 to 1908 his second home became nearby Haggs Farm, where he struck up a close friendship with the Chambers family. Here he first expressed his desire for communal living.9 He loved working on the farm, both outdoors where he helped with the crops and the animals and indoors where he cooked and did household chores. Though neither he nor Frieda ever learned to drive a car or flew in an airplane, he could “cook, he could sew, he could darn a stocking and milk a cow . . . ” Huxley learned.10 “No servants, no luxuries, no possessions,” Frieda wrote. “As a very young man he [Lawrence] had realized that they waste too much time and clutter you up.”11 Until the First World War the British were interested in all things German. Lawrence’s mother’s sister, Ada, had married a man of German origin, Fritz Krenkow. During Lawrence’s Nottingham University years (1906–08), he

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frequently visited his aunt and uncle 30 miles away. Krenkow had a library of German literature.12 Lawrence was familiar with German writers Goethe, Rilke, Mann, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Marx, as well as the operas of Wagner. He also read, wrote, and spoke German, though not perfectly.13 After his mother’s death and his own bout of pneumonia, in mid-January 1912 his Aunt Ada’s German sister-­in-law, Hannah Krenkow, knowing he had been sick and perhaps knowing of his charm and burgeoning literary success, invited him to Germany. He wrote for advice about getting a teaching position at a German university to his Uncle Fritz and his favorite Nottingham University professor, Ernest Weekley, who had taught in Germany. Lawrence broke his engagement with Louie Burrows and resigned from his teaching job at Croydon to seek a writer’s life. It was most likely March 3, 1912, an unusually bright, warm day,14 when he arrived at the Weekley home for lunch and was greeted by his professor’s sexually liberated German wife.

Schwabing: Frieda Weekley and the Early Modern German Bohemians Frieda’s mother said to her, “ ‘You, you are an Atavismus,’ ” a throwback reverted to primitive instincts. After a long life, Frieda recognized this was true. In her fictionalized second memoir she wrote of herself, “She certainly was not modern. If primitive people felt a unity embracing the whole world, they were the fish, the cow, the stone, always part of the whole, the living universe of which you are part, alive or dead, then she was like them.”15 Frieda Weekley, née von Richthofen (1879–1956), was born in German-­ occupied Metz, France, a beautiful farmland region of low hills between the Moselle and Seille rivers. Her father, a former Prussian officer, served in a civilian post there. From a fallen aristocratic background, he struggled to keep his three daughters middle-­class. Frieda, a wild child who adored her father, spent her youth running through the gardens he tended outside their two-­story farmhouse and playing with the soldiers camped around them. As teenagers she and her younger and older sisters boarded at a private girls’ school run by family friends near the Black Forest. At eighteen, while summer vacationing with her family there, Frieda met Ernest Weekley, a hard-­working, accomplished young professor of modern languages at Nottingham University. Taken by her sunny good looks, lively disposition, and facility with language, he proposed immediately. A year later Frieda, a virgin, married. They settled near the university and soon had three children. Bored with middle-­class English life, Frieda escaped to Nottinghamshire’s Sherwood Forest. Summers she took the children to the Black Forest to spend time with her family. She also had affairs. In May 1907 Frieda visited her older sister’s best friend, Friedel, in Munich’s counterculture district, Schwabing. In contrast to the highly industrialized, ultramodern Berlin, Munich was an art city with art collections, concert halls,

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theaters, and parks. The surrounding Bavarian countryside was populated by Catholic peasants having “a special beauty and sensuality, bright-­eyed and humorous,”16 who enjoyed folk festivals, dancing, and carnivals. Homes, churches, and costumes were decorated with flowers. Social life went on in the beer gardens or cellars. Two great festival seasons, Fasching, which occurred before Lent, and Oktoberfest, which celebrated the fall harvest, along with smaller holiday celebrations, created “in effect a year-­long erotic and playful carnival, in which people of all classes, including the peasants mingled on equal terms.”17 A major inspiration for the Schwabing counterculture was Myth, Religion, and Mother Right (1861) by Johann Jacob Bachofen, a Swiss contemporary of Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Nietzsche. Bachofen argued that the earliest cultures were matriarchal, “characterized by unregulated sexual relation, the absence of all individual possessions or private rights of any kind, by the communal holding of women, children, and consequently of all property.”18 These evolved to settled agrarian states “famed for their freedom from intestine strife and conflict” and for “universal fraternity among all men, which dies with the development of paternity.”19 Because “matriarchy is entirely subservient to matter and to the phenomena of natural life, from which it derives the laws of its inner and outward existence . . . the matriarchal people feel the unity of all life, the harmony of the universe which they have not yet outgrown . . .”20 From this, “matriarchy reveres the ear of grain and the seed corn, which become the most sacred symbols of its maternal mystery.”21 Bachofen found that religion was “first among the creative forces which mold man’s whole existence”;22 thus, “[e]very rise and every decline of human existence springs from a movement that originates in this supreme sphere.”23 In kaffeehäuser Frieda listened to artists and intellectuals discussing all forms of revolution, including the back-­to-nature movement being celebrated most famously in nearby Ascona, Switzerland. She was thrilled to meet, among others, an “emancipated young countess,”24 Franziska zu Reventlow, the “Queen of Schwabing,” a writer, artist, and translator (also a prostitute and dominatrix). Reventlow wanted women to have control of their bodies, to talk about sex, to free themselves from shame and guilt; she argued for the abolition of marriage and refused to name the father of her son so as to have sole custody. She defined herself as an “hetaera,” an identity Frieda shared. Frieda’s older sister, Else Jaffe, remembered “ ‘Frieda as being essentially innocent, believing in “the good of men”; though outwardly gay, she took them seriously and felt she had a “mission” to help whichever of them caught her interest and sympathy . . .’ ”25 Friedel’s husband, Otto Gross, was a medical doctor turned psychoanalyst and radical colleague of Freud and Jung. Influenced by Nietzsche and Bachofen, Gross fought German patriarchy; promoted sexual liberation and the sacredness of sex; saw mental illness as an expression of a legitimate protest against a repressive society; and saw psychoanalysis as a path to inner freedom in preparation for the revolution. Gross was openly having an affair with Else and soon with Frieda, whom he named “Woman of the Future” because of her free-­spirited yet

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aristocratic ways. She wrote that Gross “revolutionised my life with Freud”;26 “I was living like a somnambulist in a conventional set life and he awakened the consciousness of my own proper self. Being born and reborn is no joke, and being born into your own intrinsic self, that separates and singles you out from all the rest—it’s a painful process.”27 But Gross, an intermittent drug addict, was too unstable for Frieda to commit to. She returned to her middle-­class life augmented with affairs, telling herself, “ ‘You have had much, and you will have more’ ”;28 then, Lawrence arrived for lunch: “We talked about Oedipus and understanding leaped through our words.”29 Two months later they left together on separately planned trips to Germany. Through Frieda, Lawrence was exposed to the Schwabing counterculture. “I never did read Freud,” Lawrence wrote in October 1913, “but I have heard about him since I was in Germany” (Letters 2, 80). As Frieda wrote, “Lawrence and Freud and others brought the problem of sex out into the open air and sunshine where it can flourish naturally and sanely. It does not have to hide in dark corners of shame and tragedy any more”: I had a great friend, a young Austrian doctor [Otto Gross] who had been a pupil [protégé] of Freud’s and had worked with him. Consequently he had been fundamentally influenced by Freud, and through him I was much impressed too. So Lawrence through this friend and me had an almost direct contact with these then new ideas. He got most of his ideas in this living way, never so much from books, but mostly he used himself as his own guinea-­pig.30

Lawrence described Munich as “a lovely town, all artists, pictures galore” (Letters 1, 416). He likely saw a painting by Franz Marc, a principal member of Wassily Kandinsky’s Blue Rider group, owned by Frieda’s brother-­in-law Edgar Jaffe.31 The Blue Rider group, significant for expressing feelings and ideas through abstract images (blue symbolized spirituality; the horse and rider symbolized breaking free), had just had a major show in Munich. Russian-­born Kandinsky lived outside of Munich. His groundbreaking On the Spiritual in Art (1911) echoes many of Lawrence’s ideas, and was familiar in Munich: Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after years of materialism, are infected with the despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideal. The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.32

Summering with Frieda outside of Munich in a borrowed flat overlooking the Alps, the Isar River, flowering fields, a beechwood forest, and the village square33 inspired “a prolific season for Lawrence’s poetry.”34 That fall they walked across the Alps into Italy where they lived together, unmarried and condemned for

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deserting Frieda’s children with whom her husband would not allow her to communicate. By then Lawrence expressed his view of religion this way: My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what not. Letters 1, 503

Lawrence, like Bachofen, believed that religion is fundamental to determining world views: But primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience. That I must keep to, because I can only work like that. Letters 2, 165

Lawrence and Frieda mostly lived in Italy until they returned to London in summer 1914 and married. Frieda never valued or practiced monogamy and wrote of their wedding: “It was quite a simple and not undignified ceremony. I didn’t care whether I was married or not, it didn’t seem to make any difference, but I think Lawrence was glad that we were respectable married people.”35

Bloomsbury and Garsington: Lady Ottoline Morrell and the Early Modern English Bohemians Legendary for her original sense of style and her patronage of artists and intellectuals, aristocratic hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938)—familiar with peasants and people of all classes—was called “The Gypsy Queen” by neighboring Garsington villagers, which she “believed arose from her habit of wearing Russian linen dresses with a silk handkerchief on her head. It is likely that at times, in her full skirts, her copper-­red coiffure and her embroidered shawls, she was even more indistinguishable from the glamorous Kalderasà [the coppersmith gypsies].”36 She exaggerated her six-­foot height with high heels, towering hairstyles, and fanciful hats, expressing her “ ‘wild, bohemian, artistic side which never gets a look in except in my extravagance about colour and dress and pictures.’ ”37 Ottoline and her Liberal M.P. husband, Sir Philip Morrell, had an open marriage: Famous for her own affairs, she raised several children from his. Trapped in England during the war (1914–18), the Lawrences—through Lawrence’s acquaintance with the servants of Ottoline’s half brother, the sixth duke of Portland38—frequented Ottoline’s townhouse in bohemian Bloomsbury

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where she entertained, among others, Virginia Woolf and her set and Russian Jew Samuel Koteliansky, from whose Hebrew song Lawrence adapted the word “Ranani” meaning “cry of joy” or “rejoice” (Letters 2, 252, n. 3) for the name of his utopian colony, Rananim. To escape the war, the Morrells bought Garsington Manor, a Tudor mansion, then a run-­down farmhouse, on six acres of land once owned by poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s son near Oxford. Ottoline decorated it in fashionably flamboyant colors inspired by Matisse and Picasso. The Lawrences were among Ottoline’s first overnight guests at Garsington. Lawrence, who loved being handy, “helped to plant trees and bulbs, he built a wooden bower and wielded a paint brush.”39 Frieda thought,“ ‘Perhaps I ought to leave Lawrence to her [Ottoline’s] influence; what might they not do together for England? I am powerless, and a Hun [German], and a nobody.’ ”40 Ottoline told philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell to talk Lawrence into leaving Frieda.41 Later Frieda said “she would not have minded if Lorenzo had had an ordinary affair with Lady Ottoline, but what she could not stand was ‘all this soul-­mush!’ ”42 “Garsington must be the retreat where we come together and knit ourselves together,” Lawrence wrote Ottoline in summer 1915. “Garsington is wonderful for that. It is like the Boccaccio place where they told all the Decamerone. That wonderful lawn, under the ilex trees, with the old house and its exquisite old front—it is so remote, so perfectly a small world to itself, where one can get away from the temporal things to consider the big things” (Letters 2, 359). In fall 1915 Huxley was twenty-­one and attending nearby Balliol College, Oxford, when he became part of Garsington’s culture. Ottoline immediately connected him with Lawrence, then thirty, who had given up Garsington as his utopian community and was considering Florida, as Huxley recalled: I remember very clearly my first meeting with him. The place was London, the time 1915. But Lawrence’s passionate talk was of the geographically remote and of the personally very near. Of the horrors in the middle distance—war, winter, the town—he would not speak. For he was on the point, so he imagined, of setting off to Florida—to Florida, where he was going to plant that colony of escape, of which up to the last he never ceased to dream . . . Before tea was over he asked me if I would join the colony, and though I was an intellectually cautious young man, not at all inclined to enthusiasms, though Lawrence had startled and embarrassed me with sincerities of a kind to which my upbringing had not accustomed me, I answered yes . . .43

Morrell was one of the few politicians who spoke out against the war: Garsington became a refuge where conscientious objectors such as Huxley and Bertrand Russell served out their farm labor. Lawrence, exempt from military service because of poor health, wrote to Ottoline: “After the war, the soul of the people will be so maimed and so injured that it is horrible to think of ”

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(Letters 2, 272). He wanted to “bring church and house and shop together” (ibid.) and create a new life “wherein the struggle shall not be for money or for power, but for individual freedom and common effort towards good” (ibid.) and “in which the only riches is integrity of character” (Letters 2, 271). Frieda recalled: “He could be so deeply and richly happy, that young Lawrence that I have known, before the war crushed so much of his belief in human civilization . . . The deadness of them, the mechanicalness that triumphed in their souls.”44

Greenwich Village and Taos: Mabel Dodge and the Early Modern American Bohemians Called “the best-­known example of an American Bohemian hostess,”45 Mabel Dodge, née Ganson, later Sterne, then Luhan (1879–1962), a wealthy heiress from Buffalo, New York, lived from 1905 to 1912 near Florence in the palatial Villa Curonia, built by the Medici. Here she first held salons which included Gertrude Stein, whom Mabel visited in Paris where Gertrude’s brother Leo, an art critic, talked about Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso, and Mabel met Picasso and Matisse.46 Also described as “ ‘the most peculiar common denominator that society, literature, art and radical revolutionaries ever found in New York and Europe,’ ”47 in 1912 Mabel moved to Greenwich Village where she frequented the nearby gallery of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the primary early supporter of Modern art in America. Under the persuasion of the Steins and Stieglitz, Mabel became an Honorary Vice President of the legendary International Exhibition of Modern Art, the 1913 Armory Show, where she promoted Gertrude Stein and herself by publishing 300 copies of Stein’s word portrait, “Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia.” Her salon evenings, focused on a current topic, became nationally known. She was interested in all things Modern: Socialists, Trade-Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, ‘Old Friends,’ Psychoanalysts, I.W.W.’s [Industrial Workers of the World], Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, ModernArtists, Clubwomen, Woman’s-­place-is-­in-the-­home Women, Clergymen, and just plain men all met there and, stammering in an unaccustomed freedom a kind of speech called Free, exchanged a variousness in vocabulary called, in euphemistic optimism, Opinions!48

Her biographer explained: “Out of the heady confusion of competing programs and ideals, Mabel predicted, would emerge a brave new world to replace the anomie of twentieth-­century life.”49 Like Lawrence, Mabel was spiritually driven: “ ‘She believed she was called on by God to help a new spiritual impulse to take possession of the earth.’ ”50 In August 1917, after marrying Russian

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painter Maurice Sterne, she sent him to Santa Fe to paint the Indians. He soon wrote, “ ‘Dearest Girl—Do you want an object in life? Save the Indians, their art-­ culture—reveal it to the world!’ ”51 Visiting Maurice for a fortnight, Mabel went to the Christmas Day dance at Santa Domingo Pueblo north of Santa Fe. Encountering the age-­old pueblo matriarchal culture, she experienced what Bachofen called for: ‘[W]ithout a thorough transformation of our whole being, without a return to ancient simplicity and health of soul, one cannot gain even the merest intimation of the greatness of those ancient times and their thinking, of those days when the human race had not yet, as it has today, departed from its harmony with creation and the transcendent creator.’52

Mabel heard singing and drumming and ran toward it. For the first time in my life, I heard the voice of the One coming from the Many . . . The singular raging lust for individuality and separateness had been impelling me all my years as it did everyone else on earth—when all of a sudden I was brought up against the Tribe . . . where virtue lay in wholeness instead of in dismemberment.53

She rented a house in Taos where Leo Stein visited. At Taos Pueblo, home of Tiwa natives for at least a thousand years, she met Tony Lujan, her final husband. On Tony’s advice she bought a twelve-­acre property bordering pueblo land on two sides, about two miles from Taos plaza, with five little houses.54 They built on in it for years. Her guests included Ansel Adams, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Willa Cather. “I wish I could find a ship that would carry me round the world and land me somewhere in the West—New Mexico or California—and I could have a little house and two goats, somewhere away by myself in the Rocky Mountains. I may manage that” (Letters 4, 93), wrote Lawrence on October 8, 1921, from Taormina, Sicily. The Lawrences’ yearning for the Southwest was shaped in part by James Fenimore Cooper’s romanticized Leatherstocking Tales, novels of eighteenth-­century New York-­state Delaware Indians which the Lawrences read when trapped in Cornwall during the First World War. In Florence, Lawrence had seen Leo Stein’s photographs of Taos and Maurice Sterne’s paintings of New Mexico (Letters 4, 111). In a month Lawrence received Mabel’s letter inviting him to Taos. She later admitted, “I wanted Lawrence to understand things for me. To take my experience, my material, my Taos, and to formulate it all into a magnificent creation. That was what I wanted him for.”55 First going to Ceylon and Australia on Lawrence’s “savage pilgrimage,” a quest partly for spiritual revitalization and partly so as to write a novel on every continent, the Lawrences arrived in Taos on September 11, 1922, Lawrence’s 37th birthday. “I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever,” he later wrote.

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Curious as it may sound, it was New Mexico that liberated me from the present era of civilization, the great era of material and mechanical development. Months spent in holy Kandy, in Ceylon, the holy of holies of southern Buddhism, had not touched the great psyche of materialism and idealism which dominated me. And years, even in the exquisite beauty of Sicily, right among the old Greek paganism that still lives there, had not shattered the essential Christianity on which my character was established . . . But the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fé, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend . . . In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new. PPP, 142

Soon seeking escape from Mabel’s ambience, the Lawrences wintered in a snowy mountain ranch cabin at 8,000 feet. In spring 1924 the Lawrences returned to Mabel’s with the Honorable Dorothy Brett, a Garsington regular and the one convert to Lawrence’s Rananim. Mabel gave her son’s undeveloped ranch north of where the Lawrences had stayed to Frieda, since Lawrence did not want to own property. With the Indians he employed, Lawrence restored the three cabins and danced at night, forming something of a community with Mabel, Tony, Tony’s nephew Trinidad Archuleta, Brett, and Frieda. Here, Lawrence’s spiritual quest culminated: It is curious that one should get a sense of living religion from the Red Indians, having failed to get it from Hindus or Sicilian Catholics or Cinghalese . . . PPP, 144

When Trinidad, the Indian boy, and I planted corn at the ranch, my soul paused to see his brown hands softly moving the earth over the maize in pure ritual. He was back in his old religious self, and the ages stood still. PPP, 147

At his death in 1930, Lawrence’s bohemian Modernist friends surrounded him: Frieda held his ankle and Huxley’s wife, Maria, held his head while Huxley and Frieda’s youngest daughter, Barby, searched for a doctor. Lawrence had recently corresponded with Ottoline, Mabel, and Brett, caretaker of the ranch Lawrence longed to return to. Frieda wrote Mabel: “knowing the Indians changed us all; into deeper realisation and connection with the earth it drove us, it wasn’t only a mental experience”56 and “ ‘[Lawrence] could even never have written Lady C[hatterley]—nor the ‘Apocalypse’ [his last statement on revitalizing Western civilization] or died so unflinchingly in utter belief, if he hadn’t known Taos and lived in it.’ ”57

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After Lawrence’s 1935 memorial ceremony at the ranch, Barby noted: “When the casket of ashes had been put in the chapel, the sun set and the skies grew dark. A big fire was lighted on the level below, and the Indians, in feather dress, did their ceremonial dance. Trinidad, a young Indian whom Lawrence had known, led the dancers.”58

Notes 1 Frieda Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Correspondence, ed. E. W. Tedlock, Jr. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 451. 2 Aldous Huxley, ed., “Introduction,” in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1932), xix–xx. 3 Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 387–8. 4 John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912: The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 48. 5 Douglas Harper, “Bohemian.” Online Etymology Dictionary 2001–2017. www.etymonline.com/word/bohemian. 6 Huxley, “Introduction,” xxx. 7 Huxley, “Introduction,” xxx–xxxi. 8 Worthen, Early Years, 17. 9 Edward Nehls, ed., D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, vol. III: 1925–1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 601. 10 Huxley, “Introduction,” xxxi. 11 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs, 438. 12 Mitzi M. Brunsdale, The German Effect on D. H. Lawrence and his Works 1885–1912 (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1978), 94. 13 Brunsdale, The German Effect, 6, 223. 14 Worthen, The Early Years, 563, n. 5. 15 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs, 12. 16 Martin Green, The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 86. 17 Green, von Richthofen Sisters, 88. 18 J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen (Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1967), 190. 19 Bachofen, Myth, 80. 20 Bachofen, Myth, 91. 21 Bachofen, Myth, 97. 22 Bachofen, Myth, 84. 23 Bachofen, Myth, 85. 24 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs, 93. 25 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs, 89. 26 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs, 388. 27 Frieda Lawrence, Not I, but the Wind (New York: The Viking Press, 1934), 3. 28 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs, 103. 29 Frieda Lawrence, Not I, 4. 30 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs, 460–1.

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31 Carl Krockel, D. H. Lawrence and Germany: The Politics of Influence (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 111. 32 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1977), 1–2. 33 Janet Byrne, A Genius for Living: The Life of Frieda Lawrence (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 111. 34 See Christopher Pollnitz’s remark in Poems, 684. 35 Frieda Lawrence, Not I, 77. 36 Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939 (New York: Perennial, 2005), 131. 37 Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 128. 38 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs, 194. 39 Robert Lucas, Frieda Lawrence: The Story of Frieda von Richthofen and D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 129. 40 Frieda Lawrence, Not I, 82. 41 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs, 390. 42 Lucas, The Story, 130. 43 Huxley, “Introduction,” xxviii–xxix. 44 Frieda Lawrence, Not I, 73. 45 Wilson, The Glamorous Outcasts, 124. 46 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, ed. Lois Palken Rudnick (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 87–8. 47 Mable Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), xiii. 48 Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 83. 49 Lois Palken Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), x. 50 Rudnick, New Woman, 87. 51 Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 534. 52 Bachofen, Myth, xxvii. 53 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 62–3. 54 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert, 151. 55 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos: D. H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2007), 70. 56 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs, 238. 57 Rudnick, New Woman, 249. 58 Barbara Weekley Barr, “Memoir of D. H. Lawrence,” in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet, ed. Stephen Spender (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 36.

D. H . L awrence and “ T he M achine I ncarnate ”: R obot s A mong the “N ettle s ” Tina Ferris

. . . using all life only as power, as an engine uses steam or gas power to repeat its own egocentric motions this is the machine incarnate: and the robot is the machine incarnate and the slave is the machine incarnate and the hopeless inferior, he is the machine incarnate an engine of flesh, useless unless he is a tool of other men. —D. H. Lawrence, “The Gulf ” (Poems, 547) Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots, 1920) premiered in Prague’s National Theater on January 25, 1921 and first introduced the word “Robot” (capitalized) in reference to an artificial humanoid workforce. Rossum derives from the Czech word “rozum” meaning “reason” or “intellect;” and Čapek’s older brother, Josef, suggested “robota” meaning “forced labor,” “servitude,” and “drudgery.” Although Čapek’s robots were manufactured organic life-­forms stamped from synthetic protoplasm, these cyborgs were pictured in advertising as metallic to emphasize their unnaturalness. D. H. Lawrence, who was friends with Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932), was familiar with speculative fiction having read Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and many of H. G. Wells’s works. Lawrence was among the first generation to make literary use of the word “robot,” and he does so with a passion in a series of poems written in 1929. He mentions robots 47 times, as well as other closely related terms like “automata,” “machine incarnate,” and “mechanical man,” in a tight cluster of about three dozen poems from “The ‘Nettles’ Notebook.” The most famous of these include “The triumph of the machine,” which states that “. . . no engine can reach into the marshes and depths of a man” (Poems, 538), and “The gods! the gods!” which says of sea-­bathers that “. . . all was dreary, great robot[s]” except for one “woman, shy and alone” (Poems, 561). Robots also appear in early drafts of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (referencing Clifford and the proletariat)1 and a few late

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essays and letters,2 but not to the same intensity. Why was Lawrence obsessed with robots in his poetry?

Robot obsessions Čapek’s popular antifascist play was quickly translated into other languages. The American Broadway premier of R.U.R. took place in October of 1922, followed by openings in London, Chicago, and Los Angeles in 1923. Lawrence was in America at that time and possibly became aware of it then. During the seven years between the English translation and Lawrence’s robot poems, the term acquired a wealth of subtext (both past and contemporary). Robots continued to gain popularity throughout the 1920s due to several events that built upon or enhanced Čapek’s play—most notably the anticipated premier of Fritz Lang’s visually impressive silent film, Metropolis; the debut of Britain’s first electric robot named Eric; and the modern art of the Italian Futurist movement. By placing Lawrence’s poems into historical context, we can observe him joining the dialog by experimenting with this new concept. The word “robot” succinctly encapsulated many of his ideas about industrialization, mass production, class division, and the spinning wheels of progress—all damaging to the soul. He thus incorporates the robot, complete with its cultural connotations, into his personal lexicon and adapts it to his own philosophy. Čapek’s play, coming on the heels of the First World War, gathered international attention almost overnight, with the word “robot” replacing the older term “automaton.” Ivan Klíma comments on what was then a uniquely original theme: “an artificial human being, a brilliant worker, a Robot deprived of all ‘unnecessary’ qualities: feelings, creativity, and the capacity for feeling pain. In R.U.R., Robots gradually take over all the work and duties of people, even their military obligations. Čapek asked what such a revolutionary invention would do to humanity.”3 It was a question he had long dwelled upon. In 1908 the Čapek brothers had co-­written a short story called “The System” that contained the essence of the play. The character of Ripraton talks of labor problems and large-­scale production in manufacturing: “The world is nothing but raw material . . . the task of industry is to exploit the entire world . . . Everything must be speeded up . . . The worker must become a machine, so that he can simply rotate like a wheel. Every thought is insubordination! . . . I have sterilized the worker, purified him.”4 Lawrence harbored some of these same concerns of dehumanization in his own stories. Čapek amplified the growing modernist attitude that resulted from viewing everything, including the human body, as a mechanism that could be fine-­tuned for specific purposes. R.U.R.’s cast of characters includes the inventor, Old Mr. Rossum, representing the metaphysical scientist who wishes to make God obsolete; his bio-­engineer son, who merely applies science to increase production; Domin,

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the factory director and true-­believer of a “grandiose” plan that offers “salvation, well-­being, and good fortune” in the form of cheap, dependable labor; Helena, who is president of the Humanity League and concerned for the robot welfare; and the architect, Alquist, “a hero who defends traditional human values” and acts as the voice of conscience.5 The robots are essentially “living” for the humans, who become stagnant and infertile instead of using leisure to “perfect themselves.”6 Alquist prays, “God, enlighten Domin and all those who err. Destroy their work and help people return to their former worries and labor. Protect the human race from destruction . . . Rid us of the Robots.”7 Helena burns Rossum’s secret formula, but the robots attack and wipe out humanity. Two of the advanced robots evolve to acquire empathy, however, and become the new Adam and Eve. Alquist’s concluding soliloquy conveys thankfulness that “ life will not perish! It will begin anew with love; it will start out naked and tiny; it will take root in the wilderness, and to it all that we did and built will mean nothing.”8 R.U.R.’s timely success helped technocratic themes to proliferate, and thus robots could be found popping up across multiple genres of interwar society. Seven years after Čapek’s play, the German director Fritz Lang created his robot-­vision, called “Maschinenmensch” [mechanical man], in the large-­scale, feature-­length film Metropolis (1927). The screenplay was adapted from a novel written by his wife, Thea von Harbou, and filmed at Ufa Studios.9 Lang was inspired by the modern Manhattan skyline to develop his own Art Deco city of the future: “I looked into the streets—the glaring lights and the tall buildings— and there I conceived Metropolis.”10 Although Lang liked telling this creation-­ myth, planning had already commenced; but the buzzing American nightlife undoubtedly made a strong impact. According to Holger Bachmann, “the city of lights had a darker side for Lang, an undercurrent, a threatening second layer—the ‘undercity’ he would depict in Metropolis. In fact, it was the notion of a covered-­up, repressed, uglier face of the modern city that fuelled his imagination.”11 Metropolis showcased ground-­breaking special effects and was intended to prove that German cinema could compete with Hollywood12—Germany’s über-­film. But after a disappointing premiere in Berlin, it was brutally chopped and reedited for international markets without regard for plot continuity, a common distribution practice that attests to the plasticity of film. Again the critics’ appraisals were mixed, with most at least praising the visual spectacle and supreme craftsmanship. H. G. Wells wrote a particularly hostile review in the New York Times Magazine (April 1927). As a future forecast, he called the film “silly” and remarked that it “gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general, served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.”13 Wells added that “Čapek’s Robots have been lifted without apology, and that soulless mechanical monster of Mary Shelley’s, who has fathered so many German inventions, breeds once more in this confusion.”14

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Iris Barry, another contemporary reviewer, more positively called it “by far the most nearly adult picture” she had seen, praising the depth of emotion expressed by the exhausted underground laborers and its relevance: The moral is, of course, that though man might create mechanical man, even the degree of humanity the machine possessed would endow it with that capacity for disobedience and revolt which has distinguished man since Adam . . . I wonder how the audiences in cinemas in the South Wales mining districts and in Glasgow will regard this film? And whether the members of the Coal Owners’ Association have been invited to see it?15

Without evidence we cannot say if Lawrence saw the film, but he surely would have known something of it. Being a miner’s son, he would likely have reacted to the notion of shuffling worker-­drones as they file into the continuous elevators that close them behind prison-­like gates to descend into the hellish undercity. The notoriety of Metropolis continued to make news, as Ufa’s most expensive film eventually bankrupted the production company. Still Metropolis, which was heavily promoted and reviewed, had long-lasting artistic clout.16 The powerful opening montage of pistons and gears combined with a choreographed integration of human muscle and the city’s “heart machine” is an unparalleled example of techno-­noir. Lang’s femme fatale doppelgänger, Robot Maria, added a sexual allure that then transposed “the male fear of technology onto the male fear of women—both masculine ‘others’ with a rich genealogy—in order to exorcize them both.”17 Maria’s place as the first robot of cinema cemented this connection between sex and technology that had already germinated within early Futurists.18 Julia Dover says of our “fascination for anthropomorphic automata”: “Cinematic images mesmerize not because they simulate the living, but because we know they are dead, as if we have seen a ghost . . . The Maria robot offers omnipotence and impotence at the same time.”19 The robot may have assumed a woman’s form, but the seductive powers come from following men’s orders. The flesh-­covered construction and programmed personality further developed the psychological symbolism of Čapek’s robots. It introduced a paranoid self-­doubt, if artificial life could so easily fool us by disguise. Ultimately, the undercity is flooded, and Robot Maria is burned at the stake in a climactic scene (with opposing forces of fire and water) that is described as an “orgy of hatred and passion. A Witches’ Sabbath that even the most hideous imagination could not conceive of in a more horrifying way.”20 Dover notes that the “viewer is not certain which aspect they seek to annihilate—the human surface or the subcutaneous machine. Traditional codes of morality are warped by shifting appearances. Neither the workers nor the viewer know who the enemy is.”21 Robot Maria steps into that gray area between flesh and machine along with the hopeless underground laborers—both of which represent Lawrence’s “machine incarnate.” Rather than developing that subtle potential,

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however, the film’s ending offers a simplistic moral that falls flat: “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!”22 Dover states that the happy ending is quite misleading, and the “sensuous images of Metropolis suffocate the viewer, for there is no possibility for escape from the cycle of absorption and disappearance of the self into the thundering machine complex . . . human agency remains absorbed and subverted by its own fear of the machines.”23 She imagines a Sisyphian ending where the “whistle blows, and the workers assume their positions as prostrate sacrifices” once again to light their mother city.24 Čapek and Lang both dealt with class division and socialist issues in a naive manner, but their work had a powerful visual resonance and instilled a lingering fear of mob mentality and of robot-­labor revolt. Yet there was an equally strong desire to realize the future and to hasten its arrival. In September of 1928, one year prior to Lawrence’s Robot poems, England built the first functioning electric-­powered robot, named Eric, that toured London, Australia, and the U.S. creating a media sensation. This robot prototype was invented by Captain William H. Richards, Secretary of the Society of Model Engineers, and fellow aircraft engineer Alan H. Reffell. It was designed to stand, bow, and deliver the commencement speech at the Society’s exhibition and to dazzle the audience by answering simple questions. To the crowd’s timid amazement, Eric would politely introduce himself as “the man without a soul.”25 Motorized pulleys moved his arms and head while 35,000 volts of electricity generated glowing eyes and sparks that shot from his mouth when it spoke. Eric’s six-­foot-tall aluminum body resembled a knight in shining armor with gauntlets, greaves, and helmet. A big breastplate was emblazoned with the letters RUR across its chest leaving little doubt about its inspiration. Eric’s performance amounted to an exotic theatrical showboating that at once seemed to trivialize robots and also to magnify their threat by making it real. The word “robot” entered the English dictionary around the same time and continued to spread. It filled a symbolic void in an era of rising concern over the dehumanizing effects of the industrial revolution and growing threats of fascism. Meanwhile, the utopian/dystopian themes that were consequently generated around automation, electricity, and other modern advancements fueled imaginations. Avant-­garde writers and artists at the beginning of the twentieth century were turning their backs on formal conventions of the past and trying new techniques to express modern ideas. The Italian Futurist movement was initiated by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti with the publication of his “Founding Manifesto of Futurism” (1909) and was heavily promoted through prolific writings on a wide range of topics across the cultural spectrum. Its goal was to create a national aesthetic philosophy based on science. Futurist painters were heavily influenced by Cubism with its fragmentation of forms into geometric abstractions and its juxtaposition of various viewpoints. However, it went a step farther in celebrating youth and technology by featuring urban-­ industrial landscapes and skyscrapers studded with electric lights or by capturing the frenetic energy and movement of fast-­paced modes of

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communication and travel (such as radio, national newspapers, telephones, cinema, motorcycles, cars, trains, and aircraft). Where Cubists portrayed static order, the Futurists preferred a dynamic chaos that rebelled against tradition. Attracted by its vitality, Lawrence had taken an interest in Futurism and its “cult of the machine” while living in Italy.26 Kim Herzinger believes that “Every writer and artist who was committed to expressing the new way of feeling and seeing that modern life demanded had to wrestle with the implications of Futurism.”27 Their technique of ushering in the future via “high-­voltage shock treatments” helped to establish “new terms and a new basis on which Lawrence could build his ‘metaphysic.’ ”28 Having read the founding manifestos in 1914, he admired Futurism for its “purging of the old forms and sentimentalities” and for encouraging us to “be honest and stick by what is in us” (Letters 2, 180). However, he was also critical:29 “I don’t agree with them as to the cure and the escape. They will progress down the purely male or intellectual or scientific line . . . It’s the most self conscious, intentional, pseudo scientific stuff on the face of the earth” (Letters 2, 181). A more successful revolt, Lawrence believes, is comprised of “the joint work of man and woman” which in turn provides “the only way for art and civilisation to get a new life, a new start—by bringing themselves together . . . revealing themselves each to the other, gaining great blind knowledge and suffering and joy” (ibid.). Lawrence had wanted “to write an essay about Futurism” (Letters 2, 182), but instead poured these thoughts into his novel, Women in Love, particularly through the sculptor Loerke (partially inspired by his friend Mark Gertler). Futurist elements also filtered into his later poetry. According to Jack Stewart, “Futurism was the catalyst that enabled Lawrence to break through to a new style; but, as the ferment of ideas in his letters shows, his response was an ambivalent mixture of attraction and repulsion.”30 With this emphasis on technology, the visual arts of the day were filled with fusions of man and machine that were often designed to be an empowering statement about the future. But science and technology took on a more hideous aura after the horrors of the First World War (1914–18) where machine guns, tanks, bombs, poison gas, and airplanes were associated with death and destruction, or as Lawrence called it, “the great smash-­up” and “débacle” (Letters 3, 46). Alex Goody writes, “The machine men of modernism were closely bound up with militarism and the impact of war and military technology on conceptions of the human. The First World War foregrounded, for many poets and other writers, the terrible impact of technology on the vulnerable human form.”31 He adds that artists reacting to the clash of technophilia and modern war-­craft’s ugly consequences often depicted “soldiers and their artillery as machines of the same order,” with the “armouring of the ego . . . against the shocks of the modern world . . . metallizing himself, emerging empowered and technologically hardened from his confrontation with the machines of modernity.”32 Thus, during and immediately after the war, technology had lost its luster as artists became less idealistic and more cynical about the future.

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Andrew Harrison writes of the realization that the “Futurist process of coming through violence to new forms of life is now subordinated to a sense of tragic fate and wasteful destructiveness.”33 Two examples influenced by Futurism help to demonstrate this shift away from the divine machine. Lawrence, who himself dabbled in painting, admired Mark Gertler’s anti-­ war “Merry-Go-Round,” (1916), for its “real and ultimate revelation” of the modern age via its “terrible and soul-­tearing obscenity” (Letters 2, 660).34 The rigid people in the painting (several dressed in military garb) are inseparable from the carousel horses they ride with a “violent mechanical rotation and complex involution, and ghastly, utterly mindless human intensity” (ibid.). All that wasted energy goes nowhere; meanwhile they’re held captive and sport the same animatronic expressions of glee, mouths open as if to accept the bit of servitude. Thus the spinning carnival ride (looking like a garish wind-­up toy) is contrasted with the ever-­churning war machines and factories of mass produced goods. Gertler’s most famous painting perfectly captures the restless quality of industrialized urban life, a ride that cannot be stopped. Lawrence wondered what Jacob Epstein would think of it and offered to purchase the painting (Letters 2, 661). Also notable is Epstein’s own striking plaster sculpture called “Rock Drill” (1913), created prior to the war and later dismantled and reworked to form “Torso in Metal from Rock Drill,” (1915–16). Epstein wrote in his autobiography, “my ardor for machinery (shortlived) expended itself upon the purchase of an actual drill, second hand, and upon this I made and mounted a machinelike robot, visored, menacing, and carrying within itself its progeny, protectively ensconced. Here is the armed, sinister figure of today and tomorrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein we have made ourselves into.”35 Towering over three meters tall, the battle-­droid melded to “ready-­made” machinery and representing the combined might of both as they conquer and transform the earth is then emasculated by the artist mid-­war. It is no longer destructive or procreative. With the pneumatic drill discarded, the truncated bust is bronzed-­over and lacks identity apart from the machine. “Torso” becomes one of Rossum’s expendable robot soldiers, left disabled like the many wounded, shell-­shocked veterans returning from war. These two artists typify the early twentieth century’s cultural obsession with machine dominance and slave inducing technologies that is often repeated in Lawrence’s robot poems.

Robot Nettles Against this rich backdrop of techno-­marvels and rapid change, Lawrence’s short pansy/pensée form was aptly intended to be fleeting thoughts that provided a healing balm for societal wounds.36 It also allowed him to ponder robots from various angles and their impact on individuals and civilization.

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Figure 2  “Eric the Robot.” Newspaper photo (1928) in Robot Universe by Ana Matronic (New York: Sterling, 2015), 160 (grayscale plate)

Figure 3  Maschinenmensch from Metropolis © Ufa/Kino International, The Complete Metropolis directed by Fritz Lang, 1927 (New York: Kino International, 2010), DVD cover detail

Figure 4  Torso in Metal from “The Rock Drill” © The estate of Sir Jacob Epstein (Tate, London) in A Chronology of Art edited by Iain Zaczek (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2018), 227 (color plate)

Lawrence maintained that it was “the business of intelligent men to react all the time against taboos and mass-­emotions,” hence his peppery-­sweet “Pansies” have roots and “the faint grim scent of under-­earth” (Poems, 668). He then trotted out a league of robots onto his field of pansies and planted a new crop of what he jokingly referred to as “stinging” nettles.37 They packed a punch that fit his mood as well as the modern Futurist aura.

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For instance, Lawrence’s negative stance on mandatory education was a direct outcome of urban progress. Isaac Asimov states, “Advances in technology have always necessitated the upgrading of education. Agricultural laborers didn’t have to be literate, but factory workers did, so once the Industrial Revolution came to pass, industrialized nations had to establish public schools for the mass education of their populations,” resulting in the equivalent of assembly line teaching.38 Lawrence’s concern for the youth of the modern age counters the oblivious nature of the adults in Metropolis, whose very actions threaten to (literally and figuratively) drown their own children. Lawrence’s “Nettles” treat schools like an invasive species choking out rural ways of life. Obviously, Lawrence profited from a formal education; however, his stint as a schoolteacher probably dramatized that the standard cookie-­cutter variety of education was contrary to independent thought and wasn’t for everyone. Likewise, Rossum’s Robots, who are schooled “to speak, write, and do calculations,” can recite the encyclopedia from memory; but they “never think up anything original.” Domin surmises,“They’d make fine university professors;” meanwhile defectives are “thrown into the stamping mill.”39 Lawrence had grown wary of such indoctrinations in conformity that ran the gamut from children “spawn[ed] into machine-­robots / in the hot-­beds of the board-­ schools” (Poems, 555), where “they are made to utter these cog-­wheel sounds” (Poems, 567) in unison, to the elderly schooled by newspapers and “fixed in a rancid resistance / to life, fixed to the letter of the law” with a “cogged self-­will” (Poems, 571). In his essay, “Enslaved by Civilisation,”40 he concludes, “School is a very elaborate railway-­system where good little boys are taught to run upon good lines till they are shunted off into life,” becoming at last “an automaton, running on wheels” (LEA, 157). Lawrence sought to capture this effect. Among the tenets of the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” Harrison points out the use of “onomatopoeic words to ‘vivify lyricism.’ ”41 Lawrence employs sounds and rhythms to create clockwork effects in “What have they done to you—?” when depicting “men of the masses / creeping back and forth to work” (Poems, 512). He snidely declares that the “saviours of the people” have discarded the body (ibid.). Instead they’ve “given you this jig-­jig-­ jig / tick-­tick-ticking of machines, / this life which is no-­man’s-­life” (ibid.). Mechanical body imagery and repetition of the word “and” act like a gear, keeping his analogy grinding away at humanity. Thus Lawrence evokes an alliterative death cry in the “Dark Satanic Mills” as multitudes are “mewed and mangled in the mills of man”: And now, the iron has entered into the soul and the machine has entangled the brain, and got it fast, and steel has twisted the loins of man, electricity has exploded the heart and out of the lips of people jerk strange mechanical noises in place of speech. Poems, 544; emphasis added

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The above stanza provides a good example of Lawrence playing with prosody, his meter depending on “the natural pause, the natural lingering of the voice according to the feeling” (Letters 2, 104).42 There is a tendency for phrases to fall into a mechanical four-­syllable choriambic rhythm that mimics a motor humming “jiggity-­jig,” or “clickity-­clack.” Lawrence ends with the rhymed couplet, “Are these no longer men . . . / What are they then?” (ibid., emphasis mine). Much like L. Frank Baum’s proto-­robot, the cursed Tin Woodman of Oz,43 his fellow countrymen are chipped away piecemeal until they are robbed of their mind, masculinity, heart, voice, and soul. Lawrence’s chant of ghastly machine penetration, therefore, transforms men into devils, reminiscent of the rape-­like creation of Robot Maria (the real Maria having undergone personal violation as she is chased, cornered, captured, and encased in a glass tube hooked to machinery during the transfer process). The abrasive tone of the “Nettles” adheres to the Futurist promotion of reckless violence as a “hygienic” prescription designed to provoke rebellion.44 Instead of glorifying technology, however, Lawrence warns of its dangers. Amit Chaudhuri states, “ Machine,’ for Lawrence, as for many other modernist writers, is a word that stands for a whole abhorrent way of life; equally, it stands portentously for what is anti-­life and anti-­man.”45 There is a militant power behind both versions of “The triumph of the machine,” which exhibit a disruptive attack on nature: “machines have . . . / hardened the earth, shaking the larks’ nest till the eggs have broken” (Poems, 539). Like “Rock Drill,” the poem undergoes a similar transformation from victorious steamrolling machines to their collapse into “the smoky ruin of iron” (ibid.): So mechanical man in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine will be driven mad from within himself, and sightless, and on that day the machines will turn to run into one another traffic will tangle up in a long-­drawn-out crash of collision and engines will rush at the solid houses, the edifice of our life will rock in the shock of the mad machine, and the house will come down. Poems, 538 David Gordon notes: “in an age in which mass communication rapidly caused fresh phraseology to become stale, Lawrence was struggling with language itself. His very aggressiveness hints at the magnitude of his effort.”46 A new word then becomes a most effective tool. “The Gulf ” (chosen as my opening excerpt) is Lawrence’s first poem to use the word “robot.” He continues by singling out “Mr. Ford” as a “brain” of Industry, a Young Rossum tempting the populace to be master of their own machine (the automobile). A polarized debate over the impact of machines on the human condition sparked ardent fans on both sides. While the optimistic H. G. Wells may have believed it is “an inefficient factory that needs slaves,”47 the reality of

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early manufacturing was far from that ideal. If fictions like R.U.R. and Metropolis played up the “spiritless, hopeless drudges, working reluctantly and mechanically,”48 they also emphasized the split between the lofty goals of technology and the reality of working long, hot hours in a noisy factory. Clockwork automatons of the eighteenth century,49 designed to amuse the rich, had evolved to perform the arduous, dangerous, or mundane tasks of production, resulting in a growing unease about our new roles in an automated society. Might robots replace us? As machines became more life-­like, humans inevitably devolved into lifeless robot laborers—a two-­way analogy. Lawrence’s title, “The Gulf,” suggests this double meaning of both contracting and expanding gaps in the social structure, the separation between mind and labor (head and hand) as well as between human and machine. When Lawrence says Robot and slave are both “machine incarnate,” he alludes to this shrinking divide as they meld together like “Rock Drill.” The class of manual laborers have become the fleshy “limbs and trunk of the machine” (Poems, 547). Metropolis symbolizes this by having the laborers mimic the clock hands and lever actions. Public desire for mass produced goods made the assembly line essential and, likewise, turned factory workers into interchangeable cogs of industry. Dependence on machines meant we now slaved to keep them operational. Taken to its extreme, the hallucinatory dream sequence in Metropolis shows human sacrifices being led into the gaping mouth of Moloch as they become its food. Robot Maria later incites riot by asking, “Who lubricates the machine joints with their own blood∼?!”50 Goody remarks that “Taylorism and Fordism, standardization of workplaces and workers’ production, were founded on understanding the human body and self through the lens of technology. The human individual is seen as reducible to rational processes and the human body is made into a machine by its insertion into sequences of repetitive labour.”51 This view harkens back to René Descartes,52 who postulated that man was a machine designed by God. In “Man and Machine” Lawrence says, “Men have perforce to be little dynamos / and little talking radios / and the human spirit is so much gas, to keep it all going” (Poems, 552). The ultimate “triumph” of the machine may be this relentless trend toward mechanical mergence and its “fundamental challenge to our perception of what makes us human.”53 Yet Lawrence also recognizes a wide “gulf, impassable” between the “machine-­ spawn myriads” and his champions, the “sons of the elements and the unspeaking gods” (Poems, 548). He had faith that humanity would not succumb to the machine or end up “entangled among all the engines,” and advocates we distance ourselves from the robots to maintain integrity (ibid.). Lawrence says that “now forever breaks the great illusion / of human oneness” (Poems, 547) and the only class division that matters is between robot men and “men still unmechanised” (Poems, 548). Under the circumstances, he supposes that it is better to live like hermits and “hide in your own wild Thebaïd” (Poems, 553). David Ellis comments, “If most people were indeed ‘machine-­spawn’ then the only way forward for the remainder was to disengage.”54 “Life always finds a

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way” to distinguish oneself as a “freeman,” and Lawrence entreats, “Oh man, stare, stare into the gulf / between you and the robot-­hordes. . .” (Poems, 549). To recognize this gulf insured its maintenance. Admittedly, Lawrence’s “Nettles” have been largely overlooked when judged as poetry beyond a biographical or philosophical aspect. Since most were published posthumously, we cannot be sure if they were intended as a thematic sequence of social criticism, a collection of rough drafts teasing out themes and leading to some of his finer Last Poems, or merely a series of rants during an exceptionally low period of his life when he simultaneously faced mortality and accusations of obscenity. The “Nettles” have the aura of a “grumpy poet,” which is understandable since he was being attacked in both his body and his artistic soul. These theories have been made before, starting with Richard Aldington, who edited the notebooks for publication in 1932. Within the robot sequence, especially, most scholars would agree that, by the time we reach “Side-­step, O sons of men!” as it sashays away from “the entanglement of the giggling machine / that sprawls across the earth in iron imbecility,” and “On and on and on,” with its “mechanized robots” running to “their heaven and their doom” (Poems, 554), we begin to wish for a poem titled “Basta!” Perhaps that was Lawrence’s point— there is no stopping the relentless march of progress and its robot acolytes. Lawrence continues the poetic steamrolling with the ironic “Oh wonderful machine!” which at least has a touch of humor and nice imagery. The “almighty machine” lacks all sense of “wonder” (Poems, 555), and has “no feeling of the moon as she changes her quarters” (Poems, 554) nor can it “hear the sea’s uneasiness!” (ibid.). To machinery, “the sun is merely something that makes the thermometer rise!” (ibid.). Yet these contraptions must “be looked after by some knock-­kneed wretch / at two pounds a week” (Poems, 555). So how can they be gods? Even Rossum’s Robots kept Alquist alive to serve them. Lawrence preferred to write from scratch rather than revise; therefore, we should not critique these poems all in the same vein but instead appreciate this glimpse of his creative process in action. Holly Laird believes Lawrence’s “poems acquire power and significance cumulatively as they gather in sequence . . . acquire greater implication when placed in the larger drama.”55 Thus we can “attend” to some interesting things going on in the “Nettles,” particularly as he latched on to the Robot theme starting from “The Gulf ” onward. By commandeering robots and subverting Futurist forms, Lawrence pulls himself out of his “living-­dead” funk, from feeling “weighed down to extinction / and sunk into a depression that almost blots me out” (“We die together,” Poems, 544). His robot poems have given him the strength to draw clear of the “white-­faced millions” who gush forth from factories in “multitudinous ignominy” (Poems, 543). Lawrence finally emerges on the other side of the “gulf ” by joining ranks with those who have “the wind and the fire of life / in their faces . . .” (Poems, 548) and ultimately reclaiming wonder in “The gods! the gods!” After trudging through reams of aggressive robot poetry, it’s a relief when Lawrence breaks free and waxes lyrical once more.

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Certainly, there is evidence of Lawrence working some poems into a sequence, as with the pairing of “Love thy neighbor—“and “As thyself—!” The first poem relates the transformation of his neighbors (in Body-Snatcher style) into “two-­ legged things that walk and talk / and eat and cachinnate, and even seem to smile” (Poems, 555), while the next poem shows the poet being absorbed (in a Borg-­like assimilation): “If I try loving them, I fall into their robot jig-jig-jig / their robot cachinnation comes rattling out of my throat” (Poems, 556). Title patterns, as in “Robot feelings” and “Robot-­democracy,” reveal his method of covering a wide arc of social criticism (with topics such as labor, class, religion, solitude, service, and so on) that may have been left unfinished. Lawrence uses an interesting mix of adjectives to describe his robots: ego bound, brainy, aesthetic, muscular, mechanical, base, inferior, grinning, insatiable, soulless, and evil. They all seem to culminate in “The gods! the gods!” which was, with one Last Poems exception,56 the end of his robot obsession. And it provides us with a counter example (in the precursors “Forte dei Marmi” and “Sea-­bathers”) that at least some of the “Nettles” were indeed drafts that got reworked in an elegant reductionist fashion. We can witness how “the blatant bodies of these all-­butnaked, sea-­bathing city people” (Poems, 540) is pared down to “People were bathing and posturing themselves on the beach” (Poems, 561). His lines, the “bluey-­brown bodies, they might just as well be gutta percha, / and the reddened limbs” that “looks like nullity” (Poems, 540) instead become “all was dreary, great robot limbs, robot breasts / robot voices . . .” (Poems, 561). Gutta-­percha is a natural latex produced from the sap of Palaquium gutta trees—pliable when heated and rigid when cooled. Widely used before plastics, it is an appropriate material for robot types who are easily manipulated but emotionally stiff. So is marble—Forte dei Marmi translates to “Fort of the Marbles” due to its history of stockpiling Cararra marble from nearby quarries for export. It was one of the first beach resort towns in northern Tuscany. The beachgoers appear artificial and statue-­like to Lawrence, and their “sitting in bathing-­suits all day” (LEA, 282) is just a “flaunting of the body in its non-­physical, merely optical aspect” (ibid.). We can assume they are each “without a soul,” like Eric the Robot, since Lawrence writes that “The automat has no soul to lose / so it can’t have one to save” followed by his claim that most death today “is merely a machine breaks down / and can’t be mended” (Poems, 550). “The gods! the gods!” reads with a cool, yet powerful, robot efficiency that condenses many of his previous themes. The “robot limbs” contain the concepts of servitude and drudgery, the “robot breasts” convey nullity, the lack of emotion or empathy, the “robot voices” evoke the grating and senseless noise of shallow communication. The vacationers have escaped work and their “posturing” on the beach is a winding down of labors as well as an allusion to their pretense at gaiety. One can imagine the riders of Gertler’s “Merry-Go-Round” flung onto the beach by centrifugal force. Lawrence’s contempt stems from this shoreline invasion, a mass of corporeal flotsam and jetsam. He ends the stanza cryptically with “robot even the gay umbrellas” (Poems, 561).

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Lawrence visited Forte dei Marmi during the summer of 1929. Vintage postcards from the 1920s and 1930s show the arrangement of umbrellas lining its long, narrow beach like troops in formation. From a Lawrentian perspective, umbrellas block the sunlight and disconnect people from nature. Umbrellas also appear in his 1928 essay “Chaos in Poetry” and represent the confining bubble of comforting stability that shields (or shades) people from the truth: “Man must wrap himself in a vision . . . In his terror of chaos, he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting whirl. Then he paints the under-­side of his umbrella like a firmament . . . parades around, lives and dies under his umbrella” (IR, 109). Lawrence claims that mankind “gradually goes bleached and stifled under his parasol,” and requires a “window to the sun” (ibid.). He saw the work of poets as making a few small slits in the umbrella, thereby letting in light and fresh air, but persistently “commonplace man . . . patches the umbrella . . .” (IR, 110). His reference to this “Absolute Umbrella” helps explain its robot status in his poem. Furthermore, umbrellas protect us from the elements by mechanical extension of the hand and arm. Lawrence may have remembered this association from Samuel Butler’s utopian satire Erewhon (an anagram for “Nowhere”). It contained three chapters regarding “The Book of the Machines”57 that debates the pros and cons of banning mechanical inventions. The prevailing side believed that Darwinian evolution would bring about machine consciousness and self-­replication. Consequently, the human race would degrade to the point that “our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches” while machine-­life reigns supreme.58 Therefore, the question is raised, “Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud . . .?”59 Whereas supporters treat a machine as “merely a supplementary limb” and utilize umbrellas as an example of man’s “many extra-­corporeal members,” by which, Butler claims, “We vary our physique with the seasons, with age, with advancing or decreasing wealth.”60 Lawrence had read this book enthusiastically during his formative years at college and discussed it with girlfriend Jessie Chambers at length.61 Erewhon may have left a lasting impression that now resurfaced. The major shift between the three beach poems comes in the second stanza of “The gods! the gods!” which introduces a saving grace, and so becomes a more balanced poem that rises above the level of a rant. Previously Lawrence had elaborated on the beach robots by comparing them to the “vibration of the motor-­car” and “Dunlop inflated unconcern” or by singling out haunted eyes that seem to ask, “Where then is life?” (Poems, 540). But now he presents a more positive alternative in the form of “a woman, shy and alone” (Poems, 561). This goddess figure is reminiscent of the bathing woman from “Gloire de Dijon” or Aphrodite from “The Man of Tyre.” And, like “Impulse,” her soul instinctively “rolls back / away from the robot-­classes and the robot masses / and withdraws itself, and recognises a flower, or the morning-­star” (Poems, 551). Lawrence tempers his earlier sarcasm by reconnecting with nature.

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In the juxtaposition of the two contrasting stanzas, Lawrence seems to have mated the styles of the masculine Futurist with a feminine Imagist. The first stanza represents the Futurist concepts of “universal dynamism” and “interpenetrated lines of force,” where people and objects become one blur of constant motion indistinct from the background. The next stanza shifts perspective to the classic goddess image, unselfconscious and understated in her glory. The robots are fragmented; she is whole. If the poem were a painting, the beach scene might be rendered in the sharp colorful shards of a Cubo-Futurist abstraction, a jumbled assemblage of body parts. But the lone woman would likely be painted traditionally in golden hues to highlight her sunlit face, accentuating “the glimmer of the presence of the gods” (Poems, 561). Gordon notes that Lawrence was both a Modern and a Romantic writer who “tried to synthesize the naturalism of a scientific age and the supernaturalism of a religious age.”62 The second stanza also contains an intertwining of gender and style of its own produced by the percussive insertion of the word “tap.” A tap, or faucet, is a mechanical device that controls the flow of water through a pipe, a product of modern plumbing. The “Sea-­bathers” poem applies Lawrentian wit to suggest a phallic spigot (in both English and Italian): “the half-­hidden private parts just a little brass tap, robinetto, / turned on for different purposes” (Poems, 540). Thus our goddess is performing a cosmic consummation by uniting with the modern world along the strand—a meeting of earth and sea, male and female, conformity and individuality, technology and mysticism all coming together with a “glimmer” of life. She is a conduit between the energies of the beaming sun and the flowing water. Or, by applying a Vorticist slant,63 she is the still center-­point of the modern chaotic whirlpool. The blatant dichotomy of the poem is emphasized by its title of “The gods, the gods!” and its two stanzas contrasting robot masses with a lone woman—the god of the machine and the god within the individual. The double flowers at the end (“like lilies, / and like water-­lilies”) echoes the repetition in the title and creates a poetic refrain (Poems, 561). It brings to mind Christ and the biblical reference to the “lilies of the field” that toil not, versus robots that do. Both floral varieties carry their own distinct fragrance and womb symbolism: lilies of earth and of marshy waters, day-­lilies and night-­blooming, pure white lilies of the northern temperate zone and the sacred lotus of the tropics, cultivated and wild. Lawrence had referenced a poem called “Water Lilies” in his introduction to Harry Crosby’s Chariot of the Sun, the same essay as his umbrella analogy. Lawrence’s impression of that poem also fits well with his own. He says, “The visual image passes at once into sense of touch, and back again, so that there is an iridescent confusion of sense impression . . . a suffusion which liberates the soul, and lets a new flame of desire flicker delicately up from the numbed body” (IR, 114). Likewise, the shy woman is vivified by the sensations of cool water and solar heat across her skin.64 Alongside Lawrence’s sun devotion, he valued “water, most palpably water” (ibid.). So the act of “washing herself ” is a tactile experience,65 and the simple alteration from lilies

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to water-­lilies transforms purity to fertility. It’s not just a flower representing each stanza—the woman herself is compared to both types, a marriage between gods, perhaps. But what about the poet’s perspective? The passive observer is also at the beach; is he robot as well? In “Worship” and “Classes,” Lawrence divides mankind into three types: those few that can “look straight into the eyes of the gods,” seeing “life clear and flickering all around,” (Poems, 559); those who “can only see what they are shown” (ibid.); and then there are the “homogeneous amorphous class of anarchy / the robots, those who deny the gleam” (Poems, 560). M. J. Lockwood points out that seeing the religious wonder in life doesn’t “require any extra-­sensory perception on the part of the beholder, only the fullest attentiveness with those senses we all have.”66 But it does require humanity, since robots are not aware, and it is that theme we observe played out in “The gods! the gods!” The narrator is at first robot-­like as he glances over the beach in dismay, but the bathing woman attracts his notice. Suddenly, he can see the flicker of life and the glimmer of gods again. He experiences a quiet communion, as in his poem “Lonely, lonesome, loney-­o!” where he escapes “the petrol fumes of human conversation / and the exhaust-­smell of people” (Poems, 557) and is “Soothed, restored and healed / when I am alone with the silent great cosmos” (ibid.). Thus “The gods! the gods!” offers a rebirth, a baptism for both the woman and the poet/observer, as well as for the readers. If she is a god, and he is one who can recognize the godly, then we are hopefully among those who are shown the path back to humanity. This holy trinity is emphasized by the repetition of the words: gods, robots, and lilies. Lawrence’s robot poems, in broader context, demonstrate his belief that any idealism—whether social, cultural, artistic, or political—leads to “neurotic automatons”: “But at the centers of the primal will . . . here a man arises in his own dark pride and singleness, his own sensual magnificence” (RDP, 141). While we may feel that the “machine incarnate” has indeed triumphed in most of his robot poetry, the machination is finally stopped in its tracks by “The gods, the gods!” For in this poem, in particular, Lawrence has successfully taken advantage of the robot’s brief heritage of revolt and pulled from current artistic movements as well as his own personal philosophy. Lawrence would only live another six months after writing them; and, thankfully, his creative process is preserved for us in “The ‘Nettles’ Notebook.” Through poetry Lawrence was capable of sensing beauty even among the robots, capable of summoning the life-­force even as his own was winding down.

Notes 1 In “Version 1” of Lady Chatterley, Constance describes Clifford as a strange automated thing: “She looked at her husband’s light blue eyes in a sort of admiration, but also with dislike. He was a kind of Robot, after all” (FLC, 146). She

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also fears absorption: “[I]n time she would become just a half-­animate automaton worked entirely from Clifford’s will . . .” (FLC, 54). The robot references help explain Lawrence’s creative choice to dehumanize by confining Clifford to a motorized wheelchair and by having him modernize Tevershall mines. Andrew Humphries confirms that Clifford’s physical disabilities represent “a whole generation’s rejection of the body as central to life in favour of a more mechanical and cerebral infrastructure . . . Clifford’s miners become extensions of his own machine dependency,” in his D. H. Lawrence, Transport and Cultural Transition (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 234–5. In “Version 2” of Lady Chatterley, Lawrence writes that the cold-­blooded “proletariat was divided between haves and have-­nots, owners and wage-­earners, capitalists and workers. It was a polarized homogeneous proletariat. It was all Robot. And it was the suicide of the human race” (LCL, 492–3). 2 Lawrence writes Max Mohr (December 18, 1927): “I believe the race of men is dying out: nothing left but women, eunuchs, and Robots” (Letters 6, 239). In a letter to Maria Chambers (August 23, 1929), he refers to visiting America via Ellis Island as “A robot inhumanity!” (Letters 7, 438). 3 Ivan Klíma, “Introduction,” in R.U.R., Karel Čapek, trans. Claudia Novack (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), xi. 4 Klíma, “Introduction,” xi–xii. 5 Klíma, “Introduction,” xii. 6 Karel Čapek, R.U.R., trans. Claudia Novack (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 21. Emphasis on the “perfectibility of man” was a logical outcome of industrialization. Lawrence protests, “I am not a mechanical contrivance” and “I’m not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton . . . I don’t work with a little set of handles or levers” (SCAL, 20, 26). 7 Čapek, R.U.R., 34. 8 Čapek, R.U.R., 84. 9 Universum-Film AG (Ufa), founded in 1918 by the German High Command, became the first major film studio in Europe. It specialized in art films and nationalist propaganda. 10 Holger Bachmann, “Introduction,” in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinetmatic Visions of Technology and Fear, eds. Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 4. 11 Bachmann, “Introduction,” 5. 12 Special effects included the Schufftan process of trick mirrors, stop motion, double-­exposure, matte paintings, rear-­projection, and pyrotechnics. Thomas Elsaesser writes that Metropolis aspired to be “not only an American film in terms of its production values and special effects: It also wanted to be a ‘birth of the nation’ film, a foundation film, a modern ‘synthetic’ fairy tale, a Marchen for the machine age.” He describes German cinema of the 1920s as containing “vitality and electricity, fusing human and machine energy, showing sinuous bodies animated at once by electric currents and dark urges” (“Innocence Restored?” in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 128, 123). 13 H. G. Wells, “Reviews,” in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 94. 14 H. G. Wells, “Reviews,” in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 94. 15 Iris Barry, “Reviews,” in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 105.

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16 The Complete Metropolis (2010 DVD re-­release) restores 25 minutes of lost footage including missing subplot scenes. Its iconic legacy can be seen in the Art Deco cityscapes of such films as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997) as well as in the android C-3PO from George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977). Film clips from Metropolis have been used in music videos by Madonna (“Express Yourself ”) and Freddie Mercury (“Love Kills”). 17 Cited in Bachmann, “Preface,” in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, x. 18 Richard Humphreys states that “Marinetti and the Futurists brought to their work a sense of the libidinal energy that seemed to be driving the intricate technological and psychological changes,” in his Futurism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 16. 19 Julia Dover, “The Imitation Game,” in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 278. Gaby Wood supports and elaborates: “Although androids have no understanding of death, they are themselves embodiments of it. Every time an inventor tries to simulate life mechanically, he is in fact accentuating his own mortality . . . androids are more like mementi mori, reminders that, unlike us, they are forever unliving, and yet never dead. They throw the human condition into horrible relief,” in her Edison’s Eve (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), xviii. 20 “Production Reports,” in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 76. 21 Dover, “Imitation Game,” 280. 22 The Complete Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang (1927; New York: Kino International, 2010), DVD. 23 Dover, “Imitation Game,” 281. 24 Dover, “Imitation Game,” 279. 25 Although the original Eric no longer exists, robotist-­artist Giles Walker recreated it for a 2017 Robot exhibit at the South Kensington Science Museum in England. The project, commissioned by the museum and funded by a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, referenced old newspaper articles, photos, and film clips. Museum curator Ben Russell attests to its historical value: “He’s the first British robot in our modern understanding of the word . . . and is certainly among a handful of these types of robot anywhere in the world,” in Matt Burgess, “Rebuilding Eric, ‘the man without a soul’: the UK’s first robot gets an upgrade,” Wired (Feb. 7, 2017), accessed December 1, 2017, http://www.wired.co.uk/article/ eric-­robot-science-­musuem. 26 In a letter to Arthur McLeod (June 2, 1914), Lawrence admits to having “a very fat book” of Futurist poems, a picture book, as well as having read Marinetti’s, Paolo Buzzi’s, and Ardengo Soffici’s “manifestations and essays . . . on cubism and futurism” (Letters 2, 180). He writes to Edward Garnett (June 5, 1914): “I think the book [Wedding Ring] is a bit futuristic—quite unconsciously so. But when I read Marinetti . . . I see something of what I am after” (Letters 2, 182). 27 Kim Herzinger, D. H. Lawrence in His Time: 1908–1915 (London: Associated University Press, 1982), 127. 28 Herzinger, His Time, 128, 135. 29 Regarding Lawrence’s debate with Futurism, Mark Kinkead-Weekes adds that “though he did now think there was another and greater wisdom in the body and the blood . . . Lawrence is not necessarily attacking science in arguing that there is more to human and national life than scientific intellect,” in his biography D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 122.

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30 Jack Stewart, The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 117–18. 31 Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011), 140. 32 Goody, Technology, 141. 33 Andrew Harrison, D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism (New York: Rodopi, 2003), 132. 34 Mark Gertler (1891–1939) attended the Slade School of Art at University College in London and enjoyed the patronage of Lady Ottoline Morrell, through which he met Lawrence and other Bloomsbury artists. “Merry-Go-Round,” which remained unsold during his lifetime, was purchased by London’s Tate Gallery in 1984. 35 Jacob Epstein, Let There Be Sculpture (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 49. “Torso” was purchased by London’s Tate Gallery in 1960 and “Rock Drill” was reconstructed in 1974. Epstein (1880–1959) disconnected with the Futurist and Vorticist movements during the war, believing that further “attempts to extend the range of sculpture” had gone too far, and would later defend himself by saying that “to think of abstraction as an end in itself is undoubtedly letting oneself to be led into a cul-­de-sac, and can only lead to exhaustion and impotence” (Let There Be Sculpture, 50). 36 Lawrence writes in “Introduction to Pansies”: “This little bunch of fragments is offered as a bunch of pensées, anglicé pansies; a handful of thoughts. Or if you will have the other derivation of pansy, from panser, to dress or soothe a wound, these are my tender administrations to the mental and emotional wounds we suffer from . . . A thought, with its own blood of emotion and instinct running in it like the fire in a fire-­opal . . . yet each of them combining with all the others to make up a complete state of mind” (Poems, 663). 37 Lawrence’s letter to Orioli (August 2, 1929) reads, “At present I can do nothing: except write a few stinging ‘Pansies’ which this time are ‘Nettles’ ” (Letters 7, 400). His letter to Marianne Moore (April 18, 1929) reads, “even beauty has its thorns and its nettle-­stings and its poppy-­poison. Nothing is without offense, and nothing should be: if it is part of life . . .” (Letters 7, 258). 38 Isaac Asimov, “The New Profession,” in Robot Visions (New York: ROC, 1990), 445. Asimov (1920–92), a prolific author known for his popular science essays and science fiction Robot Series, is credited with coining the word “robotics” in his short story, “Liar!” (1941). He also wrote “The Three Laws of Robotics” first postulated in “Runaround” (1942). Both of these stories were collected into his book I, Robot (New York: Gnome Press, 1950). 39 Čapek, R.U.R., 13–14. 40 “Enslaved by Civilization” was later published in Vanity Fair (Sept. 1929) as “The Manufacture of Good Little Boys” (LEA, 155). 41 Harrison, D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism, 131. 42 Lawrence writes to Marsh (November 18, 1913): “I hate an on-­foot method of reading” and considers scansion “a thing invented afterwards by the schoolmaster” (Letters 2, 103–4). 43 L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) created the classic American Fairy Tale complete with the proto-­robots of the Tin Woodman (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900) and Tik-Tok, the Machine Man (Ozma of Oz, 1907). Ellis called Tik-Tok “arguably the first 100% robot: a computer brain inside a mechanical body” with “stuttering

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diction that characterized many robots thereafter” in Proto-Robots, ed. Len Ellis (San Bernardino, CA: Publish on Demand, Text Source: Project Gutenberg & Google Books, 2017), xvii. Baum attended Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, where he participated in a press conference for Thomas Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” Evan Schwartz argues the World’s Fair provided inspiration for Emerald City, described as “bursting with all the latest gadgetry,” in Finding Oz (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 277. 44 Humphreys, Futurism, 11. Point 9 of the “Futurist Manifesto”: “We will glorify war— the world’s only hygiene.” 45 Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and “Difference” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 43. 46 David Gordon, D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 10. 47 H. G. Wells, “Reviews,” 96. 48 H. G. Wells, “Reviews,” 96. 49 Notable examples from the eighteenth century “Automaton Craze” include Jacques de Vaucanson’s life-­size “Flute-­player” and “Digesting Duck.” Henri Maillardet’s “Draughtsman-Writer” was the model for The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Wolfgang von Kempelen perpetrated an infamous hoax with the chess-­playing “Turk,” but it nevertheless inspired fiction by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ambrose Bierce, and Edgar Allen Poe, as well as Charles Babbage’s work with computers, in Ana Matronic’s Robot Universe (New York: Sterling, 2015), 157. 50 The Complete Metropolis, DVD. 51 Goody, Technology, 141. 52 The French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) was inspired by the many automata he witnessed in Paris to study the mind–body connection using a mechanistic framework that was published in Passions of the Soul (1649) and posthumously in Treatise on Man (1664). 53 Wood, Edison’s Eve, xxvii. 54 David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 497. 55 Holly A. Laird, Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988). 10. 56 “The Evil World-Soul” contains Lawrence’s final use of the word “Robot” in his poetry: “The Robot is the unit of evil / And the symbol of the Robot is the wheel revolving” (Poems, 626). 57 Butler’s chapters on “The Book of the Machines” are comprised of redeveloped philosophical essays first published under the pen name of Cellarius in The Press newspaper of Christchurch, New Zealand. Most notable is “Darwin Among the Machines” (1863), later expanded into “The Mechanical Creation” (1865) for the London paper Reasoner (“Preface” in Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2015), 6). 58 Butler, Erewhon, 157. 59 Butler, Erewhon, 139. 60 Butler, Erewhon, 58–9. 61 Jessie Chambers recreates Lawrence’s reaction to Butler’s Erewhon: “It’s so fresh, so romantic, such a sense of a new country. And then he just turns all our ideas of

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society upside down, but with the greatest seriousness . . .” in her D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 120. 62 Gordon, D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic, 16. 63 The Vorticism Movement (1914) was a British offshoot of Cubo-Futurism and based on the concept of the vortex as promoted by Wyndham Lewis’s journal, Blast. 64 Ross Murfin says of Lawrence’s fondness for water rituals: “The gods always reveal themselves to the self alone, it seems, or in images of another person or creature in unselfconscious, casual relation to the world. Very often . . . in terms of a self alone in water,” The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 222. 65 Filippo T. Marinetti claimed Tactilism as another of his “inventions.” His essays include “Tactilism: A Futurist Manifesto” (1921), suggesting we “transform the handshake, the kiss, the coupling into a continuous communication of thoughts” and “Tactilism: Toward the Discovery of New Senses” (1923), detailing how a “visual sense is born at the tips of fingers,” in Critical Writings, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 372, 378. 66 M. J. Lockwood, A Study of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Palgrave, 1987), 179. He references the poem “Thought”: “a man in his wholeness wholly attending” (Poems, 581).Figure 3  Maschinenmensch from Metropolis

“M en N o M ore T han the S u b j ecti v e M aterial of the M achine ”: L awrence , M achinery, and W ar - T ime P sychology Andrew Harrison

This chapter considers a little-­discussed and controversial aspect of war-­time psychology in Lawrence’s writing, focusing on the novel beauty of mechanical warfare and the kinds of satisfaction which soldiers and civilians gleaned by serving the machine. Beginning with Lawrence’s ambivalent description of army maneuvers in his article “With the Guns,” it goes on to consider his account of a Zeppelin bombing raid in a letter, his interest in the merging of man and machine in the contemporary visual arts, his embattled response to propagandistic early war poetry, his discussion of soldiers’ psychology in the poem “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?” and the essays “Study of Thomas Hardy” and “The Crown,” and his accounts of man’s immersion in the machine in The Rainbow and The First ‘Women in Love.’ It concludes with fresh readings of the 1915 version of “England, My England” and “Tickets Please” as short stories dealing with the war spirit on the Western and Home Fronts respectively which concentrate very closely on the attraction to machinery and the blurring of the line between the human and the mechanical. In a short article entitled “With the Guns,” published in the Manchester Guardian on August 18, 1914 (just a fortnight after Britain had declared war on Germany), Lawrence offered an ominous and remarkably prescient account of modern mechanized warfare. Drawing on his experience of watching the Bavarian army training in “the Isar valley and near the foot of the Alps” in fall 1913, and of speaking with an Italian soldier who had fought in Tripoli, Lawrence predicted that this war would be “an affair entirely of machines, with men attached to the machines as the subordinate part thereof, as the butt is the part of a rifle” (TI, 81). He used the term “unnatural” five times to underscore the strange new reality of modern warfare. He noted that soldiers would no longer experience hand-­to-hand combat, but instead operate guns firing shells into unseen targets “a mile and a half away” (ibid.), and he stated that they would be forced to “lie still under machine-­fire” (TI, 83). The final paragraph of the essay drove home Lawrence’s point: “It is a war of artillery, a war of machines, and men no more than the subjective material of the machine. It is so unnatural as to be unthinkable. Yet we must think of it” (TI, 84).

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On a thematic level, the article’s account of the dehumanizing and trauma-­ inducing features of modern warfare reinforces the old binaries of the instinctive (or natural) versus the mechanical (or unnatural), and the volitional versus the involuntary. By mechanizing individuals, modern warfare strips soldiers of their humanity, leaving them with “no rights, no self, no being” (TI, 82); it reduces them to a neurasthenic state of blankness, replacing the “old natural courage” of rushing at the enemy with “cold, metallic adherence to an iron machine” and “mechanical, expressionless movement” (TI, 83, 82). Yet, as Jeff Wallace has noted, “Lawrence’s commitment was to a rationality whose function was constantly to call to account such ‘fixities’ of thought as the binaries structuring our understanding of the human.”1 On a structural level, “With the Guns” troubles the binaries which it invokes. The experience of watching the bravado of departing reservists at a train station triggers a series of connected memories of warfare, which are recounted in a repetitive form which shows that the involuntary and mechanical are always already inside us: “I remember standing on a little round hill (TI, 81) . . . Then I remember going at night down a road (TI, 82) . . . And I remember a captain of the bersaglieri (ibid.) . . . I remember also standing on a little hill crowned by a white church” (TI, 83). Mechanical subservience cannot be safely externalized because it is inscribed in the psyche as a defining aspect of human identity. This may help to account for the uncanny, haunting quality of “With the Guns,” since the spectacle of mechanized warfare (as Lawrence depicts it) is at once strange and familiar, external and internal, obscene and sublime. Lawrence describes seeing flares and searchlights as part of a night-­time military maneuver in Bavaria: The night came on. Suddenly, on the other side, high up in the darkness, burst a beautiful greenish globe of light, and then came into being a magic circle of countryside set in darkness, a greenish jewel of landscape, splendid bulk of trees, a green meadow, vivid. The ball fell and it was dark, and in one’s eye remained treasured the little vision that had appeared far off in the darkness. Then again a light ball burst and sloped down. There was the white farm-­ house with the wooden, slanting roof, the green apple trees, the orchard paling, a jewel, a landscape set deep in the darkness. It was beautiful beyond belief. Then it was dark. Then the searchlights suddenly sprang upon the countryside, revealing the magic, fingering everything with magic, pushing the darkness aside, showing the lovely hillsides, the noble bulks of trees, the pallor of corn. A searchlight was creeping at us. It slid up our hill. It was upon us; we turned our backs to it, it was unendurable. Then it was gone. ibid.

The ambivalence of such a passage—in which the effects of the machinery of war are described as both “beautiful beyond belief ” and “unendurable”—signals Lawrence’s primary focus on the self ’s troubling euphoric attraction to

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mechanical warfare despite (or even because of) its unthinkable effacement of Nature and instinct. Lawrence’s writing on modern warfare consistently alerts us to the involving beauty of destructive machinery as well as its horrors. The description of the flares and searchlights in “With the Guns” can be compared to Lawrence’s later account of a Zeppelin raid over London in a letter to Ottoline Morrell of September 9, 1915: Last night when we were coming home the guns broke out, and there was a noise of bombs. Then we saw the Zeppelin above us, just ahead, amid a gleaming of clouds: high up, like a bright golden finger, quite small, among a fragile incandescence of clouds. And underneath it were splashes of fire as the shells fired from earth burst. Then there were flashes near the ground— and the shaking noise. It was like Milton—then there was war in heaven. But it was not angels. It was that small golden Zeppelin, like a long oval world, high up. Letters 2, 389–90

The reference to Milton reveals Lawrence’s awareness that recourse to earlier modes of imaginative writing about conflict in the heavens is inadequate to convey the terrible beauty of a bombing raid. In this passage Lawrence is attempting to create a non-­moral descriptive language supple enough to invoke the visual and auditory thrill he felt; his attention to light, shape, and color invites comparison to C. R. W. Nevinson’s early Futurist-­inspired war paintings, “The First Searchlights at Charing Cross,” (1914) and “Bursting Shell” (1915). In early summer 1914 Lawrence had read with interest Italian Futurist writings by F. T. Marinetti, Paolo Buzzi, and Ardengo Soffici.2 The Futurists were renowned for their celebration of the beauty of modern machinery and warfare. In his February 20, 1909 founding manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti had written of “the hellish fires of great ships,” “the red-­hot bellies of locomotives,” “the mighty noise of the huge double-­decker trams,” and “the famished roar of automobiles.”3 He wished to replace the contemplative sentimentalism of classical Italian art with an aggressively involving aesthetic of conflict, speed, and danger. The Futurists lauded the new phenomenon of mechanical warfare they had experienced in the Italo–Turkish War of 1911–12; they would react with enthusiasm to the spectacle of the Great War in paintings such as Umberto Boccioni’s “Carica di Lancieri” [“The Charge of the Lancers”], and Gino Severini’s “Il treno blindato in azione” [“Armored Train in Action”] and “Cannoni in azione” [“Guns in Action”] (all produced in 1915). Lawrence saw their excitement about machines as historically contingent, telling his friend Arthur McLeod in a letter of June 2, 1914 that Italy (as a country which came late to industrialization) had “got to go through the most mechanical and dead stage of all” (Letters 2, 181), but he expressed sympathy with Marinetti’s “revolt against beastly sentiment and slavish adherence to tradition and the dead mind”

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(ibid.). He drew upon the “Manifesto tecnico della letteratúra futurista” (“Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”) to defend his new approach to character in a subsequent letter to Edward Garnett, his literary mentor. Whereas Marinetti wanted to eradicate psychology from art in order to focus on matter, Lawrence was interested in the synergies between mind and matter: he wanted to supplant “the old-­fashioned human element” (Letters 2, 182) in order to uncover a “new human phenomenon” (Letters 2, 183) in the “physiology of matter” (Letters 2, 182). Lawrence’s war-­time concern with materialistic psychology, and the interface between man and machine, was perhaps most powerfully expressed through his complex response to Mark Gertler’s painting “Merry-Go-Round” (1916). This arresting image of a fairground ride in motion, carrying along the bodies of uniformed soldiers and male and female civilians, suggests the mixture of terror, excitement, and pleasure that can ensue from the merging of man and machine. In a letter of October 9, 1916 Lawrence told Gertler that it was “the best modern picture” he had seen: “I do think that in this combination of blaze, and violent mechanical rotation and complex involution, and ghastly, utterly mindless human intensity of sensational extremity, you have made a real and ultimate revelation” (Letters 2, 660). He clearly saw “Merry-Go-Round” as an analytical painting revealing the unconscious drive to wage mechanical war, and the long, convoluted letter he wrote to Gertler about it shows his struggle to understand and express feelings which he had detected in himself as well as the wider culture. Lawrence asked Gertler to tell him what Jacob Epstein thought of the painting;4 he may have been aware of Epstein’s sculpture “Rock Drill” (displayed in March 1915 in an exhibition organized by the recently formed London Group), which similarly depicts in a menacing way the merging of the human form with the machine. In the first year of the Great War Lawrence was at pains to stress that war was not only—or primarily—an external event in the world but a state of the soul, and while he hated it he refused to adopt a detached moral perspective on it, instead repeatedly emphasizing his own involvement in the underlying feelings of his countrymen, and in their drive to wage mechanical war. For this reason he reacted strongly against propagandistic war writings. On November 16, 1914 he received the special “War Number” of the Chicago-­based magazine Poetry, which was sent on to him by its editor, Harriet Monroe. The magazine had offered a prize of $100 for the best war or peace poem based on the current situation in Europe. Lawrence responded angrily to the “glib irreverence” (Letters 2, 232) of some of the contributors, singling out Amy Lowell’s “The Bombardment,” John Russell McCarthy’s “Hero,” and Maxwell Bodenheim’s “The Camp Follower” for particular criticism. He produced his own war poem as a riposte to these efforts; it writes back to them by confronting readers with the immersive reality of warfare from the perspective of a young soldier whose religious selflessness is inseparable from his suicidal and murderous desires, and who feels an exhilarating attraction to mechanized warfare.

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Lawrence’s poem, in the revised form in which it was eventually published under the title “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?” in the May 1, 1915 number of The Egoist,5 immediately presents us with the soldier’s self-­hatred and the conflict between his masochistic desires and the State’s insistence on self-­ preservation: “How I would like to cut off my hands, / And take out my intestines to torture them! // But I can’t, for it is written against me I must not, / I must preserve my life from hurt.” Lying still under fire brings not terror but a feeling of inner peace: “God, how glad I am to hear the shells / Droning over, threatening me! / . . . It is the loud cries of these birds of pain / That gives me peace” (EELS, 75). The soldier’s sado-­masochism makes self and other indistinguishable: the enemy is merely “that shadow’s shadow of me.” He recounts how he had earlier run across no man’s land to bayonet a German; the killing is compared to sexual congress between a bridegroom and his virgin bride, leaving the one “consummate” and the other “planted and fertilized.” In the first draft Lawrence had emphasized the forces of matter rather than sex: “Like a magnet he took my bayonet, wanting it” (PEH, 270). The soldier in the published version helplessly enacts ritualistic violence, but is compelled to ask “Why am I bridegroom of War, war’s paramour? / What is the crime, that my seed is turned to blood, / My kiss to wounds?” (EELS, 76). He is at once savior and aggressor: he offers his body to the shells just as Christ laid down his life for humanity, expiating the sins of mankind, but he also brings vengeance on those who are evil or false, like the Erinnyes in Greek mythology. The poem ends with a grotesque image of resurrection through suicidal murder: “I walk the earth intact hereafterwards; / The crime full-­expiate, the Erinnyes sunk / Like blood in the earth again; we walk the earth / Unchallenged, intact, unabridged, henceforth a host / Cleansed and in concord from the bed of death” (ibid.). It is helpful to read “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?” alongside Lawrence’s comments on the war in his long essays “Study of Thomas Hardy” (which he was writing when he produced the first draft) and “The Crown” (which he was working on when the revised version appeared in The Egoist), since all three texts focus on the soldier’s desperate attempt to assert, and to feel, his humanity through the risks taken, and the atrocities perpetrated, on the battlefield. In the “Study” Lawrence argues that the exclusive focus on self-­preservation and safety in modern European society “has at length become over-­blown and extravagant” (STH, 7), hindering self-­realization or the aim of every living thing to attain “the full achievement of itself ” (STH, 12). In this account war comes about as a reaction against the meaningless and stifling security enforced on individuals: “Better the light be blown out, wilfully, recklessly, in the wildest wind, than remain secure under the bushel, saved from every draught” (STH, 16). The jeopardy and horror of the Western Front make the soldiers feel alive, while fairground rides, scenes of bombing, and the spectacle of maimed soldiers on the Home Front serve a similar compensatory function for the civilian population. “The Crown” is even more pessimistic, viewing the soldiers’ “passion for danger”—“the desire for the experiencing of the touch of death”

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(RDP, 475)—as part of a deliberate turning away from the challenge to realize their own “civilised and deeply passionate” (RDP, 476) natures in an era of “analysis, breaking-­down, dissolution”: “There remains only the last experience, the same to all men, and to all women, the experience of the final reduction under the touch of death” (RDP, 475). Lawrence’s account of soldiers’ attraction to war experience and war machinery as a reaction against self-­preservation, or a wilful reduction of the self, contradicts the work of contemporary psychologists and psychiatrists who came to see the neurotic symptoms exhibited by traumatized soldiers at the Front as generated by a desire for self-­preservation in a situation where they were forbidden from escaping or expressing fear. While the psychologists accounted for shell-­shock as an unconscious protest on the part of individual soldiers against the unnatural conditions of mechanized warfare, Lawrence focused on challenging his contemporaries’ assumptions about the “human” by drawing attention to the mechanistic drives of industrial workers and soldiers, and the feelings of fulfillment and satisfaction experienced by workers and soldiers in their tending of machines. The links between industry and warfare are made clear in the “Shame” chapter of The Rainbow, in which Ursula Brangwen is forced to confront the reality of the modern colliery run by her Uncle Tom. In Wiggiston his workers “ alter themselves to fit the pits and the place” (R, 322) so that “ marriage and home” become a “ little side-­show” (R, 323) and a man without work is (in Winifred Inger’s words) no more than “ a meaningless lump—a standing machine, a machine out of work” (R, 324). Uncle Tom’s “only happy moments, his only moments of pure freedom” are when he is “serving the machine. Then, and then only, when the machine caught him up, was he free from the hatred of himself, could he act wholely, without cynicism and unreality” (R, 325). Winifred, the masculine New Woman who had earlier entered into an affair with Ursula, is also committed to the machine: “She, too, Winifred, worshipped the impure abstraction, the mechanisms of matter. There, there, in the machine, in service of the machine, was she free from the clog and degradation of human feeling” (ibid.). Ursula protests against a situation in which “living human beings must be taken and adapted to all kinds of horrors” (R, 322). Her critique of Anton Skrebensky’s role as a soldier shows that she values non-­conformism and rebellion over unthinking immersion in the status quo and the machine,6 but her concluding utopian vision of colliers casting off their old lives is undercut by the novel’s depiction of the immersion in the machine as both a learned form of behavior and an innate facet of human identity. Lawrence offers further analysis of the war-­time worship of machinery in Women in Love, in the account of Gerald Crich’s modernization of his mines. Gerald installs an electric plant and brings new machinery from America, changing working practices: “Everything was run on the most accurate and delicate scientific method, educated and expert men were in control everywhere, the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments” (FWL, 212–13). We

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are told that the colliers “submitted to it all” (“the hope seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanised” (FWL, 213)), but in time they get a “further satisfaction” from their position and are “satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them” (ibid.). Lawrence describes the various kinds of satisfaction and fulfillment felt by a soldier manning a gun in the 1915 version of “England, My England.” In this story he undermines the popular image of the soldier as a humanitarian out at the Front to defend his wife, family, and country. The opening paragraphs situate Evelyn Daughtry in the midst of all the structures which war-­time propaganda saw as formative. He dreams of home life in his idyllic English cottage, with his wife and children around him. Yet the language of warfare and conflict infiltrates the sanctity of his garden: he hears the “conflict of authority, echoed even in the children!” (EME, 219). The image of life on the Home Front as full of “peace and sunshine and loveliness” (EME, 220) is treated with caustic irony by Lawrence: in this account it is almost indistinguishable from the Western Front. The central action of the story begins to unfold when Evelyn accidentally inflicts a serious injury on his beloved eldest daughter. He leaves a sharp old iron (or scythe) lying in the garden; the daughter cuts her knee on it, and the ensuing blood poisoning renders her lame. Evelyn is the unwitting agent of wounding and impairment: the path which he is attempting to construct in the dream at the opening of the story between his carefully tended garden and the unruly common beyond the stream symbolizes the connection between his conflictual home life and his military vocation. When war is declared, then, Evelyn responds to it as an outward form of his own inner turmoil: “a shiver went over his soul” (EME, 223). In spite of his habitual indifference to the declaration, something within him finally connects with the world of men and action: There, in the absolute peace of his sloping garden, hidden deep in trees between the rolling of the heath, he was aware of the positive activity of destruction, the seethe of friction, the waves of destruction seething to meet, the armies moving forward to fight. And this carried his soul along with it. EME, 224

Evelyn enlists and is “almost at once . . . drafted into the artillery” (ibid.). Lawrence describes how the middle-­class Evelyn hates his “contemptible position” as a private and the need to follow orders, but is a good soldier “because of a basic satisfaction he had in participating in the great destructive motion” (EME, 225). In The Psychology of the Great War (1916), Gustave Le Bon quotes a captain in the French Army commenting on the “miracle” by which the reservist who puts on military uniform is instantly transformed from a civilian to a military man: “He is no longer a grocer, a blacksmith, or a farmer, but a part of the machine.”7 Evelyn has no occupation to renounce, but we see how his damaging emotional detachment as a husband and father is given a positive

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outlet through the abstract, mechanical work he performs as a gunner: “Then he was really engaged. He hated it, and yet he was fulfilling himself. He hated it violently, and yet it gave him the only real satisfaction he could have in life now . . . This work of destruction alone satisfied his deepest desire” (EME, 226). Carl Krockel describes “Evelyn’s being” on the battlefield as “married to the machinery,”8 but the most compelling and disturbing aspect of the story arguably lies in the realization that the mechanical is not something external to Evelyn, but a quality latent in him which displaces old moral and emotional ties. When he is “working at the guns” (EME, 226), mechanically firing his weapon in response to the directions of his officer, and hearing “in the far distance the sound of heavy firing” (EME, 227) from the enemy, Evelyn feels a “sense of peace” (ibid.). His involvement with “abstract and keen” phenomena such as the machinery and the repetitive commands results in him discovering “his own perfect isolation and abstraction,” so that even the attraction of kissing becomes an “abstract fact” detached from his contemplation of human ties (ibid.). We are asked to imagine a form of sexuality invested entirely in the machine and its actions and reactions upon the body. When describing Evelyn’s grotesque consummation through the explosion of a German shell, Lawrence blurs the boundaries between body and mind, referring to his “blood,” his “palpitating tissue,” “the static inviolability of the nucleus,” and “the membrane of his brain” (EME, 229) as well as his “nerves” and “the whole membrane of the soul” (EME, 228); the emphasis falls upon Evelyn’s mechanical state of consciousness in and through the body. “Tickets Please” offers a comparable analysis of war-­time psychology and sexuality as invested in—and expressed through—the machine. Its plot concerns a group of young women who work as tram conductors on a dangerous Midlands tramline in “the darkness and lawlessness of war-­time” (EME, 40). Their chief inspector, John Thomas (or “Coddy”) Raynor, is an opportunistic philanderer who courts the women one by one, avoiding commitment by jilting them as soon as they begin to take an “intelligent interest” (EME, 39) in him. The central female character, Annie Stone, reacts strongly to his treatment of her, arranging for the women he has courted to get their own back on him. They confront him one Sunday evening in the women’s waiting-­room at the depot, but their intended humiliation of him turns into a full-­blown physical attack. Annie’s act of vengeance backfires when they force him to say which of the women he chooses and he selects her. The ending implies that Annie’s vindictiveness reflects the extent of her underlying feelings for him. Critics have tended to read this story either as a sardonic reflection on the changes in gender roles brought about by the war and female retaliation against earlier forms of male chauvinism and philandering, or else for its mythical allusions.9 This has arguably prevented them from fully appreciating its keen diagnosis of the war spirit on the Home Front.10 While Annie Stone is presented as another New Woman who can hold her own among the “howling colliers” on the trams (EME, 35) (a “tartar” with a “sharp tongue” who is willing to entertain

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the attentions of John Thomas despite being in a prior relationship), the story associates her demeanor in uniform with the reckless courageousness of male soldiers. The women conductors have “all the sang froid of an old non-­ commissioned officer” (ibid.); we are told that the “roving life aboard the car gives them a sailor’s dash and recklessness” (EME, 36), and in her control of the colliers Annie is jokingly likened to Leonidas holding back ten thousand Persians at Thermopylae. The apparently unpremeditated, shocking, and uncontrollable violence of the women in the depot exemplifies, then, a shared drive to maim and murder among men and women, soldiers and civilians. “Tickets Please” closely links the women’s will-­to-violence with the machines they inhabit. The story opens not with a description of the women themselves but of the tram route, with its thrills and its sense of danger and adventure. The implication is that the women’s identities are invested in the machines; their comings and goings, their sudden shifts of temper, and their violent outbursts reflect the tilting rush of the trams, and the “reckless swoops” (EME, 34), breakdowns, and derailments. The women’s rapt involvement with the machines they tend results in an involuntary enactment of violence which momentarily elides the differences between the human and the machine, causing us to ask whether the women have simply internalized the actions of the trams or whether the trams have drawn out their pre-­existing mechanistic drives. As was the case with Evelyn Daughtry, Annie Stone’s sexuality is entirely expressed through machines. She first accepts the attentions of John Thomas at the Statutes fair, which is lit up by “flares . . . and electric lights” (EME, 37), like the scene of the army maneuver in “With the Guns.” John Thomas rides with her on “the Dragons, grim-­toothed, round-­about switchbacks” and on “the horses” (a merry-­go-round) (ibid.). Their immersion in the latter ride is reminiscent of Gertler’s painting: Round they spun and heaved, in the light. And round he swung on his wooden steed, flinging one leg across her mount, and perilously tipping up and down, across the space, half lying back, laughing at her. He was perfectly happy, she was afraid her hat was on one side, but she was excited. EME, 38

The description of John Thomas’s horse as a “wooden steed” points to the complacent and anachronistic role he is playing as Annie’s knight in shining armor, and Annie’s fear that her hat may be displaced shows that she too is consciously playing a traditional female role. Yet a more dangerous emotional dynamic is discernible beneath this surface charade: her excitement and the “perilous” nature of the ride hint at the risk she is taking in publicly flirting with a man when she is already in a relationship, and the violent backlash he faces in toying with Annie’s affections. The fun and excitement continue in the cinema, when he pulls her toward him in the darkness once “the machine goes wrong.” When the projector comes back on we are told that Annie “also started

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electrically” (ibid.)—her involuntary response is here directly likened to the actions of the machine. Annie’s emotions on being jilted by John Thomas alter in stages: she is initially “startled,” then “staggered,” but this soon changes to “fury, indignation, desolation and misery,” and then to “a spasm of despair” (EME, 39), before finally resolving itself into a desire for revenge. Her underlying feelings—in contrast to her very conscious and calculating schemes to retain her existing boyfriend and to humiliate John Thomas—are uncontrollable and involuntary, carrying her along like the fairground rides. The story opens up various possibilities for interpreting the women’s attack on John Thomas as either reflective of the war-­ time atmosphere, wild, or mythically excessive. Their group actions clearly mimic military sadism: the uniformed women lock him in the room, force him to stand with his face to a wall, then hit him and bring him to the ground for a beating. The “terrifying lust” in Annie’s statement that John Thomas “ ought to be killed’ ” (EME, 44) is most obviously relatable to a military context. Yet Annie behaves “like a swift cat” (EME, 42) when she first strikes him, and the women are described as “strange, wild creatures” (EME, 43) when they act in unison; in their frenzied rush to attack John Thomas the vengeful women are reminiscent of the maenads, or Bacchae, in Greek mythology (votaries of the god Dionysus who were said to rip animals apart when possessed). The analysis of war-­time violence in the 1915 version of “England, My England” and “Tickets Please” underscores Lawrence’s insistence that the drive to kill was felt just as keenly on the home front as it was on the battlefields. Yet Lawrence’s depiction of individuals caught up in the destructive nature of the machines they tend reveals a crucial gender difference. Evelyn Daughtry’s identity is entirely subsumed into the machine: his “transcendent state of consciousness” (EME, 231) at the end of the story implies that he has become a mere instrument of death. The women in “Tickets Please,” in contrast, express in an uncontrollable manner the dangerous violence of the trams on which they serve, but their actions are at once “unnatural” (EME, 43) and wild. While Evelyn explicitly rejects human ties, feeling nothing for his wife and children, John Thomas’s choice of Annie Stone as his preferred partner effectively restores the women to an emotional and sentimental context by drawing their anger away from his philandering actions and exposing the desire and sense of competition that was always implicit in their acceptance of his courtship. The implication seems to be that men can lose themselves in their service to the machine, while there is always some aspect of female being which resists complete assimilation.

Notes 1 Jeff Wallace, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 206.

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2 Lawrence read I Poeti Futuristi (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1912) and Ardengo Soffici, Cubismo e Futurismo (Florence: Pubblicato dalla Libreria della Voce, 1914). See Paul Eggert, “Identification of Lawrence’s Futurist Reading,” Notes and Queries, 29, 4 (August 1982): 342–4 and Andrew Harrison, D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism: A Study of Influence (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2003). 3 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1991), 47. 4 See Letters 2, 661: “Tell me what people say—Epstein, for instance.” 5 Surviving fragments of an early version of Lawrence’s war poem—entitled “Passages from Ecce Homo”—are reproduced in PEH. 6 See R, 287–9. 7 Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of the Great War, trans. E. Andrews (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 326. 8 Carl Krockel, War Trauma and English Modernism: T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 40. 9 See, for example, Judith Puchner Breen, “D. H. Lawrence, World War I and the Battle between the Sexes: A Reading of ‘The Blind Man’ and ‘Tickets, Please,’ ” Women’s Studies, 13 (1986): 63–74; Kiernan Ryan, “The Revenge of the Women: Lawrence’s ‘Tickets, Please,’ ” Literature and History, 7 (1981): 210–22; and the attention paid to myth in Janice Hubbard Harris, The Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 138–9. 10 “Tickets Please” is not mentioned at all in the following books on Lawrence and the Great War: Paul Delany, D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Jae-­kyung Koh, D. H. Lawrence and the Great War: The Quest for Cultural Regeneration (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007); Krockel, War Trauma.

T o P rodu ce , or n ot to P rod u ce , t hat i s the Q u e stion : T echnology , D emocracy, and W ar in W om e n i n L ov e Gaku Iwai

‘You’ve got to start with material things,’ said Gerald. Which statement Birkin ignored. . . . ‘Tell me,’ said Birkin. ‘What do you live for?’ Gerald’s face went baffled. ‘What do I live for?’ he repeated. ‘I suppose I live to work, to produce something . . .’ —WL, 56 Women in Love begins with a conversation between the Brangwen sisters, in which Ursula and Gudrun discuss the favorite topics of girls of a marriageable age. Gudrun gives a negative answer to her sister’s question of whether she came back home to find an ideal partner and says, “ ‘Don’t you find, that things fail to materialise? Nothing materialises!’ ” (WL, 8). However, her lover, Gerald Crich, tells his best friend, Rupert Birkin, that “ ‘You’ve got to start with material things’ ” (WL, 56), and as a mine owner he endeavors to increase coal production as much as possible: “He had a fight to fight with Matter, with the earth and the coal it enclosed” (WL, 227). In Women in Love, words related to substance such as “materialise,” “material” and “matter” are employed from the beginning until the end of the novel. These are keywords because the development of this novel is bound up with the duality of production and barrenness. These two attributes, production and barrenness, are embodied by Gerald and Birkin respectively. Gerald succeeds to the mining industry owned by his family and achieves massive growth in coal production through the introduction of modern technologies to his mines. This “Industrial Magnate” represents the ethos of the time period when Lawrence produced this novel. Leonard T. Hobhouse, one of the major proponents of new liberalism, analyzed British society in the early twentieth century in his Democracy and Reaction (1904). He described the value system of the time, which placed more emphasis on economy than ethics; more on private profits than mutual support:

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The setting of Women in Love is similar to the society, which Hobhouse depicts, in which supreme value is placed on producing maximum profit through competition. Gerald, rejecting his father’s philanthropic ways of managing the business, reorganizes it and emphasizes its profitability. By contrast, Birkin swims against the tide, following his own beliefs. He appears not to be interested in making a home or in creating family ties, nor is it clear how he would earn his living after he quits his job as a school inspector. He stands aloof from society and produces nothing to contribute to it. This chapter analyzes Women in Love, focusing on the duality of production and barrenness, and especially in regards to Gerald, because he epitomizes the period of modern technology, which affected various areas of activity from the trend of social theory to the strategy of war. Although the time period in which the novel is set is not identified and the war is not described, contemporary ideological discourses and the author’s response to them are engraved on Women in Love. The early twentieth century witnessed the development of modern technologies, the birth of a new trend of thought called new liberalism, and the devastation wrought by the First World War. This chapter uncovers one dimension of this complex text by placing it within the social and political context of the time when it was produced.

Technology, labor–management strife, and democracy in the early twentieth century Chapter 17 of Women in Love, “The Industrial Magnate,” depicts in great detail the drastic reform that Gerald introduces to the management of his company on confronting his laborers. Historically, coalmining was a source of national power in Britain from the second half of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The number of miners had increased, eventually exceeding one million in 1919, which was approximately 10 per cent of the working population of men. Coal production had also grown since the mid-­nineteenth century and reached its peak in 1913—the year of the publication of Sons and Lovers and a year before the outbreak of the First World War.2 Thus, with the advance of modern technologies, the mining industry developed on a large scale at the turn of the century, and Gerald, like his contemporary mine owners, introduces extensive restructuring and mechanization to the mines he inherited from his father.

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Thomas Crich was one of the last middle-­class philanthropists of the late Victorian era. This paternalistic man romanticized laborers and wished to create a (pseudo-)familial bond with them. Despite his benevolence, however, the miners began to feel dissatisfied with this patriarch, and the first labor strife erupted when Gerald was still a child. The miners embraced the concept of equality, which the narrator rather satirically describes: “Seething masses of miners met daily, carried away by a new religious impulse. The idea flew through them: ‘All men are equal on earth,’ and they would carry the idea to its material fulfilment . . . Seething mobs of men marched about, their faces lighted up as for holy war, with a smoke of cupidity” (WL, 225).3 As this passage suggests, the early twentieth century witnessed the spread of the idea of democracy. The ruling classes, however, dismissed the newly emergent concept. Charles F. G. Masterman described how the middle classes had “constructed in imagination the image of Democracy—a loud-­voiced, independent, arrogant figure, with a thirst for drink, and imperfect standards of decency, and a determination to be supported at someone else’s expense.”4 For the governing classes, democracy meant nothing more than mobocracy, or rule by the ignorant, greedy masses— “creeping democracy,” as Mrs. Crich calls it (WL, 217). At the turn of the century, however, a group of men began to propound democracy. They were called the new liberals. Liberalism had traditionally had a dualistic view of the individual versus the state, and it expressed disapproval of the state’s intervention in the individuals. In contrast to this old, individualist liberalism, new liberalism argued for using state power to help the individual. New liberalism promoted welfare policies, rather than self-­help, to correct the economic inequality that affected the growing population of the urban working classes. And to the new liberals, democracy was a means of achieving a higher quality of life and true liberty. Those who advocated new liberalism at the turn of the century include Hobhouse, Masterman, the economist and anti-­imperialist John A. Hobson, and the pacifistic economist John Maynard Keynes, among others.5 In Women in Love, Hermione’s brother, Alexander Roddice, who is “democratic and lucid” (WL, 90), is characterized as a new liberal. Birkin, in contrast, possesses a traditional liberal individualist temperament. Birkin bears obvious similarities to the author, who had a strong antagonism towards Bertrand Russell, a staunch defender of democracy and the model for Sir Joshua Malleson in the novel, and who was never involved in the pacifist movement, eventually turning into a misanthrope avoiding contact altogether with the human community. Lawrence had been critical to the idea of democracy, and his skepticism swelled when he witnessed the rise of jingoism among the British during the war. He entertained a growing distrust for and disgust towards the masses of people who, boosted by agitators like Horatio Bottomley and David Lloyd George, were seized by a sudden enthusiasm for war. He then moved to Zennor in Cornwall to withdraw from the patriotic frenzy, but it did not free him from the tentacles of the war. In May 1916,

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conscription was finally introduced, and he was summoned for medical inspection. At this point his misanthropy reached its peak: I must say I hate mankind . . . I think truly the only righteousness is the destruction of mankind, as in Sodom. Fire and brimstone should fall down . . . Oh, if one could but have a great box of insect powder, and shake it over them, in the heavens, and exterminate them. Only to clear and cleanse and purify the beautiful earth, and give room for some truth and pure living. Letters 2, 650

A man with serious skepticism towards mankind would never accept the idea of democracy. In his letters, Lawrence did not hide his deep distrust of this governmental system. To Ottoline Morrell he laments, “I hate the ‘public’, the ‘people’, ‘society’, so much, that a madness possesses me when I think of them. I hate democracy so much. It almost kills me” (Letters 2, 593). In his fiction, Lawrence poses questions such as how to deal with the insatiable demands from the multitude and whether rights, individuality, or self-­government should be entrusted to them. For example, in The Rainbow, Ursula Brangwen, as a new schoolmistress, faces reality and finds that authoritative oppression is the only way of keeping the children of the mining district in order. The pupils are the automatized masses, lacking dignity, creativity, and personality and regulated only by the authoritarian command. This novel portrays the working classes as incompatible with democratic self-­ government. After this harsh experience, Ursula says to her lover, Anton Skrebensky, “ ‘I hate democracy . . . Only degenerate races are democratic’ ” (R, 426–7).

Women in Love, democracy, and war Most of the pupils Ursula teaches in The Rainbow will presumably become miners and their wives, and fight for democracy against their employers, as Women in Love depicts. In the latter novel, the working-­class multitudes begin to press their audacious demands to their employer, which leads to serious labor strife. And yet, as we shall see, as the miners become engaged with new technologies through their work, their enthusiasm for equality transforms into an obsession with mechanized labor and the worship of Gerald. The Industrial Magnate succeeds in building his own authoritarian regime, and his miners curiously show the popular fervor, which resembles that which drives the masses into a mad frenzy of war. Gerald assumes his position as the manager of the mining company when the conflict between labor and management is most critical. He breaks with the philanthropic management of his father, and, abandoning “the whole democratic-­equality problem as a problem of silliness” (WL, 227), launches into

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a major reorganization of the company by implementing the newest technologies. This endeavor fulfills his intense passion for efficiency: Gradually Gerald got hold of everything. And then began the great reform. Expert engineers were introduced in every department. An enormous electric plant was installed, both for lighting and for haulage underground, and for power. The electricity was carried to every mine. New machinery was brought from America, such as the miners had never seen before, great iron men, as the cutting machines were called, and unusual appliances. The working of the pits was thoroughly changed, all the control was taken out of the hands of the miners, the butty system was abolished. Everything was run on the most accurate and delicate scientific method, educated and expert men were in control everywhere, the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments. WL, 230

A comparison of the passage above with the one from Hobhouse’s Democracy and Reaction (which follows) suggests that Gerald’s new managerial style, which places great importance on efficiency with a Taylorist approach, is typical of that found in the early twentieth century: As the ‘expert’ comes to the front, and ‘efficiency’ becomes the watchword for administration, all that was human in Socialism vanishes out of it . . . We have the conception of society as a perfect piece of machinery pulled by wires radiating from a single centre, and all men and women are either ‘experts’ or puppets. Humanity, Liberty, Justice are expunged from the banner, and the single word Efficiency replaces them.6

This passage of social critique by Hobhouse can be seen as an appropriate commentary on Women in Love. The novelist, however, had a deeper insight into psychological and physiological aspects than the socialist did, and revealed a strange effect to human mentality. That is, once a man accepts modern technologies and becomes inured to the inhumane principle of efficiency, he is, paradoxically, intoxicated by this process. This effect is already suggested at the beginning of The Rainbow. The Brangwens had lived in harmony with nature at the Marsh for generations, but as their surroundings are abruptly modernized, they begin to feel a morbid fascination with the rumbling or shrill noises of the machines: “As they worked in the fields, from beyond the now familiar embankment came the rhythmic run of the winding engines, startling at first, but afterwards a narcotic to the brain. Then the shrill whistle of the trains re-­echoed through the heart, with fearsome pleasure . . .” (R, 14). In Women in Love, the miners, intoxicated by the rhythmic sound of the machines Gerald has introduced at the plant, begin to experience a gruesome sensation. The harder they are forced to work within the inhumane structure of

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a massive mechanism, the more they are obsessed with work, devoting themselves to producing coal with great efficiency. The miners’ frenzy synchronizes with that depicted in Mark Gertler’s painting “Merry-Go-Round”, in which people on a carousel show a morbid fascination with the ride’s mechanical repetition. Lawrence saw a photograph of the painting in Zennor and sent his enthusiastic praise to the painter. In effect, a weird obsession with endless

Figure 5  Mark Gertler, “Merry-Go-Round” (1916) © Tate, London; © Gaku Iwai 2017–2018

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repetition is one of the leitmotifs in Women in Love. For example, a rabbit called Bismarck that the Criches own, suddenly erupts and “Round and round the court it went, as if shot from a gun, round and round like a furry meteorite, in a tense hard circle that seemed to bind their brains” (WL, 243). The relief the German sculptor Loerke created represents “peasants and artizans in an orgy of enjoyment,” “whirling ridiculously in roundabouts” and in “a frenzy of chaotic motion” (WL, 423).7 Furthermore, the industrial organization Gerald constructs is the massive embodiment of repetitive movement: And for this fight with matter, one must have perfect instruments in perfect organisation, a mechanism [which] . . . by its relentless repetition of given movement, will accomplish a purpose irresistibly, inhumanly. It was this inhuman principle in the mechanism he wanted to construct that inspired Gerald with an almost religious exaltation . . . And between these [his will and the resistant Matter of the earth] he could establish the very expression of his will, the incarnation of his power, a great and perfect machine, a system, an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition, repetition ad infinitum, hence eternal and infinite. He found his eternal and his infinite in the pure machine-­principle of perfect co-­ordination into one pure, complex, infinitely repeated motion, like the spinning of a wheel; but a productive spinning . . . a productive repetition through eternity, to infinity. And this is the God-­ motion, this productive repetition ad infinitum. WL, 227–8

This passage itself embodies endless repetition in the persistent duplication of the same phrases. As a result, the miners, who used to raise their voices to demand equality, are now fully satisfied with being cogs in a huge machine and wish to receive more and more stimuli; while at the same time their essence as human beings is damaged by it: There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them. It was what they wanted, it was the highest that man had produced, the most wonderful and superhuman. They were exalted by belonging to this great and superhuman system which was beyond feeling or reason, something really godlike. Their hearts died within them, but their souls were satisfied. WL, 231

On the massive “merry-­go-round” that Gerald has constructed, the miners are enraptured in a gruesome ecstasy, amplifying their wild excitement. The miners described in this passage are overlaid with the image of the masses who, driven by a patriotic frenzy, enthusiastically support the mass destruction caused by war.8 Gerald’s empire, built through modern technology, is identical to a massive war

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machine in which people feel a morbid fascination with its mechanical destructive activity that harms the core of the humanity of those involved with them.

The network of family, nation, and war A series of passages on Gerald and his industrial empire reveal another crucial ideological aspect behind them—the connection of family, nation, and war. Women in Love opens with the Brangwen sisters’ conversation on marriage and a marriage ceremony in the Crich family. As the setting moves from one location to another, the focus broadens as we see a lavish party with a large number of guests at the Criches’ mansion, Shortlands, and then their mining business, which dominates a large part of Beldover. The growing influence of the Criches eventually extends throughout the country, as is symbolized by the trains that run nationwide bearing the big white initials “C. B. & Co.” (WL, 222). This sequence of events implies that the wealth of a family, which is a minimal unit of economic activity, is distributed throughout the country to contribute to the strengthening of the nation’s power. The initial purpose of coal mining is “to obtain as much money from the earth” (WL, 224) as possible, and the wealth it produces makes it possible to wage war, as indicated by the similarity between the modernized mining industry and the war machine. In contrast to The Rainbow, which approves the concept of family and naively narrates the Brangwen saga, Women in Love reveals the danger that family might become entangled with nation, and eventually with war, through apparatuses like Gerald’s massive mining company. Birkin explores living a life of barrenness in order not to be implicated in this process. He does not wish to have a productive relationship with others— the relationship that people are supposed to have in a society. He lives alone, except for some housemaids, and there is no air of family or home about him. He vehemently rejects love and matrimony, which Ursula demands, associating the “old way of love” with the image of war and calling it “a sort of conscription” (WL, 199). He naturally rejects home, which traditional novels have always admired: “One should avoid this home instinct. It’s not an instinct, it’s a habit of cowardliness. One should never have a home” (WL, 352). He impulsively buys an antique chair at a market, but abandons it when he realizes that it could be an item for making a home with Ursula. By accepting his barrenness, Birkin perhaps instinctively strives to prevent his sexuality from becoming entangled in the web of family, nation, and war.9

Gerald and Germany In contrast to his best friend, Gerald consolidates this network of family, nation, and war by dominating the mining industry. His representation as the Industrial Magnate is all the more strengthened by his both apparent and metaphorical

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association with Germany because that nation was widely considered to be the source of the mechanized, large-­scale industry that was in vogue in early twentieth-­century Europe. For example, the magazine New Age, which the young Lawrence devoured and which turned conservative following the outbreak of war, published a series of essays titled “Provincialism the Enemy” by Ezra Pound in 1917. In these writings, which reflected the wartime German phobia, Pound examined education and industry in Germany. He argued that “the ‘university system’ of Germany is evil,” and that flourishing large-­scale industry was the result of the influence of corrupt German academia: The bulk of scholarship has gone under completely; the fascinations of technical and mechanical education have been extremely seductive (I mean definitely the study of machines, the association with engines of all sorts, the inebriety of mechanical efficiency, in all the excitement of its very rapid evolution). The social theorist, springing, alas, a good deal from Germany, has not been careful enough to emphasise that no man is merely a unit.10

The empire of Gerald, who refused to go to Oxford and was educated in Germany on the science of mining, is built on the foundation of German science and industry.11 In addition to the spelling of his name, which suggests his connection with “German” and “Germany,” Gerald is associated with various German characteristics. Lawrence’s Movements in European History and certain wartime ideologies offer several crucial clues to deciphering German qualities embedded in Gerald’s characterization. First, his physical features show a striking resemblance to those which Lawrence described as unique to the ancient Germanic race in Movements, written after he composed Women in Love. Gerald’s most prominent physical quality is his “northernness.” Birkin finds in him “a northern kind of beauty” and sees “a keen, yet cold light” in “his blue eyes” (WL, 273, 60). Gudrun is magnetized by “something northern” about him and recognizes “his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like cold sunshine refracted through crystals of ice” (WL, 14). In the chapter of Movements titled “The Germans,” the narrator describes the Germanic tribes as having the “fair limbs of the men from the northern forests,” “blue eyes,” and “the yellow hair,” “born from the northern sea . . . the perfect beautiful blue of ice” (MEH, 43–4). In Lawrence’s mind, Gerald is obviously connected to the ancient Germanic race, which the author and his contemporaries called the “Germans.” Gerald’s representation as Cain is another feature that connects him with the Germans. Early in his childhood, Gerald was stigmatized as Cain because he accidentally killed his younger brother when they were playing with a gun. During the First World War, the Germans were embodied as “Cain” in the minds of the British. In spite of the two countries’ long-­term close alliance and their religious and cultural ties, the Germans began raining down bombs on Britain

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Figure 6  Bernard Partridge, “Cain,” in Punch, or the London Charivari, February 13, 1918. Its caption reads, “More than fourteen thousand British non-­combatants—men, women and children—have been murdered by the Kaiser’s command.”

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from Zeppelins. In 1918, Punch magazine published a cartoon titled “Cain,” in which a savage German was represented as the eponymous character. Furthermore, the image of Otto von Bismarck is superimposed on Gerald. In Women in Love, Gerald has a rabbit called “Bismarck” and he is compared to the Iron Chancellor by his lover, Gudrun, who “had read Bismarck’s letters, and had been deeply moved by them” (WL, 418). His connection to the founder of the new Reich is, however, more essential. Movements presents a unique view of European history as the perpetual conflict between the destructive and the creative impulse, and in its last chapter, describing the history of modern Germany, implies that the ideal leader must have both elements: “Therefore a great united Europe of productive working people, all materially equal, will never be able to continue and remain firm unless it unites also round one great chosen figure, some hero who can lead a great war . . .” (MEH, 252). Half the pages of this chapter are devoted to Bismarck and it presents a sympathetic view of him, and hence the “one great chosen figure” mentioned at the conclusion reminds readers of the Iron Chancellor, who dismantled democratic institutions and established a military regime but also contributed to the industrialization of Germany. As Keynes later states, the “German Empire has been built more truly on coal and iron than on blood and iron.”12 The Iron Chancellor of the German Empire echoes in the characterization of Gerald, who, refusing the miners’ demand for democracy, builds a colossal industrial empire that is comparable to a war machine.

The end of the matter When Gerald dies miserably on a snowy mountain, his empire collapses and the curtain is finally closed on a pageant of excitement and enthusiasm, haunted by the madness of production and destruction. Gerald’s fetish for technology ends thus in his ironic demise. At the same time, however, his friend Birkin cannot be a hero. He breaks up conventional human relationships to be free from national ideologies, but in consequence this individualist cannot build an ideal relationship with either Ursula or Gerald, nor does he present a new vision to replace that of a world enslaved to materialism. At the end of the novel, Ursula sees Birkin standing before the corpse of his close friend, and her weeping lover reminds her of the contemporary German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who dismissed Bismarck and, eighteen years later, fled from the German Revolution and went into exile in Holland, where he met his end: But when he [Birkin] went in again, at evening, to look at Gerald tears broke out. . . . He sat down in a chair, shaken by a sudden access. Ursula, who had followed him, recoiled aghast from him, as he sat with sunken head and body convulsively shaken, making a strange, horrible sound of tears.

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D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity “I didn’t want it to be like this—I didn’t want it to be like this,” he cried to himself. Ursula could but think of the Kaiser’s “Ich habe es nicht gewollt.” She looked almost with horror on Birkin. WL, 479

The Kaiser’s words that Ursula quotes are part of the statement he made on July 31, 1915 as a manifesto issued on the first anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. This remark was widely distributed through various forms of media such as newspapers and picture postcards.

Figure 7  Picture postcard depicting Kaiser Wilhelm II quoting “Ich habe es [the War] nicht gewollt.”

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Figure 8  Picture postcard depicting Kaiser Wilhelm II quoting “Ich habe den Krieg nicht gewollt.”

Thus, in contrast to Gerald, on whom Bismarck is superimposed, on Birkin, ironically, is superimposed an ineffectual Kaiser, who discharged the Iron Chancellor and began the futile war to be forced into exile.13 There is a bitter irony on Gerald’s side as well at the end. He dies and transforms into “Matter.” Turning his back to Ursula, who would never accept his idea of an indispensable same-­sex relationship, Birkin looks at his friend’s body lying on his deathbed: He forgot her, and turned to look at Gerald . . . [H]e watched the cold, mute, material face. It had a bluish cast . . . Cold, mute, material! . . . But now he was dead, like clay, like bluish, corruptible ice. Birkin looked at the pale fingers, the inert mass . . . And Gerald! The denier! He left the heart cold, frozen, hardly able to beat. Gerald’s father had looked wistful, to break the heart: but not this last terrible look of cold, mute Matter. WL, 480

Gerald’s corpse, which has turned into “cold, mute, material,” makes a striking contrast to that of his father. The elderly man’s corpse looks like him “in his teens, with his first beard on his face” and as if he is about to revive: “The dead man lay in repose, as if gently asleep, so gently, so peacefully, like a young man sleeping in purity” (WL, 334). The dead body is paradoxically rejuvenated and vital. This is a typical Lawrentian corpse, such as those portrayed in “Odour of

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Chrysanthemums” and “The Prussian Officer”—inanimate but full of energy, exactly like coal. Gerald’s corpse is deliberately portrayed in such a way as to present a stark contrast: his dead body is cold, frozen “Matter” which allows no possibility of reawakening. Gerald, who has been absorbed in producing as much coal as possible by way of modern technology, turns into a material, but not a vital mineral like coal—merely worthless “cold, mute Matter.” His body is buried in the soil of England as his bereaved family insists. The “cold, mute, material” body is, however, buried only as decaying, unusable matter, unlike the vital substance to which he devoted his life, and, sadly and ironically, he will never be resurrected from the ashes. The industrial lord goes into the dark, and the rest is silence.

Notes 1 Leonard T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), 227. 2 See B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 104, 248, and 253. 3 This passage corresponds to Lawrence’s idea that material prosperity was one of the main reasons for the rise of democracy because it brought forth the idea of material equality. See “Democracy” in RDP, 63–83. 4 Charles F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 1909), 72. 5 In the 1906 General Election, the Liberals won a landslide victory and gained 400 seats. The first decade of the twentieth century was also the period of the rise of the Labour Party. The inaugural Labour Representation Committee Conference was held in 1900 and in the 1906 Election the Labour Party won 29 seats and elected Keir Hardie as its chairman. For new liberalism, see, for example, Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 138–97. 6 Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction, 228–9. 7 J. B. Bullen maintains that Lawrence transformed Gertler’s image of a merry-­goround into Loerke’s relief. See his “D. H. Lawrence and sculpture in ‘Women in Love,’ ” The Burlington Magazine 145.1209 (2003): 842. See also Mark KinkeadWeekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 343. 8 Comparing the novel to “The Crown” and “England, My England,” Graham Holderness analyzes the connection between Gerald’s management of the mines and the war. See D. H. Lawrence: History, Ideology, and Fiction (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1982), 207–8. 9 In other words, Birkin as a solitary figure can be interpreted as what Raymond Williams calls the “irreducible presence” that subverts, as Endo argues “the modern nationalist and imperialist politics/rhetoric/aesthetics.” See Fuhito Endo,

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“Singular Universality: D. H. Lawrence and Marxism,” D. H. Lawrence Studies 20, 1 (2016): 102. 10 Ezra Pound, “Provincialism the Enemy,” in Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 191, 195. 11 Carl Krockel argues that “Gerald’s management of his father’s business mirrors the development of coal mining in Germany between Unification and the First World War,” and examines Gerald’s association with Germany in terms of Bismarck’s rule. See D. H. Lawrence and Germany: The Politics of Influence (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 159–96 (164). 12 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1920), 74–5. 13 For the historical context of the Kaiser’s statement and a different interpretation of this scene, see Hugh Stevens, “Women in Love, psychoanalysis and war,” in New D. H. Lawrence, ed. Howard J. Booth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 93–5.

H ierarchy , B eau ty , a nd F reedom : D. H . L awrence’ s R e spon se to t echno I ndu strial M odernity Colin D. Pearce

The discussion which follows is intended to provide more evidence for what a number of scholars have recently been contending about Lawrence’s fundamental ontological vision. It derives support from and provides support for the claims of Michael Bell, Graham Martin, Anne Fernihough, Fiona Becket, Robert Montgomery, Peter Fjågesund, Michael Black, and others.1 Just as no philosopher would simply say that Lawrence’s explorations of the man–woman relationship relieves him or her of the duty to read Wittgenstein on the nature of language, so too the explorations of a littérateur into the triumph and tragedy of human existence cannot be taken as relieving him or her of the duty to study the more technical and abstract discussions of the “pure” philosophers. The promise of a mutual illumination of the two dimensions of mind represented by literature and philosophy makes the effort worthwhile. As Michael Bell so wonderfully puts it: “the complexity of Wittgenstein’s thought has been overestimated and for the same reason the sophistication of Lawrence has been under-­appreciated.”2

Lawrence’s rejectionism and the limits of science Lawrence’s attitude to modern civilization is not one that envisages a certain number of partial reforms as sufficient to its healthy state. Rather, this civilization should be rejected root and branch. Lawrence’s rejectionist stance toward modern society is such a prominent feature of his thought that it is no surprise to find him attacking the very pillar of modern civilization itself—modern science. From the strictly scientific point of view Lawrence is an “irrationalist” or even a profoundly “unscientific” if not simply anti-­scientific writer. He flatly rejects the methodology which characterizes modern science.3 For him the scientific method as a path to the ultimate truth is more or less bootless. It can only dig up what it itself has buried. Scientific reductionism has the effect of

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missing the wood for the trees when it comes to phenomena that are humanly interesting in the most direct sense. “The very statement that water is H2O is a mental tour de force. With our bodies, we know that water is not H2O, our intuitions and instincts both know it is not so” (LEA, 208). When he turns to the very symbol of modern man’s scientific triumph he says that at the very moment you discover “the atom it will explode under your nose” (FUPU, 167). Thus “The moment you get down to the real basis of anything, it will dissolve into a thousand problematic constituents” (ibid.). And the more problems you solve, the more they will spring up “with their fingers at their nose, making a fool of you . . . you won’t get anything in the end but a formula and a lie” (ibid.).4 Lawrence’s fundamental point is that the true world is ultimately beyond the reach of scientific method. For Lawrence the soul stands outside the material chain of causation and so can be free enough from its grasp to observe that chain’s operation while being unfettered by it.5 Science is certainly capable of partial discoveries of one sort or another but, given that it is the “whole” about which we seek knowledge, then such discoveries in themselves are nothing to the point. That which bids fair to supply us with this kind of knowledge of the whole is most definitely not something like modern chemistry (A, 8). But such a higher form of knowledge should still qualify as scientific albeit in an evidently different sense than modern chemistry. Modern science, as distinct from “true” science, is forced to pretend it can look at the world from the “outside.” But like Jonah it is not in a position to discover where it is in fact located. “Jonah, sit still in the whale’s belly, and have a look around. For you’ll never measure the whale, since you’re inside him” (RDP, 313). So for Lawrence the modern scientific project’s whole purpose involves the removal of the awe, wonder, and amazement induced in us by our own experience of the world. Natural phenomena such as thunder, lightning, and earthquakes are reduced to such things as temperature exchanges, the motion of electrons, and variabilities in tectonic forces. But we know that art has often been inspired by natural phenomena, for example J. W. M. Turner’s paintings or Beethoven’s symphonies. Such artworks cannot be reduced to separate conceptual phenomena but have to be absorbed “whole cloth” as they are conveyed immediately to our senses. But these artistic representations of natural phenomena are not the “factual” thunder and lightning known to scientific reason. Such reasoning exiles them to the realm of pure imagination and unreality as though they have been superadded to actual reality as a kind of a footnote. But for Lawrence it is quite the opposite attitude that should prevail: it is the scientists who should justify their enterprises at the tribunal of art and not the other way around. What would go to constitute true “irrationalism” for Lawrence would rather be a dogged persistence in strictly scientific thinking when it has been shown incapable of a consistent appreciation of nature. The truly reasonable approach is to be open to the truths within us that are retrieved by a broader nosce te ipsum.6 Lawrence, then, is not a natural scientist as usually understood but

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more precisely is a humanistic psychologist. Those he opposes are analytical reductionists who cannot see the true world because they look at it through the distorting lens of scientific abstraction. If we look at ourselves from an especially “Lawrentian” vantage point it is apparent that, as products of the modern, Western society, we “are bleeding from the roots.” Furthermore, we have plucked love from the “Tree of Life,” turning it into a “grinning mockery,” all the while expecting it to “keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.” It was nothing short of a catastrophe when man cut himself off from “the rhythm of the year” by turning his back on the natural order of things as reflected in the earth, sun, and stars (LCL, 323).7 How then could Western man get himself into such a predicament? Why did he follow the blind alley of the unreasonableness of scientific reason and turn his back on the “Tree of Life”? Lawrence’s answer to this question is in part suggested when he says that our natural feelings must of necessity remain but unfortunately they have come invariably to stand opposed to our “ideals.” Once we hear the word “ideal” in this context we are immediately reminded of Plato. And unsurprisingly we find Lawrence is of the firm opinion that it is Plato who needs a “kick in the wind” above all.

A kick in the wind for Plato According to Lawrence, the initial hyper-­consciousness, which is at the root of all our problems, goes back to Plato. It was this father of the Western rationalist tradition who distorted our sense of the natural order in the first place. The “smooth” Plato, he says, would have had a much truer relation to the universe if “somebody had suddenly stood on his head and given [him] a kick in the wind, and set the whole school in an uproar.” Furthermore, “If, in the midst of the Timaeus, Plato had only paused to say: ‘And now, my dear Cleon—(or whoever it was)—I have a bellyache, and must retreat to the privy,’ ” he would have enriched his “Eternal Idea of Man” (STH, 181). For Lawrence, Plato was so “metaphysical” in his attitude to life he managed to forget the simple fact of the “W. C.” Hence his final effect on life is to render it spectral, fantastical, opaque, and ghost-­like in nature. Lawrence’s point is that Plato viewed bodily reality with an unacceptable negativity which has had a deleterious influence on Western thinking. Plato took flight from life as it must inevitably be lived and so, no matter how much we admire him for “novelizing” his wisdom as opposed to sermonizing, we cannot forgive him for his looking down on lived human existence as it is immediately experienced. “Plato makes the perfect ideal being tremble in me. But that’s only a bit of me. Perfection is only a bit, in the strange make-­up of man alive” (STH, 195).8 When Lawrence applies the adjective “little” in describing Plato’s dialogues as “queer little novels” there is an unmistakable tone of dismissiveness. We should not take Plato too seriously lest we be seduced away from life into his metaphysical “miasmic mist.”9

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So we see Lawrence rejects modern society, rejects modern science, and so rejects the civilization which has come to surround us. But then where does Lawrence’s radical rejectionism lead? Given the comprehensiveness of Lawrence’s negations and the spiritedness and energy of his anti-­modernity, is he not obliged to provide us with some intimations of a solution or a “way out,” if not a detailed road-­map to the future? Should he be allowed to just leave things simply at a loud “I protest!”? If modern man has dug himself into a tremendous hole which bids fair to become his grave, what, if anything, can we do about it in Lawrence’s view? Naturally we wish to see some signs of an answer to this question. We fully understand of course that Lawrence will never point to anything that has been tainted by Plato’s “original” sin of reality hatred, and this has to include the great tradition descending from his influence as possibly doing us any good. Western rationalism went all wrong with Plato because he never did receive that “kick in the wind,” and such a kick might have succeeded in heading off not only Aristotle, but also Aquinas, and the “beastly Kant.”10 What is needed is a new animating spirit for the “post-­modern” order to come. Lawrence makes his attempt.11

The beauty of togetherness, or, the revolution against dullness Lawrence is exceedingly critical of Jesus’s unwillingness to compromise with the “real world”: And if, when Jesus told the rich man to take all he had and give it to the poor, the rich man had replied: ‘All right, old sport! You are poor, aren’t you? Come on, I’ll give you a fortune. Come on.’ Then a great deal of snivelling and mistakenness would have been spared us all, and we might never have produced a Marx and a Lenin. If only Jesus had accepted the fortune! STH, 181

For Lawrence, the central question for human consciousness since Plato has indeed been: “This world or the next?” Western civilization has developed in a space between the secularity of modern techno-­scientific reason and the “Heavenly City” of Western metaphysics.12 But its Christian component always insisted that all our earthly crises are as nothing compared to perfect divinity and highest truth. In its heart Christianity was so “transcendental” and so otherworldly that it succeeded in leaving out of its calculations the dimension which exists between life and eternity. It made a rejection of this world so extreme as to be totally irrelevant to life as lived. When we aim too high with Jesus we end up in the depths of Bolshevism and the “Gulag Archipelago” about which Solzhenitsyn writes so powerfully and epically.13

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The point here is that Lawrence would never let his “metaphysical” striving detach him from a commitment to nature and the natural order as a given and unalterable thing of which human life is a part. Lawrence was attempting to throw the modern scientific, technological, and “secular” culture into radical relief against a broader and nobler conception of human life which drew men toward the eternal facts of love and death. The mistake of earlier thought was its insistence that we “lay up for [our]selves treasures in heaven”14 when our lives must be lived and lived well here below. So Lawrence’s account of the root causes of modernity’s outstanding symptoms in fact traces the West’s problem much further back than the Renaissance and Enlightenment to a source to which many critics of the modern world would in fact turn for a solution. And that source is nothing other than Christianity itself!15 When we read Lawrence, we see him all throughout attempting to articulate a political principle which transcends the difference between capitalism and socialism with their shared presupposition of continuous modernization. This principle might echo the political science of ancient times at some level but it certainly does not envision any kind of return to Spartanism or the specific form of republicanism associated with the Greek polis.16 That principle might be described as “togetherness.” But in his usual paradoxical way, Lawrence explains that we will have “hostile groupings of men for the sake of opposition” when social bonds are strong in such a way that “civil strife becomes a necessary condition of self-­assertion.” The truth of his togetherness principle then is seen in the fact that class hatred is actually a reminder of a deeper human solidarity. “Class-­hate and class-­consciousness are only a sign that the old togetherness, the old blood-­warmth has collapsed, and every man is really aware of himself in apartness” (LCL, 332). The “togetherness” believed in by Lawrence is premised upon a deep commonality of memory, history, and belonging. “ ‘Stick to Wragby as far as Wragby sticks to you,’ ” Sir Malcolm says to Constance in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (LCL, 273). There is a certain fellow-­feeling which comes from shared experiences such that one’s share in community “psychology” is intuited rather than learnt or consciously acquired. Against these bonds of human community is pitted the modern phenomenon of “alienation.” Without a shared history and common folkways human beings come to exist “in a state of apartness and mutual distrust.” But the technologized conquest of nature disrupts the older shared intuitions and replaces our “natural” and intuitive blood-­consciousness and blood-­warmth with mental conceptions, ideals, and grand designs.17 This is the trend of our civilization “away from the physical or organic aspects of life and therewith towards greater physical separateness between individuals and the sexes.”18 Modern man feels himself to be “an apart, fragmentary, unfinished thing” (A, 181). For Lawrence, the “class struggle” is not only more about social unity than social division, it is more about the ugliness of techno-­industrial capitalism than it is about the fight against the unequal distribution of wealth under its

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sway. The problem of techno-­industrialism then is coextensive with the problem of beauty. The spirit of man in the nineteenth century, he says, is betrayed by the fact of a ubiquitous “ugliness” (LEA, 291). In the “palmy Victorian days” the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed the great crime of condemning the workers to “ugliness, ugliness, ugliness” (ibid.). The working masses found themselves overwhelmed by “formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers” (LEA, 291–2). The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread. Indeed the “industrial problem” itself might have been solved if only those in positions of influence “had encouraged some form of beauty in dress, some form of beauty in interior life—furniture, decoration. If they had given prizes for the handsomest chair or table, the loveliest scarf, the most charming room that the men or women could make!” (LEA, 292)19

The art of the dialog Lawrence does indeed believe in a kind of “holy” individualism—but not simply. He complements this belief with a firm faith in something like its opposite at one and the same time. What can be done to resolve this paradoxical contradiction in Lawrence’s thought? Let us use the exchange between Levison and Rawdon Lilly in Chapter XX of Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod as possibly yielding some kind of solution. In response to Levison’s canvassing of the question of the historical and logical inevitability of socialist revolution, Lilly insists that we must look “somewhere else.” He says this because “ ‘The idea and the ideal [of this logic] has for me gone dead—dead as carrion . . .’ ” (AR, 280).20 Levison requests more precision from his interlocutor: “ ‘Which idea, which ideal precisely?’ ” Lilly responds: ‘The ideal of love, the ideal that it is better to give than to receive, the ideal of liberty, the ideal of the brotherhood of man, the ideal of the sanctity of human life, the ideal of what we call goodness, charity, benevolence, public spirited-­ness, the ideal of sacrifice for a cause, the ideal of unity and unanimity—all the lot—all the whole beehive of ideals—has all got the modern bee-­disease, and gone putrid, stinking.—And when the ideal is dead and putrid, the logical sequence is only stink.—Which, for me, is the truth concerning the ideal of good, peaceful, loving humanity and its logical sequence in socialism and equality, equal opportunity or whatever you like.—But this time he stinketh—and I’m sorry for any Christus who brings him to life again, to stink livingly for another thirty years: the beastly Lazarus of our idealism.’ AR, 28021

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Levison resists this outcome and asks Lilly: “ ‘What is your alternative? Is it merely nihilism?’ ” Lilly responds defensively here, explaining that his “alternative” to the progressive dream is only “ ‘for no one but myself, so I’ll keep my mouth shut about it’ ”(ibid.). Levison is sure that such silence “ ‘isn’t fair.’ ” Lilly then retorts that he has no obligation to Levison to say what he thinks. So here we have Lilly giving a warning to his interlocutor that he doesn’t feel obliged to be fully forthright in discussing these matters. But Levison insists “ ‘if you enter into conversation, you have—’ ” Lilly: “ ‘Bah, then I didn’t enter into conversation’ ” (ibid.). In other words he is reiterating that he remains free to possibly not say what he “really thinks.” It is at this point that he launches into his defense of slavery, agreeing “in the rough” with Argyle, a third character: ‘You’ve got to have a sort of slavery again. People are not MEN: they are insects and instruments, and their destiny is slavery. They are too many for me, and so what I think is ineffectual. But ultimately they will be brought to agree—after sufficient extermination—and then they will elect for themselves a proper and healthy and energetic slavery.’ AR, 281

For his part Levison finds it “ ‘impossible that slavery should be healthy and energetic.’ ” Lilly then explains that “ ‘I mean it none the less. I mean a real committal of the life-­issue of inferior beings to the responsibility of a superior being.’ ” Like a good liberal, Levison immediately suggests sarcastically that distinguishing between those “ ‘who are the inferior and which is the superior [will] take a bit of knowing’ ” (ibid.). Lilly goes on to explain that his concept of slavery involves the voluntary surrender of the inferiors to the “ ‘permanent and very efficacious [military] power of their superiors.’ ” But all this appears to Levison as an example of “the preposterous pretentiousness of a megalomaniac—one whom, after a while, humanity would probably have the satisfaction of putting into prison, or into a lunatic asylum” (AR, 282). Whether they know it or not the Lillys of this world are destined for the “prison or the lunatic asylum for their criminal-­imbecile pretensions.” This is because Levison has at his back “the huge social power with which he, insignificant as he was, was armed against . . . those [pretensions] above set forth.” As the representative of social opinion Levison can gloat that the “two inevitable engines of his disapproval”—social opinion and incarceration—are on his side against the “Lilly-­ists” (ibid.). So we see here that Lilly is playing the role that, 38 years later, Bertrand Russell was to accuse Lawrence of playing.22 By having Lilly appear to Levison (and Russell) in the guise of a fascist megalomaniac, Lawrence has communicated his thorough sensitivity to the issue. At a minimum we can say that Lawrence pre-­empts Russell’s later attack in this passage by showing his full awareness of

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the problem of the preposterous, pretentious, political megalomaniac ripe for a lunatic asylum. Levison ventures to remark that “ ‘It will take you some time before you’ll get your doctrines accepted.’ ” He does do despite the fact that Lilly had admitted a moment earlier that he would not be, Levison takes Lilly to be “ ‘speaking seriously’ ” (ibid.). But then comes the big “Turn Around.” With a “peculiar, gay, whimsical smile” Lilly exclaims “ ‘Bah, Levison—one can easily make a fool of you. Do you take this as my gospel?’ ” (ibid.). Levison had blithely assumed that Lilly was “speaking seriously,” but Lilly promptly admits that he “ ‘should say the blank opposite with just as much fervour.’ ” This prompts Levison to ask of him, incredulously and with some anger, “ ‘Do you mean to say you don’t MEAN what you’ve been saying?’ ”(ibid.). ‘Why, I’ll tell you the real truth,’ said Lilly. ‘I think every man is a sacred and holy individual, NEVER to be violated; I think there is only one thing I hate to the verge of madness, and that is BULLYING. To see any living creature BULLIED, in any way, almost makes a murderer of me. That is true. Do you believe it—?’ ibid.

Levison’s unwilling summary comment, before the crashing sound of a bomb going off ends the dialogue, is that “ ‘You have no doubt, like most of us, got a complex nature which—’ ” (ibid.). So at the critical moment Lawrence has his “stand-­in” switch gears so completely as to “out-Russell Russell” and become the most extreme individualist/libertarian imaginable when it comes to the sovereignty of the human individual. Clearly Lawrence juxtaposed these two trains of thought in one dialogic exchange in order to highlight the starkness of the contrast between the politics of obedient devotion and the politics of extreme “libertarianism.” In the short space of a few paragraphs he presents on the one hand a political philosophy which demands unquestioning submission to the naturally superior while, on the other hand, he asserts the radical freedom of all individuals without any limiting principle. The significance of all this for understanding Lawrence’s art is revealed when we look at an analysis of the passage that overlooks Lawrence’s self-­contradictory method.23 In the Levison–Lilly “debate” we see two contending political philosophies going “head to head.” The one philosophy is what we might loosely call “communitarianism,” which seeks to establish that above all man is a socio-­ political being who must live in solidarity and belongingness with others if his life is to have any meaning at all. The other contending philosophy we can generally call “liberalism,” for which the human individual is the sacred unit whose freedom and happiness constitutes the standard for all ethical judgment. There is no final resolution of the tension between these two political “theologies” in the Levison–Lilly dialogue. Rather we are exposed to an indefeasible and

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irreducible collision between the two, each of which is equally as valid as far as they go. In this way Lawrence has reminded his readers of the fundamental situation presented by Plato in his “Apology of Socrates to the Athenian Jury,” which Hegel describes as two “valid moral powers on both the sides which come into collision.”24 So Lawrence believes devoutly in the complete sovereignty of the individual soul while at the same time defending the division of society into vertical class divisions, which are not in and of themselves a necessarily and inevitably bad thing. The only possible resolution of this contradiction, other than alleging that Lawrence was a thoughtless writer, is to say that it was his intention in presenting paradoxical exchanges like those in Aaron’s Rod to force the “Levisons” of the world to think and think hard.25

Conclusion Lawrence wishes to press upon us an awareness that radical individual freedom and independence are good things but that subordination, hierarchy, and inequality can be very good things as well. His point is that it is simply impossible to have both these principles extended to their fullest amplification in any given socio-­political order. If this inherent and immoveable limitation to political life be allowed, then the problem of justice in the political community is not susceptible of any kind of ultimate or total solution. This is due to the simple facts of the human condition itself. “Life makes and moulds, and changes the problem. The problem will always be there, and will always be different. So nothing can be solved, even by life and living, for life dissolves and revolves, solving it leaves it alone” (PS, 376).26 Lawrence’s teaching in all this, then, is that we have no choice but to learn to live somewhere on the spectrum between these two deeply desirable poles of egalitarian individual freedom on the one hand and hierarchical community solidarity on the other. The private and the public dimensions in the life of man are ultimately present in each individual and it is for this reason politics must vibrate between horizontal individuality and vertical community as conditions might dictate. On the practical level, Lawrence can only mean that persons who bear the responsibility for the public good should have an appreciation of the sheer centrality to human life of both the individualistic and the communitarian principles—of the twin ideas of human being and citizen—and as a result an understanding of why and how they are irreconcilable. He will then govern on the premise that it is beyond the power of mere legislative changes, policy adjustments, and governmental reforms to solve the infinite or “existential” problem of human nature itself. The best possible politics will involve at one and the same time an acknowledgment of a principle of human apartness that sees in each individual a sovereign being not susceptible to measurement by the

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standards of any other, and a principle of human togetherness as manifested in the shared enjoyment of the beautiful made available in the world.

Notes 1 Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Paul Poplawski, “Philosophical and Religious Approaches,” in D. H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion, ed. Paul Poplawski (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996), 566–74; Anne Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993), 7; Peter Fjågesund, The Apocalyptic World of D. H. Lawrence (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1991), 94; Michael Black, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Philosophical Works, A Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 114, 174. 2 Michael Bell, “Cambridge and Italy: Lawrence, Wittgenstein and Forms of Life,” in D. H. Lawrence in Italy and England, eds. George Donaldson and Mara Kalnins (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1999), 27. The German-­speaking philosopher who was closest to Lawrence in “friend of a friend” terms was Wittgenstein, for whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) Lawrence’s one time very close friend Bertrand Russell wrote an introduction. We may note in passing here that the central character in Lawrence’s St. Mawr, written in 1925, is a woman name “Lou Witt.” 3 “To the scientist, I am dead. He puts under the microscope a dead bit of me, and calls it me. He takes me to pieces, and says first one piece, and then another piece, is me . . . life, and life only, is the clue to the universe” says Lawrence in STH, 193. 4 Lawrence also says elsewhere: “Perhaps . . . atoms, electrons, units of force or energy [are] . . . the constant from which all manifest living creation starts out, and to which it all returns” (RDP, 308). See Sandra M. Gilbert, “Apocalypse now (and then). Or, D. H. Lawrence and the swan in the electron,” in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 235–52. 5 In the words of St. Augustine, “The wise man, although he consists of body and soul, is called ‘wise’ in virtue of his soul,” in Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 261–3. 6 See Thomas Hobbes, “The Introduction,” in Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 2. 7 See David J. Gordon, “D. H. Lawrence’s Dual Myth of Origin,” in Critical Essays on D. H. Lawrence, eds. Dennis Jackson and Fleda Brown Jackson (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1998), 238–45; Anthony Burgess, “Lorenzo,” in One Man’s Chorus (New York: Carroll and Graff, 1998), 302–3 and Flame Into Being (London: Heinemann, 1985), 121; Aldous Huxley, “Introduction,” in D. H. Lawrence: Selected Letters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 11–12; Mark Spilka, The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1955), 12–16. 8 Lawrence also says elsewhere: “The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit, the mental consciousness. Plato was an arch-­priest of this crucifixion” (LEA, 203). To say the least, Lawrence gives ample evidence of having been swayed by that infamous anti-Christian, Friedrich Nietzsche. See Rose Marie Burwell, “A

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Catalogue of D. H. Lawrence’s Reading From Early Childhood,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 3, 3 (1970): 207, 213, 235, 236, 239; Mitzi M. Brunsdale says that Lawrence “was confirmed in his rejection of traditional values by his reading of Nietzsche, where he also received a sense of his own worth as a creator of art.” See The German Effect on D. H. Lawrence and His Works 1885–1912 (Berne; Frankfurt am Main; Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1978), 299; Colin Milton, Lawrence and Nietzsche (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1986); David S. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England 1890–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 14–15, 274–5; Paul Hultsch, “Das Denken Nietzsches in seine Bedeutung für England,” GermanishRomanische Monatschrift, xvi (September/October, 1938); H. Steinauer, “Eros and Psyche: A Nietzschean Motif in Anglo-American Literature,” Modern Language Notes, 64, 4 (1949), 217–18. Emile Delavenay says that “Lawrence launches into a stream of thought emanating from Nietzsche and his German disciples” in D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work (London: Heinemann, 1972), 454. 9 See Michael Bell, “Lawrence and Modernism,” in Fernihough, Cambridge Companion, 179–96; Fiona Becket, D. H. Lawrence: Thinker as Poet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); Peter Widdowson, D. H. Lawrence (London: Longman, 1992) and especially Widdowson’s introduction, “Post-­modernising Lawrence.” 10 Lawrence is at odds with his critic, T. S. Eliot, here: “[Bradley] was influenced by Kant and Hegel and Lotze. But Kant and Hegel and Lotze are not so despicable as some enthusiastic medievalists would have us believe, and they are in comparison with the school of Bentham, catholic civilized and universal.” See T. S. Eliot, “Francis Herbert Bradley,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1975), 199, and Frank Kermode, Lawrence (London: Fontana Collins, 1973), 29. See Robert Montgomery, The Visionary D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3, as well as Michael Bell, Open Secrets: Literature, Education and Authority from J. J. Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6. 11 Willson H. Coates and Hayden V. White describe Lawrence as seeing “evidences of the possibility of ‘new life’ beyond nihilism,” in The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism: an Intellectual History of Europe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 344. Heidegger says: “Language speaks. If we let ourselves fall into the abyss denoted by this sentence, we do not go tumbling into emptiness. We fall upward, to a height. Its loftiness opens up a depth. The two span a realm, in which we would like to become at home, so as to find a residence, a dwelling place for the life of man,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 191–2. George Steiner says that the vision of D. H. Lawrence involves “a range of intuitions and doctrines” that “can be exactly paralleled” in the thought of Heidegger, in his Heidegger (London: Fontana Press, 1992), 149. 12 Max Weber famously confronted Lawrence’s problem through his distinction between the pure or otherworldly “Ethics of Intention” [Gesinnungsethik] and the worldly and temporal “Ethics of Responsibility” [Verantwortungsethik]. Lawrence follows Weber in suggesting that the price to be paid for the original Christian “idealism” or Gesinnungsethik is the subsequent arrival of an equally determined Verantwortungsethik involving a “realism” so extreme as to disavow all concern with “intention” or “conscience” whatsoever. This over-­reaction to the ethics of Jesus is to be seen in the political philosophy of Marxism-Leninism. “If only the evangelists had not pitched the best life so far beyond the capacity of mortal human beings

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then the Marxist-Leninist reaction would not have set in” (STH, 181). See Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–128 and Robert Eden, Political Leadership and Nihilism: A Study of Weber and Nietzsche (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1985), 45, 48. 13 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 14 Mt. 6:20. 15 Sounding a lot like Lawrence, Alexander Solzhenitsyn asks: “How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness?” So for Solzhenitsyn, and we may add here as well such names as Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott, Eric Voegelin, and Jacques Maritain (to say nothing of Swift and Rousseau), there has been a “Great Wrong Turn of the West” between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. With this point Lawrence no doubt would be in complete agreement, i.e., the point that the prevailing Western view of the world became one which proclaimed and enforced the autonomy of man “from any higher force above him and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy.” See A World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University (New York: HarperCollins, 1978); C. E. M. Joad affirms that “ours is an age which has . . . no beliefs in regard to the existence of an order of reality which is other than that which we see and touch,” in his Decadence: A Philosophical Inquiry (New York: The Philosophical Library Inc., 1949), 308–9. See also Karl Löwith, “Can There Be a Christian Gentleman?,” in Nature, History and Existentialism (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 211. 16 Lawrence at one point said: “The Greeks, being sane, were pantheists and pluralists and so am I” (RDP, 313). So Lawrence is perhaps more Greek than Christian, which is to say he is more Greek than Platonist if we allow that Plato was indeed a critic of Greek “pluralism.” 17 Leo Strauss states the classical view as being that “unlimited technological progress and its accompaniment, which are indispensable conditions of the universal and homogeneous state, are destructive of humanity” in his On Tyranny, eds. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2000), 208. 18 Graham Martin provides us with a keen discussion of Lawrence and the “organic” but very importantly he reminds his readers that for all Lawrence’s radical attacks on “mentalism” and how it has drained the life out of modern man, he nevertheless made an “implicit defence of Reason in its original Enlightenment role, that of the free play of criticism at the expense of reigning idols of tribe and marketplace, since ‘if we pause to think about it, it is not Reason herself whom we have to defy, it is her myrmidons, our accepted ideas and thought-­forms’ ” See his “Lawrence and Modernism,” in D. H. Lawrence in Italy and England, eds. George Donaldson and Mara Kalnins (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1999), 145, 151. Martin’s point needs to be kept in mind when recalling Lawrence’s famous statement: “The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care for knowledge . . . We have got so ridiculously mindful, that we never know that we ourselves are anything . . . And we have forgotten ourselves.” See the letter to Collings, January 17, 1913, in Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 53.

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19 Lawrence adds that if “handsome space” for song and dancing had been duly allowed for, then the industrial problem might not have become anywhere near as severe as it did (LEA, 292). Lawrence suggests anchoring a social revolution in such simple and idiosyncratic measures as a few gentlemen brightening up their attire (LEA, 138). It is such a small thing, one could say, but at the same time this simple notion addresses the alienation and inhumanity visited on us by the modern West. Such things as dress and attire might seem secondary matters until we appreciate that they tie into Lawrence’s comprehensive response to the dilemma of Western culture. 20 On the question “of a radical sense of inner nothingness” in modern literature and that literature as a “gloomy story,” see J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1963), 8–9, 13–14; Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 14–15; Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 3–4; Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993); William Barrett, Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972) and Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer (New York: Anchor Press, 1986); Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 197–8; David Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and LifePhilosophy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 231; Adam Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut (Cambridge, Mass.: The M. I. T. Press, 2006). 21 According to David Lodge, Lawrence’s wife, Frieda von Richthofen, “put him in touch with progressive central European thought.” See his Write On: Occasional Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 189. See also Martin Green, The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1974); Kermode, Lawrence, 29; Huxley, “Introduction,” 11–12.; George J. Becker, D. H. Lawrence (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), 140–1; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 100. 22 On Lawrence’s relationship to Bertrand Russell see Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Paul Eggert, “The biographical issue: lives of Lawrence,” in Fernihough, Cambridge Companion, 157–78; Michael Bell, “Thought, Language, Aesthetics and Being 1900–1940,” in Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism, ed. Paul Poplawski (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003); Barbara Mensch, D. H. Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality (Basingstoke: Macmillan Publishers, 1991); Sachidananda Mohanty, Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and the Defeat of Fascism (New Delhi: Stosius Inc/Advent Books Division, 1993), 241; John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), 35–6, 75–80; Cornelia Nixon, Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women (Oakland: University of California Press, 1986); Robert Darroch, D. H. Lawrence in Australia (Melbourne: Macmillan Publishing, 1981), 65; John Lowe, “Benjamin Cooley: A Factitious Composite,” Rananim: The Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society of Australia, 4 (1996), 10–12; Norman Bartlett, “The Failure of D. H. Lawrence,” The Australian Quarterly (Dec. 1947); F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 175, 251–2. 23 James L. Jarrett makes a case that at a certain point Lawrence lost his keenness for “authoritarian” politics and more or less went over to liberalism, loosely speaking.

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His evidence for this thesis he finds in Aaron’s Rod, when Lilly famously says: “I think every man is a sacred and holy individual, never to be violated” (AR, 282–3). See Jarrett’s “D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell,” in D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Survey, ed. Harry T. Moore (Toronto: Forum House, 1969), 184–5. But, tellingly for his case, Jarrett has truncated this interchange between Levison and Lilly which we have discussed above. In fact Lilly’s famous profession de foi about the sacredness of individuality is the immediate sequel to his having praised the politics of voluntary servitude and social inequality. Jarrett seems to have overlooked the possibility that Lawrence might have expected his close reader to see that his alter-­ego character in Aaron’s Rod has freely consented to two radically different politico-­ethical propositions at one and the same time, leaving this reader to figure it out for himself. See Bertrand Russell, Portraits From Memory and Other Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956), 104–8, 112, 115–16. 24 With the trial of Socrates, Hegel says, we see a situation in which “two opposed rights come into collision.” It is not at all “as though the one alone were right and the other wrong.” The first of these contending forces Hegel calls “abstractly objective freedom” which is opposed to the “consciousness of subjective freedom.” This subjective freedom is the product of “self-­creative reason,” which is to say it is “the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Hence both Socrates (Lilly) and Athens (Levison) “suffer loss and yet both are mutually justified.” See Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), 455. See also Roger Scruton, On Human Nature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), 82. 25 See Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 150; Diana Trilling, “Introduction,” in The Portable D. H. Lawrence (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), 9; Harry T. Moore, The Priest of Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 143; Emily Hahn, Lorenzo: D. H. Lawrence and The Women Who Loved Him (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1975), 122; Emile Delavaney, D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work (London: Heinemann, 1972), 145–6; Keith Sagar, The Life of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 72. 26 See F. R. Leavis, “Mr Eliot, Mr Wyndham Lewis and Lawrence,” in The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), 244.

“ T he A rt of L i v ing ”: D. H. L awrence’ s T echnologie s of the S elf Jeff Wallace

In “The Witch à la Mode,” a story first drafted by Lawrence in 1911, Bernard Coutts takes a crossing from Dieppe and alights at East Croydon station after a 10-month sojourn on the Continent. Instead of continuing on the long trek up to the Yorkshire vicarage where his fiancée Constance awaits, Coutts decides to stay over in Purley and visit his ex-­landlady, Mrs. Braithwaite. There, he re-­ encounters Winifred Varley, with whom, it seems, he had broken off a relationship in order to become engaged to Constance. Bernard also re-­ encounters Mrs. Braithwaite’s very elderly father, Mr. Cleveland, in a short scene which surely takes a fond glance back toward the Wemmick and aged P of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. In this scene a refrain is set up by Bernard’s response to Mrs. Braithwaite’s question about his sudden and unexplained departure the year before: “ ‘I don’t know . . . Why do we do things?’ ” (LAH, 56). Mrs. Braithwaite doesn’t know either, and can only offer, “ ‘because we want to, I suppose . . .’ ” (ibid.). The elderly Pater is thus also duly consulted—“ ‘Why do we do things, Pater,’ ” . . . “ ‘Eh?—Why do we do things? What things?’ ” echoes the Pater, beginning to laugh with his daughter. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt to connect it to the passionate debates about Free Will he’d had as a young man, the Pater reverts back to the question itself—“ ‘Why do we do things?—now why do we do things?’ ” (ibid.)—and finally has to settle with: “ ‘I suppose . . . it’s because we can’t help it.—Eh?—What?’ ” (LAH, 57). Bernard Coutts already has a reputation for late and unpredictable decisions, and does not himself fully understand why he has come back to Purley for the night. Or, at least, there is an inner dialog of self-­justification, whose hesitancy is characterized by double negatives such as, “ ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t go down to Purley’ ” (LAH, 54). Yet, in a further “secret” discourse of the heart, Bernard recognizes that he “loves” the place. Because this decision has been made involuntarily, in the unconscious, which for Lawrence was a material, bodily phenomenon, it is an enlivening force, closely articulated with the thrill of the electric tramcar that Bernard takes into Purley—a thrill, that is, experienced as a splicing or complicity of human and machine: the car seems to “exult” (LAH, 54) as its strand of copper glistens against the darkening sky

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and it runs into the town where “lamp beyond lamp heaped golden fire on the floor of the blue night,” (LAH, 55) Bernard’s heart is “surging” as the car “leaped” (LAH, 54) and he greets the “blue splash” (ibid.) of the wire’s spark with a question, “Where does it come from?” (ibid.) whose openness anticipates his “ ‘Why do we do things?’ ” (LAH, 56). Wherever “it” comes from, it is this charge that first “flings” Bernard uphill to Mrs. Braithwaite’s house, his tiredness forgotten, and that quivers and tremors down the front of his body and limbs when, later, he has to disengage himself from a passionate embrace with Winifred and take his leave of her. Then, in the story’s climactic scene, it finally discharges itself in the “sudden involuntary blow” of the foot (LAH, 69) with which Bernard kicks over the lamp stand in the drawing room, creating a “bluish hedge of flame” (ibid.) which momentarily engulfs Winifred’s dress in a “starting blaze” (ibid.). Having managed to put out Winifred’s dress, in “another instant” (LAH, 70) Bernard is gone, “running with burning red hands held out blindly down the street” (ibid.). Very early though the writing of this story was, “The Witch à la Mode” lays down a cluster of interconnected motifs for the rest of Lawrence’s fiction. We do things, unexpected or impulsive things, but we don’t know why. Such are precisely the qualities that drew Lawrence to Thomas Hardy’s fiction: “It is urged against Thomas Hardy’s characters that they do unreasonable things— quite, quite unreasonable things. They are always going off unexpectedly and doing something that nobody would do” (STH, 20). And what Lawrence’s characters also do, what doing often consists in, is going off, going away, unexpectedly, swervingly—to the Continent, from Dieppe back to Yorkshire, but via Purley, for example. “We have lost the art of living,” Lawrence wrote in Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932), “and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead” (SEP, 116). In this chapter, I want to suggest the importance of connecting this “art of living” for Lawrence with the fictional motifs or tendencies we have so far identified—doing inexplicable things, going away. Framed by an analysis of two stories, “The Witch à la Mode” and “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman,” my discussion scopes out an intensely practical orientation in Lawrence’s work toward illness and health, within which those motifs might be read as a response to the dilemmas of how we get sick, and how we become well. That is to say: we do things, we go away, not just to make something happen, but to make things, ourselves, work better, or—let us briefly throw a Deleuzian complexion upon this—to free life from where it has become trapped. My central proposal is that the concept of technologies of the self will help illuminate this relationship in Lawrence between the “art of living” and the principles of practical and decisive action. To establish this, I will briefly compose an understanding of this concept, and of the term “technology” in particular, from varying configurations of the relationship between technology

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and the human in the work of Michel Foucault, Gilbert Simondon, and Brian Massumi. What is at stake in viewing Lawrence’s technologies of the self is a complex position on science which, above all, disallows any easy association of technology with a moralized dehumanization. Something of this complexity is already glimpsed, we might say, in a characteristic wavering or ambiguity in the foregoing statement from Sketches of Etruscan Places. Note, then, the transition from the “art of living” to the “most important science of all,” where the sentence seems to allow both the customary Two Cultures division between art and science, and the possibility that art has slipped semantically into science, as if “science of daily life” and “science of behaviour” might be equivalent terms for the “art of living.” Relatively careless and throwaway or not, the statement highlights the more general lack of any strict division between art and science in Lawrence’s thought. As I have explained elsewhere, a more meaningful distinction in Lawrence is that between what he would call “alert” science and “dogmatic” science—with the latter position clearly occupied by “psychology” in this instance.1 The necessary starting point for this brief excursus on technologies of the self is the very late work of Michel Foucault, whose History of Sexuality sequence focused on what he called the care of the self, via the ministration of technologies of the self, in the cultures of antiquity. “In the slow development of the art of living under the theme of the care of oneself,” writes Foucault, “the first two centuries of the imperial epoch can be seen as the summit of a curve: a kind of golden age in the cultivation of the self . . .”2 In drawing a comparison with Lawrence, the echo of “the art of living” here is not merely fortuitous. Just as Lawrence associated this art with science as externalized action—“life,” “behaviour”—so Foucault’s interest was in the empirical practices of everyday life, and of acting upon the self, in antiquity, where in his analysis the terms “aesthetics of existence” and “techniques of the self ” become effectively interchangeable. Similarly, while Lawrence’s emphasis upon externalized living behavior implies an internalizing principle in psychology—“we have psychology instead”—so Foucault identified a tendency for the organization of modern knowledge to form around interiority or the injunction to “know thyself.” In pagan and early Christian Greco-Roman cultures, he notes, “knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of taking care of yourself.”3 Later Christian and secular traditions, however, inverted this relationship, or tended even to mistranslate taking care of yourself as a synonym for knowing oneself, because of a morality founded, albeit paradoxically, on self-­renunciation and the necessity of caring for others. To write of technologies of the self, with the implication of the splicing of human and machine that this carried, in terms of Foucault’s more general project of the scrutiny of humanistic protocols and their origins, was then a way of disarticulating the principle of looking after yourself from later humanistic notions of individualism and ego-­formation, from self-­ishness perhaps. Care of the self was, Foucault explains, “not an exercise in solitude, but a true social

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practice,” incompatible neither with caring for others, nor with the potential ground of communal well-­being.4 Lawrence’s characterization of the art of living in Etruscan antiquity is now acknowledged to be one of his more fanciful historical projections— desideratum and allegory rather than historical analysis.5 Like Foucault, nevertheless, Lawrence found in antiquity a principle of health grounded in quiet practicality and communal concern. The “real Etruscan carelessness and fullness of life” is located in micro-­forms of “delicate sensitiveness”: the “odd spontaneous forms” of their domestic pottery, for example, or the “little wooden temples . . . small, dainty, fragile and evanescent as flowers” (SEP, 18, 36, 39, 32). The Etruscans’ pre-­modernity is figured in a communal worship of symbols and a doomed resistance to the ego-­driven idealism of the Roman Empire, to which, Lawrence pointedly observes, contemporary Italian Fascism related itself. This, too, embodies a critical scrutiny of unreflexive humanism. “Know thyself,” Lawrence argued in Fantasia of the Unconscious, was the “riskiest” of mottos; in that text and in the preceding Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, the bullying tendencies of idealism are queried via the insistence on acknowledging the physical existence of four pre-­conscious dynamic centers in the body. In establishing through these centers the external relations that were necessary to development, such relations were not, Lawrence maintained, “human”; even the child’s relation with its mother was “neither personal nor biological” (FUPU, 28). Similarly, and despite much emphasis on their “naturalness,” Lawrence found resistance in Etruscan forms to organicism and to its implied principles of wholeness and totality: Etruscan thought about creaturely nature was “storming with oppositions and contradictions,” so that “a lion could be at the same moment also a goat, and yet not a goat.”6 However, in one obvious regard Foucault’s technologies of the self need to be differentiated from Lawrence’s interests here. Foucault was adverting in the ancient world, emphatically, to conscious and heuristic strategies of self-­ understanding and self-­transformation, undertaken through discipline and regimen—a principle of “constant attention to oneself,” focused in key areas such as sexual activity, marriage, and diet.7 They are directed toward “establishing the individual as a moderate subject leading a life of moderation,” “in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”8 In my suggestion of a Lawrentian technology of “why do we do things?” there is the seeming obverse: spontaneous acts taken without regard or self-­ understanding, with no clear sense of outcome or ending, and certainly distrustful, we suspect, of the pious aspiration to happiness or perfection. I therefore need to turn now, in this elaboration of the concept of technology, to the philosopher Gilbert Simondon (1924–89) and a conception of technics. In his essay “Culture and Technics” (1965), Simondon argues that modern educational theory and practice forget the metaphorical basis of human “culture” in techniques of material or biological cultivation, creating a “disjunction . . . between the values of culture and the schemas of technicity.”9

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We are doomed in this regimen to certain “murderous and noxious” effects of the prioritization of cultural value, especially when these are associated with nationalism or religion—doomed, that is, to an early conditioning in the “othering” or mystification of technology, based on the polar opposition between the words “culture” and “technics,” and to an early association of technics with utilitarianism, such that we adopt technical solutions as a last resort and out of “utter exhaustion.”10 However, on the contrary, Simondon maintains, as soon as any technology within an industrial society expands beyond an immediate and local functionality—a team of oxen, say, or a flowing well and aqueduct—that technology develops an excess which Simondon describes in the terms of a feedback loop: When techniques outstrip human groups, the power of the feedback effect (effet de retour), through the modification of the environment, is such that the technical gesture can no longer just be an isolated organization of means . . . The technical gesture does not exhaust itself in its utility as means; it leads to an immediate result, but also provokes a transformation in the environment, which rebounds onto living species, man included.11

We might be alert here to the parallel between technology which “does not exhaust itself ” in utility and a modernist aesthetic in which, for example in the case of Paul Valéry’s essay, “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” the poem, in contrast to discursive prose, does not die for having lived, but exists to reconstitute its own form endlessly, not to be subordinated to, or to disappear into, any simple function of information or of explanation.12 Technology would thus be apprehended in the educational process in a relatively pure fashion, in the same way that we are encouraged to see the value of a cultural artefact in and for itself. Simondon continues: “The energy of the technical gesture, having passed through the environment, returns to man and allows him to modify himself and evolve. We are well beyond utility here . . . The major technical gesture, as an act, is a wager, a trial, an acceptance of danger . . .” (my emphasis).13 Simondon’s opening-­out of the concept of technology here—an opening-­ out, that is, to openness itself, to the radical and even dangerous uncertainty of its outcomes—recalls the logic through which the term “machinic” is generated in the discourse of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Where the mechanical machine signifies a closed system with set and limited outcomes, the “machinic” signifies open functionality and productivity, invariably expressed in terms of the endless combination and recombination of organic and inorganic processes. From such post-Deleuzian premises emerges the concept of “technologies of lived abstraction” in the work of Brian Massumi. Massumi’s book Semblance and Event (2011) develops the process philosophy of A. N. Whitehead (we are always in the midst of things, and therefore beyond the polarity of subjects and objects) by turning on a duality of meaning in Whitehead’s use of the term “abstraction.”14 While abstraction exists for Whitehead in the familiar form of a

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reproach, reducing the living complexity of a phenomenon to a number of core constituents, he also contends that abstraction is a quality of our experience of any event, in that any such event comes loaded with a “semblance” of what its future though unrealized consequences and possibilities are. This is such a fundamental aspect of human (and, in Whiteheadian terms, of non-­human and inorganic) experience that Massumi is able to speak of abstraction in terms of the “techniques of existence” by which we become aware of, work, and act upon the various potential “arcs” of movement in the world. Through a process of “diagramming,” we identify an arc and “systematically deposit” it in the world “for the next occasion to find”; the human body and its senses as “procedures” together constitute a technique of existence “whose role is to selectively channel the nonhuman activity always going on around into its own special activity.”15 Having now mapped out a post-Foucauldian way of thinking about technologies of the self, and before returning to my second short story example, I want to post a speedy shorthand reminder of the way in which two of Lawrence’s novels closely related in composition, Women in Love and Aaron’s Rod, might be read as narratives of illness and health, and in addition, of doing things, and of getting away. I begin at the moment at which, out of “sickness, a fearful nausea,” Hermione Roddice launches her attack on Birkin with the lapis lazuli paperweight (WL, 91). Birkin is ill for a week or two, and when Ursula next encounters him—“ ‘You have been ill, haven’t you?’ ” (WL, 124)—he is conspicuously returning to healthy activity, repairing a punt, “sawing and hammering away,” (WL, 123) and “very busy, like a wild animal active and intent” (ibid.). Birkin is, however, to be laid up in bed again, visited by Gerald, who can do nothing—until, that is, the wrestling of the “Gladiatorial” chapter, which “ ‘makes one sane’ ” (WL, 272)—and then lapses out of the novel, spending convalescent time in the South of France. During these periods of separation, the life-­blood ebbs away from Ursula, and she sinks into a depression or “heavy despair” in which she feels she will die, “ ‘unless something happens’ ” (WL, 191). In a sense these patterns, and the protracted final illness of the paternal Thomas Crich, are all framed by the “gleaming” health of Gerald Crich from the outset (WL, 218). We know, however, as in the diabolical liaison with Gudrun, that the health of these two, in its determination to subjugate matter and life, is also their illness. The novel is punctuated, then, by impulsive movements of action and escape—dancing in front of Highland cattle, smashing the reflection of the moon in a lake—culminating in the excursion to the Alps in search of some kind of collective resolution. Aaron’s Rod strips these patterns down to a cruder form. Aaron Sisson leaves his wife Lottie, their children, and the “unspeakable familiarity” of the family home; he suffers from a “secret malady” (AR, 22), a “strained, unacknowledged opposition to his surroundings” (ibid.), though later agrees that the act was groundless, a “ ‘natural event’ ” (145). In the Bohemian set he escapes into, there is no doing, or nothing to be done—“ ‘Isn’t there something we could do to while the time away?’ ” (AR, 29)—inducing a seemingly satirical explosion of

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action on the part of the speaker, Jim Bricknell, when he leaps up, punches Rawdon Lilly three times in the chest, and promptly sits down again. Lottie’s hair turns gray within a week of Aaron’s desertion, and she explains to the doctor that it was “ ‘death to live with him’ ” (AR, 43). Lawrence, however, experiments in this novel with more speculative forms of anatomical dysfunction: Jim’s attack is prompted by Lilly’s accusation that his need for love expresses itself in the collapse of his backbone and legs, and when Aaron turns up in London with a bad dose of influenza, his own diagnosis of this is that Josephine’s seduction of him caused the collapse of the liver and the release of its toxins. Lilly’s ministrations toward his new friend consist in massaging his lower body with camphorated oil, and displaying his “skilful housewifery” (AR, 106) to watch over him while he sleeps and until the flu subsides. But, as Lilly also has it, “ ‘One is a fool . . . to be lachrymose. The thing to do is to get a move on’ ” (AR, 102). Lilly gets a move on to Malta, Aaron to Italy, where the two are eventually re-­united, and the novel takes its own degenerative turn, as “doing things” gets translated into Lilly’s racist militarist leadership politics. What I hope this brief survey of the novels underlines is the sense in which Lawrence’s technologies of the self operate primarily on and within the field of human relationship. Doing things to or with each other involves the perpetual capacity to make each other sick, Lawrence’s fictions then gaining their diagnostic or even therapeutic motive force from how little we are likely to know about how, and how much, we can materially affect each other. A clutch of later short fictions develop a distinctive narrative shorthand to separate love and attachment from the simple inability of people to live with each other— that is, paraphrasing “Two Blue Birds,” for example: there was a married couple, and they loved each other, but they could not live together.16 Such a shorthand is itself contributory, I suggest, to the sense of a technology or “technical gesture,” in terms of the urgency with which an issue of health issue needs to be identified and a solution sought. Reading Lawrence’s later fictions is often to intuit a cavalier and impatient approach to literary form, as if the writing has more serious issues—of life and death?—to address, the novel Kangaroo being a case in point. A clustering of the shorter fictions further reveals a recursive tendency: something is being tried out, reiterated, even administered. So the stories in turn also tend to involve the proposal of strategies that we might see as radical technologies, though these never, of course, translate into the closure of solutions: you can be recommended to travel for a course of sun treatment; or go away, somewhat directionlessly, on a train; head off for “gallant affairs”; or ride off into the Mexican hinterland, to be imprisoned and sexually assaulted by a guide, or, at the extreme of this spectrum, find yourself sacrificed in a mountain ice cave at the moment of the winter solstice.17 The “technical gesture,” then, in Simondon’s terms, can, or perhaps must be, a wager, a trial, an acceptance of danger. I want to conclude by illustrating this at work in the “gamble” overtly staged by Lawrence’s story “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman,” first published in The

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Criterion in October 1924. Jimmy Frith, a London editor of the literary journal the Commentator, is divorced at 35. Determined to find a woman whose bosom he will not simply nestle passively upon, Jimmy thinks he has found her (without having met her) in Mrs. “Emilia” (Emily) Pinnegar, who sends her poems of Northern mining life to the journal. In correspondence with Emily, he discovers her personal desperation: the mother of an eight-­year-old girl, married to a miner who has another woman; a trained teacher who can no longer work because of her marriage; the author of poetry because she must express herself, “ ‘if only to save myself from developing cancer or some disease that women have’ ” (WRA, 101). Within a matter of two short paragraphs, Jimmy, who has never been north of Oxford, is on the train up to Sheffield, on a dark and snowy February Friday, his determination to visit Emily happily coinciding with a lecture he must deliver in the city. Following a desperate trudge through icy black mud to Emily’s house in Mill Valley, Jimmy’s proposition, “ ‘Why don’t you come and live with me?,’ ” is hardly less swift (WRA, 105). After watching the ritual of the woman washing off the husband’s pit-­dirt in front of the fire, he must engage in protracted discussion with the husband, Pinnegar. Nevertheless, the proposition is rapidly accepted: Emily and the girl will come to London “on Monday.” The next day, back home and fraught by the predictable misgivings, Jimmy sends a letter by special delivery, urging Emily to be absolutely sure. But no reply is forthcoming: and so at 12.50 on Monday, Jimmy greets Emily and her daughter as they arrive at Marylebone station. Richard Aldington read the outrageous action of “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman” as a “ruthless satire” on “a type Lawrence detested,” the “squirming Oxford-­and-London intellectual, with his queer dishonesty and self-­deception and silliness,” contrasted “so effectively,” Aldington writes, with “the hard, downright, unlovable people of the Midlands Lawrence knew so well.”18 Jimmy’s gesture is neatly categorized by Aldington as that of an “impulsive, unstable neurotic.” Yet the story has a way of exceeding both the terms of this satire and Aldington’s complacent, internalized psychologizing of character-­types, of regional identities, and of class. The excess is that of the sheer externality of Jimmy’s improbable technical gesture: what if Emily and her daughter come to live with him? What might happen, if such a thing were done? What is already happening in the story is that Jimmy is becoming other than himself. The satire to which Aldington alludes is undoubtedly present: we are reminded of the narcissism of the exercise, Jimmy consistently watching and addressing himself at the same time as he is talking to Emily, even in his proposal. But accompanying this, in his discussions with the Pinnegars, a principle of equivalence or equality is also established which emboldens Jimmy: he does not dress up his feelings in metropolitan condescension when he says to Emily “ ‘This seems a pretty awful place,’ ” and there is no mimicry of working class pride and resistance when Emily agrees, “ ‘It is. It’s absolutely awful’ ”

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(WRA, 105). Jimmy must confront the reality and consequences of Emily’s dignity and sense of terrible, unchanging fate. He finds in Pinnegar a man who is bitter and taciturn, but who also reads the Commentator, skeptical of its emphasis on the feelings, preferring the facts and ideas of other journals. Soon Lawrence has Jimmy “amazing” himself by challenging Pinnegar’s very identity: “ ‘But what do you mean, when you say you’re a man?’ ” (WRA, 112). The effect of these encounters, then, is not simply to highlight the Pinnegars’ equality with Jimmy, as if in a narrative gesture of political justice or retrieval that would too easily play into the hands of a clichéd redemption of the working class as “real people.”19 While unable to rid himself of class superiority, Jimmy is at the same time catapulted into an equality with the Pinnegars that alters our view of him and of the “type” that Lawrence supposedly detested. In staging an encounter between two prominent aspects of Lawrence’s own life history (the scene of the pitman’s bath in front of the fire has, by this point in Lawrence’s oeuvre, an unmistakeably metafictional texture), the sheer unlikelihood of Jimmy’s gamble, and its result, enables the story to evade the “types” that were readily available to frame it. This is less a narrative of redemption than one in which, through the extraordinary doing of something, a line of flight from the familiar is created, and those involved might become unrecognizable to themselves. “ ‘I look on you as an instrument,’ ” says Pinnegar to Jimmy, toward the end of their second conversation. “ ‘Something had to break. You are the instrument that breaks it’ ” (WRA, 118). This sounds cold and callous, and indicates perhaps the terrible sterile impasse of the Pinnegars’ marriage. But in Jimmy’s outrageous gesture of change, and, as I have suggested, in many of Lawrence’s fictions, there is just such an instrumentality—one, however, as Simondon’s conception of technics would have it, that is not exhausted by utility, but that carries an “energy” conferring the potential to move well beyond utility. As a technology of the self, this relates to, yet fundamentally departs from, the models explored in Michel Foucault’s late work; in contrast to the studied regimens of care and normative-­restorative outcomes of antiquity, Lawrence’s techniques are rooted in the article of faith that “we never really know what we are doing” (SCAL, 30). In this light, where the matter of health is concerned, it is unlikely that Lawrence would ever be recruited to those contemporary cultures of therapeutic kitsch characterized by Carl Cederström and André Spicer as a “wellness syndrome.”20 We remain grateful to Geoff Dyer for pointing out Lawrence’s—healthily?— energetic attachment to his illnesses, his refusal to have even his influenza “filched” from him.21 A clutch of letters to Earl Brewster in 1922, from which Dyer draws, finds Lawrence associating illness precisely with the transformative principles of action and struggle over and against the claims of “meditation and the inner life.”22 Nevertheless, in the spirit of counter-­intuition and contradiction that characterizes Lawrence’s work, it might be time to look again at the very practical orientations of his fictions, and to reconsider what techniques they might offer us for an art of living, a care of the self, and a principle of becoming,

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which elsewhere, in the philosophical writing, are invariably pursued with an ardent determination.

Notes 1 Jeff Wallace, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 58–66. 2 Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990), 45. 3 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Vermont: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 6. 4 Foucault, The Care of the Self, 51. 5 Amit Chaudhuri sees in Sketches of Etruscan Places primarily a channeling of the values of Lawrence’s working-­class culture, while Massimo Pallottino associates the romanticism and “pure fantasy” of the text with a tradition dating back to the “Etruscomania” of the late eighteenth century. See Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), and Pallottino, “Foreword” to D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places (London: Olive Press, 1994). 6 See Chaudhuri, ‘Difference,’ 162–5 and 182–3. 7 Foucault, The Care of the Self, 102. 8 Michel Foucault, The Uses of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1987), 89; Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 3. 9 Gilbert Simondon, “Culture and Technics” (1965), trans. Olivia Lucca Fraser, revised by Giovanni Menegalle, Radical Philosophy 189 (Jan/Feb 2015):18. 10 Simondon, “Culture and Technics,” 23. 11 Simondon, “Culture and Technics,” 19. 12 Paul Valéry, “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” The American Poetry Review 36, 2 (Mar/Apr 2007), 61–6. 13 Simondon, “Culture and Technics,” 19. 14 Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2011). 15 Massumi, Semblance and Event, 15, 26. 16 “There was a woman who loved her husband, but she could not live with him. The husband, on his side, was sincerely attached to his wife, yet he could not live with her” (WRA, 5). 17 As in the stories “Sun” (WRA), “The Wilful Woman” (SM), “Two Blue Birds” (WRA), “The Princess” (SM), and “The Woman Who Rode Away” (WRA) respectively. 18 Richard Aldington, “Introduction,” in D. H. Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 8. 19 The phrase has a peculiar resonance for any reader in post-EU Referendum Britain, and Lawrence’s story incorporates its own satirical anticipation of the recent political farce/catastrophe. Jimmy regrets the terrible handicap by which he never meets any “real people,” only “sophisticated” ones; “so few of us ever do,” reflects the story’s satirical voice, because only the people we don’t meet are the simple, genuine, unspoilt souls. Lawrence’s satire recognizes the entire predictability of a rigid

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populist conservatism founded on class inequality defensively idealizing working people as the salt of the earth—witness, of course, Nigel Farage’s proclamation that the Brexit vote was a victory for the said “real people.” 20 Carl Cederström and André Spicer, The Wellness Syndrome (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). 21 Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence (London: Abacus, 2009), 163. 22 Quoted in Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage, 162.

E ngineering A way H umanity : L awrence on T echnology and M ental C on s cio u sne s s in L a dy C hat t e r l ey ’ s L ov e r and P a n s i e s Andrew Keese

In his essay, “Myself Revealed,” D. H. Lawrence writes, “And now I know, more or less, why I cannot follow in the footsteps even of [J. M.] Barrie or of [H. G.] Wells, who both came from the common people also and are both such a success” (LEA, 181). To Lawrence, the noted fantasy and science fiction writers of the Peter Pan stories and The Time Machine and The Invisible Man sold out. Lawrence says that he “cannot . . . forfeit my passional consciousness and my old blood-­affinity with my fellow-­men and the animals and the land, for that other thin, spurious mental conceit which is all that is left of the mental consciousness once it has made itself exclusive” (ibid.). Humanity’s excessive relationship with its mental consciousness troubled Lawrence. During the course of his writing career, he determined that humans have two basic consciousnesses: one stemming from the intellect and the other from the body itself. The first category, mental consciousness, is responsible for such things as forms of government, cultural traditions, laws, and religions. The second category, blood consciousness, deals with instincts and emotions, aspects of humanity that Lawrence views as neglected.1 Lawrence rails against humankind’s penchant for customs that violate the very nature of humans, such as the logic of obscene words for natural bodily functions.2 Lawrence also holds special disdain for human ingenuity and fantastical creations as envisioned by Wells. While certainly not the central focus of either Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) or its companion book of poetry that followed, Pansies (1929), Lawrence uses technology as a way to demonstrate a problem with mental consciousness before promoting a more balanced philosophy that respects humans for what they actually are. As Connie Chatterley drives through Tevershall—where her husband runs the mine and where most who work there live—she observes the state of the people, who are representative of “the England of today” (LCL, 153). She wonders, “Ah God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men? They have reduced them to less than humanness, and now there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare” (ibid.). This

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condition of the country is symbolically recreated in Connie’s marriage to Clifford, who is unable to connect to his blood consciousness after being wounded via the ultimate destructive force of humankind’s mental consciousness, its war machine. The workers who are controlled by privileged people like Clifford are not much different. Today’s England “was producing a new race of mankind, over-­conscious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous intuitive side dead, but dead. Half-­corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent consciousness in the other half ” (ibid.). The passionate relationship between Connie and Oliver Mellors, Clifford’s gamekeeper, represents the possible solution for the country, one that is not ashamed of the body and is in touch with the blood consciousness. David Kellogg writes, “the relationship of Connie and Mellors is clearly represented as resistant to socialized forms of sexuality—including those of other characters in the novel—and thus as tending toward a ‘natural’ sexual expression.”3 The couple do not let mental consciousness dictate everything about their relationship; rather, they listen to their blood consciousness, their instincts. In his essay, “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Lawrence writes, “But I stick to my book and my position: Life is only bearable when the mind and the body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between the two, and each has a natural respect for the other. And it is obvious, there is no balance and no harmony now” (LCL, 310). Certainly, it is easy for a reader to misinterpret what has gone wrong between Connie and Clifford. Connie does not have a sexual relationship with her husband, who is wheelchair-­bound. Instead of placing the blame of the marriage’s ills solely on Connie—who needs physical fulfillment of some kind, perhaps just touch—Lawrence highlights the war wounds of Clifford, who had been paralyzed during the Great War. The narrator notes “that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is, really, only the mechanism of assumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt . . . till it fills all the psyche” (LCL, 49). Clifford is emotionally cold and has not really gotten over the war. The shock to his system had been so great that his emotional self shut off. This is why he is unable to connect with Connie, not because he is impotent with her. Instead of fulfilling both of the human consciousnesses, their relationship has been regulated to one functioning only in the unfeeling mental realm. The couple goes through the motions with “a habit of intimacy” (LCL, 50). The war recreates within Clifford, who is of noble birth, the condition of the people who have been beaten down by society’s overemphasis on mental consciousness, which dictates so much in people’s lives. As Lawrence so clearly demonstrates in his leadership novels (Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent), he saw power over fellow humans as corrupting of leaders, which makes political and religious systems, no matter how well designed, susceptible to ethical failures of the leaders. Michel Foucault

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echoes Lawrence’s sentiment in his study of power, The History of Sexuality: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”4 Like Lawrence, Foucault points to humans being out of balance between their instinctual and mental selves. Society dominates over the individual. To explain this, Foucault points to “bio-­power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-­power an agent of transformation of human life.”5 He further explains this concept in Security, Territory, Population: By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species.6

Certainly there are a lot of mechanisms which humans use to exert bio-­power, including education, police, courts, prisons, and, perhaps especially pertinent to today’s times and to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Pansies, advanced technologies. Both of these works by Lawrence demonstrate the potential that technology has to be used as bio-­power. Lawrence’s vision of technology is not easily categorized by contemporary thinkers on the subject. R. L. Rutsky classifies “portrayals of the relationship between technology and humans into two main categories—the utopian and the dystopian—based on whether they present a positive or a negative representation of technology.”7 He identifies the dichotomy of technology either benignly serving humankind as “tools or instruments” or “escaping human control, no longer serving human ends and interests, or, in more extreme cases, as threatening to ‘take over’ the role of the human master and enslave or robotize human beings.”8 The category that Lawrence treats technology in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and in Pansies (as will be seen below) does not easily fit into Rutsky’s dichotomy. Lawrence’s treatment more easily aligns with the more negative second category, but not because of the rationale Rutsky identifies. For Lawrence, the issue comes down to whether technology interferes with human beings acting like human beings: technologies that interfere with normal, instinctual behavior.

Lawrence’s views on technology Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Pansies were necessary extensions of Lawrence’s philosophies of self and society. An individual functions within a society, which

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exerts expectations and rules of behavior on the person. Societies are generally intellectual constructions with their governmental and economic systems and laws. Lawrence’s problem with societies is when they impose themselves on the individual in ways contrary to blood consciousness. Cultural creations, such as those that regulate so-­called obscene words, are the result of a collective mental consciousness. Individuals are expected to conform. That is exactly where societies fall short. They fail to recognize and respect what is natural for humans. Both of these works by Lawrence strongly advocate for personal freedoms. Using technology to manipulate a person’s body warps the essence of being human by muting its instincts and natural functions. Discussions about futuristic technology come via conversations with friends at Wragby Hall. Connie and Clifford have frequent company and intense conversations, including “a few regular men, constants: men who had been at Cambridge with Clifford . . . young intellectuals of the day. They all believed in the life of the mind, and keeping pure the integrity of the mind” (LCL, 31). These are men who are consumed by mental consciousness. Among these guests is Tommy Dukes, a brigadier general, who represents Lawrence’s positions in the conversations. Other regulars include Arnold Hammond, a writer, and Charles May, an astronomer. Each person, including Clifford and Connie and other guests, are used by Lawrence to present different takes on the issue. Their wide-­ranging discussions serve to present the problem of the novel, much like the roundtable discussion Lawrence used in The Plumed Serpent to justify why Mexico was in need of a new religion.9 In the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the discussions toward the beginning of the book highlight the problem that excessive mental consciousness poses for society. One such discussion sounds like the beginnings of a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells or Aldous Huxley, who had not yet ventured into the genre at this point in his career. The conversation starts when Olive Strangeways has been “reading a book about the future, when babies would be bred in bottles and women would be ‘immunised.’ ” “ ‘Jolly good thing too!’ she said. ‘Then a woman can live her own life’ ” (LCL, 74). Clifford says this would relieve people from having to attend to “ ‘All the love business’ ” (ibid.). Strangeways says the opposite would be true if women did not have to experience pregnancies: “ ‘That might leave all the more room for fun’ ” (ibid.). Another fantastical scenario is presented by Lady Bennerley. She says, “ ‘. . . if the love business went, something else would take its place. Morphia, perhaps. A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everybody’ ” (ibid.). Jack Strangeways states that if some of the drug were provided to people for the weekend, there’s the question of how people would feel in the middle of the week. Lady Bennerley vocalizes Lawrence’s purpose behind both technological fantasies: “ ‘So long as you can forget your body, you are happy . . . And the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilisation is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily, without our knowing it’ ” (LCL, 74–5). In other words, technology envisioned in such a way would enable

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a society guided by pure mental consciousness, one not fettered with the often-­ uncomfortable urges of body. This is the worst-­case scenario to Lawrence, one in which humans would simply forget how to be human. This scene is repeated in Pansies. In the poem aptly titled “Wellsian futures,” Lawrence writes, When men are made in bottles and emerge as squeaky globules with no bodies to speak of, and therefore nothing to have feelings with, they will still squeak intensely about their feelings and be prepared to kill you if you say you’ve got none.

Poems, 434

This takes the idea in Lady Chatterley’s Lover a step further in completely relieving people of any bodies at all. Because, without a body, you cannot have physical needs or desires. In the preceding poem,“Cerebral emotions,” Lawrence states that he is “sick of people’s cerebral emotions / that are born in their minds and forced down by the will” (ibid.). As he explains in the introduction to Pansies, Lawrence cannot understand why humans do not recognize themselves as what they are. He quotes part of a line from Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room”: “But—Celia, Celia, Celia shits” (Poems, 1331, 665). Lawrence sympathizes with Celia, who is being attacked by a disturbed person for something perfectly normal. To that, Lawrence states that Swift “couldn’t even see how much worse it would be if Celia didn’t shit . . . One feels like going back across all the years to poor Celia, to say to her: It’s all right, don’t you take any notice of that mental lunatic” (Poems, 665–6). Lawrence found the perfect example of what would happen if the logic of laws and customs is taken to its extreme; it would not be pretty or practical. Completely disregarding the body would be the ultimate mentalization by humankind. It would amount to the complete suppression or even destruction of human instinct. The characters in Lady Chatterley’s Lover also imagine if bodies did not hinder people. Winterslow states, “ ‘Help us to get rid of our bodies altogether . . . It’s quite time man began to improve on his own nature, especially the physical side of it’ ” (LCL, 75).10 Connie responds, “ ‘Imagine if we floated like tobacco-­smoke!’ ” (ibid.). Winterslow states that “ ‘nothing but the spirit in us is worth having’ ” (ibid.). Dukes provides reason from Lawrence’s perspective, saying, “ ‘Think so?—Give me the resurrection of the body! . . . But it’ll come, in time—when we’ve shoved the cerebral stone away a bit, the money and the rest. Then we’ll get a democracy of touch, instead of a democracy of pocket’ ” (ibid.). Try as people might, fantasize about technological utopias, the reality is that humans are a species of animal. Their existence begins with the body and ends with it. Lawrence does not deny the importance of the human mind; rather he rails against a squeamish society that is bent on frowning at and

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ignoring the needs of the body. Humans do, in fact, copulate, but just do not say that they do. The relationship between Connie and Mellors explores the possibility of what culture could be like if people were more open and honest with themselves. Even with Lawrence’s fantastical visions of the future, present-­day advanced technologies find a place in the novel. Clifford takes advantage of the latest motorized technology, his wheelchair, to help him move about his private wooded park (LCL, 41), and he taps into the latest advances in mining technologies to transform the profitability of his Tevershall pit (LCL, 108). Putting Clifford into the wheelchair may have been Lawrence’s way of symbolizing the suppression of the instinctual in favor of the mental, the mechanical way of existing. His disability appears to impact his ability to have sex with his wife (LCL, 45). However, for Clifford, perhaps the issue for him is that he could not fully relax with Connie. He consumes himself with mentalizing their relationship, suggesting that she seek a partner outside their marriage to bring them a baby (ibid.). But later in the novel, Clifford is once again able to have a sexual encounter, this time with his nurse (LCL, 107). Clearly, it is not about Clifford’s disability. It has to do with him mentalizing their relationship and not really giving himself over emotionally to Connie. With Mrs. Bolton, the nurse, Clifford feels like a master, and, more importantly, he is relaxed around her: “his voice ran on with her almost as easily and garrulously as her own could run” (LCL, 109). With the nurse, he is just himself, no pretentions, and despite being paralyzed, he feels like a man once again. Clifford finds fulfillment in the “technical science of industry,” which enables him to transform his mine, “a man’s victory, over the coal, over the very dirt of Tevershall pit” (LCL, 108). Technical innovation provides him with bio-­power. Clifford “felt a new sense of power flowing through him: power over all these men, over the hundreds and hundreds of colliers. He was finding out: and he was getting things into his grip” (ibid.). The rewards are enormous for the scientists and inventors or, at least, for the people who control them, such as Clifford. The narrator notes, “In this field, men were like gods, or demons, inspired to discoveries, and fighting to carry them out” (ibid.). Science has the potential to make the select few “like gods, or demons” with control over both nature and their fellow humans. The ability to create and to destroy the natural world via the ingenuity of mental consciousness is what really sets people apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. The major difference between Connie and Mellors is class, an artificial construct only significant via the mental consciousness. That these two of the leisure and working classes can have a meaningful relationship is a testament to their willingness to give way to their blood consciousness. In society, the ultimate mental construct, money, is what divides people. Striving for money, at its most basic level, is about survival, and as one makes it higher on the money scale, that person has more “freedoms” to relax and follow whatever his or her interests might be. Money is why some are forced into jobs that provide little to

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no fulfillment. The desire of employers to accumulate more money and the need of others to have jobs is ripe for manipulation and the exertion of bio-­ power. Mellors reflects on the ills of the Industrial Age, saying that “ ‘it’s a shame, what’s been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-­insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. I’d wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake’ ” (LCL, 220). People have become slaves to technologies promising better lives for them. They are just numbers on the money scale. If it is to the benefit of the company to eke out slightly more profit, even their miserable jobs become expendable. Therefore in Pansies Lawrence says people should not have to work to live; rather they should live to work at what inspires them. In “All that we have is life—,” he says, “work is life, and life is lived in work” (Poems, 390). In a similar way, Mellors says in a letter to Connie that people “ ‘ought to learn to be naked and handsome, all of them, and to move and be handsome, and to sing in a mass and dance the old group dances, and carve the stools they sit on, and embroider their own emblems. Then they wouldn’t need money. And that’s the only way to solve the industrial problem’ ” (LCL, 299–300). Machines and other technologies do not improve societies as much as men and women simply coming together as a community: Neighbors becoming friendly with their neighbors, and people using their skills to help others. If people learned to listen to their bodies rather than their heads, they might not have to work as hard, and perhaps there would be greater peace among people. In the poem, “A man,” Lawrence states that “All I care about in a man / is that unbroken spark in him” (Poems, 455). The unbroken spark occurs when people are relaxed and themselves and not infringed upon in some extreme way by society, as Clifford is with Mrs. Bolton and Connie with Mellors.

A brave new future? Lawrence died on March 2, 1930, before he could write more about technology. However, Lawrence’s friend and follower, Aldous Huxley, certainly did write most dramatically and famously about the dangerous potential of technology in Brave New World (1932). In a talk on the BBC during the same year that his famous dystopian novel came out, Huxley discussed the potential that science could have in the near term in manipulating masses of people, including elections. For instance, Huxley noted that psychology, “the science whose subject matter is the human mind itself . . . is already applied to the problems of government.”11 To Huxley, scientific advances could be used against or for the greater good. He went on to say that “The great Russian biologist, [Ivan] Pavlov, and the American Behaviourists have shown how easy it is, with animals and young children, to form conditioned reflexes which habit soon hardens into what we are loosely accustomed to call ‘instinctive’ patterns of behaviour.”12

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Certainly, physiological manipulation, as Huxley also shows in Brave New World, is only one of a myriad of ways in which society as a whole can be impacted by scientific and technological advances. Lawrence demonstrated signs that he may have been progressing artistically along similar lines as the forward-­thinking Huxley. In addition to his futuristic statements in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Pansies, during the period that he was crafting his controversial novel in October 1927, Lawrence left unfinished a story that takes place in the year 2927 (LEA, 49). Whether Huxley was inspired by Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Pansies or whether Huxley may have inspired Lawrence will probably never be known with any certainty. However, there are similarities in Brave New World. The first two chapters of Huxley’s book detail how babies are bred in bottles for specific purposes and for different stations in life, and happy pills, dubbed soma, are mentioned throughout much of the novel.13 Also, Huxley’s wife, Maria, typed the final draft of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Lawrence and Huxley were frequently in each other’s presence during the composition of Lawrence’s novel.14 After Lawrence died, Huxley compiled Lawrence’s letters, which were published in 1932 with an introduction that attempted to counter the brutal attack on Lawrence by Lawrence’s friend turned rival, John Middleton Murry, in Son of Woman (1931). Regardless, Lawrence certainly was not the origin of the babies in bottles concept. More than two decades before Lawrence was born, Charles Kingsley authored the popular children’s book, Water-Babies, in 1863, and Huxley’s brother, Julian, wrote about reproductive technology in various essays and a short story, “The Tissue-Culture King.”15 Of course, Aldous Huxley masterfully created Brave New World and deserves all of the credit for that accomplishment. However, one is left to wonder what Lawrence’s future in science fiction may have been had he lived longer. And what would he have written about? While Huxley concerned himself with how science and technology could be misused, Lawrence worried about anything which might force humans to be something other than they were actually born to be. Huxley writes in “The Censor,” which was published in Vanity Fair about a year after Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published, that “What he [Lawrence] is crusading for is, apparently, the admission by the conscious spirit of the right of the body and the instincts, not merely to a begrudged existence, but to an equal honour with itself. Man is an animal that thinks.”16 Lawrence sought a balance between the intellect of humans and their bodies. Lawrence believed in ethical limits to advances in science. Nicholas Murray notes that Lawrence “was particularly enraged by the scientific talk of the two Huxley brothers, and their belief in the theories of evolution and what Julian called ‘the possibility of mankind’s genetic improvement.’ Lawrence believed that the solution to mankind’s problems lay, not in science, but in greater freedom for the instinctive and intuitive life.”17 Despite the great potential of science, Lawrence seemed to believe that there were limits to what humans could truly know via mental consciousness. In his introduction to his edition of

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Lawrence’s letters, Huxley writes that “Lawrence disapproved of too much knowledge, on the score that it diminished men’s sense of wonder and blunted their sensitiveness to the great mystery.”18 That wonder can be explained by Lawrence’s respect for physical, instinctual knowledge, and for humans to focus too much on their mental consciousness puts them out of balance.

Notes 1 See chapter VI, “First Glimmerings of Mind,” in Fantasia of the Unconscious in FUPU and “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” LCL, 311. 2 See “Introduction” to Pansies (Poems, 664–5). 3 David Kellogg, “Reading Foucault Reading Lawrence: Body, Voice, Sexuality in Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” D. H. Lawrence Review 28, 3 (1999), 41. 4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 143. 5 Ibid. 6 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart and trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1. 7 R. L. Rutsky, “Technologies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, eds. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 182. 8 Rutsky, “Technologies,” 182. 9 See Andrew Keese, “Hybridity and the Postcolonial Solution in D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent,” in D. H. Lawrence: New Critical Perspectives and Cultural Translation, ed. Simonetta de Filippis (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 199. 10 Lawrence’s emphasis. 11 Aldous Huxley, “Science and Civilisation,” in Between the Wars: Essays and Letters, ed. David Bradshaw (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994), 108–9. 12 Huxley, “Science and Civilisation,” 109. 13 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 3–29 and 60. 14 David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 396–9. 15 Susan Merrill Squier, Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 29–55. 16 Aldous Huxley, “The Censor,” in The Critical Response to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Jan Pilditch (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), 169. 17 Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002), 208. 18 Aldous Huxley, “Introduction,” in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. A. Huxley (New York: Viking Press, 1932), xiv.

L awrence’ s A llotropic “G ladiatorial ”: R e si sting t he M echani z ation o f t he H uman i n W om e n i n L ov e Thalia Trigoni

The son of a miner, born in Eastwood, an English mining village, Lawrence had quite unexpectedly idealized the profession’s intense physical labor. This is because, for Lawrence, the technological advances that propelled industrialization had damaging consequences for human relations and the process of human cognition and understanding: they undermined what he called “the societal instinct” at the same time that the mechanical principles underlying the workings of machinery were being increasingly applied to the workings of human cognition. This “societal instinct,” along with the somatic and spontaneous mode of cognition, were built upon the workers’ physical labor and contact with each other. But the introduction of machines into their world opened up a gap between the workers and their object of work, while physiologists of the period increasingly used the machine metaphor to describe bodily operations.1 Lawrence’s Women in Love, in conjunction with his essays and theoretical writings on human psychology and understanding, provides a fertile field of inquiry to study his attitude toward technology and industrialization in relation to human behavior and perception. In this chapter, I focus primarily on the gladiatorial scene of Women in Love through the lens of Lawrence’s appropriation of the scientific concept of allotropy to describe the constituent elements of human nature. More than a battle that surreptitiously betrays the gladiators’ histrionic resistance to their homosexual drives—the traditional interpretation of the scene’s main symbolic import—Lawrence describes a battle between two conflicting worldviews: between Birkin on the one hand, who stands for the spontaneous, the dark, and the unconscious, and who is associated with the industrial element of coal; and Gerald on the other, who embodies the spirit of industrialization and mechanization, and is associated with the diamond, that is, with the world of light and consciousness. This battle, I maintain, is an allotropic gladiatorial whereby the hostility of the one against the other is juxtaposed to an inner and subtle unity between them in the form of an organic connection. It is on this allotropic relation between technological mechanization and the spontaneous and organic that this chapter

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will focus in order to provide a nuanced picture of Lawrence’s attitude toward the tectonic cultural shifts that were taking place during his time. In his famous letter to Edward Garnett, Lawrence advised his readers not to look in his work “for the old stable ego of the character,” but for . . . another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-­unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond—but I say “diamond, what! This is carbon.” And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.) Letters 2, 183

From the outset, Lawrence indicates here that allotropy is indispensable to understanding his ontological theory and approach to creating literary art.2 Thomas Gibbons observed that the source of Lawrence’s “allotrope” is a passage from Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death by F. W. H. Myers,3 co-­founder of the Society for Psychical Research in Cambridge who was enjoying, in Suzanne Raitt’s words, “respectability and public profile.”4 As Gibbons wrote, the similarities between the passage from Lawrence and Myers’s account are striking: I do not wish to assert that all unfamiliar psychical states are necessarily evolutive or dissolutive in any assignable manner. I should prefer to suppose that there are states which may better be styled allotropic;—modifications of the arrangements of nervous elements on which our conscious identity depends, but with no more conspicuous superiority of the one state over the other than (for instance) charcoal possesses over graphite or graphite over charcoal. But there may also be states in which the (metaphorical) carbon becomes diamond—with so much at least of advance on previous states as is involved in the substitution of the crystalline for the amorphous structure.5

Myers considered phenomena such as messages and words uttered without conscious intention, which he ascribed to unconscious manifestations revealing the existence of a subliminal self: “this subliminal self represents, more fully than the supraliminal self, our central and abiding being.”6 According to Gibbons, Myers considered the secondary personalities as “manifestations or ‘allotropic states’ of a unitary unconsciousness or subliminal self . ”7 The fusion of science with the literary certainly appealed to Lawrence. As Roger Luckhurst argues, it must have been his opposition to Freudianism and Ouspenskian mysticism that drew Lawrence closer to Myers’s work, since it “shared his disgust of mechanical or reductionist accounts for more dynamic, inherently metaphorical language.”8 Gibbons concluded that Myers’s subliminal self is

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what Lawrence referred to as “another ego according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable.”9 By applying the concept of allotropy to the human condition, Lawrence (and Myers) draws attention to a radically unchanged element in human nature that can manifest itself in two different forms, which may appear on the surface as opposites. Carbon and the mines, in Lawrence’s mind, were associated with the unconscious, darkness, the physical and the natural, whereas the diamond represented consciousness, light, the mechanical and the artificial. He criticized many novelists for their stress on consciousness, or the “history of the diamond,” as he called it in his letter to Edward Garnett. In the same spirit, he advised Kyle Crichton that the treatment of the unconscious is vital in a literary work. He considered this to be the author’s duty: “you’ve got to use the artist’s faculty of making the sub-­conscious conscious . . . look under his blankness . . . look for his hidden wistfulness, his absolutely shut-­off passion . . . and give the story in terms of these, not of his mechanical upper self ” (Letters 5, 294). To focus only on the conscious aspect of the characters results simply in a “good record, and excellent for conveying fact” (ibid.). Lawrence endorsed in the same letter the need for the unconscious (coal, darkness) to become the raw material the artist should bring into consciousness (light, diamond), just like the colliers brought back with them from the depths of the mines an “otherworldness,” a darkness and physicality charged with powerful bonds and feelings: “What was there in the mines that held the boy’s feelings? The darkness, the mystery, the otherworldness, the peculiar camaraderie, the sort of naked intimacy: men as gods in the underworld, or as elementals. Create that in a picture” (ibid.). An author is like a collier, descending into the depth of the human constitution in order to bring the elements s/he mined to light. In this darkness, one may discover his or her “real being,” which resembles “the gloss of coal”: “. . . if I think of my childhood, it is always as if there was a lustrous sort of inner darkness, like the gloss of coal, in which we moved and had our real being” (LEA, 290). We may capture a glimpse of the meaning of “real being” in Lawrence’s thought in his description of what the colliers brought back with them upon their ascent to the surface: “When the men came up into the light,” Lawrence continued, “they blinked. They had, in a measure, to change their flow. Nevertheless they brought with them above-­ground the curious dark intimacy of the mine, the naked sort of contact” (LEA, 289–90). They brought to the surface a robust agent that connected them in a sacred communion. This is what Lawrence called “instinct of community” or “societal instinct” (LEA, 293). Lawrence despised the industrial society he lived in because it corroded this “instinct of community.” As he wrote in his review of Trigant Burrow’s The Social Basis of Consciousness, “what must be broken is the egocentric absolute of the individual,” heralding a society where “the me-­and-you tension and contest, the inevitable contest of two individualities” is “brought into connexion.” The industrialist society gave rise to egocentric self-­interestedness, and “so long as men are inwardly dominated . . . nothing is possible but insanity more or less

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pronounced.” In a final twist of thought, Lawrence called upon his readers to “shatter the mirror” of self-­absorbed paralysis “and fall again into true relatedness” (PPP, 379, 382). In R. E. Pritchard’s words, in Lawrence’s works the “ ‘impersonal’ activity of male communion has become subordinated in the sense of ease in a larger inclusive body.” Especially in his more mature writings, Pritchard continues, Lawrence expressed a “yearning for a resurrection in a fantasied community of ‘togetherness,’ ” for a return to his childhood, when “miners were not brutalised by the industry, but in their dark underworld knew ‘a sort of intimate community’ developing their intuitive consciousness.”10 Lawrence believed in physical proximity and comradeship, bonding people in a sense of community in which they are literally in touch, united in a “naked intimacy.” Industrialism reduced people to automatons. He had a vision of society whereby no one is superior or inferior to a fellow human being, but simply feels a “recognition of present otherness,” an otherness to which we are intimately connected (RDP, 80). The industrial system eroded this harmonious connectedness: “Comparison enters only when one of us departs from his own integral being, and enters the material-­mechanical world. Then equality and inequity starts at once” (PPP, 715–16). Lawrence stressed the importance of the “societal instinct” as an inherently somatic experience. It is what he called the experience of the “blood,” which involves the sensory and intuitive elements of human nature. In his essay “Introduction to These Paintings,” Lawrence described the electric immediacy of this phenomenon: A deep instinct of kinship joins men together, and the kinship of flesh-­andblood keeps the warm flow of intuitional awareness streaming between human beings. Our true awareness of one another is intuitional, not mental. Attraction between people is really instinctive and intuitional, not an affair of judgement . . . We have become ideal beings, creatures that exist in idea, to one another, rather than flesh-­and-blood kin. And with the collapse of the feeling of physical, flesh-­and-blood kinship, and the substitution of our ideal, social or political oneness, came the failing of our intuitive awareness, and the great unease, the nervousness of mankind. We are afraid of the instincts. We are afraid of the intuition within us. We suppress the instincts, and we cut off our intuitional awareness from one another and from the world. PPP, 556

The atrophy of the “flesh-­and-blood” kinship was a symptom of the industrialist spirit, causing what Lawrence called “nervousness” in people. In the transition from Thomas Crich’s to Gerald’s generation, we see the transformation of the mines from a setting in which people were communicating instinctively and physically into a mechanized setting. Thomas Crich represents the pre-­ mechanization era of the mines, an era that Lawrence idealized in “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside.” In this essay, Lawrence presented the mines as a working space in which the colliers could communicate physically: “Under the

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butty system, the miners worked underground as a sort of intimate community, they knew each other practically naked, and with curious close intimacy” (PPP, 135). What enabled this somatic communication was “the darkness and the underground remoteness of the pit ‘stall,’ and the continual presence of danger” (ibid.). This setting brought unconscious drives to the forefront. It “made the physical, instinctive and intuitional contact between men very highly developed, a contact almost as close as touch, very real and very powerful. This physical awareness and intimate togetherness was at its strongest down pit” (PPP, 135–6). As noted earlier, Lawrence’s diamond is coal (i.e. “I say ‘diamond, what! This is carbon’ ”), but this should be understood within the framework of a dialectics whereby the refusal to acknowledge the presence of carbon within the diamond evacuates the chemical substance of its real being, rendering it a worthless casket, just like a conscious self that suppresses the instinctual, the physical and the unconscious, loses its real being, becoming a mechanical, industrialized artifact. Women in Love voices the need for these central issues to find the most apt linguistic expression: “This struggle for verbal consciousness should not be left out in art . . . It is the passionate struggle into conscious being” (WL, 486; italics in original). An integral part of the community, Thomas Crich wanted his mines to be “primarily great fields to produce bread and plenty for all the hundreds of human beings gathered about them . . . He wanted his industry to be run on love. Oh, he wanted love to be the directing power even of the mines” (WL, 224–5). The “patriarch,” as he is called, represents the “unifying idea of mankind” (WL, 221) that bonded people through the cultivation of their communal instinct. However, the momentum of industrial reality seemed unstoppable. Mines were being transformed at a fast pace. The “sword of mechanical necessity” (WL, 225) was drawn, with Crich finding a retreat in charity work. The new grim reality is summarized in Lawrence’s essay “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside”: “condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers” (PPP, 138). Gerald represents the new spirit of the modern era, he is the “Industrial Magnate” (WL, 211). Upon succeeding his father, he abolished the old system and employed many of the latest scientific advancements. Under his management, “electricity was carried into every mine. New machinery was brought from America, such as the miners had never seen before” (WL, 230). These new machines, the “great iron men,” blurred the distinction between the human and the machine. The colliers were no longer in charge of the mines. Instead, “educated and expert men were in control everywhere, the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments” (ibid.). Not only did industrialization mean more work and less pay, it meant that their work became “terrible and heart-­breaking in its mechanicalness . . . the hope seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanised” (ibid.).

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Lawrence portrayed the transition from “the butty system” of Thomas Crich’s epoch to Gerald’s mechanical era in terms of the increasing numbing of the unconscious and instinctual, somatic drives. Gerald’s treatment of people as a kind of machinery that can be disposed of once used (WL, 231) brings him close to Lawrence’s definition of the neurasthenic, a person dissociated from the “flesh-­and-blood” kinship: “such a strange pressure was upon him, as if the very middle of him were a vacuum, and outside were an awful tension” (WL, 233). In contrast to his father, who achieved a balance between the bodily and the mental, Gerald is in agony, suffering an existential crisis: “he had suddenly stood up in terror, not knowing what he was. And he went to the mirror and looked long and closely at his own face, at his own eyes, seeking for something. He was afraid, in mortal dry fear, but he knew not what of ” (WL, 232). Gerald’s refusal to embrace his “real being,” to walk like the colliers in the mines of the pristine unconscious inflicted upon him a sense of “emptiness” (WL, 266). According to Charles Ross, Lawrence rewrote scene after scene in Women in Love in order to accentuate Gerald’s “ice-­destructive” consciousness as a “nonhuman aspect of the terrible, static ice-­ built mountain-­top” of the will, reductive to phenomena, symbolic of “the resonance of this vocabulary for conveying the sterile abuse of the will . . . characteristic of modern society.”11 “The Industrial Magnate” represents the mental life, the idea of the machine, and personifies “not only British industrialism but the whole deathly vector of northern Europe.”12 As Mark Kinkead-Weekes asserted, “Lawrence put into Gerald all his fascination with power . . . the power of mind over matter, the power of technology which revolutionised the coal industry in his lifetime.”13 Gerald finds pleasure in industrial production and development; he is the one who installed electrical plants to the mines, and as Birkin makes clear at the end of “Class-Room” (WL, 35), electricity is synonymous with the “deliberate, mental consciousness” (FUPU, 29). Gerald is the embodiment of “the God of the machine,” whose religion is “the pure instrumentality of mankind” (WL, 223). As David Trotter has noted, “Gerald . . . can be associated with early twentieth-­century campaigns for ‘national efficiency’; physical health; scientific and technological training; military and naval preparedness; industrial modernization; a government of national unity.”14 Conversely, Birkin represents the principle of fluid organic life and regeneration. In an attempt to immerse himself in physical experience, he resorts to a nearby forest, where he strips off his clothes and moves naked among the flowers and fir-­trees. He takes satisfaction there from the sting of the fir-­boughs on his skin, from the smooth hardness of the birch-­trunks, and from the “lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation,” which literally enters into his blood, into his “living self ” (WL, 107). His worldview idealizes experience rather than intellect, the latter bearing little homage to one’s “spontaneous—creative fullness of being” (FUPU, 43). To gain knowledge of Ursula’s “other self ” (WL, 188), Birkin has to go under the skin. He asserts, “I don’t want to see you. I’ve seen

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plenty of women, I’m sick and weary of seeing them. I want a woman I don’t see” (WL, 147). The same deprecation of surface appearances is found in Fantasia of the Unconscious: “Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see—everything, everything through the eye, in one mode of objective curiosity” (FUPU, 102–3). It is the same wish that leads him to confess to Ursula that “I want to find you, where you don’t know your existence, the you that your common self denies utterly” (WL, 147). Birkin expresses the view that real connection can be achieved only through physical communion. He is the primary representative of the unconscious and the instinctual, the “coal” that Lawrence intended to embed in his work. He is the advocate of “the great dark knowledge you can’t have in your head—the dark involuntary being” (WL, 43). However, much like Gerald, he fails to reach equilibrium, since he is unable to communicate with others on the level he wishes. The one sees himself mirrored in the other and the two seem to merge in a peculiar oneness, their “two bodies clinched into oneness” (WL, 270). Despite the different form of consciousness that each represents, in reality they represent two forms of the same mode of being. Gerald admits that “Only Birkin kept the fear definitely off him” (WL, 232), but he denies, in a symbolic gesture, Birkin’s offer of a “blood-­brotherhood.” More than disguised homoeroticism,15 Birkin’s proposal functions as an opportunity for Gerald to embrace “the instinct of community.” Gerald’s reply, “ ‘We’ll leave it till I understand it better’ ” (WL, 207), is a testament to his dissociation from the physical, but he does not reject it outright. He defers definite answer until he understands the meaning of this kind of bondage. In the intensely physical scene of the “Gladiatorial,” Birkin’s proposal for a “blood-­ brotherhood” is one way of expressing his desire to establish a naked intimacy with him, in which sexual desire is elevated to noble ideals of male devotion and loyalty. However, Gerald proves unable to understand this, because his mind is fixated on the tendency to trust the mental and the mechanical: “His mind was very active. But it was like a bubble floating in the darkness. At any moment it might burst and leave him in chaos” (WL, 232). Although robust in outward appearance and very often cruel in his behavior, Gerald is as soft and fragile within as a “bubble.” The frail and hollow “haven” he created can only tentatively shut out the instinctual and the natural, the darkness of soot and coal. Both characters suffer from internal conflict. Gerald was “deeply bondaged in fascinated attraction . . . he was mistrustful, resenting the bondage, hating the attraction” (WL, 207). At once fascinated by and resentful of their bondage, Gerald is caught at the crossroads of contradictory feelings. His relationship with Birkin is presented as an inevitably physical communion that cannot be consciously controlled. It is a physical reality that his conscious mind, governed by the spirit and philosophy of industrialism, is unable to control. As the primary representative of the tendency to over-­intellectualize every aspect of life and rely solely on mental reasoning, he is unable to “understand” (ibid.), as

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he says, their bond. Birkin experiences similar feelings of attraction-­repulsion regarding Gerald. Their first interaction, for instance, is described in the following terms: “There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very near to love. It was always the same between them; always their talk brought them into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous intimacy which was either hate or love, or both . . . they kept it at the level of trivial occurrence. Yet the heart of each burned from the other. They burned each other inwardly. This they would never admit” (WL, 33). From the very beginning, their hostility is juxtaposed to an inner organic unity as “the heart of each burned from the other.” This sense of external difference, underpinned by an organic unity on a deeper level, points toward the formation of an allotropic relationship. The complementarity of the two male protagonists is initially conveyed on the physical level. The organic, instinctual consciousness that Birkin advocates is physically materialized through Gerald’s stout physique, a point constantly stressed in the novel. Lawrence began the “Gladiatorial” by stressing the physical opposition of the two protagonists, initiating in this way the framing of the two on the allotropic diamond–coal opposition. His description of Gerald’s body as “concrete and noticeable, a piece of pure final substance” (WL, 269) is energized through Birkin’s “white and thin” body (ibid.). Following the allotropic pattern, Lawrence stressed the fact that the two men were, appearance-­wise, “very dissimilar” (ibid.). Birkin is “tall and narrow, his bones were very thin,” while Gerald is “much heavier and more plastic. His bones were strong and round” (ibid.). The “Gladiatorial” corresponds to a physical rite allowing them to communicate through their somatic faculties and gain carnal knowledge of each other. It is through a “physical understanding” that they are able to grasp their singularity and “break into a oneness” (WL, 270). The bodily language used by each mirrors the different ontology each represents: Gerald is “frictional” and “mechanical,” whereas Birkin is “abstract as to be almost intangible” (WL, 269). Lawrence used an ambiguous lexical register to describe Birkin’s movements: “He impinged invisibly upon the other man, scarcely seeming to touch him, like a garment . . . like some hard wind” (WL, 269–70). The paradoxical “impinged invisibly” identifies the forceful physical collision as imperceptible and is followed by a stress on physical contact (“like a garment”). The choice of the word “wind” suggests a physical type of communication that affects one’s inner being, penetrating one’s carnal shell to reach deep inside. Lawrence’s use of the wind metaphor conveys the infusion of Birkin’s “physical intelligence” (WL, 269) into Gerald as a means of communion and connection. His mode of being penetrates, as if in a sexual congress, Gerald’s monolithic intellectualism, “piercing in a tense fine grip that seemed to penetrate into the very quick of Gerald’s being” (WL, 270). Despite his resistance, Gerald felt mesmerized by Birkin’s approach: to him, Birkin possessed some “great subtle energy, that would press upon the other man with an uncanny force, weigh him like a spell put upon him” (ibid.). Birkin has to break through

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Gerald’s conscious shell to make him embrace his physical unconscious and recognize its nature. To this end, he moves like a “fine net, a prison, through the muscles into the very depths of Gerald’s physical being” (ibid.). They finally manage to reach the desired state when they are “intent and mindless” (ibid.). By merging into oneness, they jointly embody the allotropic subjectivity that unites them. As Birkin put it, it is “a final, almost extra-­human relationship with him—a relationship in the ultimates of me and him . . .” (WL, 363). Integral to the “white knot of flesh” (WL, 270) that the two protagonists form is the idea of a physical and psychical union. Although surviving only momentarily, this is the kind of diamond of which Lawrence had spoken, one in which we may recognize the carbon at its core as its constituent component. The “Gladiatorial” is an externalized psychomachia wherein the constituent elements of human nature merge into oneness at the same time that they are striving to break free. In a final call for unity, Birkin proclaims, “ ‘We are mentally, spiritually intimate, therefore we should be more or less physically intimate too—it is more whole’ ” (WL, 272). Being “awake and potent in that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind” (WL, 318), Birkin is able to recognize the importance of his union with Gerald. This, however, is a logic that Gerald ultimately rejects. He refuses the union that would involve each “given to each other, organically,” and is thereby condemned to “a sort of fatal halfness” (WL, 207). A psychological impasse follows: “He felt that his mind needed acute stimulation, before he could be physically roused” (WL, 233). Gerald experiences a death of the body, he becomes a mental machine-­like being driven purely by mental reason. His physical intelligence freezes in a state that triggers a process of disintegration that will finally lead to his death in the Alps. It should nevertheless be noted that, despite his denial, Gerald is unable to disentangle himself from Birkin, who seems to be the only one able to take his feeling of vacuity away. Birkin kindled the embers of coal within him, but Gerald remained unable to free himself from his obstinate intellectualism. Their interaction is described in religious terms. It is compared to a “church service,” a communion fusing two beings into one that “seemed to contain the quintessence of faith” (WL, 232). The quintessence of this holy faith involves the inability to grasp conceptually and intellectually the signified. In the critically contested chapter, “Excurse,” that Lawrence rewrote to reveal a “mystically-­physically satisfying” experience between Birkin and Ursula,16 the narrator comments that it is a “sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content,” an “unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle . . . the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic body of reality” (WL, 320). A stubborn intellectualist who embodies the spirit of mechanical industrialization and rationalization, Gerald is unable to introduce his experience with Birkin into the symbolic order of understanding. He does not efface it but denies it.

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Notes 1 For more on the subject see Thalia Trigoni, “Lawrence’s Radical Dualism: The Bodily Unconscious,” English Studies 95, 3 (2014): 302–21. 2 On the “other ego” and the allotropic, a further useful background discussion is Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 125, which includes reference to C. P. Ravilious, “Lawrence’s ‘Chladni Figures,’ ” Notes and Queries 20, 9 (1973): 331–332. For a stylistic analysis of Lawrence’s allotropy, see Garrett Stewart’s “Lawrence, ‘Being’ and the Allotropic Style,” Novel 9 (Spring 1976): 217–42. 3 Tom Gibbons, “ ‘Allotropic states’ and ‘fiddle-­bow’: D. H. Lawrence’s Occult Sources,” Notes and Queries 35, 3 (1988): 338–41. 4 Suzanne Raitt, Vita & Virginia: the Work and Friendship of V. Sackville West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 122. 5 F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Vol. 2 (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 85. The same metaphor is also employed on page 198. 6 Myers, Human Personality, 81. 7 Gibbons, “ ‘Allotropic states’ and ‘fiddle-­bow,’ ” 340. 8 Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 260. 9 Gibbons, “ ‘Allotropic states’ and ‘fiddle-­bow,’ ” 340. 10 R. E. Pritchard, D. H. Lawrence: Body of Darkness (London: Hutchinson, 1971), 181. 11 Charles L. Ross, Women in Love: A Novel of Mythic Realism (Boston, Mass.: Twayne, 1991), 110. 12 See David Bradshaw’s “Introduction,” in Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), xxi. 13 Kinkead-Weekes, Triumph to Exile, 337. 14 David Trotter, The English Novel in History 1895–1920 (London: Routledge, 1993), 126. 15 See for example Michael Squires, “Dickens, Lawrence, and the English novel,” in The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence, eds. Michael Squires and Keith Cushman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 42–59; C. L. Ross, “Homoerotic Feeling in Women in Love: Lawrence’s ‘Struggle for Verbal Consciousness,’ in the Manuscripts,” in D. H. Lawrence, the Man who Lived: Papers Delivered at the D. H. Lawrence Conference at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale April 1979, eds. Robert B. Partlow, Jr. and Harry T. Moore (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 168–82; Jeffrey Meyers, D. H. Lawrence: a Biography (New York: Knopf, Random House, 2002); and George Donaldson, “ ‘Men in Love’? D. H. Lawrence, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich,” in D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays, ed. Mara Kalnins (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1986), 41–67. Squires places Birkin in a novelistic tradition of seducers and suggests that in earlier works his dalliance would have been with a woman (Squires, 54). For Meyers, the “Prologue” clarifies such aspects of the novel as Birkin’s intimacy with Crich, and his repressed homosexual desires (Meyers, 143). Meyers reads Birkin’s homoerotic attractions in the “Prologue” as overt “homosexual affairs with working men” (Meyers, 143) and thinks that “the homosexuality in ‘Gladiatorial’ is overt” (Meyers, 148). The “Prologue,” however, states clearly that Birkin’s “reserve, which was as strong as a

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chain of iron in him, kept him from any demonstration” (Meyers, 502). For Ross, a study of the manuscripts clarifies Lawrence’s artistic intentions in cancelling the “Prologue” and leaving the Blutbrüderschaft theme submerged until chapter 16, “Man to Man” (Ross, 181). 16 Pierre Vitoux, “The Chapter ‘Excurse’ in Women in Love; Its Genesis and the Critical Problem,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 17, 4 (1976): 821.

G reen L awrence ? C on s cio u sne s s , E cology, and P oetry Fiona Becket

One of the most critical episodes in Lawrence’s novel of disintegrating modern consciousness, Women in Love (1920), occurs in the chapter called “An Island.” The local mill-­pond is the scene of an encounter between Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, the novel’s Lawrence-­figure. In a novel whose fundamental structure is dialogic, Ursula and Birkin develop their superficially oppositional positions on the nature of degraded humanity: this is the novel about which Lawrence said “the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters” (“Foreword,” WL, 485). Birkin’s stance is that humanity as a collective is so beyond redemption that a world emptied of humans is the only salvation possible. Ursula persists in arguing for the redemptive possibilities of individual integrity underpinned by love. The complex language of this encounter has a double focus: the “frictional to-­and-fro” of the dialog (WL, 486) and the ways in which the narrative embodies tensions between conscious feeling and unconscious response. Birkin has complained to Ursula that he can’t make a success of his days: there is something, as he puts it, that “ ‘I can’t get right, at the really growing part of me’ ” (WL, 125, emphasis added). They debate their differences. The language of the episode reveals the unconscious drama of desire and loathing, attraction and repulsion, unity and separateness, which will define their relationship and lead to the open-­endedness of the novel’s final sentence. Birkin metaphorizes: people are over-­ripe fruit turned to bitter ash inside, hanging on the dead tree of humanity. Eventually, emotionally exhausted by the intensity of their disagreement, they drift away from each other and Birkin becomes absorbed in the simple action of dropping daisies into the pond. For Ursula, the spectacle of the flowers floating on the surface of the dark water moves her: ‘Why are they so lovely?’ she cried. ‘Why do I think them so lovely?’ ‘They are nice flowers,’ he said, her emotional tones putting a constraint on him. ‘You know that a daisy is a company of florets, a concourse, become individual. Don’t the botanists put it highest in the line of development? I believe they do.’

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‘The compositae, yes, I think so,’ said Ursula, who was never very sure of anything. Things she knew perfectly well, at one moment, seemed to become doubtful the next. ‘Explain it so, then,’ he said. ‘The daisy is a perfect little democracy, so it’s the highest of flowers, hence its charm.’ ‘No,’ she cried, ‘no—never. It isn’t democratic.’ ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘It’s the golden mob of the proletariat, surrounded by a showy white fence of the idle rich.’ ‘How hateful—your hateful social orders!’ she cried. ‘Quite! It’s a daisy—we’ll leave it alone.’ ‘Do. Let it be a dark horse for once,’ she said: ‘if anything can be a dark horse to you,’ she added satirically. They stood aside, forgetful. As if a little stunned, they both were motionless, barely conscious. The little conflict into which they had fallen had torn their consciousness and left them like two impersonal forces, there in contact. WL, 131

As an educationalist Birkin’s classroom knowledge, confirmed by Ursula, who is a teacher, is shown to be inadequate to the task of understanding the daisy. Botanical knowledge belongs to the impersonal world of science and cannot explain Ursula’s initial, non-­cerebral response to the flowers’ loveliness. The tongue-­in-cheek banality of Birkin’s attempt to invoke the demos through his understanding of the structure of the daisy contrasts with his previous account of mankind as a dead tree covered with galls, and himself as a blighted bud: “ ‘I can’t get my flower into blossom anyhow’ ” (WL, 125). Neither model of humanity can be assumed to be authoritative or final in Birkin’s thought: he is, like Lawrence, exploring the terms of his personal philosophy. As this scene by the mill-­pond proves, the relationship between Ursula and Birkin will be underpinned by conflict and oppositionality. The language suggests a metaphysical drama which implicates categories like “consciousness” as a form of embodied feeling, often at a remove from what is verbal. In this example the daisy becomes the focal point for reflection and absorption. It is the agent by which Birkin and Ursula are taken out of themselves but, for all the theorizing they indulge in about the condition of human happiness, they never achieve the different versions of happiness they crave. They remain overly self-­conscious, egocentric human beings, continually wrong-­footed by an abrasive language. In Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), by contrast, Lawrence makes a skillful transition to the world of the daisy and succeeds where Birkin and Ursula fail; to bring the more-­than-human world consistently into the foreground, to make it radically visible and, crucially, to implicate it in how we might understand consciousness, in poetry, in ways that transcend psycho-­centric models. In natural histories, the scale and diversity of non-­human life far exceeds the human. Poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers acknowledge this imbalance and attempt to reverse the human-­centeredness of aesthetic endeavor to re-­position

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nature in relation to culture and, in so doing, to dismantle the crude binaries that conventionally define and restrict thought. In the “preface” to “Flowers” Lawrence plays with ideas of growth, asking, “Do you know what was called the almond bone . . . the last bone of the spine? This was the seed of the body, and from the grave it could grow into a body again” (Poems, 240). The metaphor is botanical (human re-­generation is secondary to plant-­formation) but are there ways in which consciousness can be understood as plant-­like? “Almond Blossom” offers a view: Look at the many-­cicatrised frail vine, none more scarred and frail; Yet see him fling himself abroad in fresh abandon From the small wound-­stump. Even the wilful, obstinate, gummy fig-­tree Can’t be kept down, but he’ll burst like a polyp into prolixity. Poems, 260 Animal categories of birth and death, being and self-­hood, are confounded by the endless impersonal proliferation of plant-­being, available in all its diversity and difference. So it is that Birds, Beasts and Flowers refuses the comforting certainties of the pastoral vision. Look closely, and we encounter poems about more-­than-human life which develop models of consciousness that transcend human solipsism. Away from the birds and beasts, we are presented not with the pastoral imagination but a revised way of configuring plant forms in the context of poetry which acknowledges the diversity, strangeness and temporality of plants: “Trees suffer, like races, down the long ages. / They wander and are exiled, they live in exile through long ages” (Poems, 259) and yet they return, “The unquenchable heart of blossom!” (ibid.) put forth from boughs, as Lawrence expresses it, as if out of mineral hardness, “Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom” (ibid.). In a vision which accentuates connectivity, animals, like those of the northern hemisphere identified in “Kangaroo,” “Seem belly-­plumbed to the earth’s mid-­navel” (Poems, 344). This suggests the consciousness of non-­ human beings of the order that determines migrations and growth (“Audile, tactile sensitiveness as of a tendril which orientates and reaches out” (Poems, 237)) and other kinds of “instinctive” responsiveness related to magnetism and related planetary forces. So here is a direct and un-­nuanced statement: D. H. Lawrence’s modernism is environmental. The ecocritic might wish to see in Lawrence’s work an extension of romantic pastoral or confirmation of the logic of deep ecology, for instance, but Lawrence’s writing destabilizes and subverts the expectation. In a recent book Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, after a general introduction, which invokes Lawrence, Conrad, and, interestingly, Mary Butts, rightly commits two chapters to Lawrence.1 Sam Wiseman considers Lawrence alongside John Cowper Powys, Butts, and Virginia Woolf in an analysis of the “relationships between humanity, place and the nonhuman life.”2 David Mazel’s A Century of

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Early Ecocriticism includes Lawrence’s essay on Crèvecœur with this justification: “D. H. Lawrence is another ‘man of letters’ who can be claimed as an early ecocritic. Like [Henry] Tuckerman, he takes a more positive view than [James Russell] Lowell of primitive nature and what he saw as its invigorating effect on literature.”3 My critical intervention is to examine Lawrence’s poetry and in particular how it implicates consciousness in ecological models of connectivity. It is certainly the case that in the novels and much of the discursive writing Lawrence develops comparisons between ante-­modern and instrumental cultural paradigms. Yet, in his final work, Apocalypse (posthumously published in 1931) Lawrence is dismissive of the pastoral: “What is our petty little love of nature—Nature!!—compared to the ancient magnificent living with the cosmos, and being honoured by the cosmos!” (A, 76). It is timely to ask to what extent are the easy binaries of nature/technology, spirit/science, more complicated than have been assumed in Lawrence? For ecocritics, to what extent has “technology” become an uncritical form of shorthand which obscures the potential of positive sustainable technologies which might yet redeem a degraded earth, and how might a reappraisal of the poetry clarify the nature/ technology, spirit/science axes for the contemporary reader of Lawrence? Lawrence is the “go to” modernist for a consistent and developed personal philosophy which emphasizes the redemption of a degraded culture through the re-­birth of the individual who, ultimately, has more meaning in the context of the whole. In Apocalypse the “whole” signifies the cosmos defined by connectivity, the goal being to “re-­establish the living organic connections” and to jettison more solipsistic ambitions (A, 149). In Women in Love, where redemption is on hold, at the level of language an oxymoronic tendency embodies what is called elsewhere in Lawrence’s writing “the tension of opposites” (Poems, 302) and implicates the reader in a connective search for meaning. In the discursive writing, and central to Lawrence’s thought, are hyphenated verbal constructions of which the familiar “blood-­consciousness” (FUPU, 185), and the less noticed “sap-­consciousness” are two examples (FUPU, 19). Vividly metaphorical, these neologisms also embody a certain literalness, exemplifying the ways Lawrence creatively re-­works technical, material language in the production of highly idiosyncratic expressions in his personal “lexicon,” and their attendant images. What these expressions demonstrate graphically are two terms in a state of semantic and spatial tension in which the whole is assumed to be greater than the sum of its parts. Critics have typically prioritized “blood” over “consciousness” in this expression which has produced a degree of confusion in relation to the status of “lifeblood” in Lawrence’s philosophy of feeling, compared to blood as signifying race in the ugly politics of, say, The Plumed Serpent (1926). To some readers, perhaps the majority, “blood-­consciousness” persists as a dangerous construction;“sap-­consciousness,” if noticed, appears merely risible. Objectively, however, both deserve careful critical attention, and it is to the potentially fruitful “sap-­consciousness” that I now turn.

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As always, then, metaphorical creativity in Lawrence provides the principal way in to the complexity and idiosyncrasy of his thought. Consciousness—not the unconscious—is his theme, to which all other themes are subordinate, and his inquiry transcends the limitations of human experience. In chapter 3 of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), called “The Birth of Consciousness,” Lawrence throws out a challenge: But what we fail to know, yet what we must know, is the nature of the pristine consciousness which lies integral and progressive within every functioning organism. The brain is the seat of the ideal consciousness. And ideal consciousness is only the dead end of consciousness, the spun silk. The vast bulk of consciousness is non-­cerebral. It is the sap of our life, of all life. We are forced to attribute to a star-­fish, or to a nettle, its own peculiar and integral consciousness. This throws us at once out of the ideal castle of the brain into the flux of sap-­consciousness. FUPU, 217

The “peculiar and integral consciousness” of the starfish and the nettle as the embodiment of life-­forms which do not replicate the human nervous system necessarily informs the ways in which much of the poetry in Birds, Beasts and Flowers might be read.4 Crucially, in the long passage quoted here, it is a planetary perspective that is presented to the reader. It is in part a statement of resistance to the human-­centered psychoanalysis of Freud with whom Lawrence takes issue in both his books on the unconscious (Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious). It is also a position that is central to Lawrence’s unwavering anti-Cartesian stance, a position that he refines discursively in his often-­stated objections to “Freudism.” Drawing on scientific discourse for effective and relevant models, Lawrence argues that the “first fused nucleus of the ovule” (FUPU, 19) is established as the seat of consciousness long before the physical development of the fetal brain, and that in every organism this fused nucleus remains “the creative-­productive centre, the quick, both of consciousness and of organic development” (ibid.). It is a materialist thesis which implicates the life of feeling. Lawrence radically re-­locates instinctive responsiveness to the nerve clusters of the body in order to interrogate the mind/body split perpetuated by Freudian psychoanalysis. Such threads and tendrils of living tissue, imitative of the sun (the solar plexus) are ambivalently present in the body apart from the mind and distinct, therefore, from the unconscious which, in Lawrence’s parlance, is disastrously and irretrievably located “in the head” (thanks to Freud). But how does the “sap of our life” necessarily undermine the “ideal castle of the brain”? At the level of metaphor “sap-­consciousness” self-­consciously conjoins terms usually associated with opposing sides of familiar binaries: botanical and animal. As a poet Lawrence must push language to its limits and unique, highly personal, metaphors result (the novels are the principal arena for this activity rather than the poetry, which is often more “discursive”). It is because “sap” is

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linked, visually by means of the hyphen, with “consciousness” that Lawrence’s argument transcends the human. Elsewhere in “The Birth of Consciousness” a different botanical term is used, “dehiscence,” to describe the splitting of the mammalian subject from the body of the mother: “There at the navel, the first rupture has taken place, the first break in continuity. There is the scar of dehiscence, scar at once of our pain and splendour of individuality” (FUPU, 21). Again at the level of language the “metaphysic” takes shape, more subtle than the often strident, dogmatic, and assertive proclamations of the discursive writing. It is fitting and possibly inevitable that Lawrence’s theory of the origins of consciousness should be fashioned from a language which transcends the limits of the human to identify an ecological responsiveness which both requires and recommends what I term a “botanimal” knowledge. Further, Lawrence plays with the mindless (in the best sense) attributes of sap when he concludes in relation to dehiscence that: Life cannot progress without these ruptures, severances, cataclysms; pain is a living reality, not merely a deathly. Why haven’t we the courage of life-­pains? If we could depart from our old tenets of the mind, if we could fathom our own unconscious sapience, we should find we have courage and to spare. We are too mentally domesticated. FUPU, 21–2

So it is that Lawrence puts the “sap” back into “sapience.” Here are signs, then, of the ways in which consciousness is related to non-­ human modes of being in Lawrence’s imagination. A study of green modernism is impoverished, even distorted, by not taking serious account of Lawrence’s poetry in this light and in particular, despite its many self-­conscious departures from natural histories, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. While Lawrence’s early poems often took for their subject matter Lawrence’s first relationships with women, and while the poems in Look! We Have Come Through! largely concentrate on the relationship with Frieda, the poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers represent a movement away from the often confessional and heuristic material of the period up to the early 1920s and establish Lawrence’s right to be viewed as a poet of nature. This is double-­edged, of course, and sits uncomfortably awry in relation to metropolitan modernism and the anti-­nature proclamations of, for instance, Wyndham Lewis in Blast! or the belligerent technologism of the Futurist manifestos. To what extent, then, is a turn to more-­than-human nature in these poems a symptom of resistance to the solipsism of the earlier volumes, and more broadly to a solipsistic strain in modernism? To what extent do these poems open up a “nature” which insists on eco-­consciousness rather than ego-­consciousness? Accepting the imperatives which took Lawrence to Ceylon, Australia, and New Mexico, Birds, Beasts and Flowers was inspired principally by Sicily and the area around Florence. Representations of the Mediterranean bioregion are interwoven with references to ancient local color: democracy, Hellenic myth,

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and the pre-Socratics. Natural histories are not separable, in the volume, from cultural histories but the natural histories themselves are wildly and playfully rewritten. Before I develop this idea in close analysis of some key poems, the “prefaces” reward some attention. The “prefaces” overturn common expectations of the form and use of the preface, refuse to provide any prefatory information about the poems collected there, but offer up codified forms of knowledge that may or may not resonate with the reader. So it is that the “Fruits” preface rehearses the spurious etymology that characterizes the poem “Figs,” and the “Trees” preface invokes Empedocles’ thought in preference to modern botanical science. Lawrence, who had studied botany, overturns the authority of the Linnaean system of classification of plants, and of the general principles of received knowledge. This is in keeping with the familiar reception of Lawrence as anti-­science, dismissive of evolutionary theory and a confident denouncer of an over-­reliance on scientific method based on empirical evidence. What the prefaces provide, in dialog with the poetry, is an aesthetic response to “vegetal life” because it is commonly overlooked, not least as an omnipresent embodiment of non-­human existence.5 In this context Lawrence has undertaken something very special. The poetry in Birds, Beasts and Flowers attempts to communicate plant-­difference and diversity, for instance, by means of a range of interconnections because ultimately Lawrence’s goal is to represent, and to understand, the cosmos. However, it might be premature to apply the epithet “green” to Lawrence. Here’s why. The preface to the “Trees” section invokes an ecological crisis: It is said, a disease has attacked the cypress trees of Italy, and they are all dying. Now even the shadow of the lost secret is vanishing from earth. Poems, 248 The poem “Cypresses” laments the loss of the trees’ cultural, perhaps sacred, meaning to the ancient Etruscan people. In doing so it laments the Romans’ instrumentalist attitude to the Etruscans so that what is “Roman” becomes synonymous with contemporary, “mechanical,” culture articulated ultimately in fractured reference to America and, indeed, to emergent fascism: Vicious, dark cypresses! Vicious, you supple, brooding, softly-­swaying pillars of dark flame, Monumental to a dead, dead race Embowered in you! Were they then vicious, the slender, tender-­footed, Long-­nosed men of Etruria? Or was their way only evasive and different, dark, like cypress trees in a wind? Poems, 250

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The ecocritic in search of expressions of concern about the blight killing the Tuscan cypresses will be frustrated. The aesthetic response cannot be assumed to be an environmentally-­conscious response but it is, nevertheless, engaged in an encyclopedic interconnectedness which starts with the tree endowed, like all non-­human life in the poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, with something we must call consciousness. This is poetry which participates in a steadfast refusal to allow the plant to be reduced only to itself—as food, waste, and resource—so that it cannot be extricated from the complex interactions with nature and culture that would appear to define it. In a different poem the “Bare Fig-Trees” are a figure of the “Demos” but not before they are invoked as metallic, “silver”; many-­branched, a “strange and sweet-­myriad-limbed octopus,” a “sweet-­fleshed sea-­anemone,” and finally the “many-­branching candelabrum” (Poems, 251). Lawrentian metamorphoses are inscribed in this ecology of forms. In “Bare Almond-Trees” an Empedoclean idea is revised: the creaturely trees of the pre-Socratic imagination are re-­worked by Lawrence into a form of living machine—an iron-­stemmed “magnetic apparatus” potentially receptive to “electric influences” that might “hear the chemical accents of the sun,”“telephone the roar of waters-­over-the-­earth,” and, crucially, “take the whisper of sulphur from the air” (Poems, 253). Here the tree is ecologically helpful. It acts on chemical pollution but, by describing the tree in terms of the machine, Lawrence undercuts the received nature/technology binary. The tree in this example embodies interconnection. It can internalize and deal with technology as a facet of its world—there is no pastoral retreat which is different from the world of sulfur and trees. What is described in “Bare Fig-Trees” is an alternative to the telos of the plant (classically from acorn to oak) which we encounter in “Peach,” a poem that articulates more clearly than any other the tension and interplay between different kinds of formation. Embedded in “Peach” is an observation which is both profound and provocative, and which begs questions about the relationship between growth and artifice as equivalent forms of making. The fundamental question of the poem combines ontological as well as epistemological sensitivity: “Why was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball?” This is immediately followed by a response which is also a riposte: “It would have been if man had made it” (Poems, 232). This important and often overlooked judgment proceeds from a series of observations about the physical form of the peach which tap into a common sense of the texture of the fruit’s surface, its color, weight, and shape. For Holly Laird, despite the seven questions posed at the heart of this poem, Lawrence “refuses to give us a glimpse of anything we might recognize as a peach.”6 I respectfully disagree. The entire poem is absorbed in interrogating the nature of the peach and the processes, coded in whatever lies within the peach stone, which produced it. This poem has the potential, as we expect, to be read in a highly nuanced fashion. One reading brings to the surface a coded celebration of the male body, familiar in Lawrence’s fiction, while a related reading recognizes in “Peach” a familiar narrative of

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desire constructed around women’s bodies. We are accustomed to aligning observations in “Figs,” “Medlars and Sorb-Apples,” and “Pomegranate” with misogynistic positions in Lawrence. It might be tempting to read the celebration of the “heavy globule” (Poems, 232) of the peach as of a piece with the “swung breasts” of “Gloire de Dijon” (Poems, 176), and it could be argued that the “bivalve roundnesses” of “Peach” (Poems, 232) open out the field of reference more erotically. These peachy observations are cast in self-­consciously sensuous language which invokes the body of the fruit in the hand as “voluptuous heavy” and refers to its phases of growth from “silvery peach-­bloom” to its bivalve form also of “such inordinate weight.” However, it is the botanical understanding of the peach’s structure (its “lovely, bivalve roundnesses” (ibid.)) that ultimately undercuts the rather obvious androcentric suggestiveness and points to a serious project around “making”—a notion which encompasses “natural” organic growth and manufacture. The opening and closing references to the peach stone—line 1, “Would you like to throw a stone at me?” and the final line “Here, you can have my peach stone” (ibid.)—act as pericarp or pod in which the fruit (as text) takes form. The first and last lines, concerned as they are with the stone, are located peri + karpos, [“around the fruit”] for the stone holds the kernel of the next crop of fruit. The metaphorical power of kernel and shoot is central to Lawrence’s language of rebirth, as attentive readers of The Rainbow will acknowledge; but in “Peach” our attention is drawn first to the form of the fruit and then to more profound questions of how physical forms emerge from what Lawrence calls in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious “the first fused nucleus . . . the creative-­productive centre” (FUPU, 19), a process which is the antithesis of industrial production. The text of “Peach” gives barely a clue to the identity of the addressee. The silent presence is that of the implied but unvoiced interlocutor who is both the reader and potentially an other whose textual presence is palpable by virtue of the questions posed in the text and the invocations to look at, and feel, the peach as well as the peach stone. The poem’s first line constructs the addressee as aggressive—either playfully so, so that a peach stone stands in benignly for a rock, or as having the potential for real violence in the context of, say, a biblical punishment or form of martyrdom; or in a way which suggests that “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” (Poems, 232). The final line of the poem indicates that the speaker has transformed all the possibilities of playful and actual violence implicit in stoning and has acquired agency, “Here, you can have my peach stone” (ibid.). The possibility of aggression has been transformed into benign condescension. The addressee has been disarmed. It is only in the final lines of the poem that we learn of the reason why the speaker might become the object of a (peach) stoning and it relates directly to the central observation of the poem to do not with the organic bivalve and tactile form of the fruit, but with the distinction, indeed the contrasts, to be drawn between botanical principles of growth (in which evolutionary criteria can be assumed) and the rational machinic design of human imagination which would conceive a peach

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diagrammatically “round and finished like a billiard ball.” In this beguilingly simple observation is rooted a considered meditation on the distinction between phusis and techne. By implication the peach is not “round and finished.” It is, and must be, unfinished because it consistently and continually partakes in the cycle of growth and decay from stone to peach to stone to tree to fruit, and so on. Michael Marder gives a reason why this appeals to an ethical as well as an ecological understanding: “the plant is at once the most singular and the most general being: ethical concerns with vegetal life therefore pertain to plant ontology in each of its expressions and as a whole” (italics in original).7 The peach proclaims itself as a peach, not a ball, and its self-­appearance is evident in the growth of the fused bivalves, and the dip where they conjoin. In the poem its end is not yet achieved in the way in which the billiard ball, in its featureless perfection, is perceived as finished (which, microscopically, is imperfection, but let that pass).8 To be functional, a manufactured object must at least approach the condition of being finished, and this is double-­edged: in a palpable way one property of it as a thing, is that it has expired—it has ceased to develop. The peach can never be “finished” in this way, so that while it lacks the symmetrical and disciplined perfection of the functional billiard ball, its end is continually deferred. It ceases to be a peach only inasmuch as it might change its form. It might shrivel and rot on or off the bough; it might be consumed and transformed. As is common with plant-­being(s), it transcends its fruiting form to take on other forms either as “waste” (a misnomer) or in a new form of dissemination from the potential fullness and fecundity of what lies within the peach stone. Similarly, the boundaries of the plant (ego-­less) are porous and multiple; plant-­ hood is defined by infinite iterations of head, stem, petal, floret, leaf. A plant is not finite as an animal is finite: it never ceases to grow in the way an animal ceases to grow because of the endless proliferation of plant forms. It lends to cultural theory the epithet “rhizomic.” While there is no context for construing D. H. Lawrence as politically “green,” much of his poetry challenges familiar habits and hierarchies of thought. This begins with his anti-Cartesian “metaphysic” and ends with the radical aestheticization of the more-­than-human world which is itself suggestive of a new kind of humanities, one which pays attention to radical difference across the species and is, therefore, constitutive of an ethics of care and respect for that which is conventionally below the ontological horizon. Only in this context can we talk accurately about a “green” Lawrence. Indrek Männiste, in a study that concentrates on Lawrence’s novels and, in particular, on the place of coalmining culture in Lawrence’s fiction, argues that “Lawrence’s oeuvre unveils deeply rooted existential concerns regarding man’s ontological standing in the self-­ imposing technological age.”9 In this Heideggerian reading, “technology,” manifested as post-­artisan culture, represents a threat to the integrity of the human spirit: and here phusis (distinct from natura) is opposed to the modernized sense of techne. Männiste is not alone among ecocritics in drawing attention to the relevance of Heideggerian thought to eco-­poiesis. For Trevor

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Norris, “Both writers’ concerns fall within the perspective of ecocriticism because they reflect explicitly on what it means to be the inheritor of industrial and scientific modernity, and think carefully and persistently about its environmental, aesthetic, and spiritual transformations.”10 Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in these writings is a clear sense of the tensions between the pastoral and the industrial, of culture shaped by artisanal making and the impersonal scientific culture of modernity. In my reappraisal of the poetry we see that Lawrence’s engagement with the more-­than-human world goes beyond the familiar nature/technology binary: the “electric sensitiveness” in the almond-­trees’ “steel tips” demands it (Poems, 253). Poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, in particular, give a specific articulation to the “sap-­consciousness” of Lawrence’s imagining. Ultimately, as a collection, Birds, Beasts and Flowers embodies the radical ecology of forms proposed counter-­intuitively by Lawrence as a counter-­voice and antidote to the “ideal castle,” the enclosed fortress, of the human mind which has produced planetary conditions enough to force a radical reassessment of human engagement with the more-­thanhuman world. Lawrence proposed that we think about consciousness differently, and this is not separable either from his re-­presentation of unconscious functioning or from his sense of our radical interconnectedness with more-­ than-human life. Instrumental knowledge (Birkin’s daisy) is limited and, like Birkin (suggests Lawrence), we know it. Poetry, however, has the capacity to reveal networks of connection, and different orders of knowing, to which instrumental knowledge is insensitive.

Notes 1 Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, Green Modernism: Nature and the English Novel, 1900–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 2 Sam Wiseman, The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism (Clemson, South Carolina: Clemson University Press, 2015), 1. 3 David Mazel, ed., A Century of Early Ecocriticism (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2001), 11. 4 The first American edition was also published in 1923 and excluded the “Tortoise” poems from the “reptiles” section. 5 Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) advocates an ethical approach to plant life based on a new critique of vegetal existence. 6 Holly A. Laird, Self and Sequence: the Poetry of D. H. Lawrence (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988), 131. 7 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 183. 8 Made from wood, clay, elephant ivory, or celluloid, the billiard ball is not as removed from organic nature as the image of tooled perfection might imply. Lawrence’s example, therefore, self-­consciously challenges a received sense of what is “natural” and what is manufactured.

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9 Indrek Männiste, “Nature, Technology and the Sense of Enframing,” in D. H. Lawrence: New Critical Perspectives and Cultural Translation, ed. Simonetta Filippis (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 55–76. 10 Trevor Norris, “Martin Heidegger, D. H. Lawrence, and Poetic Attention to Being,” in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, eds. Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 115.

D. H . L awrence and F ilm : R econ sidering F idelity in K en R u s sell’ s W om e n i n L ov e Earl G. Ingersoll

The topic of D. H. Lawrence and film has been plagued with extremism. It has been easy enough to find a myriad of instances in which Lawrence seems negative about the “movies,” and yet as Nigel Morris indicates, Lawrence could also be positive. In the same vein, after decades in which the main, if not sole criterion of film adaptation was its “fidelity” to its corresponding literary work, film has achieved supremacy over “literary fiction,” and adaptation critics/theorists universally reject “fidelity” as a valid concern. Jason Mark Ward’s monograph The Forgotten Film Adaptations of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories (2016) is a recent example in its exaggeration of “fidelity” in Jane Jaffe Young’s D. H. Lawrence on Screen (1999) and especially in Louis K. Greiff ’s D. H. Lawrence: Fifty Years on Film (2001) to damn it, as Ward argues for “the fluid text” he finds in John Bryant’s monograph of that title. The time is right to recuperate, at least in part, the criterion of “fidelity” by exploring Ken Russell’s film adaptation of Lawrence’s masterpiece Women in Love as an instance of the distinct possibility of adaptations supplanting the “source text,” as Russell’s millions of viewers overwhelm the fewer readers of Lawrence’s novel. D. H. Lawrence’s antagonism toward cinema, or what he called “the movies,”1 is well known. In his article “D. H. Lawrence’s View of Film,” Sam Solecki,2 for example, points to the passage in A Lost Girl (1920) in which an entertainer in a theater/cinema clearly speaks for Lawrence: “The pictures are cheap, and they are easy, and they cost the audience nothing, no feeling of the heart, no appreciation of the spirit, cost them nothing of these. And so they like them, and they don’t like us [theater people], because they must feel the things we do, from the heart, and appreciate them from the spirit” (LG, 148–9). In its own way, this voice speaks to Lawrence’s rejection of cinema as a medium because it accentuated consciousness at the price of spontaneity and feeling, and his rejection of cinema’s content because it too often perverted sexuality.

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Lawrence and other Modernists In his recent study The Forgotten Film Adaptations of Lawrence’s Short Stories (2016),3 Jason Mark Ward helpfully places Lawrence in the context of other Modernists, such as Virginia Woolf, whose tongue could be as venomous as Lawrence’s in her responses to the “movies.”4 One of Lawrence’s often-­cited barbs is especially pertinent. In “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Lawrence writes: “The radio and the film are mere counterfeit emotion . . . people wallow in emotion: counterfeit emotion. They lap it up: they live in it and on it. They ooze with it” (LCL, 312; emphasis added). Coincidentally Woolf, in her essay “The Cinema,” writes that when the modern “savage [or movie-­goer] watches a ‘movie’ . . . the eye licks it all up instantaneously . . .”5 suggesting a similar animal hunger for “fast food.” Woolf, however, benefited from her membership in the Bloomsbury Group, and was drawn to other aspects of cinema beyond the “movies.” Her attraction to newsreels, for example, led to employing cinematic elements in her fiction and to her recent recognition as an early film theorist. Lawrence’s (and Woolf ’s) friend E. M. Forster shared Bloomsbury’s distaste for the movies in part because their audiences were generally working class. When, however, Forster accepted Christopher Isherwood’s invitation in the 1930s to visit Hollywood, where Isherwood had become a screenwriter, he was so impressed by the filming of Little Friend6 that he saw it again and again. At the same time, Forster refused to allow any of his six novels to be filmed. When approached by one director after another, he wrote his friend Santha Rama Rau, who had adapted A Passage to India (1924) for a highly successful stage production, that he “didn’t and don’t want A Passage filmed.”7 Following his death in 1970, five of his six novels were screened, including the posthumous homosexual novel, Maurice (1971).8 Among the Modernist novelists, James Joyce stands out by embracing cinema. He is credited, for example, with establishing the first movie house in Dublin, after being extremely attracted to cinema in Trieste, where he and his family lived before they moved to Paris in 1920. Among his contemporaries, Joyce was the novelist who would have celebrated the efforts to film his novel Ulysses (1922), which topped the lists of the 100 most important novels of the past century.

Lawrence and the close-­up Like Ward, Lawrence’s recent biographer, Andrew Harrison, has reminded us that Lawrence went on record expressing abhorrence at the common cinematic technique of the close-­up. Indeed, he considered the close-­up “pornographic.” That a writer whose last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), was banned for over 30 years as obscene should find the close-­up “pornographic” speaks to the complexities of Lawrence’s responses to the technology of cinema. It harkens

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back to The Rainbow’s tragic banning, purportedly for its sex scenes, which few readers a century later would find “obscene.” What probably seemed “pornographic” to Lawrence was the close-­up’s invasive expression of erotic intimacy, leaving the viewer no other place to look and positioning the viewer as voyeur of a simulated act of exhibitionism. Ward points out that Lawrence was sufficiently offended to brand the close-­up pornographic for encouraging women as well as men to masturbate, although it is unclear whether Lawrence meant in the darkened movie theater or later in the privacy of their own homes.9 Lawrence’s surprising response to the close-­up offers an instructive instance of his uncommon views of film and spotlights the risk in oversimplifying Lawrence’s responses to technology. I speak from experience. In the inevitable Lawrence chapter in my first monograph, Representations of Science and Technology (1992),10 it was easy enough to parade the usual expressions of antagonism toward mechanization in coal mining in Women in Love or the sense of reduced humanity in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Soon, however, I began to find positive expressions of technology. The Rainbow’s Anton Skrebensky, for example, takes Ursula for an automobile ride in the country, eroding the custom of chaperoning young women, and we see Ursula’s unadulterated joy in viewing the countryside passing by. And in Women in Love, the Lawrence figure Birkin parks his automobile to sleep with Ursula in Sherwood Forest. And there is that humorous thank-­you note to Amy Lowell, who two years earlier had sent Lawrence the typewriter on which he was typing the manuscript of Women in Love: “Every day I bless you for the gift of the type-­writer . . . I take so unkindly to any sort of machinery. But now I and the type writer have sworn a Blutbruderschaft” (Letters 2, 645). Even Lawrence as self-­acknowledged technophobe seems amazed to have sworn blood-­brotherhood with a machine. It might be added that Nigel Morris offers a helpful critique of what Paul Poplawski identifies as “The Popular Image: Lawrence and Film” in his D. H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion.11 Morris generalizes that Lawrence “never attacked cinema in isolation”12 but always in conjunction with some other aspect of modern culture. Additionally, Morris points out that Lawrence was sufficiently impressed by the Western film The Covered Wagon (1923) to indicate on several occasions “ ‘How like it is’ ” to the Southwest he knew and to “hum ‘Old Susannah’ from the score!”13 Morris goes on to argue that even a Lawrence poem such as “When I went to the film” is not supportive of the “Popular Image” of Lawrence as a hater of film—although Morris performs some fancy footwork to make his case. He is much more successful in his concluding paragraph where he brings together a stronger argument for seeing Lawrence’s “fascination with vision . . . in his numerous passages in his fiction that echo the experience of film spectatorship or seem aware of cinematic technique.”14 This approach of Morris encourages us to see a further link between Lawrence and Virginia Woolf—that “odd couple” of Modernism, Woolf herself having recently come into her own as a film theorist in her seminal essay “The Cinema” (1926).

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Additionally, Women in Love has a special place in the context of Lawrence and film. As Andrew Harrison points out, the publisher Thomas Selzer not only facilitated its publication in America but pursued its adaptation for the screen. On Christmas Day 1922, Selzer and his wife visited the Lawrences at the Del Monte Ranch. A week later, Selzer left for “California to try (in vain) to sell the film rights for Women in Love to Warner Brothers.”15 Nigel Morris asserts that Lawrence “was delighted when $10,000 was offered for the film rights to Women in Love” . . . “though the deal eventually fell through.”16 Morris fails to remind us that $10,000 would have been a small fortune a century ago, especially to Lawrence, whose banned novel The Rainbow had made publishers leery of accepting his work and Frieda occasionally was reduced to begging for money. We can only wonder if he anticipated profiting from selling the rights, or foresaw the challenges Hollywood faced in representing the novel’s nudity and sexuality would forestall the possibility of seeing his novel as a “movie.” And as a fringe benefit of his cooperation, he might avoid disappointing Selzer and jeopardizing future publication with his friend.

Ward and his forerunners Since Ward’s Forgotten Film Adaptations is the most recent monograph on Lawrence and film at the time of writing, it offers a useful framework for re-­ viewing this challenging subject. Ward’s launch pad is a critique of the two major forerunners of his project—Jane Jaffe Young’s D. H. Lawrence on Screen17 and Louis K. Greiff ’s D. H. Lawrence: Fifty Years in Film.18 Jaffe Young focuses upon three adaptations of Lawrence’s fiction: “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” the most frequently filmed of Lawrence’s fiction; Sons and Lovers, his break-­through novel, accorded his best by some; and Women in Love, probably his masterpiece. Jaffe Young’s large effort to find cinematic equivalents in the Russell film for an array of stylistic elements in Women in Love such as diction, syntax, rhythm, metaphor, and symbol clearly justifies this novel’s receiving the lion’s share of her attention. Frequently, she is ingenious in finding equivalents, for example, for the novel’s diction in film’s shot and image. Greiff ’s monograph is equally exhaustive in providing readers with ample and eminently readable explorations of Lawrence’s fiction screened. Ward, in turn, is very critical of Jaffe Young and especially Greiff for alleged commitment to the now generally discarded criterion of film adaptation’s fidelity to the “source text,” i.e., the novel or short story. Ward’s approach to the vexed relationship between film adaptation and fiction, specifically Lawrence’s short stories, draws upon several sources. He is particularly drawn to the notion of “The Fluid Text,” the title of John Bryant’s monograph.19 Ward finds in Lawrence’s fiction apt expressions of the fluid text, given Lawrence’s sometimes obsessive revisions, for example, “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” which went to six versions between 1909 and 1914. Ward,

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however, ignores the fact of publication itself, perhaps because his focus is the short story and short film. Novels and feature-­length films are more definitely finalized by publication or release. Yes, there are three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; it was the third version, however, that Lawrence published, or more precisely, self-published, as Andrew Harrison reminds us, to eliminate the middle-­man.20 In another instance, Cambridge University Press may have published the version of Sons and Lovers Lawrence initially expected to have published, before his editor Edward Garnett cut roughly a third of the manuscript. Once the printed copy was in his hand, however, Lawrence might well have found it superior, just as many of us have, after reading an expert editor’s work on our manuscripts. In the process of making his case against earlier approaches to film adaptation, Ward tends to extremes when he exposes what he sees as the sins of Jaffe Young’s and Greiff ’s commitment to the criterion of “fidelity.” While criticizing what he reads as Greiff ’s excessive concern with the adaptation’s divergence from the novel, Ward, for example, counts the instances in which Greiff uses some form of the word “betray,” including its occurrence in quotations, to give the impression Greiff considers fidelity the most important, if not the sole, criterion for judging a film adaptation.

Reconsidering the function of fidelity Now that the theory and the criticism of film adaptation appear to have eliminated “fidelity” as any criterion in evaluating film, because fidelity privileges the “source text,” the time seems right to reopen the question of fidelity’s legitimacy in discussions of a film adaptation’s success. The justification for returning to fidelity is the overwhelming power of film adaptation now—a power not merely to “read,” or interpret, fiction but to supplant the adaptation’s source text. The latter outcome is demonstrable in the fame of Ken Russell’s groundbreaking film in which full-­frontal male nudity was legitimized for the first time in mainstream narrative film. As Greiff asserts, “It’s safe to say that Russell’s Women in Love remains the most discussed and most famous of all the D. H. Lawrence films.”21 This judgment is, of course, a mixed blessing because in our technological world millions more view a film adaptation than read the source text. Instances of film’s power to supplant Lawrence’s novel begin with viewer response to the casting of the Russell film. These viewers obviously include readers of the novel, especially some Lawrence specialists who have criticized one member of each main couple. In the first, it is the miscasting of Jennie Linden in the Ursula Brangwen role that has produced the strongest criticism. Linden’s appearance and manner have reminded enough viewers of Debbie Reynolds to compromise her portrayal of an Ursula modeled upon Frieda Lawrence, and clearly the more important Brangwen sister. In the end, Linden

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demonstrates her inability to achieve “star-­equilibrium” with the Lawrence-­ figure Rupert Birkin, enacted by Alan Bates, who was styled by the filmmakers to resemble a healthier Lawrence. In the other couple, the casting offers the reverse. The role of the strong New Woman Gudrun Brangwen is enacted by Glenda Jackson, whose performance earned her an Academy Award, while Oliver Reed’s casting as Gerald Crich has drawn the criticism of Lawrence’s readers, not including Greiff, who argues that Oliver Reed was an excellent choice.22 Reed unquestionably turns in an excellent performance as Gerald; Lawrence, however, envisioned the figure as “Nordic,” a polar ice-­and-snow Gerald, whose totem was the wolf, as Gudrun decides at first sight.23 In his book Women in Love and Other Dramatic Works (2002), Larry Kramer prefaces his screenplay of Ken Russell’s film with inhouse insights into its casting. He indicates Universal Artists wanted to enhance Oliver Reed’s star-­ power by assigning him one of the major roles in Women in Love, while Kramer, who had recently read Lawrence’s novel, thought Reed’s lack of Gerald’s “Nordic” appearance reduced his qualifications for the role. Russell didn’t care, having made a point of not having read the novel.24 Kramer asserts: “Casting Ursula was all that remained. No name actress would take the part once Glenda was cast. They knew she would dominate the screen.”25 As a result, Jennie Linden was chosen for Ursula’s role in such desperation to begin shooting that the wardrobe department was unsure they could produce clothes for her in the shooting. Additionally, by casting Reed as Gerald Crich, the filmmakers introduce the vexed issue for Lawrence’s readers of Women in Love seeking models for Gerald. The “usual suspects” are well known. One indisputable but ultimately unhelpful model is Thomas Philip Barber, the owner of Barber Walker & Co, the coal mining company in which Lawrence’s father and his father worked. Barber’s contributions are merely external, except for the accidental shooting of his brother when both were boys. It is an act that haunts Lawrence’s Gerald in the “Water-Party” scene, for example, in his fussing over the request of the Brangwen sisters for a boat to escape the crowd. The other familiar model is John Middleton Murry, younger than Lawrence but also a writer, a friend Lawrence unsuccessfully attempted to bring into a blood-­brotherhood bonding. Yet another man in Lawrence’s life while he was writing Women in Love—William Henry Hocking,26 Lawrence’s enigmatic Cornish neighbor—may also have been a model in the narrow but very significant context of Lawrence’s attraction to Hocking. And we cannot ignore the candidate Jessie Chambers proposed in her memoir as the earliest model; namely, Bert’s boyhood chum George Henry Neville, the rustic Don Juan who abandoned one young woman pregnant with his child and was later forced to marry another he had also impregnated. Jessie reminds us that in “The Sisters,” an early draft of Women in Love, Gerald abandons Gudrun, who is pregnant with his child.27 As the leading candidate for Gerald’s model, Murry was dark-­haired, making Oliver Reed a good casting choice. There is another candidate, however, who was fair-­haired as was Gerald

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Crich—David Garnett, the son of Edward Garnett, Bert’s editor and mentor. Indeed, the portrait painted by Virginia Woolf ’s sister Vanessa Bell of David, or “Bunny,” Garnett in London’s National Portrait Gallery depicts him as blond and fair in coloring.

The indeterminate function of Women in Love’s “Prologue” It is much more than the fair hair and coloring of Garnett that qualifies him as a prime candidate for Gerald Crich’s model. As Lawrence’s letters and his posthumous novel Mr Noon make clear, Bunny was extremely important to the Bert who was undergoing a life-­changing transformation as Frieda’s lover. Both Lawrence and Frieda were extremely attracted to Bunny, functioning in loco parentis. From Bavaria, Lawrence writes Edward Garnett of his pleasure watching Bunny swimming in the Isar River,28 but assuring Edward they would not allow Bunny to swim in the Zemmthal, where the water from the Alpine glaciers would be frigid, even in late August. Lawrence also writes of their uproarious pleasure imitating Russian dance movements with Bunny, and their anticipation of his joining them in the Austrian Tyrol. When Bunny arrives in Mayrhofen, however, he is accompanied by Harold Hobson, the American engineer who has broken up with a girlfriend in Russia. The foursome moves up the Ziller River to Dominikus Hütte, the lodge for the Alpine scenes of Women in Love. Lawrence assists Bunny’s “botanising,” collecting over 200 plants. While Lawrence spends time with Bunny, Hobson and Frieda gravitate toward each other, and as Johanna tells Noon, “Stanley”/ Harold Hobson “had me in the hay-­hut” (MN, 276). When Johanna shares that information with Noon, he undergoes a transformation through which he becomes erotically liberated and acknowledges her right to have relations with other men. As I have argued elsewhere, Bunny was aware that Lawrence was attracted to him and may well have led him on.29 In her memoir Deceived by Kindness, Angelica Bell Garnett (Virginia Woolf ’s niece, fathered by Duncan Grant, but given the name of Vanessa Bell’s husband Clive) wrote that her dead husband Bunny told her he had enjoyed cultivating the attraction of Lawrence and other writers, including Edward Thomas and H. G. Wells. Surprisingly, Lawrence continued his friendship with Hobson, while mourning the loss of Bunny’s companionship, “botanising” in the Alps.30 While Lawrence was writing Women in Love, his relationship with David Garnett31 played a central role in “The Prologue,” as George Ford entitled what Lawrence conceived of as the novel’s introduction. Lawrence offers a return to the summer of 1912 he spent with Bunny and Hobson. “The Prologue” reveals the farewell of three young men after a week’s hiking in the Zemmthal, an area crucial to Lawrence’s “psychic geography.”32 The threesome—Lawrence, Bunny, and Hobson—even have their Women in Love identifications—Rupert Birkin,

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Gerald Crich, and William Hosken, later Theobald “Tibby” Lupton, the same trio appearing in the transparently autobiographical/biographical narrative of Mr Noon Part II. Tellingly, Frieda, or “Johanna,” is absent from “The Prologue,” where the Birkin–Gerald relationship is significantly more intense than the novel’s scenes of heavily masked love. Lawrence eventually did independently remove “The Prologue” from Women in Love. And yet one wonders why Kramer–Russell could not have included “The Prologue” farewell scene, while the titles ran, to indicate the Tyrol trio’s shared past. Filmmakers often excuse themselves by pointing out their time constraints, all the while adding questionable interpolated scenes. Gerald’s Nordic ethnicity is important because it explains Gudrun’s attraction to/ repulsion from him and prepares for key scenes such as Gerald’s spurring his mare at the railroad crossing and intervening in Gudrun’s performance with his cattle. Lawrence’s readers are unlikely to voice such a complaint because film has contributed to the ghetto-­izing of “literary fiction.”

Re-­viewing fidelity in Russell’s Women in Love After the criterion of “fidelity” had been virtually eliminated, David Kranz and Nancy Mellerski addressed the issue in their film-­adaptation book In/Fidelity (2008).33 Likening adaptation to translation, they employed the sexist trope of film adaptation’s similarity to a woman: adaptation can be beautiful but unfaithful, or not beautiful but faithful. In their effort to introduce some levity into a once highly charged issue, they ignore the possibility that an adaptation can be not beautiful and unfaithful or both beautiful and faithful. Much as we might enjoy castigating the filmmakers for their casting of the major roles in the Russell film, we should remind ourselves that novelists work alone, and filmmaking is a community project that occasionally cannot do a better job of casting to produce an Ursula as strong as her model, Frieda, and a Gerald with not only Nordic characteristics but the chutzpah to wrestle with Alan Bates in their birthday suits. Filmmakers’ unwillingness to be more “faithful” to the “source text” can lead to even writers confusing powerful graphic images in a film adaptation such as Russell’s Women in Love with elements of Lawrence’s novel. Two writers of note misremember details in a key episode in that novel. Anthony Burgess, for example, in his 1985 biography, Flame into Being, writes of Lawrence’s “WaterParty” as though it were Russell’s scene in which Gerald’s sister Laura and her husband Tibby Lupton are drowned: “The young couple we meet in the first chapter, running to their wedding, we meet again drowned.”34 Similarly, in her introduction to the Penguin paperback edition of Women in Love, the writer Louise DeSalvo also “misremembers” who perishes in Gerald’s pond. If two well-­published writers can suffer from memory lapses, what are we to expect from the “common reader,” as Russell’s film, a masterpiece in its own right,

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subsumes Lawrence’s Women in Love to the extent that not only does Oliver Reed become Gerald Crich but Jennifer Linden becomes Ursula Brangwen? Indeed, the very strength of the performances of Glenda Jackson as Gudrun Brangwen and Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin may, if anything, solidify the performances of Reed as Gerald and Linden as Ursula in the memories of Lawrence’s readers. In this vein, the substitution of Tibby Lupton and Laura Crich for the unnamed young doctor and Diana Crich has greater impact than we might assume. The filmmakers’ alteration, for example, removes the novel’s suggestiveness in Gerald’s hearing a “child’s voice,” probably Winifred’s, crying out, “Di-Di-Di . . .” (WL, 179). On the other hand, the lasciviousness of the film’s newlyweds, who make love openly, seems much more reminiscent of the 1960s—à la The Beatles’ tune “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”—than Lawrence’s staid Crich family, just as the film’s juxtaposition of the Ursula– Birkin lovemaking with the tangled corpses of the newlyweds exaggerates any love-­and-death theme Lawrence may have wanted. Similarly, Lawrence may have actually written the poem “Fig” years later than Women in Love, but he probably would not have had his Birkin performing the erotic demonstration of how one eats such a fruit, an obvious trope for cunnilingus. Russell’s insistence upon the Freudian linking of love and death undermines Lawrence’s efforts to validate in Ursula and Birkin the potential for “coming through,” as he and Frieda accomplished early in their relationship and as the autobiographical/ biographical characters Gilbert Noon and his Johanna come through in the posthumous novel Mr Noon. In the same vein, the prospect of Oliver Reed becoming Lawrence’s Gerald Crich is disheartening because it may certify Murry’s claim to being Gerald, the same Murry who wasted no time in bedding Lawrence’s widow, Frieda.35 Film adaptation theorist James Naremore offers provocative insights into these complex issues of adapting fiction for the screen by pointing to François Truffaut’s well-­known interview of the great auteur Alfred Hitchcock.36 Hitchcock indicated he might read a novel and borrow an idea but would never return to the source text while making the film. He went on to tell Truffaut he would never adapt a novel such as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment for the screen because it had “too many words.”37 And in response to Hitchcock’s judgment that narrative film was closer to the short story than the novel, Naremore points out that the director’s half-­hour television film Lamb to the Slaughter,38 based upon the “faithful” script produced by its author Roald Dahl, was “one of Hitchcock’s most perfect achievements.”39 A powerful voice on these issues of fidelity is Linda Ruth Williams’s in her scholarly article “Bad Sex and Obscene Undertakings: Ken Russell’s Women in Love” (2013).40 Her unique contribution to this discussion is grounded in her access to the bizarre narrative of how the filmmakers collaborated with the generally anonymous examiners who spoke to issues of the film’s potential obscenity. In the case of the controversial—to say the least—scene of full frontal

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male nudity in the wrestling scene, she concluded that the largest lever of the filmmakers’ success in gaining approval of the scene was the respectful fidelity to the literary masterpiece that Women in Love had become by 1969 when the film was to be released. Williams ends with the ironies of Lawrence and Russell in our time: Lawrence is less often read now than in the 1960s, because of a shift in “feminist and other political literary analysis” and, in most cases, he is known to viewers through film adaptations. Speaking of the BBC’s two-­part amalgamation of Women in Love and The Rainbow, directed by Russell (2011), Williams concludes of the director’s last work: “His final two Lawrence collaborations provided little material for public antagonism, in stark contrast to the still stunning, still confrontational Women in Love.”41 Clearly, as Christopher Orr points out, film adaptation studies had struggled for decades to deny legitimacy to what had been the dominant notion that “fidelity” to a source text was the sine qua non of evaluating adaptations of “literary fiction”—popular genres of fiction being beyond the pale of the fidelity judges.42 However, to deny “fidelity” any legitimate function in evaluating adaptations merely sins in the opposite direction. Is it, one wonders, too much to ask filmmakers to pay the same respect to source texts they expect their audiences to pay to their films? What we might hope for is a compromise between those adaptation critics/ theorists who deny the legitimacy of any consideration of “fidelity” to the source text, and those literature specialists who once considered “fidelity” the major, if not sole, criterion. It is difficult not to hear the wise voice of pioneer film-­ adaptation theorist André Bazin in his monograph What Is Cinema? (1967): “It is those who care the least for fidelity in name of the so-­called demands of the screen who betray at one and the same time both literature and the cinema,”43 and “In short, to adapt is no longer to betray but to respect.”44

Notes 1 As I noted in my monograph Screening Woolf: Virginia Woolf on/and/in Film (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016), Virginia Woolf also used the term “movies,” as Americans do for those films viewed as sheer entertainment, but she used the British term “cinema,” as Americans use “film” when the medium offers more than entertainment. Lawrence tended not to use “cinema,” since his rare viewing appears not to have included anything beyond “the movies.” 2 Sam Solecki, “Lawrence’s View of Film,” Literature/Film Quarterly 1 (Winter 1973): 12–16. 3 See Jason Mark Ward, The Forgotten Film Adaptations of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Rodopi), 2016. 4 Ward points to a humorous incident in Laura Marcus’s monograph The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) which he mis/takes as involving Virginia Woolf and Lawrence. He writes that Woolf was approached by the editor of the cinema journal Close Up to write some

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film criticism, and he goes on to say that when she declined she was asked whether Lawrence might substitute for her. Ward cites what he takes to be Woolf ’s recommendation: “You know that Lawrence loathes films? Foams about them. I’m sure he’d foam for you” (quoted on 322). Unfortunately for Ward, it was novelist Dorothy Richardson, a contributor to Close Up, not Woolf, who recommended Lawrence as a critic who would “foam” about cinema. 5 Virginia Woolf, “The Cinema,” in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1958), 180 (emphasis added). 6 Little Friend, dir. Berthold Viertel (1934). 7 E. M. Forster, Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, Vol. 2: 1921–1970, eds. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (New York: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1984), 277. 8 I continue to use the earlier and now often offensive term “homosexual” for those in the closet and reserve “gay” for those who are out. 9 We can measure the depths of Lawrence’s hostility by his bizarre view of the close-­up as an inducement to the act of masturbation, an activity he found abhorrent, at the same time as he valued anal intercourse, restricted to a man and a woman, as possessing the potential for psychological transformation. 10 Earl G. Ingersoll, Representations of Science and Technology in British Literature Since 1880 (New York: Peter Lang, 1992). 11 Paul Poplawski, “The Popular Image: Lawrence and Film,” in D. H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion, ed. Paul Poplawski (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996), 589–638. 12 Nigel Morris, “Lawrence’s Responses to Film,” in D. H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion, ed. Paul Poplawski (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996), 592. 13 Ibid. 14 Morris, “Responses to Film,” 602. 15 Andrew Harrison, The Life of D. H. Lawrence (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 254. 16 Morris, “Responses to Film,” 592. 17 Jane Jaffe Young, D. H. Lawrence on Screen (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). 18 Louis K. Greiff, D. H. Lawrence: Fifty Years on Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001). 19 John Bryant, The Fluid Text (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 20 Harrison, The Life, 353–5. 21 Greiff, Fifty Years, 84. 22 Although Greiff doesn’t mention it, his positive response to Russell’s choice of Reed for Gerald Crich may have resulted in part from his discovery of an interview in which Michael Caine turned down the role because of the nude wrestling scene, implying other young actors may have also refused the role. We need to recall that a half-­century ago, actors who portrayed characters who even vaguely seemed to be same-­sex oriented frequently got their sexual orientation questioned. 23 As in The Rainbow where Tom Brangwen sees his future wife Lydia Lensky, and involuntarily says, “That’s her” (R, 29), Lawrence offers here a variation on “love at first sight.” 24 Kramer indicates he was an English major at Yale. Like Stephen Daldry, the director of The Hours, who was also a student of literature, Kramer speaks for the traditional notion of fidelity to the literary text. Kramer adds that when Reed appeared on location drunk, dumped him off a sofa, and demanded Kramer’s suite, Kramer

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began to move out to keep the peace, only for Reed to withdraw his demand. Kramer indicates that among the five directors being considered to work on his screenplay of Women in Love one was Stanley Kubrick, an auteur who might have produced an adaptation unrecognizable as Lawrence’s novel. There was no love lost between Kramer and Russell, whose directing failures made this film a make-­orbreak challenge. 25 Larry Kramer, Women in Love and Other Dramatic Works (New York: Grove Press, 2002), 13. 26 In several ways, Hocking, like Bunny Garnett, is a strong candidate for Gerald Crich as a man toward whom Lawrence was impelled emotionally and perhaps physically. One suspects Lawrence may have pushed that connection to the point that Hocking stopped visiting Lawrence and soon married, just as Bunny deserted Lawrence, and Frieda, for “Bloomsbury.” In later years, Hocking’s family refused to even talk about Lawrence. 27 Neville was also the first model for Leslie Tempest in The White Peacock and for Gilbert Noon, before Lawrence himself subsumed that role in Part II of Mr Noon. 28 Like Lawrence and Frieda, Bunny swam nude, perhaps heightening his appeal (Letters 1, 425, 429). 29 See Earl G. Ingersoll, “Lawrence and ‘Bloomsbury’: The Friendship with David Garnett,” D. H. Lawrence Review 26 (1995 and 1996): 7–34. 30 Lawrence couches his loss of David Garnett in the language of flowers: “We have missed you fearfully—oh the flowers I see that I want you to have” (Letters 1, 445), and writes to David’s father, who had been “sarcastic” toward Hobson: “I don’t think he’s so bad. We [Frieda, Hobson, and he] get on really awfully well, we three together” (Letters 1, 489). 31 Lawrence may have felt he had lost Bunny, who gravitated to “Bloomsbury” and became Duncan Grant’s lover. He last saw Bunny celebrating the Armistice with “Bloomsbury,” representing for Lawrence a tragic loss of his young friend. Lawrence’s relationship with Murry, on the other hand, continued into his last years. 32 See Earl G. Ingersoll, “Lawrence in the Tyrol: Psychic Geography in Mr Noon and Women in Love,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 26, 1 (1990): 1–11. 33 David L. Kranz and Nancy C. Mellerski, eds., In/Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). 34 Anthony Burgess, Flame into Being: Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1985), 126. 35 Burgess summarily dismisses Murry as a model for Gerald: “Gerald Crich . . . is clearly not based on John Middleton Murry, a small neurotic editor and critic,” in his Flame into Being, 114. 36 François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock Truffaut (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966). 37 It is difficult not to hear the Emperor in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, dir. Milos Forman (1984), criticizing Mozart’s music for having “too many notes.” 38 Lamb to the Slaughter, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (CBS Entertainment, 1958). 39 James Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 7. 40 Williams is well known for her monograph Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), focusing

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on psychology rather than film adaptation. She includes her middle name to distinguish herself from Linda Williams, the film theorist. 41 Linda Ruth Williams, “Bad Sex and Obscene Undertakings: Ken Russell’s Women in Love,” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 6, 3 (2013): 352. 42 See Christopher Orr, “The Discourse on Adaptation,” Wide Angle 6 (1984): 72–6. 43 André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Selected and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 68. 44 Bazin, What is Cinema, 69.

P oetic s of T echnology : D. H. L awrence and the W ell -T empered C ou nterpoint Indrek Männiste

This chapter explores Lawrence’s literary responses to modern technology by analyzing his most typical poetic ways of representing technology-­related themes in his works. Since technology, in its various modern industrial forms, is generally depicted as being set against nature or otherwise estranging to Lawrence’s characters, it is suggested that it may be useful to explain his peculiar representational framework for technology via the concept of counterpoint. Indeed, by adopting the term from composition theory, it is argued that the contrapuntal approach to describing technology forms a distinctive literary device for Lawrence in an effort to communicate the “polyphonic” experiences of everyday technical consciousness of the “bewildering pageant of modern life” (WP, 281) and thereby synchronizes the readers more effectively with the realities of industrial modernity. While adopting the counterpoint for tracing the technicity in Lawrence promises, perhaps, no overarching solutions, it nevertheless provides a viable literary model, and a novel perspective, for exploring “the dynamic interplay of tensions and contradictions”1 that technology typically triggers in the poetic creation of the experience in his texts. Anyone familiar with Lawrence can relate to the view that he was “acutely conscious of the effects of technology” and that he rejected “the machine zeitgeist” which characterized the early twentieth century.2 Indeed, together with several other Modernists he “strived to reveal machinic processes” in his writings.3 In a more philosophical sense, Lawrence’s views on technology and industrial modernity have generated studies from the perspectives of social critical studies to posthuman analyses and Heideggerian readings.4 Much less, however, has been said about the language, poetic imagery, and techniques in which Lawrence chose to shape and express his critique. In what follows, an attempt has been made to address precisely that.

“The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights . . .” In order to better understand Lawrence’s literary choices and poetic imagery in dealing with technology, it would be most instructive if from the very outset we

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could bring ourselves to notice certain crucial aspects that define Lawrence’s sense of technology. Unlike today, when we are completely immersed in the totality of the “technosphere,” in which technology is so familiar and near to us that we usually fail to notice it, technology in Lawrence’s writings is still largely viewed and experienced as if having (and belonging to) its own sphere or somewhere outside. It has been argued that “modernity relies on the intellectual separation of people and things” and that, perhaps, industrial modernity especially is “predicated on the intellectual separation of people and machines.”5 Jacques Ellul, a noted philosopher of technology, adds to this claim when he writes in The Technological Society: As long as technique was represented exclusively by the machine, it was possible to speak of ‘man and the machine.’ The machine remained an external object, and man remained none the less independent. He was in a position to assert himself apart from the machine; he was able to adopt a position with respect to it.6

How to keep man and nature safe from “the machine” from within the world of industrial modernity is the central focus of Lawrence’s concern with technology. Since technological products tend to come to the foreground of human attention precisely when they are “new and large and noisy or frightening,”7 Lawrence, seeing himself as being situated in “a curious cross between industrialism and the old agricultural England” (LEA, 289) found himself in the very epicenter of this time of great confusion for many. With the notable exception of the well-­known proponents of “the machine,” Gerald Crich and Clifford Chatterley, and, to a certain extent, Leslie Tempest, described as being “such an advocate of machinery” (WP, 296), as well as Tom Brangwen and Winifred Inger, both “serving the machine” (R, 325), most of Lawrence’s characters resist technology one way or another. They banish it decidedly outside of either themselves or nature and see it as intrinsically alien and against their true self or well-­being. Indeed, technology, which we should read in Lawrence as being almost always synecdochal and representing industrial modernity in its entirety, is something decidedly external and estranging. We get a sense of this meaning, for example, in Will Brangwen’s notion of self when he announces that “the whole of the man’s world was exterior and extraneous to his own real life . . .” (R, 179) and that he would not mind if “the whole monstrous superstructure of the world of today, cities and industries and civilization,” would be swept away (ibid.). He firmly believes that there on the outside, i.e., where technology belongs, is only “fabricated world” (ibid.). While Lawrence (or Will) does not follow the Marxist meaning of superstructure here—for Marx, industries belong to the base, not to the superstructure—we can understand that Will feels “extraneous” to both: to the means of production and the culture. Oliver Mellors, similarly, finds that it is what is beyond the woods, “in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines,” (LCL, 119) that threatens both

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his newfound love and the faith of his beloved woods since the outside destroys everything that does not conform to it. Cyril Beardsall, Paul Morel, and Rupert Birkin, too, seem to define their sense of true self largely via nature and thus see anything threatening it, or frightening natural creatures, as attacks on their personal selves, on their freedom. After having spent some time in London, Cyril Beardsall finds that modern city life has altered his relationship with his beloved Nethermere. It seemed only a “small insignificant valley” (WP, 267) now and all its former symbols seemed “trite and foolish” (ibid.). Watching “two colliers, among the fields,” Paul Morel senses that his “freedom in the beloved home valley, was going” (SL, 115) and that he is “a prisoner of industrialism” (SL, 114). Rupert Birkin, an outspoken vitalist and anti-­industrialist, whose dislike of modern mankind “amounts to almost an illness” feels “doom, despair and hopelessness” (WL, 61) when he is approaching London on a train with Gerald. Even Anton Skrebensky, a forerunner of Gerald, fights the modern city on a very personal existential plane in The Rainbow, being soaked in the “horror of the City Road” (R, 423) and the “cold sordidness of the tram-­car” (ibid.), and feels almost ontologically bereft of a “luminous, wonderful world he belonged to by rights” (ibid.). He feels that London is a “refuse-­heap” into which he has been thrown against his will. There are also two strong female characters, Ursula Brangwen and Connie Chatterley, who constantly feel alienated or threatened by surrounding industrialist technologies. Ursula Brangwen feels habitually horrified by the colliers, whom she describes as characters of the “underworld” (WL, 11), and she wants to smash “the great machine” (R, 325), the totality of the colliery system, when visiting her uncle Tom Brangwen. Connie Chatterley’s hostile feelings toward industrialist technology are carried forward throughout Lady Chatterley’s Lover, particularly in her sense of the industrialist Midlands. She seems to be always aware of the smells and noises of the nearby collieries and feels deeply affected by the “soulless ugliness of the coal-­and-iron Midlands” (LCL, 13). As we can see, in all these characters technology and modernity are being experienced contrary to the sense of a truer or better life. The characters are made constantly aware of it and they attempt to resist this. They try to keep technology outside of their lives and their sense of self. It would seem that, while early industrialist modernity, perhaps, drove a wedge between people and machines, technology became, in whatever form, a crucial and ever growing part of people’s lives on a more existential plane, and Lawrence set out to meticulously document it.

“. . . there is concert and order, an organized interplay . . .”: Lawrence and cantus technicus Through the characters’ perceptions as outlined above, then, Lawrence typically presents technology as being alien or estranging to them. In what follows,

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however, we will engage in a more precise analysis of how, in the poetic creation of the experience, the perceived externality of technology plays an important part in the narrative presentation of industrialist themes. Furthermore, we will explore a possibility of whether the perceived hostility toward technology could be explained not so much as external to his characters but, rather, as a different competing “voice” in the modern experience of the industrialist reality. A closer analysis of Lawrence’s technology-­related passages suggests that very often technology is presented as being almost always contrary, or against, something else. It is suggested in the following that we treat his contrastive technique of presenting technology-­related themes similarly to the counterpoint in music. What exactly is the counterpoint? In very general terms, the counterpoint is a “branch of music theory which is concerned with the construction and the combination of melodies.”8 The counterpoint means “the technique of setting, writing, or playing a melody or melodies in conjunction with another” as well as “a thing that forms a pleasing or notable contrast to something else,” or, even more simply, “to emphasize by contrast.”9 The term comes from the Latin punctus contra punctum, or note against note. As Hugo Norden stresses, the emphasis here is on the word against. Indeed, “the contrapuntal lines are played or sung against, not with, each other so that the prevailing spirit is one of conflict and stress.”10 Naturally, the conflict in question need not be a violent one. Rather, it is “more nearly that of two or more lines, each with a characteristic design of its own, functioning simultaneously with a common artistic purpose.”11 A simple counterpoint looks like the one in the Figure 9. As we can see, the counterpoint starts, like any polyphonic composition, with a basic main melody or cantus firmus, to which related but distinct melodies or voices are added. In the counterpoint each voice “must be fully realized on its own and able to stand independently. All voices are considered

Figure 9  “In a Dorian kind of Mood” by James Weaver © Courtesy of James Weaver

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of equal importance; no voice dominates, except momentarily.”12 The horizontal development of each voice “is just as important as the vertical juxtaposition between voices.”13 The musical concept of counterpoint has been widely applied to the field of literature, from Bakhtin’s pioneering work on polyphony to more recent applications in the context of postcolonial studies.14 Indeed, Edward W. Said famously proposed the counterpoint as “a model of how discrepant texts and historical narratives could be brought together on equal terms, and reconceived as part of a complex whole.”15 In Culture and Imperialism, Said writes: In the counterpoint of Western classical music, various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work.16

In addition to Said’s work, the counterpoint technique in literature has also been used successfully for analyzing “characterization, setting (including symbol and scene), and narrative structure” of a text.17 F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, arguably used the counterpoint for placing “character against character, setting against setting, and one plot against another to demonstrate for the reader the moral change and ethical growth of his narrator, Nick Carraway.”18 Aldous Huxley, even more conspicuously, adopted the counterpoint as a dominant literary device in his novel Point Counter Point (1928) in which Lawrence figures as one of the prototypes. It would seem, then, that the counterpoint can indeed offer a useful model for literature because it is “dynamic, in the sense that it describes a relation between voices in movement; regulated, according to conventionally agreed upon sets of rules; and egalitarian, in that voices are equal and only temporarily assume a dominant position.”19 Despite borrowing the concept of musical counterpoint from music and applying even further emotional qualifiers from music for examining his texts below, making a strong case for Lawrence and music is not the main concern here. Several such attempts have been made in extensive studies claiming, for example, Lawrence’s “emulation of Wagner’s Romantic style in his repetitive symbolic language”20 or offering readings of his works “with Adorno’s analysis of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-­tone compositional technique.”21 While it is easy to get carried away with these interpretations, we should remind ourselves that Lawrence’s musical knowledge was limited at best and that in much of his early work, as Elgin W. Mellown points out, the references to music have been used mainly to “reinforce the social position which he wanted to claim for himself ” and that, for example, the overwhelming number of “undisciplined” musical references in The White Peacock “causes much of the novel’s artificiality.”22 It is, then, an exploration of a purely literary application of the concept of musical counterpoint on a particular theme in Lawrence’s texts that shall interest us

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here. It is suggested below that it is precisely a type of contrapuntal relationship and “organized interplay” of themes that technological motifs seem to create in so many episodes in Lawrence’s fiction. While he seems to carry out the technical subject matter as always being against, or in relation to, characters’ competing inner feelings or nature, the narrative presentation also depends on further poetic devices, which also will be examined below. Let us start by examining a few idiosyncratic examples of Lawrentian counterpoint by considering a passage from The White Peacock: The beautiful day was flushing to die. Over in the west the mist was gathering bluer. The intense stillness was broken by the rhythmic hum of the engines at the distant coal-­mine, as they drew up the last bantles of men. WP, 51

As we can see, “the hum of the engines” from the distant coalmine is being described as breaking up an otherwise idyllic evening landscape scene. To draw a parallel with the musical counterpoint, the perceived “beautiful day” and “blue mist” form the pleasing starting voice or the cantus firmus of Cyril Beardsall’s experience. The “hum of the engines” adds a second voice to the thus far prevailing single “melodic line” of the “beautiful day” and “intense stillness.” We can call this cantus technicus or the technological voice in Cyril’s experience. As the result, we now have not a homophonic but a polyphonic description of Cyril’s experience since “the hum of the engines,” equally part of his experience, introduces another voice to the cantus firmus. Furthermore, since the “hum of the engines” or the cantus technicus is placed clearly against the cantus firmus of the “beautiful day” here, and because there is an apparent conflict and tension between them, the relationship is admittedly contrapuntal. To continue with analogies from music, and further illustrate the tension between the two conflicting voices, and the emotions they are causing, we notice that when the overall mood in the beginning of the passage or the cantus firmus is described as affettuoso (tender) then the being “broken by the rhythmic hum”—the cantus technicus—is described as sudden or brusciamente (abrubt). What is more, the affettuoso mood of the cantus firmus, of “the intense stillness,” which is the result of the “beautiful day” and the “blue mist,” does not seem to belong to the landscape only; importantly it also echoes the pleasant feelings arising from the day Cyril has had with his friends. The result of the contrapuntal cantus technicus of the “hum of the engines,” then, is that both Cyril’s mood and the serene landscape have been, in his experience, considerably affected. He has been subjected now, due to the industrialist reality, to a decisively modern experience of having to deal with several and often contradicting affections at the same time. The effect of the counterpoint is even greater here due to the fact that, unlike in Lawrence’s later novels, in The White Peacock, as Frank Kermode aptly observes, “the pits and colliers of the region are almost entirely omitted.”23

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We find exactly the same representational technique and similar imagery in a scene in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: He turned into the dark of the wood. All was still, the moon had set. But he was aware of the noises of the night, the engines at Stacks Gate, the traffic on the main road. LCL, 118

Again, the stillness and peace in the wood—the initial “melodic line”—as well as Mellors’s elated feelings of having “softly, softly” (ibid.) kissed Connie goodbye just a few moments ago, have been disrupted by the contrapuntal noises of the nearby Stacks Gate coalmine and the passing cars. Similarly to the previous example, the wood and Mellors’s mood can be described as very much affettuoso in the initial “melody.” When we dig deeper into the passage, we see that it is precisely these noises and this uneasy “dread of the industrial night” (LCL, 119) of the second melody—the cantus technicus—that importantly contribute to Mellors’s realization that the wood is no longer a place where a man can be “private and withdrawn” and that there is “evil” outside with “sparkling lights and gushing hot metal” (ibid.), which threatens his relationship with a socially higher ranking lady. The contrapuntal second “melody” of the evil of the machines has been extended to the society outside, which with its existing sense of social hierarchy will, Mellors realizes, no doubt be hostile towards a love affair between a gamekeeper and a lady. In other words, Lawrence describes industrial machinery synecdochally here as being as hostile to the wood as society is to their love. By the end of the passage, and as the result of “the insentient iron world” (ibid.) “melody” in the counterpoint, Mellors’s mood has changed from affettuoso to lacrimoso (sad, tearful). We also notice the appearance of an adversative conjunction—“but”—here. This “but” introduces the first “notes” of the contrapuntal “melody” in Mellors’s typically Modernist experience. As in our first two examples of Lawrentian counterpoint, the polarizaton of technology and nature within nature by way of certain distinguishing markers is one of Lawrence’s most common techniques. The counterpoint form which Lawrence uses does not always take the one-­directional shape from affettuoso to lacrimoso, as in our previous two examples. Occasionally, the mood starts affettuoso, then changes to lacrimoso by way of a cantus technicus, and then proceeds with a third voice, as in the following passage from The Rainbow: The blue way of the canal wound softly between the autumn hedges, on towards the greenness of a small hill. On the left was the whole black agitation of colliery and railway . . . That way, Ursula felt, was the way to London, through the grim, alluring seethe of the town. On the other hand was the evening, mellow over the green water-­meadows and the winding alder trees beside the river, and the pale stretches of stubble beyond. There the evening glowed softly, and even a pee-­wit was flapping in solitude and peace. R, 287

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Let us attempt to recast all the voices in the passage vertically in a true counterpoint form by way of the following schema: Cantus firmus: The blue way of the canal wound softly between the autumn hedges, on towards the greenness of a small hill; Melody 2 (Cantus technicus): On the left was the whole black agitation of colliery and railway . . .; Melody 3: On the other hand was the evening, mellow over the green water-­ meadows and the winding alder trees beside the river, and the pale stretches of stubble beyond. There the evening glowed softly, and even a pee-­wit was flapping in solitude and peace. The initial description of the river and its pastoral surroundings, with affirming colors like “blue” and “green,” is being contrasted with the “black” colliery and railway as the lacrimoso “melodic line” in the passage. These, as before, form the cantus firmus and cantus technicus respectively. However, on this particular occasion there is also a third “melody” at play in the description of Ursula’s perception of her and Skrebensky’s surroundings. While Melody 2 has initially disrupted the pleasing cantus firmus in Ursula’s experience for a moment, Melody 3 in the passage takes over from the cantus technicus and turns Ursula’s mood back to affettuoso with another serene description of nature. The contrapuntal relationship here illustrates the true egalitarian nature and dynamism of the “melodies” since the cantus technicus assumes the dominant position only temporarily. What is also rather interesting in this passage, and peculiar to Lawrence, is the fact that he depicts the “way to London” as starting inherently from somewhere “grim” and “black.” This, once again, confirms the need for a synechdochal understanding of Lawrence’s treatment of technology. Collieries, railway, and London have, in the final scheme of things, all one root cause: industrial modernity. The stark opposite of this is nature as it is, with man’s traditional and benign interference: “green water meadows,” “winding alder trees,” and a happy “pee-­wit.” Tellingly, the industrial side has been placed to the “left” side of the river and pre-­modern countryside on the “other hand” or the right side. Clearly, these sides of the river are evaluatively marked as the wrong (left) (collieries, railway, London) and the right (nature) side. This naturally seems to allude to well-­known idiomatic superstition according to which the left side is always considered as unlucky. Also, for Lawrence, the wrongness of the left side could be derived, knowingly or not, from the division of the hemispheres of brain in which the left side controls logic and rational thought (industrialism) and the right side emotions and imagination (nature), which fits perfectly with the given imagery and its evaluatively charged content. What is more, the left and right side of the brain correspond, respectively, to Lawrence’s distinction between mental consciousness and blood consciousness. What he condemned as mental consciousness (brain, intellect) is, in fact, only the left side of the brain and his

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concept of the creative blood consciousness correlates to the “right hemisphere’s being and experiencing the world.”24 This distinction, again, fits well with the given imagery: technology, being on the left, remains on the pure intellect side and nature on the vital and life-­affirming right side. That this evaluative use of left and right is not an isolated instance, we find out in another novel, Women in Love, where, once again, and in two separate occasions, “a valley with collieries” (WL, 11) and “coal-­mine . . . and its patterned head-­stocks” and “black railway” (WL, 113) has been placed to the left hand side of the path, where the Brangwen sisters walk, and “cornfields and woods” (WL, 11) to the right-hand side.

Is it the train that falls like a meteorite . . .? Continuing the theme of “black railways,” one of the most idiosyncratic ways in which Lawrence realizes the cantus technicus in counterpoint is his frequent use of the train trope. As has been aptly noted, train travel “transformed the social, cultural and physical landscapes of Britain and America” and “brought entire populations into contact with a very visible modernity.”25 While the more sensationalist drama of Victorian times focused mainly on the dangers of rail travel and its shock elements, Lawrence uses trains synecdochally as the ambassadors of modernity, and plays them out, as always, as threatening on a more metaphysical plane. Trains are described habitually as intruders on nature and as estranging to certain characters. For example, Elizabeth Bates feels “insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge” when the locomotive engine, Number 4, “thumped heavily past” (PO, 181) in Lawrence’s “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” The train also “startled” a colt “from among the gorse” which runs away as it approaches (ibid.). The train, clearly, adds a contrapuntal cantus technicus to the surrounding nature and the feelings of Elizabeth Bates, and carries forward one of the several “alienations”26 in the story—the environmental alienation. The train, in this passage, brings home the message of the new modern “insignificance” of man in the age of technology. Man is quite literally trapped between new technology and nature; or, as Walter Nash rightly observes in his extensive reading of the passage, “a mere tenant in his industrial environment.”27 Ursula Brangwen, similarly, feels utterly miserable on her outing to the South Downs in The Rainbow, when a train “tunnels” through the landscape and her sense of self: Yet the downs, in magnificent indifference, baring limbs and body to the sun, drinking sunshine and sea-­wind and sea-­wet cloud into its golden skin, with superb stillness and calm of being, was not the downs still more wonderful? The blind, pathetic, energetic courage of the train as it steamed tinily away through the patterned levels to the sea’s dimness, so fast and so energetic, made her weep. Where was it going? It was going nowhere, it was just going.

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So blind, so without goal or aim, yet so hasty! She sat on an old prehistoric earth-­work and cried, and the tears ran down her face. The train had tunnelled all the earth, blindly, and uglily. R, 429–30

The passage starts, once again, in affettuoso mood with a beautiful description of the landscape, and ends in lacrimoso with Ursula weeping. The “blind” and “pathetic” train as cantus technicus triggers the alteration in Ursula’s sensibilities by way of the new “melody” in the counterpoint. The train is clearly meant to be understood synecdochally here as standing in for the entirety of industrial modernity and progress. The train, similarly to progress, is “just going” without critically questioning its “goal or aim.” We find yet another example, where both landscape and a person’s feelings are affected, in Paul Morel, who feels verily “violated” by a passing train in Sons and Lovers: And occasionally, the black valley space between was traced, violated by a great train rushing south to London, or north to Scotland. The trains roared by like projectiles level on the darkness, fuming and burning, making the valley clang with their passage. They were gone, and the lights of the towns and villages glittered in silence. SL, 140

We learn from the passage that the contrapuntal “great train” alters considerably Morel’s carefree attitude and the valley’s peace when he is walking home after work from Nottingham. The train is being considered as an unwelcome stranger in the serene valley. Also, it is emphasized that the train, by its very nature, belongs rather to the heart of the industrious places such as London and Scotland, and not in the valley where Morel walks. The train is a trespasser. Trains also feature frequently in Lawrence’s poems. In “Kisses in the Train,” for example, the train once again provides a clear cantus technicus to nature: I saw the midlands, Revolve through her hair, The fields of autumn Stretching bare, And sheep of the pasture Tossed back in a scare.

Poems, 83

The imagery comes from a man in love on a train, watching “through her hair” outside of a window and who, due to the speed of the train, sees “the midlands” as revolving in front of his eyes. The usual contrapuntal perspective here is somewhat shifted, for the observer is now involved in the very thing that forms

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the cantus technicus to “the pasture” and “sheep” that run away in fear as the train passes. The stanza is a good example of modernistic sensibilities in which exalted feelings of love, nature, and technology have all intertwined into one “revolving” and polyphonic experience. The speed of the train is an important marker in the poem since it sets the tone of the whole experience, which later in the poem is described as “whirling” and as making the protagonist’s “sense and reason spin like a toy” (Poems, 84). Another very interesting use of the train trope occurs in the poem “Red Moon-Rise.” In the first stanza it is suggested that “. . . and we can use / The open book of landscape no more, for the covers of darkness have shut upon / Its figured pages . . .” (Poems, 54). We learn that it is a train, which is “running across the weald” and which causes the “embrace of darkness around” (ibid.). We learn further that between those “covers of darkness” are “trees and hills and houses closed” (ibid.). Again, the train in the poem realizes the cantus technicus against the cantus firmus of nature. The phrase “we can use the open book of landscape no more” importantly parallels Lawrence’s thoughts in his late essay “Return to Bestwood,” where he suggests that “the more motor-­cars and tram-­cars and omnibuses there are rampaging down the roads, the more country retreats into its own isolation, and becomes more mysteriously inaccessible” (LEA, 15). Indeed, as in several previous examples, the isolating effect very much applies to trains, too, which Lawrence describes as closing off or hindering our direct access to nature. People have more “joy-­rides and outings,” Lawrence writes, “but they never seem to touch the reality of the country-­side” (LEA, 15–16). The feared result of not being able to use “the open book of landscape” for Lawrence lies in the fact that “fields and woods . . . sleep as in a heavy, weary dream, disconnected from the modern world” (LEA, 16).

Counterpoint and adversative conjunction As in the first example with Mellors, Lawrence has an interesting tendency to realize cantus technicus via adversative conjunctions. It is by way of words like “but,” “but alas,” “however,” “nevertheless,” and the like that Lawrence mediates the effect of contrast and transformation from an initial mood of cantus firmus to another. Typically, as in the case of Mellors above, the adversative conjunction breaks the initial affettuoso and changes it to lacrimoso. Examples of this practice abound in Lawrence. Let us consider a few additional examples of this. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie describes Wragby Hall like this: It stood on an eminence in a rather fine old park of oak trees: but alas, one could see in the near distance the chimney of Tevershall pit with its clouds of steam and smoke . . . LCL, 13

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The passage suggests that, had not Connie been able to see “the chimney of Tevershall pit,” the surroundings of Wragby Hall would have been fine to her; “but alas,” she was indeed able to see it. The adversative conjunction of “but alas” in a sense nullifies the “old park of oak trees” here. The contrapuntal “chimney” and additional noises and smells from the pit ruin the impression of Wragby Hall completely for Connie and make the potentiality of the affettuoso mood by way of “old park of oak trees” untenable. Another distant colliery, later in the novel, reminds Connie that “the old agricultural England” is now no more than an illusion when she walks in the woods with her husband: ‘I consider this is really the heart of England,’ said Clifford to Connie, as he sat there in the dim February sunshine. ‘Do you!’ she said, seating herself in her blue knitted dress on a stump by the path. ‘I do! This is the old England, the heart of it: and I intend to keep it intact.’ ‘Oh yes!’ said Connie. But, as she said it, she heard the eleven-­o’clock blower at Stacks Gate colliery. Clifford was too used to the sound to notice. LCL, 42

The brusciamente adversative “but” changes the affettuoso of the elated feelings both characters have of their lovely surroundings. Naturally, it is always Connie (or Mellors) by whom cantus technicus is highlighted in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, never Clifford. Lawrence makes similar use of an adversative conjunction in the creation of a counterpoint in the following passage from The Rainbow: Still the Marsh remained remote and original, on the old, quiet side of the canal embankment, in the sunny valley where slow water wound along in company of stiff alders, and the road went under ash-­trees past the Brangwens’ garden gate. But, looking from the garden gate down the road to the right, there, through the dark archway of the canal’s square aqueduct, was a colliery spinning away in the near distance, and further, red, crude houses plastered on the valley in masses, and beyond all, the dim smoking hill of the town. R, 13–14

The adversative “but” here, again, cuts off the mood of the cantus firmus of the first half of the passage, which describes the authentic surroundings of the Marsh farm of the Brangwen family. The “but” introduces the forever-­changed countryside of the Brangwens and the alienation of the family from their earlier, more pastoral being. While it is not very common, Lawrentian counterpoint can also be used for an opposite change of mood: sometimes it starts with a lacrimoso description of industrial surroundings and ends on a positively contrasting affettuoso note:

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We came near to the ugly rows of houses that back up against the pit-­hill. Everywhere is black and sooty: the houses are back to back, having only one entrance, which is from a square garden where black-­speckled weeds grow sulkily, and which looks onto a row of evil little ash-­pit huts. The road everywhere is trodden over with a crust of soot and coal-­dust and cinders. Between the rows, however, was a crowd of women and children, bare heads, bare arms, white aprons, and black Sunday frocks bristling with gimp. WP, 180

As we can see, the conjunction “however” brings in a pleasing aspect of an otherwise terrible looking mining village. “White aprons” and “bristling Sunday frocks” provide the contrapuntal voice to the “black” industrialist everyday. Lawrence also uses the same polarizing effect of black and white in his short story “A Sick Collier,” in which the husband’s “indescribably black and streaked” face is being contrasted with his wife’s “white blouse and white apron” (PO, 166).

Conclusion As the analysis above hopefully has shown, technological themes in Lawrence’s narrative presentation can indeed be described as often having a genuine counterpoint form. As a literary device, the Lawrentian counterpoint enabled us to bring together and interpret seemingly contradictory themes and affections and treat them as parts of the complex whole of the Modernist everyday. Indeed, coupled with additional emotional markers such as affettuoso and lacrimoso, the Lawrentian counterpoint allows capturing the “polyphonic” complexity of the inner feelings of his characters caused by the industrialist surroundings even more precisely. The examination of these themes suggested that Lawrence frequently realizes the counterpoint via brusciamente appearing technological motifs, such as trains and coalmines, which, functioning as cantus technicus, disrupt the initial affettuoso sensibilities of cantus firmus of his characters. The close reading showed that, as a poetic device, the Lawrentian counterpoint is not only a simple and one-­directional “emphasizing by contrast” technique but it can also take many-­valued and more interesting forms in cases where the counterpoint consists of more than just two voices. Additionally, the chapter examined the important role of the train trope and adversative conjunctions in the realization of the cantus technicus. In a more general sense, it seems that counterpoint as a literary device for extracting specifically technology-related motifs in fiction is by no means limited to Lawrence and that it can be plausibly adopted for describing the poetic creation of the experience of several other authors. On the whole, while indeed the “counter in counterpoint is a term of opposition,”28 the contrapuntal readings and interpretations are techniques that effectively join and bring something together without necessarily seeking to resolve the dissonance.

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Notes 1 Kathryn Lachman, “The Allure of Counterpoint: History and Reconciliation in the Writing of Edward Said and Assia Djebar,” Research in African Literatures, 41, 4 (2010): 164. 2 Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 14. 3 Beatrice Monaco, Machinic Modernism: The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 54. 4 See, for example, Raymond Williams, “D. H. Lawrence,” in Culture & Society 1780–1950 (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, 1960); Jeff Wallace, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Fiona Becket, D. H. Lawrence: Thinker as Poet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); Colin D. Pearce, “Two Metaphysicians: D. H. Lawrence and Martin Heidegger Compared,” Social Science Research Network (2009) http://ssrn.com/abstract=1372835, and Indrek Männiste, “Nature, Technology and the Sense of Enframing,” in D. H. Lawrence: New Critical Perspectives and Cultural Translation, ed. Simonetta de Filippis (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 55–76. 5 Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2. 6 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 43. 7 Frederick Ferré, Philosophy of Technology (Athens, GA and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), 9. 8 Hugo Norden, Fundamental Counterpoint (Boston: Crescendo Publishing Company, 1969), 1. 9 Oxford Dictionary of English: Second Edition, eds. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 395. 10 Norden, Fundamental Counterpoint, 1. 11 Ibid. 12 Lachman, “The Allure of Counterpoint,”164. 13 Ibid. 14 Daria Tunca, “Linguistic Counterpoint in Gbenga Agbenugba’s Another Lonely Londoner,” in Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, eds. Elisabeth Bakers, Sissy Helff, and Daniela Merolla (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), 196. 15 Lachman, “The Allure of Counterpoint,” 162. 16 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 51. 17 James M. Mellard, “Counterpoint as Technique in The Great Gatsby,” The English Journal, 55, 7 (1966): 853. 18 Ibid. 19 Lachman, “The Allure of Counterpoint,” 165. 20 Carl Krockel, D. H. Lawrence and Germany: The Politics of Influence (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 7. 21 Gemma Moss, “A ‘Beginning Rather Than an End’: Popular Culture and Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr,” Journal of D. H. Lawrence’s Studies, 4, 1 (2015): 121.

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22 Elgin W. Mellown, “Music and Dance in D. H. Lawrence,” Journal of Modern Literature, XXI, 1 (Fall 1997): 49, 51. 23 Frank Kermode, Lawrence (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973), 11. 24 See Jim Phelps, “ ‘Blood and Mental Consciousness’: D. H. Lawrence’s concept of the ‘biological psyche’ and its relation to his ‘art-­speech’ reconsidered in the light of developing neuroscience.” 14th International D.H. Lawrence Conference, London, 2017. 25 Goody, Technology, 4. 26 Walter Nash, “On a Passage from Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums,’ ” in Language and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Stylistics, ed. Ron Carter (London and Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1982), 100–20. 27 Ibid. 28 Jonathan Arac, “Criticism between Opposition and Counterpoint,” Boundary, Special Issue on Edward W. Said, 25, 2 (1998): 57.

T rain s in D. H. L awrence’ s C reati v e W riting Helen Baron

In his many voyages around the world, Lawrence frequently traveled by train; in fact his train journeys started when he was very young. Unsurprisingly trains occur frequently in his novels, stories, and poems. This chapter is an investigation into how his enthusiasm for travel in general and his vast experience of train-­ travel in particular enabled him to heighten the dramatic impact and the revelation of character in his creative writing. This chapter is not about “life into art”1 but seeks to leave aside the topic of autobiography and, instead, to ask questions more related to literary technique, intentions, and effects. The recent rise in the number of creative-­ writing courses in universities has made it increasingly popular to focus on an author’s stylistic methods for achieving emotive effects and his techniques for manipulating the reader’s response, more so than used to be the case when Lawrence’s novels were valued largely as autobiographical fiction or as propaganda against the industrial complex, a critique of the dualistic battle between the machine and the human.2 Therefore this chapter explores the variety of ways that Lawrence subtly focused on trains to advance his plots, and, more importantly, to coerce—overtly or subliminally—the reader’s feelings and responses. The best place to start is Mr Noon. In both Mr Noon and The Lost Girl, a major topic was saliently and dramatically getting out of England! It was a topic that naturally drew on Lawrence’s own experience of trans-European train travel. But how did he actually exploit it to enhance the emotive and dramatic effect of these two novels? By the end of Part I of Mr Noon, Gilbert Noon is desperate to leave Woodhouse. He has been sacked from his teaching post for a mild sexual misdemeanor, and has decided to go to Germany to pursue his science doctorate, but first he has to visit the bedside of Emmie Bostock where she is attended by her fiancé Walter Whiffen, an embarrassing scene which he undergoes on the grounds that he may have made Emmie pregnant during their after-­chapel spooning escapade. Having reached this point in his narrative, however, Lawrence writes an ironic tirade about the eternal triangle, closes the book, and then starts Book II,

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with the words: “The sun was shining brightly when Mr. Noon awoke in his bedroom in the ancient and beer-­brewing city of Munich” (MN, 97). The transition appears to be deliberately abrupt. In Book I, readers had followed Gilbert Noon in some detail as he rode his motorbike around the Nottinghamshire villages, but now we are given no account whatever of his journey to Germany.3 Not only is there no experience of Mr. Noon’s journey on his first trip abroad, but, worse, Lawrence is sardonic about the narrative hiatus. He taunts the reader, the “gentle reader,” about this narrative gap: “No, I’m not going to tell you how Mr. Noon got out of [Emmie’s] bedroom; I am not.” Then he continues to mock the reader for three full pages before returning to some sort of narrative. This mild teasing of the “gentle reader” (“ ‘I call you gentle, as a child says, “Nice doggie” because it is so scared of the beast’ ” (MN, 118) is littered with expressions such as: “ ‘After which I hope I can say what I like,’ ” and “ ‘How Gilbert came to be living in [Professor Alfred Kramer’s] flat I shan’t tell you. I am sick of these explanations.’ ” It is in Mr Noon that Lawrence most frequently and sardonically insisted he was the novelist, the narrator, and therefore he would choose what to describe, what to include and what to leave out. He is both author and narrator and he stands up in front of his imagined readers haranguing them about his right to decide. This declaration by Lawrence, I feel, endorses my perpetual questions: Why did he do it like this? What are the effects created by the choices he makes? Ironically, Mr Noon contains so much apparently biographical material, and seems, feels, to be based on diaries written during his trek with Frieda from Munich to Gargnano—surely, given the minutely detailed daily descriptions, it can’t have been written solely from memory of a journey which took place eight or nine years earlier?4 I emphasize Lawrence’s reiteration that he is in charge of the novel’s content, because of the way he then decides to introduce the Frieda figure. It is self-­ evident that he soon wishes to get Gilbert Noon to meet Johanna Keighley. He does so almost immediately, soon after the start of Part II of the novel, early in the second chapter. But the big question is: How? He has decided to make her arrive at the flat of her brother-­in-law, Albert, not only when Noon is staying there alone, but at a late hour of the night. Clearly Lawrence wants her appearance to be a bit of a shock for Gilbert Noon. However, Lawrence could have had her simply arrive in the evening, expecting to see her brother-­in-law, with as little explanation as he gave for Gilbert’s own sudden appearance in the flat at the beginning of the previous chapter. But no. He chooses to introduce her in a very devious and emotionally loaded way. He puts her on a train in a compromising situation. He withholds her name—withholds it for three pages. Why did he do this? In the Orient Express, which in those paradisal days ran to the Morgenland via Munich and Vienna, sat a lady who ought to have got out at Frankfort. Why then is she spinning on towards the Austrian frontier? The answer is

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simple. At dinner, on the train, she sat at a tiny table face to face with a little Japanese. MN, 118–19

This is not just an ordinary train, but the Orient Express. The passengers are rich. There is the tone of nostalgia—“which in those paradisal days ran to the Morgenland” (“Morgen,” in its meaning of “Morning,” hints at a new dawn).5 Lawrence changes tense from past to present continuous and back: “sat a lady” . . . “Why is she spinning?”. . . “she sat.” The word “spinning” enhances the sense of the momentum with which the “lady” is being propelled beyond her intended destination. A little further down the page Lawrence writes, “And the train flew on” (MN, 119). The relentlessness of the speed of the train is a fundamental element in Lawrence’s conception of this scene. The lady is literally being carried away. There were intentions and plans. She should already have got out of the train at Frankfurt, but at the present moment the train is propelling people forward. They are not in control. They are spinning on toward a frontier. The loss of control could not be better dramatized than within a train. She is almost asleep and dreaming, but the announcement of the next station is like a wake-­up call. Random encounters take place on trains, which might be exciting or threatening. No-­one has control as to which other passengers they will be enclosed with. This is a very different world from Gilbert Noon’s Woodhouse. A woman who takes an express to the Orient risks meeting Orientals. He offers no explanation, no obvious reason why the “lady” finds herself sharing a tiny dinner table with a Japanese gentleman. The fact that the table is tiny means that they are close together and the Japanese man is able to make intimate approaches, which are under the table and therefore secret. It is natural to imagine, hard not to assume, indeed, that the dining car of the Orient Express would have been full of people, though only the waiters are mentioned. Even the presence of waiters makes the situation public enough. But the “lady” and the Japanese gentleman are somewhat in a world of their own in their secret touchings. Such a situation could not be replicated in a tramcar—a vehicle Lawrence often used in his fictions to describe semi-­intimate, jostling, shoulder-­ to-shoulder contacts between potential lovers. Lawrence goes on: Why this strange and electric connection should suddenly have started across a tiny table in an express train, who knows. Suffice that by the time the oranges and apples and nuts were bounced on to the table, the woman had felt a quiet, strangely powerful, hand grip her knee under the board, and linger with a slow, intense, magnetic pressure. ibid.

The word “bounced” gives the effect of the rocking, jolting, uncertain movement of the train, in which the waiters have to land their dishes on unreliable surfaces.

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If the train is bouncing about, so are the passengers. Is the “lady” being “bounced” into a compromising situation? There is a haphazard forward momentum, a focus on the immediate present, which blots out all consciousness of the larger picture, the plans, the destination. There is also the forward momentum of the several-­course meal, naturally followed by the headiness of liqueurs, and the sense of being locked in a forward-­moving situation. This could not be so well dramatized in a town restaurant, because it would be less easy to indicate the completely unexpected nature of the company, the jostling, rocking, a sense of being trapped within a machine—and then the sudden means of escape, natural, forgivable, with no explanation or apology required. Lawrence is relentless in describing the lady’s incipient submission in the moments up to the point of her spontaneous escape: The sad, almost saurian eyes of the Oriental gazed fixedly into the green-­grey eyes of the woman, till she felt she would do anything, anything for him . . . And as the waiter filled her little glass she felt the two legs of the stranger pressing her knees between his own, under the table, a long, slow, insidious pressure . . . She drank her Benedictine in a little throatful, and by the time it was swallowed she had lost all sense of her surroundings. ibid.

In fact, “her surroundings” are bound to be already unfamiliar. Unless one commutes by the same train on a daily basis, the interior of a carriage is comparatively strange. A favorite restaurant or a hotel might not be so potentially disorienting, and what better than the arrival at a station to propel someone in this situation into their escape? Till she felt the jar of the brakes: and she heard the porters yelling Munchen . . . In dazed bewilderment she was climbing out of the train, and the Japanese was following in his slow oriental fashion, watching. He decided not to leave the train. And so it was that Gilbert, reading in bed just after midnight, heard the bell ring. MN, 119–20

Here again, Lawrence dispenses with the practicalities. How did the lady solve the problems presented by her sudden exit from the train? Abruptly, but with the apparent nonchalance of “And so it was that . . .” he jumps from the Japanese man’s decision “not to leave the train” to Gilbert’s hearing the doorbell ring. It is as if Lawrence means to jolt Johanna from her aroused state straight into Gilbert’s unexpectant condition. The lady arrives, flustered and distressed. It is still two pages before Lawrence allows the reader to know the woman’s name. He has set up her portrait in a naughty little drama on a rattling train, as a sort of surprise for the Englishman, whose own sexual escapade (which cost him his teaching post) appears

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provincial by comparison. Lawrence has also given the reader a privileged ringside seat, as it were, in the train, so that we can imagine how the encounter might impact on Gilbert. She has been shown to be open to a completely unexpected sexual encounter with a foreigner. And she has been so far carried away by his charm or persistence as to miss her station. She is trapped there unless she makes choices. The momentum of the train seems to seduce her into adventurism and forgetfulness. She is also irresponsible: she dashes off the train without a backward look at the Japanese man for whom a moment earlier she had been willing to “do anything”; she had forgotten that her father was waiting for her at Frankfurt station, would have been there for some hours; and she expected her brother-­in-law to pay for the taxi from the station to his house. This little drama shows that she gives herself to any situation. It would be hard to find a better venue than a train for this melodramatic shambles. So here we have the focus of this chapter. A situation—conversation, confrontation, dramatization of a character—which could have taken place anywhere—is given extra dramatic impact by being located inside a traveling train. Two aspects are involved: the exposure of the character, and the quintessential qualities of train-­travel. In the Mr Noon episode, an aspect of Johanna’s character is exposed: she is liable to give herself to any situation. On the other hand, one of the many features of train-­travel is also exploited by Lawrence: various forms of sexual encounter can take place there. This is probably one of the reasons that his youthful poem, “Kisses in the Train,” has its impact. But in this poem Lawrence focuses his dramatization on the whirling exterior of the train’s landscape and the still interior of the train’s lovers: I saw the midlands / Revolve through her hair; / The fields of autumn / Stretching bare, / And sheep on the pasture / Tossed back in a scare. // And still as ever / The world went round, / My mouth on her pulsing / Throat was found, / And my breast to her beating / Breast was bound. // But my heart at the centre / Of all, in a swound / Was still as a pivot, / As all the ground / On its prowling orbit / Shifted round . . . Poems, 83

For Lawrence this kissing poem was not just a kissing poem, but was enhanced by being set in a moving train. He was clearly aiming to convey the sense that if he placed the action in a train he would add something to the intensity of the situation. He constantly shifts the focus between the whirling countryside and the stillness at the centre of the poet’s being. He also complicates this shifting focus by ricocheting between the two meanings of the word “still”: one “continuing,” the other “motionless.” A passenger in a train is passive, motionless, while being continuously propelled forward. This poem relates to the period during which Lawrence was writing and rewriting Sons and Lovers, where he frequently uses train-­travel to intensify

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emotional encounters. In the prelude to sexual intimacy between Paul and Clara, Lawrence sets up and exploits a special, peculiar, dynamic which involves trains: in particular, missing or not missing a train. In Chapter XII, entitled “Passion,” Clara visits Paul and his mother for Sunday tea, and Paul tries to seduce Clara while walking her home in the dark. But she insists on catching her train. The narrator says, “She wanted to escape” (SL, 373), so Paul angrily leads her to the station: She ran over the rough dark fields behind him, out of breath, ready to drop. But the double row of lights at the station drew nearer. Suddenly: ‘There she is!’ he cried, breaking into a run. There was a faint rattling noise. Away to the right, the train like a luminous caterpillar was threading across the night. The rattling ceased. ‘She’s over the viaduct—you’ll just do it.’ Clara ran, quite out of breath, and fell at last into the train. The whistle blew. He was gone. Gone!—and she was in a carriage full of people. She felt the cruelty of it. ibid.

Clara’s insistence on catching her train means that she will not participate in any further intimacy. There is also a hint of embarrassment for her, rushing at the last minute, out of breath, and possibly muddy from the field walk, into a carriage full of people. Here and elsewhere in the novel, a major aspect of train-­ travel is the lack of privacy. But in this instance the train, catching the last train, the imperative of it, provides Clara with the chance of resisting Paul’s sexual advances. In the chapter “The Theatre,” Lawrence reverses the issue. When Paul finally achieves intimacy with Clara it is because he misses his train home after they have been to the theater together. It is like a twin episode reversed, with the train as the linchpin: The train had gone. He would have to walk the ten miles home. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I shall enjoy it.’ ‘Won’t you,’ she said, flushing, ‘come home for the night? . . .’

SL, 376

Missing the train was evidently an issue for amorous encounters, but also in the cruelty of Clara’s first resistance is the sense of the public nature of train travel: “. . . and she was in a carriage full of people. She felt the cruelty of it.” This is another large element of Lawrence’s depiction of train travel. At the age of thirteen Paul travels to Nottingham with his mother for his job interview at Jordan’s, and in the train his main emotion is embarrassment at his mother’s uninhibited chatter in the presence of strangers:

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She was quite excited, and quite gay. He suffered because she would talk aloud in presence of the other travellers . . . They thought awhile. He was sensible all time of having her opposite him. Suddenly their eyes met, and she smiled at him, a rare, intimate smile, beautiful with brightness and love. Then each looked out of the window. SL, 117

In addition to the feeling of embarrassment, of exposure, or lack of privacy, in the presence of random, unknown people in the train, there is also, here, a rare intimacy, an awareness of each other, almost a reflection on Paul’s part of his mother’s relationship with him, in a manner that was strangely different from their relationship in the family home. Later, in the characteristic manner of the narrative of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence offers a parallel, or twin, or echo, scene, when Paul, probably aged about 21, takes his mother to Lincoln for a day-­trip. As he sits opposite her on the train, again, he watches her and reflects almost obsessively on how she looks and what she must be feeling. It is as if this insight is facilitated and intensified by the exclusiveness of their sitting opposite each other, confined within the moving train for an extended period of time. I must emphasize that Lawrence did not have to set this scene in a train. He could have placed mother and son in a café or a park. But he is clearly using this traveling bubble for special effect. The two people are focused on each other and sharing their observations of the views from the window: She was bright and enthusiastic as ever, but as he sat opposite her in the railway carriage, she seemed to look frail. He had a momentary sensation as if she were slipping away from him. Then he wanted to get hold of her, to fasten her, almost to chain her. He felt he must keep hold of her with his hand. SL, 280

The situation in the train arouses and deepens Paul’s insight into his relationship with his mother. Similarly, in The Lost Girl, Lawrence uses the train to give Alvina an insight into her relationship with Miss Frost. Early on in The Lost Girl, Alvina goes to London to become a nurse. Her journey from her hometown, Woodhouse, to London is not described: “She kissed them all goodbye, brightly and sprightlily, and off she set. She wasn’t nervous. She came to St Pancras, she got her cab . . .” (LG, 32). Lawrence did not choose to exploit the experience of train-­travel at this point in the plot. But when Alvina leaves for London the next time, Lawrence gives her a sort of epiphany, while the train is drawing out of the station at Woodhouse. In her months as a student in London Alvina has changed a great deal. Her experience of nursing in London has made her more bold and assertive. (“Time passed like an express train” (ibid.)). Her old governess, Miss Frost, who is like a mother to her, and very close emotionally, is worried about her, wants to ask her if she has

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“betrayed herself ” with any of the young men she has been working with in London, whom she talks about so much. Miss Frost doesn’t put the question, but when she kisses Alvina goodbye at the station: . . . tears came to her eyes, and she said hurriedly, in a low voice: ‘Remember we’re all praying for you, dear!’ ‘No, don’t do that!’ cried Alvina involuntarily . . . And then the train moved out, and she saw her darling standing there on the station, the pale, well-­modelled face looking out from behind the gold-­ rimmed spectacles . . . LG, 35

Alvina, in motion, and focused on Miss Frost as the train draws her backward to her exciting life in London, callously reflects: Time for Miss Frost to die. She, Alvina, who loved her as no one else would ever love her . . . knew that it was time for her darling to be folded, oh, so gently and softly, into immortality . . . It was time for Miss Frost to die. As Alvina sat motionless in the train, running from Woodhouse to Tibshelf, it decided itself in her. LG, 36

The departure, the train moving slowly away as Miss Frost stands on the station platform and as Alvina watches her receding, makes this situation, the realization, the tension between the two women, much more poignant than it would be if Lawrence had reported Alvina’s thoughts inside Manchester House, in a drawing room, or even standing together saying farewell on the platform. Lawrence uses the train to focus Alvina’s sense of withdrawal from her governess at this point in her life and to enhance the emotional intensity of the situation in the reader’s visual imagination. It is not that every train journey, every mention of a train in Lawrence’s fiction or poems, has a special significance in conveying character, relationships, dramatic intensity. Not by any means. Sometimes the train journey is merely a functional way of moving the narrative along. For example, in Women in Love there is a whole chapter entitled “In the Train” in which Birkin and Gerald Crich discuss life. This conversation could have taken place anywhere. Apart from one short phrase: “There was a silence between the two men for some time, as the train ran on” (WL, 57), there is no indication that Lawrence is using train-­travel to enhance the vividness of their conversation. In the same way, the big train journey that finally takes over the narrative of The Lost Girl gives me a dilemma with regard to the thesis mounted in this chapter. One can hardly say that Lawrence is setting characters and scenes in a train to enhance the drama, when it is unimaginable that Alvina and Ciccio would be likely to travel from London to near Naples by any other means of

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transport. So the question, given the inevitability of their traveling by train across Europe and down Italy, becomes one of how does Lawrence use the train journey for the purpose of drawing his readers into belief, into imaginative participation, in this particular fiction? It is a comparatively long narrative—eleven pages. How does Lawrence exploit this train-­journey to enhance the drama and characterization in The Lost Girl? It seems to herald an initiation for Alvina, to highlight the strangeness to her of the very different world she is traveling into, the sense of unpredictability of Italian behavior, and the unfamiliarity of the landscape as she is conveyed south into sun and warmth, away from the grayness of England. At Paris, the Gare de Lyon: . . . they hurried down the desolate platform in the darkness. Many people, Italians largely, were camped waiting there . . . There was a horrible fight for seats, men scrambling through windows. Alvina got a place—but Ciccio had to stay in the corridor. LG, 296

After waking up in Provence, Alvina watches through the window, and Lawrence strives to convey the impressions of someone who has never traveled to the Mediterranean area before: She listened to the chatter of French and Italian in the corridor. She felt the excitement and terror of France, inside the railway carriage: and outside she saw white oxen slowly ploughing, beneath the lingering yellow poplars of the sub-Alps, she saw peasants looking up, she saw a woman holding a baby to her breast, watching the train, she saw the excited, yeasty crowds at the station. And they passed a river, and a great lake. And it all seemed bigger, nobler than England. LG, 297

Lawrence uses this train journey to document a change of attitude, outlook, perception in Alvina, newly experiencing life outside England, where, for example, a woman would not breastfeed her baby in full view of a passing train. Afterwards, Lawrence again dramatizes the feeling of being exposed among the passengers, the uncontrolledly random company in a train carriage, but this time he does not emphasize the embarrassment or the sense of the cruelty of it all, but instead describes how Alvina relishes the contact. The Italian passengers take a great interest in her and ask Ciccio if she is “making him a baby.” These unknown, friendly Italians, with whom Alvina is trapped in the train carriage, ply her with their salami and red wine, and are delighted when she does not bridle at being in close contact with them and their crude manners. Trains are also significant in Lawrence’s creative writing when they are viewed from the outside. The obvious candidates are the well-­known incident

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in Women in Love when Gerald compels his horse to endure the frightening passage of a train at a railway crossing, and the ominous trundling down the line of the colliery locomotive at the start of “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” In both cases, the train involved is a colliery wagon train rather than a passenger train. If one were to summarize the plot of “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” it would not require many sentences. None the less it is a very powerful, moving, and haunting short story, perhaps as much an extended mood poem as a narrative. A miner is killed at the pit and brought home to his widow, who, as she washes down his body, reflects questioningly on her marriage to him. So how does Lawrence approach his story? How does he start, get it under way, with a view to ending up where he wants to be?6 The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway-­line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge . . . PO, 181

Lawrence focuses on precise detail, as if directing the reader’s attention to envisage the scene closely: “seven full waggons”; the colt runs out “from among the gorse”; the woman “held her basket aside.” Why did Lawrence make the woman watch “the footplate [my emphasis] of the engine advancing” rather than something higher up, the steam, or the driver’s cab? The focus on the footplate suggests that, even though this is a “small locomotive,” it dwarfs the woman recoiling into the hedge.7 A powerfully ominous undercurrent is created by the words Lawrence chooses to describe the advance of this train. It menaces the young horse, which is “startled,” and the woman, who is “insignificantly trapped.” The engine and its wagons are described as “clanking,” “stumbling,” “with loud threats of speed,” “jolting.” In particular, “The trucks thumped past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement.” The sense of menace is built up steadily by these expressions. Obviously the train is noisy and it is also clumsy—“stumbling” and “jolting.” But what exactly are “threats of speed”? It is a steam engine, and the heavy chugging that such engines make seems to be suggested by the word “threats,” but is the train in some way “threatening” to accumulate momentum and travel fast? No, despite all the noise and heaviness, it is stuck in “slow inevitable movement.” There is a sense of frustrated, effortful movement, menacing but dreary.

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Some of the imagery of the colliery engine here is greatly developed in the famous episode in Women in Love, where Gerald Crich forces his Arab mare into confrontation with a similar train. Lawrence particularly develops the line: “The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement.” The passage in Women in Love covers many lines, but a selective sample indicates the way Lawrence focuses on the train’s menacing approach: The locomotive chuffed slowly between the banks, hidden. The mare did not like it. She began to wince away, as if hurt by the unknown noise . . . The sharp blasts of the chuffing engine broke with more and more force on her . . . The noise was released, the little locomotive with her clanking steel connecting-­rod emerged on the high-­road, clanking sharply. The mare rebounded like a drop of water from hot iron. Ursula and Gudrun pressed back into the hedge, in fear . . . WL, 110

While many of the characteristics of the trains are common to both passages, the impersonality and subdued hints of threat in “Odour of Chrysanthemums” seem very restrained by comparison with the description in Women in Love, which is laced with emotive insertions, such as: “the trucks thumped slowly, heavily, horrifying,” “frightful strident concussions” and “like a disgusting dream.” Another aspect of viewing trains from the outside is exploited by Lawrence in two parallel passages in Sons and Lovers, which describe Paul waiting on a local platform for the arrival of a visitor, convinced that he would be disappointed. The painful anticipation turns into a sudden wave of delight when the expected guest arrives. In Chapter IV, “The Young Life of Paul,” Paul, Annie, and Arthur wait in the dark and cold for William to arrive for the Christmas holiday. Meantime the three children were on the platform at Lethley Bridge, on the Midland main line, two miles from home. They waited one hour. A train came—he was not there . . . They all grew silent. He wasn’t coming. They looked down the darkness of the railway. There was London! It seemed the uttermost of distance. They thought, anything might happen, if one came from London . . . Cold, and unhappy, and silent, they huddled together on the platform. At last, after more than two hours, they saw the lights of an engine veering round, away down the darkness. A porter ran out. The children drew back with beating hearts. A great train, bound for Manchester, drew up. Two doors opened—and from one of them, William. They flew to him. SL, 104–5

A very similar emotional graph is offered in chapter XII, “Passion,” when Clara is invited to Sunday tea with Mrs. Morel. Paul waits impatiently at the station, convinced she will not come:

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Perhaps she had missed her train—he himself was always missing trains— but that was no reason why she should miss this particular one. He was angry with her—he was furious . . . Suddenly he saw the train crawling, sneaking round the corner. Here then was the train, but of course she had not come. The green engine hissed along the platform, the row of brown carriages drew up. Several doors opened. No, she had not come!—No!—Yes, ah there she was, she had a big black hat on! He was at her side in a moment. SL, 363

Lawrence’s strategy in both episodes is to use his experience of train-­travel to enhance the emotions of anticipation, longing, fear of disappointment, as well as the powerlessness of those waiting on the platform to affect the train’s arrival. In both passages he thereby achieves an immense sense of relief and joy, by the sudden swift movement toward the visitor: “They flew to him” (SL, 105) and “He was at her side in a moment” (SL, 363).

Notes 1 As, for example, Keith M. Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art (London: Penguin, 1985); and F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1955), 45, where, despite the affirmative title, “Novelist,” Leavis can only see Lawrence’s biography in his fiction. 2 For example, Frank Kermode, Lawrence (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973): “Just as Ursula and Gudrun were originally Frieda . . . so Birkin was the voice of . . . Lawrence . . . The machine has turned England . . . into this kind of underworld . . . into dissolution” (64). 3 He sold his motorbike in order to fund his trip; therefore, the reader can rule out the possibility of his riding there. 4 Mark Kinkead-Weekes found it instructive, as the Cambridge biographer of this period of Lawrence’s life, to write an article listing the limitations to this novel’s supply of accurate biographical information. See his “A Biographer Looks at Mr Noon,” Journal of D. H. Lawrence Society, ed. Bethan Jones (2004): 32–50. 5 “Morgenland,” the Orient or East; the opposite of “Abendsland,” the Occident or West. 6 There are many commentaries on this; e.g. Walter Nash, “On a Passage from Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums,’ ” in Language and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Stylistics, ed. Ronald Carter (London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1982), 101–20; and Hueffer’s condescending approval quoted in Keith Sagar’s The Art of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 14. 7 A former coal-­train driver, who attended my delivery of an early version of this chapter in Eastwood, informed the audience that colliery locomotives had very high footplates, that would have been level with a bystander’s head.

O n E ntertainment : T he L a s sit u de of L awrence’ s D ead N ov el Dominic Jaeckle

We have to hate our immediate predecessors, to get free from their authority. —D. H. Lawrence (Letters 1, 509) In 2004, Tan Lin would pose a train of rhetorical questions concerning the limitations preset by “literature” as a category: What are the forms of non-­reading and what are the non-­forms a reading might take? Poetry = wallpaper. Novel = design object. Text as ambient soundtrack? [Duchamp] wanted to create works of art that were non-­retinal. It would be nice to create works of literature that didn’t have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats.1

Whilst Lin’s preoccupations here relate more acutely to the necessary semiotic reorganization of a reader’s symbolic worth and work under the adage of digitization, his sense of literature’s need for a meaningful expansion beyond the critical strictures of a codex culture relate directly to D. H. Lawrence’s confrontation of culture as category in the 1920s. In his efforts to outline a critical theory of entertainment by way of his Mornings in Mexico (1927)—and as read in concert with his late writings on the novel—Lawrence draws a variety of mediums into a kunstkammer of critical interest as he considers the terms and conditions of literary labor and cogitates on an analysis of the reader and the “literary” classification itself, presaging Lin’s call for renewed inquiry by almost a century. As Lawrence confronts the behavioral properties of the novel (with a refracted interest in the theater and the cinema as explicatory tools) it is not a question as to how we respond or react to cultural material that preoccupies him but, rather, a query as to how we best employ these various forms. It is the nature of readerly experience that furnishes him with a focus; of the coeval character of self-­interest and social-­awareness that stoke critical valorization when we are to consider the terms of a cultural engagement with literature. In this late work, we have a concentrated effort to distill the “proper function of the

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critic,” to borrow his popular phrase; we have an attempt to sophisticate a sense of the novel’s social purchase by way of a concentration on our methodology of approach and a cynical analysis of the personalism propagated by our receipt of meaning.2 But Lawrence continually argues that a reader’s behavior needs to be simultaneously both speculative and bellicose in character: “We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free from their authority,” he writes (Letters 1, 509), and—with the author as our immediate—his consideration of a reader’s capacity for a critical and semiotic control of information inveighs heavily upon his conceptualization of novelistic cultures. Considering the direct challenge that a reader poses to an authorial power, he moves to expurgate the author entirely from view to focus instead upon a novel’s surplus value: on the isolated value of a novel to a reader; on the value of a cultural spectacle to its spectator. In his assessment of the importance of our critical independence as readers—and the basic sense of interactivity that denotes the very title reader itself—he intimates a view of the novelistic medium as a technological functionary for our various critical desires and his sense of the somewhat mechanical purposes of culture prove to upend any museological critical impulse.3 Instead, rather than proposing a literary analysis as any retrospective disciplinary field, it could be argued that Lawrence’s belief in the novel’s technological prowess—and apparent faith in entertainment at large—depends on the novel’s category as an obsolete machinery and it is from such a point of desuetude that he can begin considering the shape of its future. The technological category, in this context, argues against any navigation of structural or formalist convention; instead, Lawrence’s novel is technologized so as to heighten a sense of the novel’s use—of its purchase, its power, and its purpose. His interest is in the movement of a moving information. As both his theoretical surveillance of entertainment and his surgical digestion of the novelistic detail a theory of itinerancy, a material culture itself fades into insignificance when set against the voluminous demands Lawrence alleges that we should make of it. As we broaden our interests and consider his scrutiny of the appeal of entertainment, he appears to be posing a thread of fundamental questions that combat a complacency commonly circumambient to our receipt of narratological media. Given the privacy inherent to critical interaction, is it possible to move beyond the parameters of a self-­interest and self-­awareness that underscore an imminent cultural engagement? In an economy of short attentions, has the novel developed itself thoroughly enough as a tool with which we can sharpen our critical prerogative? Can we perceive the novel as a cultural machine designed to cut through the clamor of self-­interest that—to Lawrence’s eye—defines a Modern literature of the early twentieth century? “We have to hate our immediate predecessors, to get free from their authority,” he writes; in sum, in both his analyses of the novel and queries as per the transcendental qualities of entertainment itself, he argues that we need to revise our sense of the ways in which literary culture can be tooled to better assist in a

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comprehension of our traffic through contemporary history. The novel’s obsolescence is not a qualifier of its formal failure in this context but, rather, Lawrence’s long view on entertainment represents a willful urge to look beyond the edges of a codex culture to consider the couching of a novel in a world beyond its own terms and consider the nature of critical engagement with relation to an ever-­evolving cultural field. In other words, it is important that the novel is (figuratively) left behind. His novelistic technê—his “surgical operation” (STH, 153)—thus depends, first, on self-­recognition and, second, on a capacity to move beyond any selfish semiotic to allow the medium a more pragmatic role in a dialectical view of social progress. The form simply needs to be technologized, needs to be operated, needs to be directed so as to facilitate this movement. For Lawrence, to technologize the novel thus results in our forsaking and forgetting the literary machine itself to, instead, focalize its function; as with any machine, we need to consider the consequences of its application, consider the ramifications of turning it on, and consider a movement from the introversion of literary engagement to the social effectuality of the itinerant literary idea. I will argue that it is such a position that we encounter as secreted behind his use of the word “entertainment”—as preponderate in his commentaries on the novel in “Surgery”—and it is from such a position that I will re-­consider Lawrence’s own diagnosis of the novel’s diagnostic powers as indicative of the contemporaneity of his comments on literary culture. As we corroborate Lawrence’s theory of entertainment with his own analysis of a reader’s investigative competences, the question brought to the fore recurrently pertains to a conceptualization of ownership. With particular attention paid to his essay of 1923, “The Future of the Novel [Surgery for the Novel—or a Bomb],” his wide-­view of the novel’s sense of direction instantaneously figures that the form holds an essential secondarity that we can derive from the essay’s key pun; from the diagnostic operation inspired by his surgery and as supported by his indicative “operation.” As we consider the novel atop his operating table, the value of a literary text is predicated (somewhat simply) by the virtue and whim of our interaction. As such, the text is only constituted as dear by virtue of the critical attachment of a particular reader to a particular text; the novel is ours by virtue of our ability to play with it—by virtue of our capacity to recognize ourselves within its terms. This, for Lawrence, is the primary ailment securing the “serious” novel’s necessary death. If we are to perceive our ability to condition the meaning of a text as the endgame of our interaction—if we are to elevate a cultural object only in terms of our capacity to recognize solely the specifics of our selves within its contexts—Lawrence suggests (in a somewhat incendiary tone) that the novel needs be killed off due to the limitation of our purview: So there you have the ‘serious’ novel, dying . . . ‘Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?’ asks every character in Mr Joyce or Miss Richardson or

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Monsieur Proust. ‘Is the odour of my perspiration a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-­blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon fat and Shetland tweed?’ The audience round the death-­bed gapes for the answer. And when, in a sepulchral tone, the answer comes at length, after hundreds of pages: ‘It is none of these, it is abysmal chloro-­coryambasis,’ the audience quivers all over, and murmurs: ‘That’s just how I feel about myself.’ STH, 151–2

The predicament, as imaged unequivocally here, is the issue of self-­consciousness; both the self-­consciousness of the novelistic object itself, the self-­consciousness of its culture and, in turn, the inherited self-­consciousness of its reader. The novelistic, in Lawrence’s eyes, thus facilitates its own impasse as we consider its mechanisms and—as he observes a reader’s want to employ the novel as an emotive mirror for the interior life—introduces one fundamental question that Lawrence reiterates throughout his commentary in “Surgery”: how do we read beyond the limits of self-­recognition? Significantly, the procedure that Lawrence argues as necessity rests in an emphasis on the novelistic at large rather than the specifics of one culpable, individual text. Rather than engage the self-­consciousness of a novel itself, he envisages his reader as a general character emergent from his diagnosis of the form’s history. His critique is anchored upon a reader’s ability to read the world in a novelistic fashion true to his own definition of the term: to speculate, critique, and confront a notion of continuity, narratologically. As readers, Lawrence thus charges that we need to allow for a literary manipulation of narrative order to structure itself with a clear sense of pedagogical purchase: “ ‘what next?’ ” he writes, “That’s what interests me. ‘What now!’ is no fun anymore’ ” (STH, 154). If we are to entertain the novel as a meaningful object of attention, we need to seat our stresses upon the “what next?” of cultural interaction; on a movement beyond the imminence of our own interaction with its pages. Lawrence’s confrontation of a reader’s axiomatic registration of self within the terms of cultural engagement grounds a more numinous theory of critical interactivity that intersects with contemporary thought. Moving beyond the epochal entrapment of a “Modern” literature, his emphasis on (and affront of) the narcissism of insight highlights the significance of his purview to an ongoing constellation of recent works that have moved to reconsider the “mattering” of literary cultures in the contemporary academy.4 Rita Felski, in her critique of scholarly method and the effectual influence of literary-­ critical “matter,” dissects what she dubs “the current mood and rubric of critique” and, in so doing, corners a point of comparison with Lawrence’s purview. Expressing the institutionalization of an attitudinal suspicion, the insinuation of expertise—and the spatial logic of a “digging down and standing back” that she associates with contemporary literary study—Felski intimates the terms of Lawrence’s surgery in her analysis of reading (and her investigation

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of a literary economy of attention) as she explores the ways in which literary engagement facilitates a double registration of self. We have the initial encounter (or moment of recognition) followed closely by the readjustment of a reader’s self-­image.5 “What does it mean to recognize oneself in a book?” “I feel myself addressed, summoned, called to account,” she writes: “I cannot help seeing traces of myself in the pages I am reading.”6 However, and crucially, Felski homes in upon the transformative qualities of our interfacing a literary work, on precisely a sense of accountability that paints the novel as supplementary to the “what next?” of a reader’s interaction as would preoccupy Lawrence. Through an analysis of the mechanics of literary exposition, any momentary intimation of self-­reflection is liable to an engagement with exterior life rather than a scrutiny of the internal machinations of personality. The novel, for Felski, is thus an art form defined by its capacity to predicate a “readjustment” of thought and feeling: Indisputably, something has changed: my perspective has shifted; I see something that I did not see before. Novels yield up manifold descriptions of such moments of readjustment, as fictional readers are wrenched out of their circumstances by the force of written words. Think of Thomas Buddenbrook opening up the work of Schopenhauer and being intoxicated by a system of ideas that casts his life in a bewildering new light. Or Stephen Gordon, in The Well of Loneliness, stunned to discover that her desire to be a man and love a woman is not without precedent after stumbling across the works of KrafftEbing in her father’s library. Such episodes show readers becoming absorbed in scripts that confound their sense of who and what they are. They come to see themselves differently by gazing outward rather than inward, by deciphering ink marks on a page.7

A history of the novel, for Felski, is littered with such elucidations of the form’s persuasive power and examples of its capacity to engineer a mechanical empathy; but the significance of her suggestion of a renewed call for a suspicious concentration on a reader’s manipulation of that very persuasive system is an element of her theoretical scaffold antedated by Lawrence. The novel is a blameworthy form, but proposes itself as of secondary importance when set against the ways in which a deciphering of its terms predicates a more extroverted perspectivism. Felski alleges that, as such, we must be conscious of our fabrication of something new through the activity of critical praxis; that we must acknowledge a reader’s literary labor as a germinal, creative enterprise beyond simply casting any aspersion as to the narcissism of insight or the anchorage of a titled labor through the distinct categories of reader and writer. Rather than any sense of ownership, Felski’s intimation is that our processes of literary-­critical engagement denote a mode of application tantamount to a sense of belonging; it is a social exercise. Her insinuation is that literary engagement facilitates a sense of our mutual alienation that we need to paint in

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positive terms, and it is precisely such an argument that Lawrence himself would strive to give platform. As he would stipulate in “Surgery,” the “What-­next?” book becomes a category with which to facilitate a recalibration or “readjustment” of the self-­ consciousness advocated by the novel’s qualities as a singular, material object as propositioned by Felski. A “what-­next?” formalism, as Lawrence details it, depends upon the parabolic, the scriptural, and the philosophical. It is contingent upon a moment of transmission, an exchange of self-­interest—from writer, to text, and on to reader—that necessarily toys with the idea of a critical application and an itinerant traffic of information apparent in both theory and practice: If you like to look in the past for What-­next? books, you can find the little early novels by Saint Matthew, Saint Mark, Saint Luke and Saint John, called the Gospels . . . Plato’s Dialogues, too, are queer little novels. It seems to me it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract-­dry. The two should come together again, in the novel . . . You’ve got to find a new impulse for new things in mankind. And it’s really fatal to find it through abstraction. STH, 154

“There is no smooth road into the future,” as Lawrence would famously write in the opening pages of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (LCL, 5), but the novel’s disruptive power pertains to the adaptive potential of a reader to reconcile contemporary thought with an obsolete formalism to envisage it; specificity, rather than “abstraction,” is key here as we consider the hybridity of the novelistic ideal that Lawrence alludes to. The mechanical materialism of his purview demands that, although the act of reading is a private undertaking by nature, the consequence needs to be imagined as a social entity; we’ve the reader, the connect between reader and writer mediated by the page, and the necessary connect with the world beyond it. This fluidity inspires a sense of the novel’s technological function in the Lawrentian vain. In this mode, Lawrence’s advocacy—his sense of the “motive power” of critical literacy (STH, 154)—is less a question of textual detail or a critical fidelity to content, but moreover an interrogative long view of the act of interpretation itself. Looking beyond the reader’s private engagement of a text, the questions axiomatically arrogated by that action are Lawrence’s, by and large; “what next?” (STH, 154); “What’s to be done?” (ibid.). In “Surgery,” he confronts the privacy of literary interaction, our want for critical affirmation, our ability to locate ourselves in the terms of text, our need to analyze the “That’s just how I feel about myself ” of literary engagement (STH, 152), but—informed by the “what

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next?”—a sense of the necessary look beyond the limits of critical reaction begs an interest in a broader cultural ecology defined by action and application. In diagnosing the novel—and to remain with the “surgery” as his structural metaphor—the “operation” Lawrence is questioning queries the integrity of the novel’s diagnostic power; it asks whether the novel itself can plausibly invite a reading practice that uses the text as a means with which to diagnose the state of a wider culture or, conversely, merely endows us with another mirror for the strictures of personality. The text needs to harbor or inspire an implication, not behave as an end in itself. The only means with which to confront such a critical crossroads is to reproach the question of the novel itself and—imagining catastrophe—Lawrence explicitly re-­considers the novel’s vehicular powers in a world perpetually moving forwards: Some convulsion or cataclysm will have to get the serious novel out of its self-­ consciousness . . . What’s to be done? . . . Supposing a bomb were put under this whole scheme of things, what would we be after? What feelings do we want to carry through, into the next epoch? What feelings will carry us through? What is the underlying impulse in us that will provide the motive-­ power for a new state of things . . .? STH, 152, 154

If, as Lawrence suggests (as would Felski), we inevitably look for ourselves (in the singular) as folded into the novel’s formal “precocity” (STH, 152), this is a further guarantee of its obsolescence: The people in the serious novels are so absorbedly concerned with themselves and what they feel and don’t feel, and how they react to every mortal trouser-­ button; and their audience as frenziedly absorbed in the application of their author’s discoveries to their own reactions; ‘that’s me! that’s exactly it! I’m just finding myself in this book!’—why, this is more than death-­bed, it is almost post mortem behaviour. STH, 152

To confront such thinking, and avoid the dead author as a coined cliché, we should not express much disquiet over the novel’s death (or the “smell” of a corpus (ibid.) to borrow his image), but rather Lawrence suggests we need concentrate instead upon the character of an interpretative afterlife: The novel has got a future . . . It’s 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 new line of emotion, which will get us out of the old emotional rut. Instead of sniveling 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 a wall. STH, 155

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As we turn the novel atop his table in “Surgery,” the ways in which this speculative impulse underscores a sense of the medium’s obsolescence (and secures a conceptualization of the novel as a minority technology in the age increasingly concerned with mass media) withstands as the presiding preoccupation of his critique. Here, in “Surgery,” Lawrence echoes the aforesaid atmosphere apparent in his introductory comments to Lady Chatterley: “. . . we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen” (LCL, 5)—but in this instance the novel is specifically remarked as an attitudinal tool to facilitate that optimistic motion as the necessary formal evolution of the novel itself withstands as his focus. His “serious novel”—“a monster with many faces” (STH, 151, 152)—is subject to a simple conceit; with the advancing of technological progress and industrial acceleration, various cultural forms and media prove eclipsed and elided by new, more dynamic means of production, performance, expression, and dissemination. What proves striking about the Lawrentian take on the “serious” novel’s death, however, is its initiation not of a means of writing but rather of a specific methodology for a readership. He demands that we see ourselves within the context of cultural change and not merely as bound by the parameters and conventions of a representative cultural media. We need to look beyond the edges of a codex culture to consider, instead, the itinerancy of a literary image as it moves between parties, and it is this, arguably, that proves key to the “what next?” that sits so centrally to his thinking. The precedent for a “what next?” criticality owes wholly to a post Gutenbergian cultural cosmogony. To borrow from Raymond Williams’s taxonomy, any engagement with the “novel” is suggestive of the continued threat to its “dominant” status as a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk; we read forwards, not backwards, and that leads to a want for new cultural structures. Such a conceit is tethered entirely to a thin theorization of cultural hierarchy; it is a position galvanized by the progressive development of cultural media and technological format over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-­first.8 However, as Jonathan Arac has noted, such a dialogue has dogged the novel’s self-­interest as a form since its inception. Drawing our attention to the birth of its “serious” incarnation (to employ Lawrence’s category), Arac casts his mind back to the relative youth of literature as a special interest in his consideration of the novel’s uneven developmental history.9 “The term literature,” he argues, “began to consolidate its modern meaning around 1830”; looking to anchor his sense of historical precedent, Arac back-­pages to 1832, and—in particular—to Victor Hugo’s publication of Notre-Dame de Paris.10 Although the novel’s action is seated some centuries earlier—localizing its narrative to a Paris of the late 1400s—Hugo entertains an understanding of obsolescence rendered plausible by the codex and its capacity for cultural elucidation, communication, and self-­definition. In short, Hugo’s indication is that the opportunity afforded by dissemination systems produces a pluralism inspired by privacy—constituted by personal activity—but that is powerful primarily in its ability to draw a meaning from the novel itself that is not

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necessarily confined to the structural integrity of a book as a singular, fixed object. Arac paraphrases from the text: Frollo, the archdeacon of the cathedral, looks from the church to the book on his desk and declares This will kill that . . . the book will kill architecture as the prime expression of the human mind.11

Arac continues to cite Hugo’s own clarification of such a position in his advantaging of a print culture that would (or could) tower over stone in terms of its formal influence: In its print form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, ethereal, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the days of architecture it made a mountain of itself, and forcibly took hold [s’emparait] of a century and a place. Now it makes itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself [s’eparpille] to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once.12

Thought’s “imperishability”—accommodated in printed text—is powerful for Hugo only in its advocacy of an itinerancy and this is conceptually bound to an understanding of the structural integrity of the novel. Thought, iterative as printed text, is migratory; it intimates a literal transcendence: an ability to rise above the fixed terms of place and time predicated by the architectural to advocate, instead, a concentration on the “air and space” of a moving idea. Rather than celebrate the totemic qualities of the building itself, we consider the varied demands that a visitor may make of it. Itinerancy is thus key to the power Hugo allots the book as a singular object; an image, idea, or symbol can inferentially fragment and spread, every word a single member of a “flock of birds,” only loosely held together in association. The symbolic language that Hugo employs to formally communicate the strength of print still holds; the idea proves “imperishable” at the expense of any concentration on its medial form. “This may kill that,” but the integrity of the idea withstands. Hugo’s image is undeniably a powerful one, but it is the feted competition between the book and the building that provides a greater simpatico with Lawrence’s stance. Rather than acknowledging aesthetic introspection to stand as any brand of critical jouissance, the self-­obsession of novelistic culture sits entirely at odds with the social demands we need to make of its function, for Lawrence. Instead of establishing the novel as a formal enclave for any weak theory of genius or authorial primacy—or, indeed, as a germinal bed to nurture self-­interest—the conceptualization of culture as supporting some social commons appears as at the apex of his argumentation. Disclosing his understanding of “entertainment,” and moving on from his anatomical surveillance of the novel, Lawrence sits his argument within another analogical theater. Here, we have an audience ahead of a play (rather than the performance itself) as his focus, but the critical distance between his two theaters—the stage

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and the surgery—is a narrow one. Both require a degree of operation, and it is here that we are privy to Lawrence’s own interpretation of the conflict between the book and the building that would preoccupy Hugo. “We go to the theatre to be entertained,” Lawrence writes: “It may be The Potters, it may be Max Reinhardt, King Lear, or Electra. All entertainment” (MM, 59). As he begins to categorize his definition of this broad term, the play becomes a methodology for encouraging a critical detachment rather than any material encounter. It becomes a meager detail from which a public forum is capable of envisaging itself as an integrative forum for critical difference and, as such, his own iteration of the “flock of birds” at wing above Hugo’s Paris. He envisages these histrionic displays of human behavior as intuiting a disassociation of self in order that a concentration can extend, instead, to the social implications implied by our involvement in a mass—our inclusion in an audience—our sublimation to a “flock” of minds party to this drama. The social implication of his “we” is of perennial importance as he intuits the social intimations of culture; figuring both a sense of the vitality of a crowd—and the value of the individual as its axiom—the componential character of the theater as a democratic space for a myriad of minds underscores the social emphases of “entertainment” to his mind. It is a question of culpability; the value of the theatrical space is not constituted by its actors but rather by our status as critics, as spectators, and our readiness to analyze our want for escapism: We want to be taken out of ourselves. Or not entirely that. We want to become spectators at our own show. We lean down from the plush seats like little gods in a democratic heaven, and see ourselves away below there, on the world of the stage, in a brilliant artificial sunlight, behaving comically absurdly, like Pa Potter, yet getting away with it, or behaving tragically absurdly, like King Lear, and not getting away with it: rather proud of not getting away with it. We see ourselves: we survey ourselves: we laugh at ourselves: we weep over ourselves: we are the gods above of our own destinies. Which is very entertaining. MM, 59

The theater is valuable as, in spite of our sublimation to the role of audience member—and the presiding sense of our selfish purposes as spectators—the performance is privileged only by the nuance of a personal desire aided and abetted by the possibility of critical difference, by the individuated virtues of interpretative operation. The novel and the theatrical space (the book and the building)—to Lawrence’s mind—are therein equivalents. The active character of our spectatorship necessarily renders a unique facilitation of meaning seat-­ by-seat to thereby aggregate a social, dialectical space defined by difference, by critical distance. The theater, a wholly subjective forum, thus allows the form, shape, and concerns of the play itself to dissipate; instead of any archetypal demonstration of any human connect, we’re given platform for a broader

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scrutiny of that connection itself by way of our simultaneous alienation and inclusion within an audience. The play is there to be used; to give platform to self-­definition, in the first, to then allow that self a social function. In sum, it becomes a means with which to explicate the “what next?” of Lawrence’s purview as indicative of a shift in focus from a singular critical desire to a broader social need, and portrays the essentially technological precedent he demands of novelistic cultures within his surgery. Remaining with Lawrence’s excavation of the entertainment-­impulse, here we see him unequivocally establish the idea in machinic terms. What begins in a detachment of self supports that same self through the evocation of memory to then provide the individual spectator with a “machine” designed for the purposes of the social critique of an “actuality” (MM, 59): The secret of it all, is that we detach ourselves from the painful and always solid trammels of actual existence, and become creatures of memory and of spirit-­like consciousness. We are the gods and there’s the machine, down below us. Down below, on the stage, our mechanical or earth-­bound self stutters or raves, Pa Potter or King Lear. But however Potterish or Learian we may be, while we sit aloft in plush seats we are creatures of pure consciousness, pure spirit, surveying those selves of clay who are so absurd or so tragic, below . . . The audience in the theatre is a 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. ibid.

The “secret” Lawrence alludes to is our withdrawal; a withdrawal pluralized by his “we.” The mob has an apparent power, but that power—that “purity”—is engineered only by our separation. Only scaffolded by our ability to motivate meaning by way of our singularity, by way of our ability to delineate our unique capacity to rise above the “machine,” to—inferentially—consider the deeply personal terms of our unique operation of this cultural mechanism. Our ability to “survey the realm of actuality” requires proper accreditation, and it is there that the link between his two theaters can be forged. Between the operating table and the stage, self-­awareness is the basis for a further social critical preoccupation. This is the cornerstone of Lawrence’s theory of entertainment, and his sophistication of the terms of a cultural consumerism; a critical detachment that advocates a universalist association with some human scene in the moment of analysis. He proffers that to lose ourselves to the command of spectacle is, in the end, to suffer an abstraction of the world: A few people, the so-­called advanced, have grown uneasy in their bones about the Universal Mind. But the mass are absolutely convinced. And every member of the mass is absolutely convinced that he is part and parcel of this

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Universal Mind. Hence his joy at the theatre. His even greater joy at the cinematograph. In the moving pictures he has detached himself even further from the solid stuff of earth. There, the people are truly shadows: the shadow-­pictures are thinkings of his mind. They live in the rapid and kaleidoscopic realm of the abstract. And the individual watching the shadow-­spectacle sits a very god, in an orgy of abstraction, actually dissolved into delighted, watchful spirit. And if his best girl sits beside him, she vibrates in the same ether, and triumphs in the same orgy of abstraction. MM, 60

Abstraction, as Lawrence would dictate in his definition of the “what-­next?” book, is the enemy. However, a number of Lawrence’s readers—looking to outline the nature of Lawrence’s iteration of the critic’s function—have proven receptive to the subjective center of Lawrence’s critical thought by way of this question of the “abstract” within his writings. Alan Friedman would refer to the Lawrentian take on the novel as an “open form” (or, perhaps, open source) document; aware of the developmental and changing social scene around it, the Lawrentian novel embraces an idea of revolutionary affect as central to its socio-­political purview.13 Henry Miller, writing in his “passionate appreciation” of Lawrence’s oeuvre The World of Lawrence, indicates a disparity between the vitality of Lawrence’s philosophical currency and his ability to parse that philosophy through his fictions. “Lawrence’s ideas are more exciting in the abstract than when they are presented through his fiction,” Miller writes; “there is something . . . sterile and artificial about his characters and novels.”14 Miller’s take on Lawrentian “abstraction” stands as indicative of a broader appeal to the idea that Lawrence’s philosophical and critical position presents a more applicable (albeit perambulatory) view of the future of the novelistic tradition than can be accommodated within the traditional formal entrapments of his novels themselves. However, there is an optimism inherent to Lawrence’s position that finds simpatico in equivalent analyses of technocratic culture in the 1920s; his “kaleidoscopic realm of the abstract” is echoic of Baudelaire’s “Kaleidoscope with [a] consciousness,” his sense of culture’s utopian precedent is echoic of the works of László Moholy-Nagy.15 But in Lawrence’s view of culture we need to learn to navigate our way through a more instrumental view of our interaction than simply allot its mechanisms a sentience all of their own if we are to allow his “what next?” the full force of his intentions and conviction. To consider the etymological history of the word “entertainment” itself, it is important to remain cognizant of the fact that the word has its history in a comprehension of commonality—derived from the Old French, entertain holds its roots in entretenir: to hold together, to support.16 It is there that we have Lawrence’s aping of the structural preoccupations that concern Hugo in his efforts to tally some conceptual competition between print and architectural thought. As we concern ourselves with the proximity of Lawrence’s two

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theaters—with the book and the building as designated ciphers for the discussion of literary culture’s instrumentality—the self-­aware reader that Lawrence scaffolds in these two texts coheres with contemporary issues surrounding critical coherence, facticity, and the presiding and iconographic personalist economy that presides as we consider literature as an industry. Crucially, however, the dynamic movement from self to that self ’s social state presents a view of reading we can translate from Lawrence’s 1920s to the digital age. Whether we consider Uricchio’s “algorithmic turn,”17 Mager’s “algorithmic ideology,”18 or Cheney-Lippold’s “algorithmic identity,” the advocacy is twofold, consistently;19 we’ve a central concern for the limits of our sovereign control of material, and an awareness of the entrenchment of our own reading habits in the extension and sophistication of these governing systems. But we take, for instance, Donald Mackenzie’s claim in 2006: the algorithm is “an engine, not a camera.” Both poles of his assertion ascribe the importance of an operator to the ontological consideration of algorithmic operation.20 This assertion is key to Lawrence’s position and the operation he aggregates as we consider the terms of his surgery and his theater. To cite Uricchio specifically, the challenge a reader faces in these contexts can, perhaps, be garnered in Lawrence’s own literary conceptualism. Uricchio writes that, “Although of a different order than the clearly defined subject–object binary that characterized the modern era for the last few hundred years, the algorithmic turn remains rooted in human experiential and semiotic practices”: Human continuity might override newly emerging disruptive potentials, helping us instead to locate and assess the alterations to our established modes of interaction and being in the world, and make creative use of them. At a moment of transition, it is difficult to tell whether this is simply a default mode—the momentum of the past—or if it reveals a level of adaptive insight—part of the same fabric of imagination that creates and uses these new affordances.21

Expressing his own iteration of a Lawrentian “what next?,” here Uricchio articulates the urgency of a renewed interest in application and critical communication. Where we’ve sought self-­reflection in literary culture, we need to think instead in terms of social progression and, as such, to analyze our own degree of culpability as instituted in the “operation” of these machines rather than in any perception of culture as an escapist vehicle or isolationist convention. We need to consider the “what next?” of our entertained ideas.

Notes 1 Tan Lin, “A Field Guide to American Painting,” in Seven Controlled Vocabularies & Obituary 2004, The Joy of Cooking: [Airport Novel Musical Poem Painting Film

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Photo Hallucination Landscape] (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 13. 2 D. H. Lawrence’s remark in SCAL—which has now descended into cliché— unequivocally showcases his interest in the inner workings of critical culture: “Truly art is a sort of subterfuge. But thank God for it, we can see through the subterfuge if we choose. Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We had the feelings ad nauseam. But we’ve never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren or not. The artist usually sets out—or used to—to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tail, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” See “The Spirit of Place” in SCAL, 14. 3 For an analysis of the “museological impulse,” and its debt to Modernist cultures, see Boris Groys, “Entering the Flow,” in In the Flow (New York: Verso, 2016), 3–23. 4 See Rita Felski, “The Stakes of Suspicion,” in The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 14. “One volume after another button-­holes its readers in [an] insistent, even indignant, fashion: Why does Literature Matter?, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century, Why Poetry Matters, Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, Why the Humanities Matter, Why Milton Matters, Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters, Why Books Matter, Why Comparative Literature Matters. That this verbal tic has gone viral—that mattering is exercising the minds of an expanding cohort of critics—points to a change of gears and an overhauling of priorities. The overall tone of such titles is one of exhortation combined with a whiff of exasperation. No more hair-­splitting, nit-­picking, angels-­on-the-­head-of-­apin scholasticism! Leading questions can no longer be avoided: Why is literature worth bothering with? What is at stake in literary studies?” 5 Felski, “Stakes of Suspicion,” 52–85. 6 See Rita Felski, “Recognition,” in The Uses of Literature (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 23. 7 Felski, “Recognition,” 23–4. 8 See Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London and New York: Verso, 1980), 40–2. 9 See Jonathan Arac, “ ‘This Will Kill That’: A Provocation of the Novel in Media History,” Novel 1, 44 (May 2011): 6–7. 10 Arac, “ ‘This Will Kill That,’ ” 6. 11 Ibid. 12 Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, ed. Marius-François Guyard (Paris: Garnier, 1959), 218. 13 Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel: The Transition to Modern Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 130. 14 Henry Miller, The World of Lawrence (London: Calder, 1996), 233. 15 Similarly to Lawrence, László Moholy-Nagy looks to a sense of our critical outlook as a faculty informed by an antiqued cultural apparatus. Our ability to integrate new technologies into the perspectival demands of the present demands that we need to rehearse, practice, and test the limitations preset by antiquated media before

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oscillating too readily around the obsolescent stratification of any given form. In the end, he suggests, the outlook is optimistic: “Men discover new instruments, new methods of work, which revolutionize their familiar habits of work. Often, however, it is a long time before the innovation is purely utilized; it is hampered by the old; the new function is shrouded in the traditional form. The creative possibilities of the innovation are usually slowly disclosed by these old forms, old instruments and fields of creativity which burst into euphoric flower when the innovation which has been preparing finally emerges.” See Painting, Photography, Film, trans. Janet Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 27. 16 For source, see Chambers, Dictionary of Etymology, ed. Robert K. Barnes (New York: Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, 2000): Entertain verb About 1475 entertienen maintain, in a translation of Caxton’s; borrowed from the Middle French, from Old French entretenir hold together, support (entre- among, from Latin inter- + Old French tenir, to hold, from Latin tenēre). 17 See William Uricchio, “The Algorithmic Turn: Photosynth, Augmented Reality, and the Changing Implications of the Image,” Visual Studies 26, 1 (2011): 25–35. 18 See Astrid Mager, “Algorithmic Ideology,” Information, Communication & Society 15, 5 (June, 2012): 769–87. In this article, Mager cites and develops a view put forward by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law in their book Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) in which they argue that “the processes that shape our technologies go right to the heart of the way in which we live and organize our societies . . . Understanding them would allow us to see that our technologies do not necessarily have to be the way they actually are” (4). Mager revises Bijker and Law’s position in terms of the commercial orientation of algorithmic cultures in the early twenty-­first century, anchoring her investigation in global search technologies, local debate, and governmental regulation to emphasize an effect on readership. 19 See John Cheney-Lippold, “A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, 6 (2011): 164–81. 20 See Donald Mackenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), in which he explores the co-­mingling of algorithmic cultures with hypothetical, financial systems to assess the ways in which the institution or catechization of financial terminology feeds into a culture of speculation and crisis. 21 Uricchio, “Algorithmic Turn,” 35.

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Index Aaron’s Rod 106, 109, 114n.23, 120, 128 Adams, Ansel 46 adversative conjunction 181, 185–7 Alcorn, John 18 Aldington, Richard 62, 122 algorithm 215 Allen, Grant 2 allotropy 6, 137–9 allusion 63, 80 anarchy 66 anti-Cartesian metaphysic 7, 153, 158 Apocalypse and The Writings on Revelation 47, 152 Aquinas, Thomas 104, 208 Arac, Jonathan 187, 210 Aristotle 104, 129, 208 Asimov, Isaac 59 Asquith, H. H. 27, 31 automaton (concept of) 5, 52, 59, 61, 66–7, 140 avant-garde 55 Bachmann, Holger 53 Bachofen, Johann Jacob 41, 43, 46 Bakhtin, Mikhail 179 Barry, Iris 54 base (Marxian concept of) 63, 176 Bazin, André 170 Baum, L. Frank 60 BBC (British Broadcasting Company) 133, 170 Becket, Fiona 4, 7, 101 Beethoven, Ludwig van 102 Bell, Michael 2, 4, 101 bio-power (concept of) 129, 132–3 blood consciousness (concept of) 6, 19, 105, 127–8, 130, 132, 152, 182–3 Bloomsbury group 43, 162, 172nn.26, 31 Boccioni, Umberto 75 bohemianism (ideas of) 38–40, 43, 45, 47

Bolshevism 104 Booth, Howard J. 4 Bottomley, Horatio 87 Bramley, J. A. 22 Brecht, Bertold 1 Brewster, Earl 123 Bryant, John 7, 161, 164, Burrells, Anna Louise 3 Burrows, Louie 26, 40 Buzzi, Paolo 75 Butler, Samuel 51, 64, 70n.57 Butts, Mary 151 cantus firmus (concept of) 178, 180, 182, 185–7 cantus technicus (concept of) 177, 180–7 Čapek, Karel 5, 51–5 capitalism (ideas of) 17, 105 Carlyle, Thomas 3, 11, 21 Cederström, Carl 123 Chambers, Jessie 64, 166 Chaudhuri, Amit 60 Christianity 104–5 Conrad, Joseph 151 counterpoint (concept of) 175, 178–80 Cowper, John Cowper 151 Criterion, The 122 Crosby, Harry 65 “Crown,” The 73, 77 Croydon 14, 26, 40 Cubism 55 Dahl, Roald 169 Daly, Macdonald 25 Daly, Nicholas 2 Darwin, Charles 64 dehumanization (ideas of) 52, 117 Delany, Paul 11 Descartes, René 61 Dickens, Charles 11, 115

232

Index

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 169 Dover, Julia 54–5 Dyer, Geoff 123 Eastwood 5, 13–14, 17, 19, 22, 25–30, 33–4, 39, 137 Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser 30–1 Ebbatson, Roger 17 eco-poiesis (concept of) 158 ecocriticism (ideas of) 153 ecology 11, 22, 151, 156, 159, 209 ego (concept of) 63, 117–18, 150, 154, 158 Egoist, The 77 Ehlert, Anne Odenbring 22 Ellis, David 61 Ellul, Jacques 176 “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?” 5, 73, 77 England, My England and Other Stories 5, 73, 79, 82 English Review, The 25 Enlightenment 38, 105, 112n.18 entertainment (concept of) 8, 170n.1, 203–5, 211–14 Epstein, Jacob 57, 76 erotica 41, 143, 157, 163, 167, 169 Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious 102, 118, 142–3, 152–4, 157 fascism (ideas of) 6, 55, 118, 155 Felski, Rita 206–9 Fernihough, Anne 4, 101 fidelity (concept of) 7, 161, 164–5, 168–70, 208 First ‘Women in Love,’ The 78–9 First World War 6, 39, 46, 52, 56, 86, 93, 96 Fjågesund, Peter 101 Forster, E. M. 162 Foucault, Michel 6, 117–18, 123, 128–9 Freudianism (ideas of) 138, 153, 169 Futurism 55–7, 75 Garnett, Edward 25–6, 29, 33–4, 76, 138–9, 165, 167 Gertler, Mark 1, 56–7, 63, 76, 81, 90 Gifford, Terry 20

“Gloire de Dijon” 64, 157 Goody, Alex 56, 61 Gordon, David 60, 65 Great Expectations 115 Greiff, Louis K. 7, 161, 164–6 Haggs Farm 39 Hardy, Thomas 11, 15, 18–19, 116 Harrison, Andrew 57, 59, 162, 164–5 Heidegger, Martin 4, 185, 175 Herzinger, Kim 56 Hitchcock, Alfred 169 Hobhouse, Leonard T. 85–7, 89 Hobson, John A. 28, 87 Hughes, Emrys 28 Hugo, Victor 210–12, 214 Huxley, Aldous 6, 37, 39, 44, 47, 51, 130, 133–5, 179 Hölderlin, Friedrich 1–3 Ingersoll, Earl G. 3 interactivity (concept of) 204, 206 Introductions and Reviews 64–5 Isherwood, Christopher 162 Italo-Turkish War 75 jouissance 211 journalism 25 Joyce, James 3, 162 Kandinsky, Wassily 42 Kangaroo 121, 128 Kant, Immanuel 104, 208 Keats, John 1 Keynes, John Maynard 87, 95 Kingsley, Charles 134 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark 15, 142 Klíma, Ivan 52 Kramer, Larry 166, 168 Kranz, David 168 Krockel, Carl 80 Lady Chatterley’s Lover and A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover 19, 51, 105, 127–31, 134, 162–3, 165, 177, 181, 185–6, 208 Laird, Holly A. 62, 156 Lang, Fritz 5, 52–5

Index Late Essays and Articles 1–2, 12–13, 19–20, 22, 59, 63, 102, 106, 127, 139, 176, 185 Lawrence, Frieda 42, 165 Le Bon, Gustave 79 Leavis, F. R. 3–4 Lloyd George, David 87 Lockwood, M. J. 66 Lost Girl, The 161, 191, 197–9 Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories 29, 31–2, 115–16 Lowell, Amy 76, 163 Luckhurst, Roger 138 Mackenzie, Donald 215 McLeod, Arthur 75 Manchester Guardian 73 Männiste, Indrek 158 Marder, Michael 158 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 55, 75–6 Marx, Karl 4, 40–1, 176 Massingham, H. W. 26 Massumi, Brian 6, 117, 119–20 Masterman, Charles F. G. 87 Mazel, David 151 Mellerski, Nancy 168 Mellown, Elgin W. 179 mental consciousness (concept of) 127–8, 130–2, 134–5, 142, 182 mentalization (concept of) 131 “Merry-Go-Round” 1, 57, 63, 69n.34, 76, 81, 90–1 metaphysics (concept of) 104 Metropolis 5, 52–5, 58–9, 61, 67n.12 Midlands 25, 80, 122, 177, 184, 195 Miller, Henry 214 Milton, John 75 mining 2, 12, 19, 26, 28, 30, 32, 39, 85–6, 88, 92–3, 122, 132, 137, 158, 163, 166, 187 modern science (ideas of) 6, 101–2, 104 Modiano, Marko 3 Monaco, Beatrice 3 Monroe, Harriet 76 Montgomery, Robert 101 Moore, Roger 27, 33 morality (concept of) 39, 54, 117 Morrell, Lady Ottoline 43–4, 75, 88

233

Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays 21, 203, 212–14 Morris, Nigel 161, 163–4 Movements in European History 93, 95 Mr Noon 167–9, 191–5 Murray, Nicholas 134 Myers, F. W. H. 138–9 Naremore, James 169 Nazism (association with) 6 Nation 5, 25–8, 31, 34 National Coal Strike 25–7 Nevinson, Christopher C. R. 75 New Woman (ideas of) 78, 80, 166 New York Times Magazine 53 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 20, 40–1 Norden, Hugo 178 Norris, Trevor 158 obsolescence (concept of) 205, 209–10 “Odour of Chrysanthemums” 97, 164, 183, 200–1 Orr, Christopher 170 Paul Morel 26 Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence 38, 47, 140–1 Plato 103–4, 109 Plumed Serpent, The 109, 128, 130, 152 polyphony (concept of) 179 Poplawski, Paul 163 Pound, Ezra 93 pre-Socratics (ideas of) 155 principle of becoming 123 Pritchard, R. E. 140 progress (ideas of) 14, 16, 52–3, 59, 62, 84, 205, 210 Prussian Officer and Other Stories, The 97, 183 psychoanalysis 4, 41, 153 psychology 73, 76, 80, 105, 116–17, 133, 137 Pugh, Bridget 17 R.U.R. 51–3, 61 Rainbow, The 11, 15–17, 19, 73, 78, 88–9, 92, 157, 163–4, 170, 177, 181, 183, 186 Raitt, Suzanne 138

234

Index

realism (ideas of) 26, 111n.12 Reffel, Alan H. 55 Reflections of the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays 66, 78, 102, 140 rejectionism (concept of) 101, 104 religion (ideas of) 38, 41, 43, 63, 106, 119, 127, 130 Renaissance 105 Rilke, Rainer Maria 1, 40 “Rock Drill” 57–8, 60–1, 76 Roman Empire 118 Ruskin, John 3, 11 Russell, Bertrand 44, 87, 107–8 Rutsky, R. L. 129

superstructure (Marxian concept of) 176 Swift, Jonathan 131 synecdoche (concept of) 176, 181–4

Saturday Westminster Gazette 26 Schopenhauer, Arthur 40, 207 Schwabing (counterculture of) 40–2 Shelley, Mary 53 “Sick Collier,” A 187 Simondon, Gilbert 117–19, 121, 123 Sinzelle, Claude 12–13, 15 Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays 116–17 Smith, Stewart 4 Soffici, Ardengo 75 Solecki, Sam 161 Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr 104, 112n.15 Sons and Lovers 11, 14, 21, 86, 164–5, 177, 184, 195–7, 201–2 Spicer, André 123 Stein, Gertrude 45 Stein, Leo 45–6 Sterne, Maurice 46 Stewart, Jack 56 Studies in Classic American Literature 123, 216n.2 Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays 18, 73, 77, 116

Ulysses 162 Uricchio, William 215

technologies of self (concept of) 117–18, 120–1 Thackeray, William Makepeace 38 “Tickets Please” 5, 73, 80–2 Timaeus 103 Time Machine, The 127 trauma (concept of) 74, 78 Truffaut, Francois 169 Turner, J.W. M 102 Twilight in Italy and Other Essays

Vanity Fair 38, 134 Vorticism (ideas of) 65 Wagner, Richard 40, 179, 210 Wallace, Jeff 3, 74 Ward, Jason Mark 161–5 Weekley, Ernest 40 Wells, H. G. 51, 53, 60, 127, 130, 167 Westminster Review 38 White Peacock, The 11–14, 16, 19, 25, 175–7, 179–80, 187 Whitehead, A. N. 119–20 Widdowson, Peter 4 Williams, Raymond 3, 11, 210 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 101 Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, The 101, 122–3 Women in Love 17–18, 85, 87–9, 91–3, 95–7, 120, 141–5, 149–50, 169, 177, 183, 198, 201 Woolf, Virginia 3, 44, 151, 162–3, 167