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ANN WORDSWORTH
The Quest for Ranunitn: D. II, Lawrence's Letters to S. S. Koteliansky edited by George J. Zytaruk (McGill! Queens UP 113s) Planning Utopia is quite a favourite literary pastime despite its inbuilt absurdity. Writers want so much—order within which to be creative, unthreatening relationships which are serviceable without being degrading, a milieu in which work is a pleasure and sex involves love. Yet the pantisocracy which Coleridge and Southey hoped to set up on the banks of the Susquehanna in 1794 was less fraught with contradictions, absurd as it was, than D. H. Lawrence's new community, Rananim, 'this little Hesperides of the soul and body', the inconceivable offspring of Hebrew music and Garsington weekends.
The scheme began idyllically, during a walking tour in the Lake District, just before the declaration of war. 'It seems like another life', Lawrence wrote to Lady Cynthia As- quith in 1915, 'we were happy—four men.' I had been walking in Westmoreland, rather happy, with water lilies twisted round my hat—big, heavy, white and gold water lilies that we found in a pool high up—and girls who had come out on a spree and who were having tea in the upper room of an inn, shrieked with laughter. And I remember also we crouched under the loose wall on the moors and the rain flew by in streams, and the wind came rushing through the chinks in the wall behind one's head and we shouted songs, and I imitated music hall turns, whilst the other men crouched under-the wall and I pranked in the rain on the turf in the gorse and Koteliansky groaned Hebrew Music,'—Ranani Sadekim Badanoi.
Alas for the letters. A record of Kot singing might evoke the magic better than the correspondence does. In fact, Koteliansky's role in the scheme was more or less played out by the end of the walking tour. The important letters about Rananim are to Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell and other literary friends; Lawrence only mentions the scheme to Kot sen- timentally, and later rather wearily: 'one is eight years older and a thousand years more disconnected with everything.'
The real subject of the letters is what Lawrence sourly describes as 'the dribbling inevitable of pettifogging fate': money pro- blems, instructions for sending on parcels and getting supplies. quarrels. Kot was pro- bably the sturdiest and kindest of Lawrence's friends and certainly, in correspondence, one of the dullest He doesn't spark' off any of Lawrence's brilliant theorising, just rebukes for his -inertia, his living like a toad in a cave—`a den plumbfull of newspapers, leaves of einnamon for me, not newspapers.'
What an exasperating correspondence. It should be so revealing: written over so long a time, from the walking tour to the month before Lawrence's death, from so many places—Sicily, Ceylon, Australia, Mex- ico—to a close friend whom Frieda Lawrence very much disliked. The op- portunities for indiscretion were certainly there, but were not taken. There is far too much day-to-day directive, not enough literary discussion, and too little gossip—though what there is, is sharp and good : Bertrand Russell, `Garsington tea- party Bertie pronouncing on Lenin, what kind of realism is -real nowadays?' The Sitwells: 'I never in my life saw such a strong strange family complex: as if they were moored on a desert strand, and nobody in the world but their lost selves.'
But the vecu, the lived experience, is what is lacking. There is one strong outburst: `God above, leave me single and separate and unthinkably distinguished from the rest: let me be a paradisal being, but never a human being.' One funny blasphemy : 'Really I suspect Jesus of having had very little to do with sheep that he could call him- self the Lamb of God.' One piece of literary raw material: 'I saw a most beautiful brindled adder in the spring, curled up asleep with her head on her shoulder. She did not hear me till I was very near. Then she must have felt my motion, for she lifted her head like a queen to look, then turned and moved slowly on with delicate pride into the bushes .. . It is queer the intimation of other worlds which one catches.'
Lawrence's painful and defiant ex- plorations of self, the fraught interactions of life and creativity, are kept for letters to other friends and of course for the novels themselves. Kot was too inert to be stimulating, too kind and practical to be-pro- voked, too moody to be subtly responsive. Catherine Cal-swell's account of the Cafe Royal dinner in 1924 when Lawrence got drunk and Kot held forth shows exactly the exuberant awkward camaraderie the rela- tionship was based on : 'Lawrence is a great man.' (Bang! down came Kot's strong fist enclosing the stem of a glass so that its bot- tom came in shivering contact with the table.) 'Nobody here realises how great he is.' (Crash! another good wine glass gone.) 'Especially no woman here or anywhere can possibly realise the greatness of Lawrence.'
But if Kot is to be blamed for not drawing more out of Lawrence, the editor is also tO blame for promising overmuch. It is not at all certain that the reader is lucky that Lawrence lived 'prior to the common-place availability of the telephone', as Mr Zytaruk chooses to put it, if the information preserved could perfectly well have been conveyed by a three-minute call. Perhaps the whole problem of publishing complete col- lections, trivia, post cards and all, is due for a reconsideration. A full census of letters with some in pre-cis and important ones printed in full is of more interest to general readers and as much use to scholars as the over-con- scientious printing of everything. In this case, the title is misleading, the enthusiastic introduction is not supported by the con- tents, and the elegant format of ap- proximately one letter to a page makes it an extremely expensive book.
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