BOOKS

Towards the Great Secret By STEPHEN POTTER 2‘14 old enough to have lived through the two Iseparate decades of Lawrencismus—first the Twenties; and then the revival, which began in the mid-Fifties. The skewy shape of Lawrence acceptance in the Twenties was dictated by a kind of official or stock criticism. The peak of Praise came early, with the success of Women in Love; but as the later novels appeared, we were told that the early ones were the best—not, par- ticularly not, the wondrous Rainbow, but the more conventional Sons and Lovers. The what-a- Pity note was sounded. All this preoccupation With sex (of Lawrence the Puritan!), all these 'fixed ideas' (stick-in-the-mud Lawrence) about the dark gods. It was the same with the poetry. Birds, Beasts and Flowers was earlyish and there- fore good (`Lawrence is simply marvellous about the snake'). Afterwards—Pansies and the rest— were 'just bad temper,' the irritable journal of a disappointed man.

It would be hard to over-emphasise how de- pressing and puzzling these half-truths and rank falsifications seemed to those who loved and en- loYed Lawrence's genius. Even more exasperating has been the fact that the Lawrence revival seems to have evoked an echo revival of this same sort Of criticism, a bad dream of 'we have been here before,' including a repeat even of the knock- about interlude of the Keystone Cops and Lady Chatterley, plus, this time, horror-comic eminent don in the role of Private Inspector.

Yet how eloquently these volumes of the Com- plete Poems,* which are arranged in order of date, show that Lawrence was always evolvrng towards a more complete and perfect power. les, perfect, if we remember that most of the Poems in the second volume had never been !een by him in print, and had never been sub- /ected to the detailed and trenchant revision Which he often rightly felt that his work needed.

The majority of these were published two years after Lawrence's death, by Richard Aldington. I saw them then, but I think at that time, 1932, We were too exhausted by the very name D. H. Lawrence to absorb them properly. Reading this second volume now I realise that I, also, had been the victim of a personal stock judgment of Lawrence's poetry. I had been convinced that the best elements—the physical description, of the Place, the rock, the fur of the animal, the hard- ness of the bough before budding, the 'sap thundering in the trees'—were often done as well or better in the prose. Now I must recant. The thought in the poem is often improved by com- pression; it has less of Lawrence's tricks of repetition, much less of the sometimes bad literary manners of his prose. That wonderful early poem 'Love on the Farm,' so closely woven that an excerpt is impossible, must have been written at the time of the first novel, The White * THE COMPLETE POEMS OF D. H. LAWRENCE. Edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts. (Heinemann, two volumes, 6 gns.) t Vtrint D. H. LAWRENCE IN NEW Mexico. By Knud Merrild. (Routledge, 35a.)

Peacock, and perfectly expresses its essence. (What a hole this poem must have made when it appeared among the gentle nature verses of the Georgian Poets anthology!) Later came 'Tuscan cypresses . . . folded in like a dark thought. . . . Is there a great secret? . . . Is it the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans?' Here is the first perfect epitome of the book of essays which followed, Etruscan Places.

Of course, few of the earliest verses have even half the power of 'Love on the Farm.' The young Lawrence, like the young Keats of 'I stood tip- toe,' is full of wonder which he cannot yet

express. And many of the last poems, the later Pansies, are footnotes, scraps; and many of the

scraps are served with a sauce of real hate.

Sometimes it truly is the voice of a sick man irritably fighting back with lines 'written on his nerves,' with hatred of all the 'nice' people, of the fat-witted policeman who locked up his pic- tures, of poor Tommy Earp, who criticised them.

Lawrence was very ill and—in 1929—very starved of financial success and recognition. He would not acknowledge anyone as his superior, not even Walt Whitman.

And whoever walks a mile full of false sympathy

Walks to the funeral of the whole human race It is in these moods that he sometimes sails near to a self-parody :

0 when the old world sacrificed a ram • it was to the gods who made us splendid and it was for a feast, a feast of meat, for men and maids • on a day, of splendour, for the further splendour of being men.

Above all, at this time, by the way, Lawrence was furiously reacting against the would-be dominance of Middleton Murry, which he em- phasised tetchily with: A man wrote to me: 'We missed it. you and I' . . A miss is as good as a mile mistel (The fact that this reference is to Murry, and that this thought, and the whole relationship between them, is fascinatingly expounded in Law- rence's last letter to Murry should be mentioned in the Notes, which are occasionally not quite full enough of this kind of information.) There is much cross advice to young men : 'Don't be sucked in by the su-superior.' Don't dwell in cities. 'For oh the poor people . . . I see the iron hook in their faces . . . pulling them back and forth to work, back and forth.' All negative; but then, on the next page perhaps, a splendid positive. If the modern young man were to ask me, 'Should I read Lawrence?' I would say, 'Yes, these pages especially. If you happen to catch on.' If you feel Lawrence can help you to free your mind from ideas 'as hard as acorns.' Read the lines 'Free Will,' Self-sacrifice,"For a Moment' (we can all sOmetimes be gods—for a moment). Or 'Thought': Thought, I love thought. But not the jaggling and twisting of already existent ideas . . .

Thought is not a•trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges.

Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.

For the old, there is the superb last sequence in the last poems, from 'Phoenix' to 'The Ship of Death,' where Lawrence accepts with glad- ness and with touching dignity the imminence of his own dissolution.

How does Lawrence do it? There has been much good criticism of this poetry, and much of it is well quoted in Professor Pinto's intro- ductory essay, itself full of wise, long-distilled judgments. Lawrence himself distinguishes 'ex- pressive form,' by which he means Coleridge's 'organic form,' from literary form. Lawrence thought of organic poetry—his poetry—as

poetry of this immediate present, instant poetry . . . the unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present, poetry whose permanency lies in its windlike transit.

This may seem 'an example of what Auden called Lawrence's 'wonderful wooziness,' or a valid de- scription of what Aldington described in Lawrence as the Poetry of Becoming, rather than of Being.

But there was one thing right about that early stock appreciation. Once more, as I read these poems, I hold my breath when I see the descrip- tion of an animal or plant in the offing, and I know for certain that I shall experience the familiar small joyful shock, that the seen will be made miraculously re-seen. It happens even in those last poems, whether it is whales, or Bavarian gentians, or a line or two on grass in blossom :

gniss in blossom, blossoming grass, risen to its height and its natural pride

in its own splendour and its own feathery maleness.

Knud Merrild's memoir of Lawrence in New Mexicof has just been re-issued. I agree with Aldous Huxley that it is one of the best of the many score Books On, and the only one, so far as I know, which gives a really satisfactory record of Lawrence's conversation. I know, this Taos country (as a 'tourist-skimmer,' Lawrence would say): and it is rather grim and flowerless, not outwardly provocative of poetry. But Law- rence lived in it, not on it : and though it seemed barren to him, too, the sight of an animal, a blue jay or, once, a dead mountain lion trapped by two Mexicans—such incidents would bring him to life and he would talk to and of animals, and it would work for him, says Merrild, 'as inspiration,' as a spring to set him going. From the talk would come a poem. There was a poem-on the dead lion :

Her round, bright face, bright as frost . . .

And stripes on the brilliant frost of her face, Sharp, fine dark rays . . .