Lawrence's Vicious Art

By C. B. COX

IF in my passion I slay my neighbour, it is no sin of mine, but it is his sin. for he should not have permitted me,' wrote Lawrence in a pro- jected foreword to Sons and Lovers sent to Edward Garnett in 1913. And in 1916, after finishing Women in Love, he went even further: 'When I see people in the distance, walking along the path through the fields to Zennor. I want to crouch in the bushes and shoot them silently with invisible arrows of death.' In the so-called 'power' period from 1920-25, he associated himself in fantasy with Don Ramon's men in their blood lusts: 'Then, the instriking thud of a heavy knife, stabbing into a living body. this is the best. No lust of woman can equal that lust.'

Such destructive impulses make the usual post- Leavis picture of Lawrence as a man on the side of life and health and tenderness seem distinctly odd. And what are we to say now about the witnesses who testified to the moral virtues of Lady Chatterley's Lover? This novel in particular has been said to demonstrate Lawrence's reverence for life, his belief in the unique value of individuals; the love between Connie and Mellors is associated with the flowers of the wood, paradoxically tender, vulnerable, yet also as eternal as the vital spirit of life itself. But recently Professor G. Wilson Knight and Mr John Sparrow have proved that Mellors imposes on Connie a form of perverted sex normally repugnant to women. How can we accept Mark Spilka's view, common now among academics, that in his major novels Lawrence 'developed a concrete vision of experience with normative value for his readers'?

Keith Sagar's sympathetic, workmanlike study* provides some answers for these problems. It's interesting to see the great change between his views and those of Anthony West in his book of 1950t, now republished. West shows a good deal of annoyance with Lawrence, treating him as prophet rather than artist. He writes with some acerbity about incidents such as the journey to the Del Monte Ranch to start a Utopia—With one disciple, poor Dorothy Brett, as deaf as a Post, with an ear trumpet cocked and ready in case she should miss any word from the Messiah.' West dismisses the poetry and most of the novels as worthless, including The Rainbow and Women in Love, repeating the popular view of the time that Lawrence refused to accept any form of mental discipline. After the many sensitive examinations of Lawrence's art of the last fifteen years—by Leavis, Hough, Mark Schorer and V. de Sola Pinto—West's book has little more than historical interest. But his objection that the 'amorous junketings' which end The Plumed Serpent 'are not much help to anyone involved in the normal life of the Midlands' should not be laughed aside too easily. Are we really clear yet about what precisely Lawrence is advocating?

In contrast Sagar writes in a detached, sensible style, and at last it seems possible to avoid the extremes of anger and worship that have vitiated so much previous criticism. Sagar acknowledges

the elements of perversity in Lawrence, but argues'

- Ai*

4Keei, * Aar OF D. H. LAWRENCE, By Keith Sager. (CU.P., 45s.) t D. H. LAWRENCE. By Anthony Weit. (Arthur Barker, 15s.) D. H. LAWRENCE AS A LITERARY CRITIC. By David Gordon. (Yale U.P., 35s. 6d.) that these are largely confined to the period from 1917 to 1924. when he was suffering from acute depression caused by the Great War. Before this, from 1906 to 1916, we have a gradual process of discovery and growth culminating in the great achievements of, The Rainbow and Women in Love. After 1924, he moves towards a final serenity. Like the hero of The Man Who Died, he is reborn into a new art and vision. There is some evidence for this theory, but I think it shifts attention from the paradoxes and conflicts that run throughout Lawrence's career. Even in his last period, creative and destructive impulses are at war. and his reverence for life struggles with longing for annihilation.

Sagar is not unaware of this kind of conflict. He quotes Frieda writing to Garnett as early as 1912 to emphasise Lawrence's revolutionary purposes: 'I have heard so much about "form" with Ernest; why are you English so keen on it? Their own form wants smashing in almost any direction, but they can't come out of their snail-house.' Lawrence aims at nothing less than a complete destruction of existing civilisation. Sex becomes the liberating experience, a rejoining of the individual with the great flood of phallic energy; so having children is not, for Lawrence, its main purpose: 'But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.' In Women in Love, Birkin and Ursula make this leap, and withdraw into a social vacuum. Lawrence must build an ark to survive the destruction of civilisa- tion, and so he searches for relationships and modes of consciousness which have no social consequences.

Sagar assembles this material well, but it seems to me that he instinctively resists the extremism of Lawrence. He argues that in Sons and Lovers the relationship between Paul and his mother is essentially normal, and that its destructive quali- ties have been over-emphasised. In The Plumed Serpent he thinks that the wild rites of Don Ramon do not receive Lawrence's full sympathy, for they are tested and judged by the realities of Kate's experience. So throughout his book Sagar treats the destructive elements as aberrations, for the true genius of Lawrence 'finds life already meaningful and art a process of discovery, revela- tion and praise.' This tendency to feel uneasy with Lawrence's more extravagant doctrines is typical of much recent academic writing; it indi- cates a subconscious desire to transform him into someone more acceptable to the common assumptions of society.

The defence witnesses at the trial were forced into this role by the need to persuade the jury, but it is one that dilutes the full force of Law- rence's genius. Most people find fulfilment through tenderness in sex, and through care of their children in the fixed relationship of marriage. In contrast, Lawrence believes that in modern society 'a man who is emotionally edu- cated is as rare as a phoenix.' This 'education' is possible only for the man who breaks completely with the corrupt forms of normal behaviour in western civilisation, and this demands abandon- ment to extreme, even forbidden, experiences. This is why Lady Chatterley symbolically accepts and enjoys the perversity of Mellors.

Such basic conflicts are brilliantly expounded in David Gordon's new study of Lawrence's

literary criticism:. Gordon carefully examines battle & MIA poetry sod novels, as well as famous works such as Studies in Classic American Literature, and the result is a major contribution to our understanding of Lawrence's mind. As a critic Lawrence was constantly vituperative. Dostoievsky was 'a lily-mouthed missionary rumbling with ventral howls of derision and dementia,' Chekhov 'a willy wet-leg' and Proust 'too much water-jelly.' But, as Gordon points out, he did not spend much time quarrelling with the second-rate, and his denunciations often make great writers more interesting than conventional praise: 'what most distinguishes Lawrence as a critic of culture is his acute perception of its unconscious predilections and prejudices, par- ticularly as they inhibit the breadth and depth of an artist's vision.'

Gordon acknowledges that there is much paradox and inconsistency in the criticism. Law- rence's greatness lies in part in his social realism. in his ability to present the interplay of human relationships with a delicate insight not seen before in English fiction; but as visionary he rejects the inadequacies of existence. Gordon argues that this conflict between fact and vision, history and myth. is central to Lawrence's art: 'He exalts Blakean Mind but also Rousseauistic Nature. He remained a divined man in a divided age. heroically determined to make himself and it whole.' He is torn by a 'desire to lind a perfection within history combined with an almost-as-strong reluctance to find perfection anywhere but in possibility itself.'

This conflict forces Lawrence to create new forms for his art. He resists any kind of self- conscious discipline that checks the flow of im- passioned thought, and tries, often with much crudity and excess, to create a language that embodies dynamic self-awareness. His argument, therefore, proceeds not in carefully arranged logical patterns, but by continual slightly modified repetitions. Lawrence wrote: 'If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.' What is most alive in a novel is its fluid, dynamic conflicts of energies: his own art becomes a living force, a war of opposing elements deliberately created to capture the pulse of the living moment.

At his best, in many short stories, The Rainbow and Women in Love, Lawrence presents an extraordinary interplay of realism and myth. combining reverence for what things are with a mystical vision of what they might be. But the impossibility of actualising his vision, either by joining with friends in a new community, or in art itself, drove him to despair. The desire for destruction and death became an integral part of his creative life. He himself wrote: 'You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writer.'