Shaw Against Lawrence
BY F. R. LEAVIS CERTAINLY an occasion for some applause : 'A propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' can at last be got. But (I am afraid I shall seem ungracious) I wish the manner of its reprinting—along with pieces from 7'hcenix (and other sources) and the promise of a companion volume of Selected Literary Criticism which will draw on Phcenix again and on Studies of Classic American Literature also—had not sug- gested that we are never to have a reprint of Phcenix, all of which we need. And we need the whole of Studies in Classic American Literature. The greatest writer of the twentieth cen- tury has been dead for twenty-eve years; but essential works of his, works that should have been widely current and fulfil- ling their function, have remained unobtainable—some of them for decades.
Again, I wish that this volume* had not been called Sex, Literature and Censorship—the title shrieks from the hideous dust-jacket. Eliot in The Waste Land, Joyce in Ulysses, Wyndham Lewis in Tarr—these, I am moved to comment, are concerned with sex; Lawrence is concerned with the rela- tions between men and women. Of course, the 'ugly little word,' as Lawrence calls it, has to be used; he uses it himself. But associated in a title with 'censorship,' under Lawrence's name, it plays up to all the misconceptions and misrepresenta- tions from which Lawrence has suffered—all the subtly obstin- ato resistances that have made it so hard to get the nature of nis work, and the meaning and scope of what he stood for, recognised. The point of my misgivings is enforced by Mr. H. F. Rubinstein's introductory essay.
In the opening of it we read : 'D. H. Lawrence, a determined Shaw-hater . . .' Determined hating, one comments, was as alien and impossible to Lawrence—as contrary to his nature and the profoundly considered ethie that he lived—as deter- mined loving. No one who had in any serious sense read him' could have used the phrase. Still, one tells oneself, Mr. Rubin- stein is only a lawyer, writing as a lawyer; his theme, 'The Law versus D. H. Lawrence,' safely limits him, and his disability will hardly need to be obtruded. But on the next page we find him volunteering that 'the author of St. Joan . . . understood Lawrence better than Lawrence understood him.' And, though he refers modestly to 'mere lawyers,' he considers it within his competence to measure Lawrence for us against Shaw : they are comparable magnitudes (we gather); geniuses who 'sought essential truth, the one through reason, the other through sex.' Both, he tells us, 'succeeded, in their supreme moments, in touching—as it were, at opposite ends of a circumference— fringes of the same garment.'
Thus, in introducing this volume, Mr. Rubinstein dismisses, lightly and confidently, the whole meaning of Lawrence's work. For Lawrence isn't accidentally or marginally anti-Shavian. Shaw represents as well as any writer the disorder of modern life that it was Lawrence's genius to diagnose so unanswerably (for his depreciators don't answer, they merely misrepresent, or, as Mr. Rubinstein does, ignore him). And Shaw's case illustrates well how immensely Lawrence's preoccupation, where sex is concerned, transcends anything that the word 'sex' suggests. _ What repels Lawrence in Shaw is what Mr. Rubinstein acclaims as the triumph of reason. It is the automatism, the emptiness and the essential irreverence—all that makes Shaw boring and cheap; the emotional nullity that when, as in St. Joan, he confidently invites us to respond to depth and moving significance makes him embarrassing and nauseating. What Lawrence comments on in 'A propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' is Shaw's treatment of sex : He has a curious blank in his make-up. To him all sex is infidelity and only infidelity is sex. Marriage is sexless, null. Sex is only manifested in infidelity, and the queen of sex is the chief prostitute. If sex crops up in marriage, it is because one party falls in love with somebody else, and wants to be unfaithful. Infidelity is sex, and prostitutes know all about it. Wives know nothing and are nothing, in that respect. . . Our chief thinkers, ending in the flippantly cock-sure Mr. Shaw, have taught this trash so thoroughly that it has almost become a fact.
This truth about Shaw is So plain that it didn't take a Law- rence to perceive it. Where the genius appears is in the way in which Lawrence illuminates the significance of the trait and of the whole Shavian phenomenon, and justifies his own par- ticular kind of insistence on the crucial importance of a right attitude to sex. To say that his own attitude is a religious one is not to say that he makes sex his religion. How much more than sex (the 'sex' of Mr. Moore's title) is in question the great passage about the 'body' in 'A propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' makes manifest—'body' standing for all that spon- taneous life which the conscious mind, with its attached ego and 'personality,' and its instrument of will, can thwart, but cannot command. The body's life, says Lawrence, is the life of real feelings; but 'our education from the start has taught us a certain range of emotions, what to feel and what not to feel, and how to feel the feelings we allow ourselves to feel,' and today we are 'creatures whose active emotional life has no real existence, but all is reflected downwards from the mind.' The 'higher emotions' have to be faked: And by higher emotions we mean love in all its mani- festations, from genuine desire to tender love, love of our fellowmen, and love of God : we mean love, joy, delight, hope, true indignant anger, passionate sense of justice and injustice, truth and untruth, honour and dishonour, and real belief in anything: for' belief is a profound emotion that has
the mind's connivance. •
superior to any conceivable novelist. It is a pleasing prefer- ence in a lawyer.
The other major pieces in the volume besides 'A propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' are Pornography and Obscenity' and Introduction to these Paintings, one of the most impressive of all Lawrence's essays. It brings home to us the astonishing reality of his immense knowledge; his perceptions and judge- ments are always first-hand. Here is an account of the essential deyelojnent of European painting, with some amusing and devastating comments on Clive Bell and Roger Fry. The shorter pieces exemplify the extremely free colloquial manner that Lawrence used for the admirable journalism of which he Wrote so much in the later years (his superb tales being in so little request).
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