Category: Influence
May 4, 2020 October 2, 2020 James Walker censorship, Environment, Influence, Rananim
Coronavirus and Literature: What we can learn from D.H. Lawrence
Frustrated with modernity and the literary establishment, D.H. Lawrence travelled the globe in search of Rananim. He believed a new way of being was possible, making this the philosophical focus of his novels. Can his ideas on community help us during these difficult times? Expect a few tantrums on the way…
Although he would have enjoyed the solitude, D.H. Lawrence wouldn't have coped very well with lockdown. Not because he was rubbish at following rules, but because he was a proper fidget. After leaving Britain in 1919 he travelled the globe, never settling in one place for more than two years. He refused to own property, making home in disused cabins at the top of mountains or being put up by friends. There were numerous reasons for his peripatetic lifestyle, but here we'll focus on one: Rananim.
It's believed that Lawrence first came across the concept of Ranamim when his friend S.S. Koteliansky sung the Hebrew chant Ranani Zadikim l'Adonoi to him. The two met in 1914 and were together in Barrow-in-Furness when WWI was declared. This was a significant time to bond as it marked a very difficult period for Lawrence as he suffered from poverty, political persecution – his wife was German, and frustrations with the censor that would plague his entire career. This is best captured in a letter to Edward Garnett in June 1912, when Lawrence really let rip:
"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it's a marvel they can breed. They can but frog-spawn — the gibberers! God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime."
This letter was in response to publisher William Heinemann who had rejected the first draft of his third novel, Sons and Lovers. This was eventually published in 1913 but it didn't take long for it to be banned from libraries. His next novel, The Rainbow (1915) was seized under the Obscene Publications Act and burned. Although it didn't contain any naughty words, it was deemed anti-British for daring to question everyday fundamentals such as work, religion, and relationships.
Lawrence was as frustrated with the publishing industry as he was with modernity. Industry dehumanized community and destroyed the natural landscape, whereas war demanded blind conformity to the flag and a further loss of individuality. He felt like he was the only one who could see this 'Ugliness. Ugliness. Ugliness' and so began to develop a philosophy for life through his novels. To do this he had to get away from Britain sharpish, and so embarked on a 'savage pilgrimage' of self-imposed exile.
"I shall say goodbye to England, forever, and set off in quest of our Rananim" he wrote to Koteliansky, on 12 January 1917. Rananim was the concept of a utopian community, a place where humanity could rise from the ashes of the past and old values, and purged of evil, be reborn in peace and love. Away from modernity and consumerism, it would be possible to find "a good peace and a good silence, and a freedom to love and to create new life." The phoenix became his personal emblem, as he too was rising out of the flames and being reborn.
S.S. Koteliansky
It would be a mistake to interpret this as the desire to create some kind of hippy commune or scribal gathering. This is evident from Lawrence's time in Taos, New Mexico. Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy patron of the arts, invited the Lawrence's to stay with her in 1921. She wanted him to capture the spirit of Taos in the same way that he had done with Sea and Sardinia (1921). She too was trying to escape modernity and believed that bringing the greatest thinkers and artists together in one place would help build a better world than the one currently being destroyed by war and industry.
Lawrence was apprehensive at first, asking whether he'd encounter "a colony of rather dreadful sub-arty people". He wasn't a fan of literary crowds who he described as "smoking, steaming shits". He was also cautious of "meeting the awful 'cultured' Americans with their limited self-righteous ideals and their mechanical love-motion and their bullying, detestable negative creed of liberty and democracy." But he eventually turned up a year later after taking a detour via Australia and Ceylon.
There was an immediate clash of personalities and they quickly fell out. He hadn't travelled halfway across the world to further her status. So, he headed off to the hills to live in a cabin. It was here, away from the crowds, that he was truly happy, embarking on a series of DIY projects – carpentry, glazing and putting up shelves, living simply and writing under a tree.
We are being asked to self-distance at the moment and many of us our finding it difficult. But Lawrence chose to get as far away from people as he could, writing, "I only want one thing of men and that is that they should leave me alone". What he really meant was anybody who banned his books or didn't share his world view.
His search for kindred spirits took him to many countries, but it never quite worked out. At his most desperate he considered ploughing his savings into a boat, "I would like to buy a sailing ship and sail among the Greek islands and be free…free! Just to be free for a little while of it all…with a captain and a couple of sailors, we could do the rest."
Lawrence teaches us to seek out Rananim in our lives. We may not have the freedom to replicate his nomadic lifestyle, but we are starting to think about what community means, or, at the very least, have introduced ourselves to the neighbours for the first time.
Rananim doesn't exist in a single place or location, location, location – so don't expect Kirstie Allsop to source it out for you. Rather it's a state of mind shared with likeminded people. So, don't expect to find it too soon. In a letter to Catherine Carswell he explains, "I think people ought to fulfil sacredly their desires. And this means fulfilling the deepest desire, which is a desire to live unhampered by things which are extraneous, a desire for pure relationships and living truth".
Lawrence lived through the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which killed 50 million people – more than died in WWI. He had terrible health throughout his life and eventually succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 44. He was not happy with the world he was born into, or perhaps more accurately, unhappy with the way that world was being destroyed by industry, pollution and greed. Sound familiar?
It seems fitting, then, that during lockdown, where everything "extraneous" has been removed, the rainbow, the title of Lawrence's 1915 novel, has become the symbol of hope during these difficult times. This once banned book which dared to demand a different way of being holds a message in the final paragraph that we can all relate to.
"She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven."
This article was originally published on the Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature websitein response to the challenges presented by coronavirus.
In the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre we are exploring Lawrence life through artefacts. We officially set sail in November 2019 to mark the centenary of his self-imposed exile. You can submit artefacts here, or join in the conversation on Instagram or leave a comment below.
October 29, 2019 James Walker Influence, Rananim
Black History Month: The influence of D.H. Lawrence on Claude McKay
"Is life strife, is it the long combat?
Yes, it is true. I fight all the time.
I am forced to"
The Battle of Life, D.H Lawrence
"If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!"
If We Must Die, Claude McKay
As a rebel writer, D.H. Lawrence spent his entire life fighting against people and systems. Ideas expressed in early novels, such as The Rainbow (1915), took on the ideologies of religion, marriage, family, sexuality, and national identity. In the subsequent Obscenity Trial, Judge Sir John Dickinson went as far as to describe the novel as anti-British, claiming that Lawrence was mocking the very principles that British soldiers were defending. Lawrence was very good at winding people up.
To compound matters, Lawrence married a German woman on the outbreak of WWI and moved to Cornwall, where he was accused of being a spy and had his passport removed. On and on the battles went throughout his short life – and not just with his novels. When he turned his hand to painting and exhibited works at the Warren Gallery in 1929, 13 were seized and placed in a prison cell! The Daily Telegraph reported the paintings were "gross and obscene" the likes of which had "never been seen in London before".
Understandably, Lawrence came to resent intellectualisation and what he described as "mental consciousness". This form of thinking produced "ugliness, ugliness, ugliness" and was responsible for the "iron machine" of industrialisation and the subsequent exploitation of workers in favour of profit. A world in which people lived in their heads had a dehumanising effect, further removing man from his natural connection with the environment. It is little wonder, then, that Lawrence developed a philosophy of "blood consciousness", a more sensuous and guttural connection with the world which was incorrectly interpreted as smut by the censor.
Given that Lawrence fought the establishment throughout his life, it is perhaps not such a surprise that he was an influence on black American poets of the 1940s and 1950s, specifically Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, or so argues Leo Hamalian in a journal article from 1990. As Langston Hughes put it, "Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives". If it was difficult for a miner's son with a provincial accent to be accepted by the literati, imagine how difficult it was for a black person.
Claude McKay (September 15, 1889 – May 22, 1948), one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, detailed the intense racial violence against black people in poems such as 'If We Must Die'. Originally attracted to communist ideas, he helped form the African Black Brotherhood as a means of achieving social emancipation. Like Lawrence, he travelled far afield to find peace. He lived in the UK and USA, experiencing every form of racism imaginable, had an "ecstatic welcome" in Russia due to his political beliefs, before heading to the more open-minded Parisian backstreets. However liberal Paris was, there was still a lot of work to be done. He wasted no time highlighting the stereotyping of sexualised black figures in the art world which he argued helped to reproduce social hegemonic values that legitimated (European) white supremacy over Afro-Caribbean identities.
Like Lawrence, McKay's novels outlined an instinctual/intellectual duality. But the two writers had very different reasons for doing this: Lawrence was desperate to escape modernity and so outlined a philosophy of spiritual individualism which he called Rananim – a search for a community of like-minded people. It could be argued, for example, one of his main objections to the war was not moral, rather resentment at being told what to do and where to go!
McKay wanted to empower black people. He implored individuals to stand up for their rights and to be accepted as equals. It goes without saying this came with real risks, most notably lynching and murder. McKay's travels, then, were not so much about escape but rather finding acceptance within modernity. This is perhaps best exemplified in his 1928 novel Home to Harlem which gave voice to romantic homosexual relationships while forging a distinctive black identity for the "uprooted black vagabonds" – such as himself – who found themselves exploited and used in Western communities.
Writing in his autobiography, McKay states that in Lawrence "I found confusion – all of the ferment and turmoil, the hesitation and hate and alarm, the sexual inquietude and the incertitude of this age, and the psychic and romantic groping for a way out." Lawrence's appeal, "lay instead in his compulsive and impassioned struggle to overcome the psychological traps that threatened to imprison and destroy man's direct appreciation of life and it's mysteries in the modern age."
Lawrence grew up in a mining village, McKay came from a family of peasant farmers. They both understood what it meant to struggle. They knew what it was like to have a domineering matriarch in the family. McKay expressed this in poems such as 'December 1919' and 'Mother', Lawrence addresses it in just about every novel he ever wrote. They also shared similarities in their social status as outsiders in the world of Literature, as well as being young men with strong ideas on how to forge their way in the brave new world. But the trait that McKay felt best mirrored his own was a "psychological restlessness that drove him steadily towards artistic achievement and away from marginal existence of his natal community in his own life."
In 1977, McKay was posthumously awarded the Order of Jamaica for his contribution to literature. As a left wing liberal he paved the way for future generations of black writers, such as James Baldwin, who would continue his fight. His natal community was proud of what he achieved. The same can't be said of Lawrence, despite being part of the canon, and paving the way for everyone to swear more freely. He famously wrote, "I can be anywhere at home, except home". Eastwood has never forgiven him.
Article source: D.H. Lawrence and Black Writers Author(s): Leo Hamalian Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Spring, 1990), pp. 579-596 Published by: Indiana University Press
In November 2019 we will launch our D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre. It will be comprised of artefacts that piece together Lawrence's life, offering an alternative to the linear biography. How do we represent his influence on writers such as Claude McKay? How do we get across complex ideas like blood consciousness? Get involved and help us bu submitting an artefact here.
October 21, 2019 October 21, 2019 James Walker Guest Blog, Influence, Modernism, Uncategorized
Why World War I cultivated an obsession with insects
Allied forces wearing gas masks at Ypres, 1917.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
In this guest blog, originally published in The Conversation, Rachel Murray of University of Bristol explains how a craze for popular entomology developed around World War I with films and popular insect books a source of fascination for modernist writers and thinkers, including Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Katherine Mansfield, and Marianne Moore.
"The soldier is no longer a noble figure," observed the war poet Siegfried Sassoon while serving on the Western Front. "He is merely a writhing insect among this ghastly folly of destruction."
It is little surprise that Sassoon turned to insects to express the plight of the World War I soldier. Many did. Bugs – both real and metaphorical – came to shape the way people thought and wrote about the experience of war, and this prompted a surge of popular interest in insects more generally.
This was the first fully industrialised, long-range conflict, in which the enemy was reduced to minute specks. On the front line, soldiers wore bug-like gas masks and camouflage uniforms for the first time, were strapped into new prototypes of military body armour, and crawled through the mud in tanks. The optics of war even caused the modernist writer Wyndham Lewis, who served as an artillery officer, to remark: "These battles are more like ant fights than anything we have done in this way up to now."
The striking resemblance between humans and insects also stemmed from their close proximity on the battlefield. Lice, mosquitoes and flies thrived in the trenches, quickly becoming one of the main sources of illness and death among soldiers. Faced with the rapid spread of typhus, malaria, and trench fever (spread by lice), the War Office teamed up with entomologists to tackle this enemy within.
This led to a campaign of insect extermination, in which troops were regularly disinfected with chemicals designed to halt the spread of lice. Yet while this was going on, soldiers were also being subjected to poisonous gases from the enemy, some of which had previously been used as insecticides. One Dutch newspaper was quick to notice the parallel treatment of soldiers and insects.
De Groene Amsterdammer, May 9, 1915.
__De Groene Amsterdammer Archive__
In this satirical illustration from May 1915, the female embodiment of Germany, "Germania", sprinkles insect powder over a tiny group of soldiers. At first glance, she appears to be delousing them, but she is in fact exterminating them with chlorine.
Yet if the conditions of war reduced human beings to bugs, then it was to these life forms that people turned in search of ways of understanding their predicament.
Bug mania
Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre.
_Wikimedia Commons_
Perhaps because people felt closer to insects than ever, in the period around World War I a craze for popular entomology developed.
Studies of insect life were in high demand, with more books devoted solely to bugs than ever before. Of particular interest to the British public was the work of French entomologist Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre, whose groundbreaking and often gruesome studies of the behaviour of wasps, beetles, mantises, and flies sold widely in the years surrounding the war. Fabre was a pioneering figure in the life sciences who demonstrated that more could be learnt about insects as living entities observed in their natural habitats than as dead specimens pinned in display cases.
The development of new film technologies also meant that the sophisticated behaviour of insects could be made visible to the human eye. In November 1908, nature documentary maker F. Percy Smith's The Acrobatic Fly caused a stir when it was screened at a London cinema. Advertised on the front page of The Daily Mirror, the short film consisted of remarkable footage of a fly juggling various miniature items with its front legs.
After the war, the public appetite for bugs on screen continued to grow. From 1922, a series of nature shorts called Secrets of Nature was screened in British cinemas. Many of the films focused on the hidden lives of ants, wasps and beetles.
Modernist insects
This popular bug interest was also seen in the more canonical cultural output of the period. The films and popular insect books mentioned above were a source of fascination for modernist writers and thinkers, including Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Katherine Mansfield, and Marianne Moore, who listed Fabre's ten-volume collection, Souvenirs entomologiques (Entomological memories), in a list of "great literary works". The poet William Carlos Williams even remarked: "Henri Fabre has been one of my Gods."
Some writers were inspired by the remarkable ability of insects to thrive in inhospitable environments. Set during the war, DH Lawrence's novella The Ladybird draws on Fabre's account of the "sacred beetle" (also known as the dung beetle), which sculpts the waste products of larger animals into a home for its offspring. The text highlights the ingenuity of the dung beetle, emphasising its ability to transform death and decay into a source of new life.
Scanning electron microscope image of an ant.
Others were drawn to Fabre's account of the unique ways that insects perceive their surroundings. One of Wyndham Lewis's characters remarks enviously that "the insect sees a different world to us, and possesses other means of apprehending it", while in Virginia Woolf's novel To The Lighthouse, artist Lily Briscoe longs to experience the compound vision of ants: "One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with."
The turn to popular entomology in the years surrounding the war was no coincidence. While insects may have come to represent the degraded nature of human existence, studies of bug life helped writers and artists, as well as the public at large, to look beyond the wartime atmosphere of destruction, and to develop new ways of seeing themselves and the world around them.
Rachel Murray, PhD Candidate, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence's life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we capture the modernists' fascination with entomology? What insects should be crawling through our draws? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence's savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact, get involved and submit ideas here
May 18, 2019 August 13, 2019 James Walker Guest Blog, Influence, phoenix
D.H. Lawrence and the Phoenix of Regeneration
In our second guest blog exploring the relevance of the Phoenix, David Brock takes a broader look at representations of the Phoenix in Lawrence's work and asks why he believed it was important to be "erased, cancelled, made nothing".
It is almost central to a satisfactory understanding of D.H. Lawrence to be aware that his life and creative output are packed with symbolic meaning. One has only to consider such works as The Rainbow, The Plumed Serpent, The Thimble, The Ladybird, The Fox, The Captain's Doll, or the powerful novella, St Mawr, where the titular fiery Welsh stallion is an almost phoenix-like messenger from a lost world, representing the instinctive life which man has lost, to realise how vitally important symbols are in Lawrence's writing.
In fact, in St Mawr, it is significant that there is a character, named Phoenix, who understands the horse, and helps lead the heroine of the story to the possibility of a new life. But, more about that another time.
Artwork from www.dawnoftheunread.com
The Plumed Serpent, is the Mexican God, Quetzalcoatl – which is the title Lawrence chose for the novel, prior to interference from his publisher. As Lawrence scholar Keith Sagar points out, Quetzalcoatl "is a phoenix, for he threw himself into a volcano… there to sleep the great sleep of regeneration until his cycle should come round".
There are many quite fabulous references to Lawrence's cherished symbol, that fabled bird, the phoenix, in his amazing, large-scale, post-war symbolic essay, The Crown. Here the phoenix is "like an over-sumptuous eagle" which "passes into flame above the golden palpable fire of the desert". We glimpse "the young phoenix within the nest, with curved beak growing hard and crystal, like a scimitar, and talons hardening into pure jewels". Lawrence wills that our souls should come "into being in the midst of life, just as the phoenix in her maturity becomes immortal in flame".
In Aaron's Rod – where the "Rod", which is Aaron's flute, is a symbol itself, at the point where Aaron's desire returns, Lawrence writes, "The phoenix had risen in fire again, out of the ashes".
Phoenix by D.H. Lawrence
Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?
If not, you will never really change.
The phoenix renews her youth
only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down
to hot and flocculent ash.
Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest
with strands of down like floating ash
shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle,
immortal bird.
It should go without saying that Lawrence's headstone in Vence, where he died, depicted a phoenix (now displayed at the Birthplace Museum, Eastwood), or that one appears on his memorial plaque at his ranch, in Taos, in New Mexico. Or there being a play by Tennessee Williams, a playwright who adored Lawrence, which is called I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix. And here on this digital screen, hosting this guest blog, Lawrence is reborn once more, this time for 21st century audiences, soon to transform into a series of artefacts in James Walker and Paul Fillingham's Memory Theatre.
Lawrence defiantly designed and drew the phoenix which appeared on the privately printed, signed, limited edition of 1,000 copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover, published in Florence, in 1928, when the novel was banned in England. And, in 1929, the year before his death, Lawrence wrote a challenging, yet affirmatory, short poem, called Phoenix, in which he interrogates his reader, asking "Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing?. . .If not you will never really change", explaining that the phoenix can only renew her youth when she is "burnt down to hot and flocculent ash".
It is only then that "the small stirring of a new bub in the nest with strands of down like floating ash shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle, immortal bird".
David organises a D.H. Lawrence reading, study and performance group, The Lawrence Players, which meets fortnightly, between 5 and 7 pm in Chapel-en-le-Frith library (16th, 30th May and so on). Any enquiries, please contact David at vegan.lawrentian@gmail.com
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence's life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we represent the phoenix or encourage our audience to render themselves "sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing"? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence's savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here
December 17, 2018 August 13, 2019 James Walker Criticism, Friends, Guest Blog, Influence
On the Dangerous Ambiguity of the prefix 'Eco'
I found this uncredited image at Sott.net and changed the colours/filters and added the Phoenix symbol.
In this guest blog, Stephen Alexander, author of Torpedo the Ark, questions the use of the prefix 'eco' for a wider discussion around language and fascism, blood and soil.
Many scholars – including some who should know better – continue to fetishise the prefix eco- and think that by simply placing it in front of words including criticism, feminism, and politics, they can sex-up their research and immediately make it seem more vital and contemporary.
But ecological thinking – which, ironically, often prides itself on being radical – has a long and essentially conservative history that can be traced back to figures on the völkisch far-right keen to promote a pessimistic vision of the world that is not only anti-urban, anti-capitalist and anti-science, but fundamentally illiberal and anti-humanist in character. Indeed, whilst this post-Romantic German tradition pre-dates National Socialism, it was nevertheless within the Third Reich that such thinking was first put into practice and formed a key component of Nazi aesthetics and ideology.
Now, of course, I'm not suggesting that a concern for the environment automatically makes one a fascist. But I am pointing out that nature-based ideologies are very often used to legitimate Social Darwinist beliefs and that many reactionaries have called for a neo-feudalism based upon rural values and natural divisions. We can see this in the work of two figures closely associated with ecologism in England during the inter-war period – John Hargrave and Rolf Gardiner.
The former was convinced that modern life had produced a 'mentally and physically deficient race' that couldn't even be relied upon to breed sufficiently. A self-declared pantheist and Anglo-Saxon nationalist, Hargrave hoped to create a new national myth or substitute folk-memory for the English. To this end, he founded a movement in the 1920s – the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift – which was meant to establish a counter-culture founded upon 'the distinctive German brand of serious nature-worship'.
In practice, this meant that members spent most of their time hiking, camping, or making their own clothes, but they lent all their activities an earnest spiritual significance that rather absurdly combined Native American ritual with Norse mythology. Although they never numbered more than a few hundred members, the KKK could claim several public figures as supporters, including Havelock Ellis, Julian Huxley, and H. G. Wells. D. H. Lawrence was at least partly sympathetic. In a letter to Rolf Gardiner, he wrote:
'I read the Kibbo Kift book with a good deal of interest. Of course it won't work: not quite flesh and blood. […] The man alternates between idealism pure and simple, and a sort of mummery, and then a compromise with practicality. What he wants is all right – I agree with him on the whole, and respect him as a straightforward fighter. But he knows there's no hope […] And therefore, underneath, he's full of hate.'[1]
By the outbreak of the Second World War, Hargrave had become increasingly isolated and irrelevant on the political scene. And by the end of the War he'd found his true calling as a faith healer and eco-mystic.
As for Rolf Gardiner, Lawrence profoundly influenced the thinking of a man who would become one of the founders of the Soil Association in 1945. But what really interests is how easily Gardiner also came under the sway of National Socialism. Always an active Germanophile and Nordicist, Gardiner became a fervent exponent of Blut und Boden in England in the 1930s and dreamt of an Anglo-German political union.
His major written work, published in 1932 and dedicated to Lawrence, is a semi-religious work entitled World Without End. In it, Gardiner calls for a spiritual rebirth and a new attitude towards 'nature, the soil, to sex and to politics'.
Whilst, to his credit, he rejected any 'nonsensical racial theory' – not least because of his own half-Jewish background – he nevertheless enthusiastically greeted the Nazi assumption of power in 1933 and was soon on warm personal terms with the Nazi Minister for Agriculture Walther Darré. Both men agreed on the importance of living according to ecological law, which, of necessity, means the subjection of the individual to the 'larger organic authority' of the Natural Order.[2]
In sum: we all need to exercise caution before we take an ecocritical turn – because you never know where it might lead …
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence's life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we capture his views on nature and alternative living while exercising caution about using the prefix 'eco'? What would the Kibbo Kift have looked like if it'd been devised by Lawrence? In 2019 we will be building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence's savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here.
[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991). Letter 4268, dated 16 January 1928, pp. 267-68.
[2] Gardiner was also an associate of Lord Lymington and the rather sinister English Array. A journal edited by Lymington, The New Pioneer, to which Gardiner was a frequent contributor, affirmed a form of eco-nationalism in which an analogy was drawn between farm and nation, effectively transforming citizens into livestock. For further details on this and many of the other points discussed here, see Anna Bramwell's Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (Yale University Press, 1989) and her earlier work Blood and Soil: Walther Darré and Hitler's Green Party (Kensal Press, 1985). Readers of Lawrence interested in his relationship to German culture and his green critique of industrialism and technology, should also see Anne Fernihough's D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, (Oxford University Press, 1993).
December 10, 2018 August 13, 2019 James Walker DH Lawrence Society, Guest Blog, Influence, Poetry
How Lawrentian ideals have come to influence future generations of poets
This is our second blog exploring the influence of Look! We Have Come Through! This time David Brock explores how Lawrentian ideals, particularly those of renewed inner life, have come to influence future generations of poets and artists. He pays particular attention to Steve Taylor's collection The Calm Centre, which picked lines from Lawrence's 'Song of a Man Who Has Come Through' to preface his own book of verse on the theme of individual enlightenment.
In an enlivening introduction to a 1990s Wordsworth edition of D.H. Lawrence's Poetry, Albert Glover writes of the amazing breakthrough Lawrence made as man and poet on finding fulfilment in love and marriage. 'Everything Lawrence wrote after Look! We Have Come Through! [the cycle of love poems he produced during this important phase] comes from a soul forged in the ecstasy of spiritual awakening', Glover asserts, before quoting the memorable, mysterious opening of Lawrence's 'Song of a Man Who Has Come Through'. . .'Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!/ A fine wind is blowing the new direction of time. . .' This being 'the prophetic stance of the risen man', Glover suggests.
A present day writer, thinker and poet, Steve Taylor (who gave spell-binding, unscripted talks to the Lawrence Society in its glory days, about Lawrence as Pagan, and as Mystic, and now appears annually in Mind, Body and Spirit magazine's list of 'the world's 100 most spiritually influential living people'), has picked lines from this key poem to preface his own book of verse on the theme of individual enlightenment. Entitled The Calm Center, it features an introduction by spiritual teacher and author of The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle.
Of the Lawrence poem in question, composed around the time of Lawrence's marriage to Frieda, on 13th July 1914, the late great Keith Sagar writes that it is 'about life and art, about Lawrence the married man and Lawrence the poet', and that it 'consists almost entirely of images – wind, chisel, fountain, angels.'
What is the 'wind' which Lawrence speaks of? Keith suggests it signifies the release of a new imaginative, poetic energy suddenly at large, and which may provide him with inspiration so powerful it may break through the rock encasing our soul, to open up a new 'Pagan paradise' – the Hesperides – where the golden apples offer a life free from the old (Eden apple) fear of sin.
The poem ends with 'the three strange angels' knocking on the door, at night. Lawrence is ready and willing to face this disturbing challenge – 'Admit them, admit them'. Together with his wife, he feels able to save the seeds of creativity – these wind-blown, winged gifts – from a world descending into war and destruction. And, as Keith also puts it, the 'exorcism' of Sons and Lovers has brought the re-birth of Lawrence's 'demon' – a force now 'free to become no longer the writhing repressed half of a split psyche.'
Steve Taylor's therapeutic poems (which are reflective discourses, rather in the manner of Lawrence's Pansies) reveal how we too might heal our mental ailments, achieve this 'new' Lawrentian 'wholeness and courage', and find a 'self' free of negativity 'which can recognise and respond to the sacred', within what Frieda called 'the great vast show of life'.
One must be prepared to change. As with Lawrence there are difficult questions and challenges. 'The Off-Loading' is reminiscent of one of Lawrence's most famous final poems, 'Phoenix', in asking 'Are you willing to give yourself up?' It is only when you can let go that 'you'll be empty, peaceful and light/ and ready to float free' – rather like Lawrence's 'immortal bird' rising from the flames.
There are poems about engagement with trees, something Lawrence understood uncannily well. It is of unfathomable value – balm to the suffering soul – to wake up to nature and reconnect in this profound way.
'The Project' is concerned with permitting your inner self to unfold and have expression.
'The End of Desire', about the erroneous pursuit of false goals in life, feels pure Lawrence, while Steve's concluding poem 'The Essence' has that grand Lawrentian theme that we can each be a living manifestation of cosmic energy.
Lawrence's remarkable verse contains next to nothing that is 'chaff'. In common with his other work, it offers a great and nourishing influence on succeeding generations of writers, whose own uplifting poetry can achieve similar spiritual breakthroughs, leading to the awakening of new 'integrity', 'vital sanity' and holistic being. Steve Taylor's latest volume offers this Lawrentian vision of renewed inner life and fulfilling emotional health.
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence's life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we capture and track his influences? What are you personally 'willing to give up' and how does this compare with Lawrence's own principles? How do we represent renewed inner life? In 2019 we will be building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence's savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here.