I told a number of people, some academic, that I was hoping to write a commentary for this edition1; and alas, met with a mixture of cynicism and commiseration, if not very plain distaste. Lawrence was third ( just beaten by Dostoevsky and George Eliot, if I remember) on D. L. Mencken’s list of the ten most boring writers of all time. F. R. Leavis’s fine study of Lawrence in 1955 showed that the other Eliot, Thomas Stearns, was archepiscopally—and very unpoetically—dismissive of him. Sadly few of those I spoke to, and especially among the non-academics, seemed anxious to treat him much more kindly. Lawrence, or at any rate that last-period Lawrence, was clearly no longer with it, was quite passé. Death had sunk him out of sight like a deep-diving whale, and therefore, in this ever less tolerant (and literate) world, out of mind. This is a common fate for the much-studied, of course, one of those ‘snatches of lovely oblivion and snatches of renewal’ on the ‘longest journey’ that wouldn’t have distressed Lawrence or his once-living self. I can’t imagine he ever seriously doubted that in human memory he would stay as fixed as a star in Heaven—or a species of flower on earth. He needed no wreaths, and knew his little ship of death would sail through all the doubts, decryings, and disparagements. As indeed, in all practical terms, it has; yet he always (he loved paradox, falling in hate as well as in love) risked rough seas for his human name, if not for his non-human soul.
Above all this isn’t the age for sermons. We can tolerate smart slogans, good advertising copy, fluent jargon . . .but Lawrence sometimes seems impossible. Anyone would think the man hadn’t read a single word on deconstruction, or postmodern theory, or political correctness . . . or a dozen other vitally important matters. To say what you mean is hard enough; to sound as if you actually meant what you said is preposterous, ludicrously naive.
Born in 1926, four years before Lawrence himself died, I still hold some no doubt disgracefully antediluvian (to anyone smarter and younger) views on literary and other values. Words (and how they’re used) continue to fascinate and haunt me. I still, dullard that I am, can’t accept that since they all equally deal with signs, his poems (or Blake’s, Shelley’s, anyone else’s) must be classed with the dullest commercial or the most abstruse scientific texts. In short, I can’t discount Lawrence as seems nowadays increasingly expected of his readers. He remains to me of the dimensions, in the context of both the Victorian and our own times, of a peak in the Everest range, or of the importance of rich old cities such as Rome or Paris, or of the value of some whole botanical genus, an oak or primrose family—much too lastingly significant to be forgotten. Lawrence is very big; you may criticize and despise him, but you had better do it bigly also. Neither sniggers nor a latter-day Pecksniffianism are enough.
I am an atheist (more of that later) as to all ideas of an established and intervenient God; but not in my belief that there are comparative worths, in science as in the arts, and affecting us both as members of society and as individuals. Some objects and ideas do have value, though others may be as futile as a film star’s fart—and only too often, as noisome. Above all I loathe the drift (a kind of fascism of the majority) that would so homogenize, suburbanize, and ‘democratize’ life as to make it lose all its varieties and roughnesses—make it, like margarine, ‘easy to spread’. If we attempt to destroy all distinctions, and especially those (for example in education, sensitivity, intelligence, and passion) to which we can personally lay no great claim, perhaps other people won’t notice that we’re actually rather dull and ordinary or that (horror of horrors) there are others who are different.
There are too many people on earth
insipid, unsalted, rabbity, endlessly hopping.
They nibble the face of the earth to a desert.2
This difference first struck—seized—me when I went to Oxford in the 1940s. I was studying French and supposedly solely absorbed in all that, from the Chanson de Roland to Sartre and Camus; not in peculiar English visionaries such as Lawrence. Nevertheless, like many of my wartime generation, I fell on my knees with him. He said so many things we believed or didn’t believe in, yet couldn’t articulate; he had shocked my own parents’ fuddy-duddy generation. It was obvious they were very wrong (not least, had they—and we!—but seen it, for having produced us). They’d also fathered and mothered the botched society most of us middle-class children came from. How had Lawrence (in his 1927 short story ‘A Dream of Life’) defined it? A society full of ‘paltriness, smallness, meanness, fathomless ugliness, combined with a sort of chapel-going respectability!’ He was writing about Eastwood in the Midlands, where he himself had been born, but he might—give or take some minor class and cultural differences—just as convincingly have been describing the suburbs where I was born myself.
Some writers speak to you. They can attract and fascinate; you may admire and envy them; yet somehow they never manage to establish the most serious writer-reader bond, which is a relationship almost like a marriage, and as closely intimate as an old friendship or love affair. By ‘speaking’ we mean ‘writing’ as if it may be assumed you are friends or lovers (or brothers and sisters) and so constitute a close human bond. I’ve been very aware of this ‘speaking’ and being ‘spoken to’ all my own literary life, both as reader and as writer. It can take place across countless centuries; it is totally indifferent to both place and time. We use ‘to speak’ in this somewhat odd way because of a parallel with drama. We may read Hamlet, written about 1600. But when we see it acted, it is now, eternally now, of the very hour we see it. ‘Speaking’ in the novel, in this sense, destroys all other ‘real’ time between the writing and the reading, as between the acted and the written in the theatre. It’s by no means inevitably present, even in those writers who can and do sometimes ‘speak’. It’s by no means always present in Lawrence. He can write too much, can be a virulently judgemental bore; I can guess why Mencken so disliked him. But then, sometimes, you leap to him, or rather he leaps you with him, like the horse St Mawr, to an effortlessly and infinitely higher plane, almost to another planet. Then he does ‘speak’, here, now, in the same room. To hell with time and death, the blackshirt tyrants of our helot being: Lawrence is.
This speaking was what first called me to Lawrence, and it is why I have always counted him as a very strong influence on my own writing, I now think a much greater one than the French existentialists, allegedly my favourites. ‘He was a part of me’, in A. L. Rowse’s phrase. But since the 1940s and my Oxford years, an unhappy shift of cultural mood has taken place in Britain. There were countless reasons for this change, not least the bitter experience of the two world wars and the loss of empire. Perhaps it is best labelled, broadly, as the collapse of a belief or faith in a positive life, a seemingly overwhelming need to denigrate and a fear of proving foolish if you do the opposite. It is (significantly) accompanied by a general ignorance of and indifference towards nature. Satire and mockery, a comic-sour doubt of the serious (curiously similar to a trait in Jewish culture, which of course has a much longer and more painful history of suffering), have since at least the 1950s been very acceptable attitudes to take or show in England, not least among the supposedly intelligent and culturally alert. When it was directed against so many patently outmoded social and political habits and notions, it was defensible, but when it began to shift to a universal disparagement . . .
Of course this oxymoronic bittersweet English culture (Keats and Byron, or just Byron alone, for that matter) has always had a soft, romantic side as well as a hard, satirical, or lampoon-loving one. But the current sneer or snigger on the British face, so evident in these last thirty years, has not really been able to swallow Lawrence. He is too easy to make fun of, to mock, to put down for being so preoccupied by his own ideas, so positive that all his instincts—intuition turned dogma—must be right. I can hardly blame the denigrators. Swept on in the general flood of carping, I have implicitly denied him myself (and to myself) for decades. I was stupidly wrong, but surely that snigger, that too-fastidious (too distorted by the zeitgeist) dismissal, weren’t therefore right. Aspects of Lawrence, especially in those last years, do remain near impossible to defend or justify, indeed sometimes near the ridiculous. It is the ones that don’t that we tend—if we don’t positively try—to forget.
There are now countless critical and biographical accounts of Lawrence, and it is not my job—nor my wish—to ape an academic. I am a fellow novelist and feel a frequent sympathy and admiration for him; not a scholar-critic, desperate to amass new facts and make definitive judgements. It’s not that I scorn all critics, but I know the enormous gulf between creating and judging, which has nothing—or very little—to do with comparative knowledges or intelligences, and far more with possessing a kind of religiousness. . . the need not just to teach, but to express one’s finer self through teaching.
Briefly, Lawrence first saw the Mexicos, both old and new, in 1922. Some three years later, in 1925, he fell seriously ill there with influenza and malaria, and his tuberculosis was confirmed. At the end of that year he moved—it was to prove forever—back to Europe. In that last lustrum of his life (he was to die in 1930), his final spirit hardened and took shape. Again and again he tried to net the butterfly (‘Farewell, farewell, lost soul!’) less seen than sensed. What happens to us after death? With that was bound up another great issue. Why was humanity so ubiquitously sick, in a psychic equivalent of his own wretched state of health? It was his numerous plunges into these two dark worlds, trespassing on those of anthropology and theology, philosophy and metaphysics (to say nothing of that of politics), that were to cause the trouble. Bertrand Russell thought Lawrence led directly to the Nazis; and some of what he wrote in this period can be taken (especially if one suffers from tunnel vision and overliteralism) as highly offensive to many now (sixty years later) widely held views on matters such as fascism, racism, and feminism.
During Easter 1927, Lawrence and his American friend Earl Brewster, passing a shop window in Volterra, Italy, had seen a toy white cock escaping from an egg. Brewster suggested it presented both a potential title and the chance to broach the theme of resurrection. He knew he was sowing a seed in fertile ground, for they were in Volterra gathering material for Etruscan Places (which devotes a chapter to the little town and their visit). The old culture was already deeply attracting Lawrence.
The Etruscan religion is concerned with all those physical and creative powers and forces which go to the building up and the destroying of the soul: the soul, the personality, being that which gradually is produced out of chaos, like a flower, only to disappear again into chaos, or the underworld. We, on the contrary, say: In the beginning was the Word!—and deny the physical universe true existence. We exist only in the Word, which is beaten out thin to cover, gild, and hide all things.
A result of this incident was the first part of The Man Who Died, called ‘The Escaped Cock’. It was first published in Forum in February 1928. A further part, written that same year, was then added to the first, and the whole published, still under the same title, by the Crosbys at the Black Sun Press in Paris in September 1929. Lawrence always preferred his own original title, and never authorized The Man Who Died (though he ‘reluctantly’ allowed its use on an abortive London edition). A first public edition in Britain under the new title appeared from Martin Secker in March 1931; a first American, from Alfred Knopf, six months later. The complex story of the various manuscripts and typescripts of the two parts and their publication is told at length by Gerald M. Lacy in the Black Sparrow Press edition of The Escaped Cock3 and also, more simply, in Keith Sagar’s introduction to Lawrence’s Complete Short Novels.4
Almost everything he wrote in the later 1920s throws light on this austere last novel, but of especial value must be the Last Poems and Apocalypse, published posthumously in 1931 and 1932, respectively. An article entitled ‘The Risen Lord’, first printed in 1929, may be read now in Phoenix II. Sagar felt this was so pertinent that it constituted almost a third of the novel. Of lesser but still obvious value are Etruscan Places, first published in 1932, and St Mawr of 1925. This last is also about a resurrection of a kind, and is, to my mind, among the very best of Lawrence’s last fictions. I have just read it in tandem with The Man Who Died, and can vouch for their closeness; though one is almost sweet sherry to the other’s eau-de-vie. The Man is very near a sermon; St Mawr remains a brilliant short novel.
There is no doubt how highly Lawrence himself valued The Man Who Died, whatever his feelings may have been over the title. Several letters stress its importance. After his various brushes with the police following the 1914–1918 war, most notoriously over Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to a sick man it must at the very least have threatened still more trouble. Christ is shown resurrected and sexually potent (‘I am risen’—how dare he make such an abominable pun on one of our most sacred mysteries!). He doesn’t even discreetly couple, as any decent Anglo-Saxon should, with a respectable Christian woman, but flaunts his manhood with the mere priestess of some pagan cult, a shameless foreigner.
Today, these sixty-two profoundly changed and changing years later, surely only the most bigoted and least imaginative could feel outraged. Anyone above that miserable level will understand that Lawrence’s rejection of his early nonconformist chapel upbringing was based far more on social and aesthetic matters than on narrow sectarian ones. He asserted again and again that he was religious, indeed deeply respected Christ, at least symbolically, even if he couldn’t accept much of what the Church and theology had made of him . . . and their insistence that all the faithful sheep must believe. In the last few decades we have perpetrated (and continue to perpetrate) quite enough only-too-real secular and biological crimes to make whatever blasphemy there is in The Man Who Died seem very mild indeed.
I am in Lawrence’s case myself, having for years publicly called myself an atheist. As I said, in terms of all established religion (and most politics), I am so, with no belief whatever in either a personal afterlife or an intervening deity. To old-style believers, the world of people such as myself may seem incredibly bleak. But it isn’t. For a start, our beliefs oblige us to put all reward for living—all its aesthetic point and ethical purpose, all its joys and all its duties—into life itself; and then we sometimes know, as we claim ourselves atheists, that we may also be religious, but can’t say so because the word is so often assumed to be a synonym for ‘Christian’. Lawrence transparently sensed this seeming paradox, I believe, and more acutely than any other writer of this century.
There are many eyewitness accounts (such as Cynthia Asquith’s) of the almost palpable charge of life-energy he seemed to exude. He was ‘preternaturally alive’; there was an ‘electric elemental quality that gave him a flickering radiance’. He was different from other people, and not just in degree, but in kind.
What he intensely prized was this acute awareness of being, a sensitivity like that of a Geiger counter aroused or evoked by and in all that existed, though most strongly in simple nature and the primitive worlds remotest from high culture—that is (we lack an exact word for it), the ability to feel and venerate the existingness in things. It isn’t quite the same as Duns Scotus’s medieval ‘haecceity’ (Gerald Manley Hopkins’s ‘thisness’), the separate individuality in all things; but much more a fundamental intuitive sense of their being. Of course we humans all imagine we have this sense; we know we’re alive. But much of Lawrence’s hatred of the cold, ‘overcivilized’ north—not least of England and North America— stemmed precisely from his feeling that we very largely lacked any true apprehension of this existingness, indeed behaved as if we couldn’t believe it was there. We might have faint intimations of such a sensitivity, but we didn’t, like him, profoundly treasure both it and all that provokes it. We couldn’t, or we wouldn’t have allowed a perverted Christianity and our maniacal pursuit of the Devil—or Mammon—and the lethally soulless machine (‘Man invented the machine so now the machine has invented the man’) so grossly to distort our societies and our psyches. One of his best-known attempts to convey existingness was in the short story ‘Sun’, which also belongs to this last period and to his final return to Europe and his beloved Mediterranean.
I very much doubt if I fully understood the implications of realizing this existingness when I first fell for Lawrence. I did share it, though only slowly. It is why I became a natural historian; it is why I became a writer myself, always stumbling, despite being a novelist, after the poem; why I constantly declare myself an atheist, yet remain endlessly fascinated by religion, even by sects as remote as the Shakers; it is why, though also calling myself a French existentialist, I could never accept le néant and la nausée as one was supposed to do in those long-past years. Above all it’s the existingness of things that has for me invariably dulled and diminished their other, much more obvious qualities and importances: their beauty, their social and political significance, their moral aspects . . . all have been thrown into shadow by the dazzling revelation, like some all-changing nuclear flash, that why they are or purport to be means far, far less than that they exist.
I may speak of it as if all this were (it does so seem with Lawrence) some sort of innate gift, like a musical or a colour sense or one of balance. Undoubtedly it is so in part; but I very strongly believe that it is also something that can be acquired, can be learned and practised, the susceptibility to it increased. At any rate I am sure that the manifold manners of life that most of us have given ourselves (or more often, that society gives us) are deeply hostile and inimical to this sense of existingness. Almost all our social cultures clearly see it as a threat. Our philosophies and religions, our pleasures and pastimes, both our cultural and commoner routines and habits . . . it is almost as if they were deliberately (devilishly!) designed to blur and obscure the fact that I exist—or better, that the ‘I’ exists; and this ‘I’ is on his or her one and only brief ‘holiday’ from an eternity of oblivion, the néant of the existentialists. To begin to know, so that you may fully accept, this—put most simply, that you both live and must die—is shattering, not least because it makes the apparent absence of any knowledge or acceptance of it in our societies incomprehensible. Why on earth do we, how can we, remain so ineffably stupid?
It was his acute and often raging horror at the insanely blind folly of humankind, especially of its more fortunate and better educated, and their total failure to see the reality of their situation, that must be seen as the constant drive behind Lawrence through most of his adult life. It was exacerbated by the 1914–1918 war, but truly burst out in his last decade. It is what gave him his incredible, almost supranatural energy. The less familiar with his work sometimes shrug it off as mere egotistical vanity. It was not. It was his essence.
Against the supposed awful pessimism of us atheists concerning the nature of the afterlife must be set Lawrence’s own recurrent notion of the ‘strange flowers such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me’. These ‘flowers’ make up much of the Last Poems; in effect they assert that there is an afterlife for the soul, though not for the ‘me’, the individual ego. God breaks the loathsome, self-important ego down to His own oblivion, but then finally sends a soul forth to take its place, a new man on a new morning. Lawrence, of course, cannot be read for strict common sense, narrow science, or reason; but we may go to him for feeling. Feeling is what bursts through again and again into the numerous quasi-mantras of the Last Poems. He somehow can’t really believe, because he can’t feel (as he might feel a pinprick), that what he is will one day die.
So much of the last work was written at a near white heat that language is put under the deepest strain. There is perpetual war between an intellectual and a feeling Lawrence, between the someone who ‘wants out’ (who asks nothing, in his own words, ‘except to be left, in the last resort, alone, quite alone’) and the lifelong egocentric. He may conceive of an afterlife in oblivion—the great goal in ‘The Ship of Death’—since it submerges
the obscene ego
a grey void thing that goes without wandering
a machine that in itself is nothing
a centre of the evil world-soul.
He may invite the annihilation of his own ego, yet somehow, so strong is—and remains, in this lower, latter world!—his personality, his own residual self, that his eager self-immolation is never totally credible:
but in the great spaces of death
the winds of the afterwards kiss us into blossom of manhood.5
Like Lawrence, in such matters most of us rate feeling well above reason. We wander in a mist of vaguely ‘religious’ prejudices, of notions imbibed in childhood. It is like looking at the outside world through smeared glass, and sometimes we can barely see it. The effort of seeing it, of (in the current jargon) deconstructing it, is too much for most of us—I suspect less through lack of knowledge or intelligence than from a fear or dislike of having to face reality. Lawrence sensed this. It is one major reason he increasingly abandoned the (to him) flimsy froth of the more orthodox novel, and preferred to express himself (since he believed all his life that the novelist was superior to the poet, the philosopher, and the saint) in what was, for the previous admirers of his realism, a near-symbolic fiction. Even though what Lawrence himself always called The Escaped Cock was set in the Mediterranean, its techniques may seem as bare, if not as barren, as a New Mexican or Arizonan desert. In all this very last work he is repeatedly hammering nails, or one great nail, home. He hardly writes to please; he writes to teach through symbols. In short, he writes to parable.
All his life, ever since the days of the Pagans’ group at Eastwood in England and the pipe dream of his ideal colony, Rananim, with its echoes of Coleridge and Southey’s Pantisocracy, Lawrence had evolved a faith: the purpose of the novel was to teach. It was didactic, moral; never to merely amuse nor simply entertain. In the Fantasia of the Unconscious (published in 1922, just before he began The Plumed Serpent), he declares that ‘for the mass of the people knowledge must be symbolical, mythical, dynamic’. This requires a ‘higher, responsible, conscious class’—the Lawrences of this world—to present and produce what the lower classes might absorb and learn from. As so often, Lawrence risked at best inconsistency, having so long damned modern civilization and education, and at worst the menacing tar-brush of fascism. But the underlying signal is clear. In The Man >Who Died Lawrence was not concerned to demonstrate what he had so often proved, that he could write fine and beautiful near-realistic novels. The Plumed Serpent of 1926 had come out of the impact of New Mexico and his sense of his own ‘decayed Christianity’; but it had come also from an old self, which hadn’t fully recognized the intense, burning-rapid development of the new Lawrence in the cold arms of death. I suspect this is why, like most, I count it a failure.
The new self needed the starkness and simplicity of The Man Who Died, Apocalypse, and the Last Poems, almost as Beethoven needed the sublimities of certain passages in the last quartets and piano sonatas. The Plumed Serpent hadn’t made it clear enough what was wrong with Christianity, its placing of far too much stress on the Christ-Child and, especially since the 1914–1918 war, the Christ Crucified, and not nearly enough on what was for Lawrence the essential, the Christ Reborn. In Apocalypse he further placed the blame for the misleading of man and the corruption of true Christianity on the Revelation of St John of Patmos. In his 1931 introduction to the book, explaining the hostility of many intellectuals, Richard Aldington wrote, ‘Lawrence’s fundamental heresy was simply that he placed quality of feelings, intensity of sensations and passion before intellect. In this he is the very antithesis of Bernard Shaw. . ..’
Needless to say, this novel is not faultless. There’s always a danger in using euphemisms. Personally I in general prefer them to the careless crudity of so much contemporary would-be realism, but their drawback is that they can, and with time only too often do, pratfall into unintended humour. Every novelist knows the problem of sex: whom will your words please, whom will they offend? The woman-flows (not menstruation!), the new suns coming up, the intricate warm roses, the shutting and stirring lotuses, the scars and buds: they don’t always present Lawrence at his happiest.
Nor does the element that has upset so many women in recent years, and I think quite rightly: his often rather painfully obtrusive masculinismphallicism. This aspect of Lawrence, like his rashes of anti-Semitism, is not acceptable to many of us since the Holocaust and the rise of the feminist movement. Yet I believe that the virtues of both his writing and his personality enormously exceed the black shadows of these familiar bees in his bonnet. Lawrence is not quasi-divinely perfect, and we can’t make him so.
One of those virtues is to my mind the way he finds such a simple, sometimes near-biblical, style to tell his story. The occasional flashes of his old poetry show a last relic of his acute powers of existingness: old feeling infuses skilled imagining. There is that always fertile pithiness, that flair for the striking phrase (what an asset he would have proved on Madison Avenue): ‘words beget words, even as gnats’; ‘the dread insomnia of compulsion’; ‘the sheer stillness of the inner life’; and many others.
I have never been able to read Lawrence for long before being plunged, besides the sympathy and affection (and pepper-grains of irritation), into thought. Part of his hyperawareness, his existingness, his soul-energy, is that he seems also a mirror for the reader. You must start searching for yourself in his texts. The Man Who Died needs to be read by someone fully aware of the despairing, almost hectic seriousness with which Lawrence saw mankind’s deep-rooted psychological and emotional problems. Those last are what this text is essentially about, not the precise rightness or wrongness of its views concerning Christ. The human side of the world, our world, is very sick, and has become several times worse since Lawrence himself died; and I believe we need, desperately, whatever our own religious beliefs, to listen to his message. He isn’t trying to shock us; but trying passionately, like all good preachers, to save us.
I’d like to finish with two quotations, the one from Richard Aldington’s introduction to Apocalypse, and the other from the very last page of Apocalypse itself, which gives both Lawrence’s living mind and his living soul.
First Aldington:
I shall only say a little about The Man Who Died. It is intensely personal, and the saddest thing Lawrence ever wrote. It is the only thing in his work which looks like a confession of defeat, and this he promptly countered by writing Apocalypse. The opening part when he describes the mingled agony and gradual happiness in creeping back from death to life is full of pathos; one can’t help thinking of his own sufferings as he recovered from one or other of his serious crises. Like much of Lawrence’s writing, it has more than one meaning. You can take it as an expression of his latest feelings about Jesus—a rejection of Jesus as a teacher, an acceptance of Jesus as the lover. The mistake of Jesus was not in loving, but in trying to influence men by a doctrine of love. Even when he was struggling with the problem of love and hatred, Lawrence was always a great lover; his deepest and most passionate belief was in love.
What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his ‘soul’. Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterward. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.
1. This essay was first printed by the Yolla Bolly Press in California, 1992. It was then reissued by the Ecco Press, New York, in 1994.
2. D. H. Lawrence, ‘There Are Too Many People’, in Last Poems (New York: Viking Press, 1933).
3. Los Angeles, 1973.
4. London: Penguin, 1982.
5. See Keith Sagar’s D.H. Lawrence, Penguin, 1986.