Belle and Sebastian’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress works well for cleaning-music.
Will likely finish Lawrence’s The Trespasser today. Finished Sons and Lovers last week. Aside from reading an inordinate amount of D.H. Lawrence, I’ve also started reading Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and like it quite well. Will read St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul next.
Aside from Lawrence himself, I’ve also started reading a fair amount of criticism on him. In January, Nathanael’s father, Dr. Mosley, took us to New Orleans. I picked up some 1950s criticism on Lawrence at a used bookstore. I’m relieved to find that many critics have also held the same dissatisfactions and criticisms with Lawrence’s works. For all his subject matter…and insights…the man seems to have absolutely no concept of love. It’s exhausting and disturbing. And really, really sick. Eliseo Vivas, in D.H. Lawrence: The Failure and Triumph of Art, points out that Lawrence had no understanding of agape.
Having said this we have at last arrived at what I take to be the very heart of the heresy Lawrence espoused. Not only does he interpret in his own idiosyncratic manner the Father and the Holy Ghost; he denies the Son. After a fashion he acknowledged the first and third Persons. His interpretation would have been shocking not only to Eliot and Bishop Temple but even to his own nonconformist ancestors. Sometimes, but not often, Lawrence referred to the Son. But Lawrence did not in his heart acknowledge Him. Lawrence denied Him, and he denied Him because he hated Him. To acknowledge Him would have meant acknowledging the role of love — not eros but agape — in our Western world. And to make this acknowledgement would have involved a repudiation of his deepest feelings, his radical alienation and his radical misanthropy. Lawrence, a bundle of inconsistencies, was consistent on one point: he never would give up the assumption of the radical difference between his own superiority and the inferiority of the mob. He was willing to call himself the priest of love, but the love he served was eros. Agape he would not and could not serve.
Fortunately we do not have to depend on inferences here, he himself expressed his attitude clearly. Thus, in a letter to Middleton Murry of October, 1925 he writes: “. . . Must you write about Jesus? Jesus becomes more unsympathisch to me, the longer I live: cross and nails and tears and all that stuff! I think he showed us into a nice cul-de-sac.” In an essay on “Aristocracy” he flatly asserts the essential difference, a difference in being, in kind, and an infinite one, between some men and the majority. And in Apocalypse he writes: “The Christian doctrine of love even at its best was an evasion. Even Jesus was going to reign ‘hereafter’ when his ‘love’ would be turned into confirmed power. This business of reigning in glory hereafter went to the root of Christianity, and is, of course, only an expression of frustrated desire to reign here and now.”
Lawrence’s attitude towards agape involves more than theological heresy. It is a moral defect that has its unlovely side. His defenders have tried to clear him from a charge sometimes brought against him that, for all his contempt of Mussolini, Lawrence had a well developed streak of proto-fascism. He was not, as one might expect, a consistent proto-fascist. But the tendency is there and it is deep-rooted in a psychology incapable of love. It is useless to try to deny it.
This is not all. When we put his scorn for agape together with his attitude toward the infallibility of his feelings, we get an attitude and a body of beliefs that constitutes the least acceptable aspect of his ideology, since they lead him to the conclusion — logical enough given its premises — that any act of his, if authentic, is beyond reproach. This is found in his essays and sometimes turned into the genuine art of his novels. In the foreword to Women in Love he writes: “Nothing that comes from the deep passional soul is bad, or can be bad. So there is no apology to tender, unless the soul itself, if it should have been belied.” [‘Just because you feel it / doesn’t mean it’s there.’ –Radiohead.]
Give me a second…the mail’s here. Vernon Staley’s The Ceremonial of the English Church just arrived. Excellent.
. . . Just how far was Lawrence willing to go? Apparently there was no limit. If Lawrence’s deep passional soul prompts him to kill, it is perfectly right for him to do so, and if Lawrence’s soul leads him to hate or to love, that, too, is right. And it may have been right for Frieda [his wife, whom he stole from Ernest Weekly, husband and father of her three children] also, for we remember the time recorded by one of his biographers, when Frieda broke a plate on Lawrence’s head while he was washing dishes . . .
. . .There are times when the reader of Lawrence is tempted to give up. He asks himself in exasperation, Why bother, why? All this misanthropy, this insufferable, childish arrogance, the kicking of our world’s hard-won moral principles — can the beauty he often brings into his pages make up for these ugly qualities? [Don’t I know it…must avoid misanthropy…must not retire to a nunnery…must not project Lawrence’s motives unto other men…] . . .
. . .Lawrence himself did not hesitate to acknowledge to his friends at times that he had raging murder in his soul. In an undated letter to Lady Ottoline Morel [Morel? Paul Morel?], placed by Huxley immediately after one dated June 1916, Lawrence makes a pathetic statement, moving in its sincerity and impressive because it is one of those frequent instances in which he saw himself with cruel objectivity. He writes:
I have had a great struggle with the Powers of Darkness lately. I think I have just got the better of them again. Don’t tell me there is no Devil; there is a Prince of Darkness. Sometimes I wish I could let go and be really wicked — kill and murder — but kill chiefly. I do want to kill. But I want to select whom I shall kill. Then I shall enjoy it. The war is no good. It is this black desire I have become conscious of. We cant so much about goodness — it is canting. Tell Russell he does the same — let him recognize the powerful malignant will in him.
Thus it is not possible to flatly contradict Bertrand Russell when he tells us that Lawrence’s “metaphysical philosophy of ‘the blood’ ” leads straight to Auschwitz…Russell of all people! I appreciate that.
T.S. Eliot (predictably) blames it on the fact that Lawrence (born a congregationalist, but that’s beside the fact…presumably, anyway…then again perhaps it’s the fact that speaks for itself…in any event, he ended as something of an animist) did not acknowledge the authority of an orthodox tradition (Eliot obviously referring to the triad of Anglo-Catholicism, royalism, and classicism, in this case…with Vivas pointing out: Orthodox? But what about Catholic and Eastern?), following only his ‘Inner Light’.
Other things of which I’m tired: 1) New Women, 2) Siegmund, 3) Paul Morel.
Oh, right! The floor’s dry. Time to put the kitchen back together and fold clothes. And then, work on Latin I suppose.
Going to see Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation tonight with my ex-roommate. Nathanael flies in on Friday, and that is two days away. Did anyone make it to the L’Abri Conference in Rochester, Minnesota last weekend? I missed it.