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This dissertation has been 64-13,344 microfilmed exactly as received C O W A N , James Costello, 1927- LAWRENCE IN OLD AND NEW MEXICO: THE QUEST AND THE ART. The University of Oklahoma, Ph.D., 1964 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan Copyri^t by- James Costello Co-wan 1964 THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE LAWRENCE IN OLD AND NEW MEXICO; THE QUEST AND THE ART A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY JAMES COSTELLO COWAN Norman, Oklahoma 1964 LAWRENCE IN OLD AND NEW MEXICO: THE QUEST AND THE ART APPROVED BT ' T ' ' / c X' .y-X. — lL DISSERTATION COMMITTEE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT S I am sincerely grateful to Professor Alphonse J. Fritz not only for the guidance which made possible my completing this work but also, more profoundly, for the intellectual stim ulus without which I should not have begun it. The value to me of his teaching in his course in the Modern British Novel and his seminar in the Fiction of D. H. Lawrence can be nei ther estimated here nor illustrated in the pages that follow. I am also indebted to Professor Victor A. Elconin, Professor Calvin G. Thayer, and Professor Maurice K. Temerlin both for their service on my dissertation committee and for their effec tive guidance and instruction during my years as a graduate student. I wish, additionally, to thank Bobby L. Smith, whose unpublished essays on St. Mawr and the stories in The Woman Who Rode Away first stimulated my own thinking on these works, and my wife, Judith R. Cowan, M. D., who reduced the mysteries of neuro-anatomy to the elementary terms I needed in order to evaluate Lawrence's grasp of that subject and who daily cre ated the environment in which life with D. H. Lawrence became not only possible but pleasurable as well. I l l TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................... iii Chapter I. THE END OP THE CYCLE ........................... 1 II. REGENERATION THROUGH ROMANTICISM....... 35 III. LAWRENCE AND MURRY: THE DARK AND THE LIGHT ............................... 89 IV. THE QUEST FOR SYMBOL AND MYTH.. ................ 125 V. THE SYMBOLIC STRUCTURE OF THE PLUMED SERPENT .......................... 180 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................ 224 LAWRENCE IN OLD AND NEW MEXICO: THE QUEST AND THE ART CHAPTER I THE END OF THE CYCLE When D. H. Lawrence arrived at Mabel Dodge Sterne's house in Taos, New Mexico, on his thirty-seventh birthday, II September 1922,^ he came in response not merely to the written invitation he received from the rich American dilet- 2 3 tante on 5 November I92I, nor even to what she, as Mrs. Tony Luhan, subsequently described rather luridly as her 4 nocturnally willing him to come, but to the urging of his own expectations of America. Although the anniversary ^Harry T. Moore, Poste Restante : A D. H. Lawrence Travel Calendar. with "Introduction" by Mark Schorer (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956), p. 68. 2 Harry T. Moore, in The Intelligent Heart : The Story of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Grove Press, Inc :, 1962), p. 356, comments that "Lawrence asked whether Taos was not an art colony: he knew 'all that "arty" and "literary" crew', who were 'smoking, steaming shits'." '1 Richard Aldington, D. H. Lawrence : Portrait of a Genius But . (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), p. 283. ^Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), p. 35, as reprinted in Edward Nehls 2 seems to have occasioned no particular celebration, it marked for Lawrence the beginning of an experience through which he sought the means to personal and artistic regener ation for himself and to spiritual, cultural, and political regeneration for society. In one sense, Lawrence's pil grimage to the promise of America embodied, no less than his fiction of the period, the quest of the hero of romance. As Joseph Campbell has stated the mythic pattern of this quest: The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: seuaration— initiation— return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder : fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his Tellow man. 5 Lawrence's journey to America, the most important of his many travels, was, in essence, a quest for the symbols and myths by which what he regarded as the waste land of con temporary western civilization could be revived. The pur pose of this study is to discover, through an examination of Lawrence's fiction of the three years between his arrival in America and his final departure on 22 September (ed.;, D. H. Lawrence : A Composite Biography (3 vols.; Madison; University of Wisconsin Press, 1957-59;, II, 166. ^Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), p. 30. 1925,^ first, what the New Mexican and Mexican experience contributed to the artistic development of the concerns of Lawrence's quest, and, second, what the implications of this experience were for his subsequent development as an artist. The solution to the problem of the waste land, for Lawrence, lay finally in personal and public commitment to the values of romanticism, that is, of dynamic organicism rather than static mechanism. This commitment to romantic values was formulated and presented expositorily in several ways in the period preceding Lawrence's journey: in the idea of America that formed concurrently with the rejection of the European waste land in his letters for the period, in the cyclic theory of history in Movements in European History (1921), in the romantic theory of literary art and criticism in Studie s in Classic American Literature (1923), and in the mythic theory of personality in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). A consideration of these several expressions of romanticism as a major concern in Lawrence's life and art will provide, I believe, the most advantageous perspective from which to view the primary materials of the period in New Mexico and Mexico. Armin Arnold traces Lawrence's idea of America to his earliest reading of such books by American authors as ^Moore, Poste Restante, pp. 83-84. 4 Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, Alcott's Little Women, Longfellow's poems, Emerson's essays, Thoreau's Walden, and Whitman's Leaves of Grass, though except for the last of these, "These books had by no means such a far-reaching influence on Lawrence as the novels of Thomas Hardy or George Eliot." Lawrence's first direct connection with America, which came with the American publication of his first novel. The White Peacock, on 19 January 1911, led him, on the basis of unfavorable American reviews, to the conclusion that "The Americans are just as stupid as we 7 expected." Nevertheless, major characters in Lawrence's early novels and short stories with some regularity think g of emigrating to America, and Mellors' plan for a life of 9 farming in British Columbia in Lady Chatterley's Lover indicates that Lawrence never abandoned the theme. Lawrence's first personal relationship with Ameri can artists was with the American poets among the Imagists, a group Lawrence joined, despite reservations on both the others' part and his, probably because he liked H. D . T Armin Arnold, D. H. Lawrence and America (London: The Linden Press, 195ST, pp. 13-14. Q Arnold, p. 14, mentions George in The White Peacock. Siegmund in 'The Trespasser. Geoffrey in Love Among the Haystacks. the young couple in "Daughters of the Vicar," and Bachmann and Emily in "The Thorn in the Flesh." ^D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1959), p. 301. (Hilda Doolittle) and Richard Aldington.Stanley K. Coffman, Jr., notes Lawrence's apathy toward Imagist goals but thinks that he needed the financial assistance Amy Lowell provided and that his gratitude kept him in the group. Lawrence, who replaced Ezra Pound in the first Some Imagist Poets (1915), acknowledged, along with H. D., Aldington, Miss Lowell, P. S. Flint, and John Gould Fletcher, the six principles, derived from Pound, which appeared in the pref ace as a statement of poetic doctrine representing the common ground of the contributors. Coffman asserts, never theless, "that Lawrence was an Imagist only by courtesy of the others : 'we only included him from sympathy and to try and educate him,'" though Aldington thinks that this state ment "was meant as a joke" and calls Lawrence's poetry "immeasurably superior to mine."^^ Lawrence's personal relations with the American Imagists remained cordial: Amy Lowell paid well for his contributions to the Imagist anthologies of 1915, 1916, and 1917 and sent him a present of sixty pounds when in 1916, after the suppression of The Rainbow, he was trying to raise money for a trip to America ; and H. D., after the Lawrences' expulsion from Cornwall in ^^Arnold, p. 18. ^^Stanley K. Coffman, Jr., Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), pp. 28-30. 12 1917, lent them her apartment in Mecklenburgh Square. Lawrence's first written mention of his impulse to go to America makes the venture sound like an escape to a 13 place of refuge, for he wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith on 16 August 1915: "I feel like knocking my head against the wall: or of running off to some unformed South American place where there is no thought of civilised effort.