THE SPIRIT of D. H. LAWRENCE the Spirit of D

THE SPIRIT OF D. H. LAWRENCE The Spirit of D. H. La-wrence Centenary Studies Edited by Gamini Salgado sometime Professor of English University of Exeter and G. K. Das Professor of English University of Delhi Foreword by Raymond Williams M MACMILLAN PRESS ©the Estate of Gamini Salgado and G. K. Das 1988 Foreword© Raymond Williams 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 978-0-333-34159-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Wessex Typesetters (Division of The Eastern Press Ltd) Frome, Somerset British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The spirit of D. H. Lawrence: centenary studies. 1. Lawrence, D. H.- Criticism and interpretation I. Salgado, Gamini II. Das, G. K. 823'.912 PR6023.A93Z/ ISBN 978-1-349-06512-7 ISBN 978-1-349-06510-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-06510-3 Contents Foreword Raymond Williams vii Preface G. K. Das xiii Acknowledgements xv Notes on the Contributors xvii 1 Lawrence's Autobiographies John Worthen 1 2 'The country of my heart': D. H. Lawrence and the East Midlands Landscape J. R. Watson 16 3 The Extension of Metaphor to Scene and Action, Chiefly in Lawrence's Early Novels F. B. Pinion 32 4 Lawrence's Counter-Romanticism John Beer 46 5 The 'strange and fiery' Course of The Fox: D. H. Lawrence's Aesthetic of Composition and Revision AlbertJ. Devlin 75 6 'Pioneering into the wilderness of unopened life': Lou Witt in America Frederick P. W. McDowell 92 7 The Second Lady Chatterley Louis L. Martz 106 8 Desire and Negation: the Dialectics of Passion in D. H. Lawrence Kingsley Widmer 125 9 The Philosophy of D. H. Lawrence P. N. Furbank 144 10 Lawrence and Forster: their Vision of a 'Living 154 Religion' G. K. Das 11 D. H. Lawrence and the Fantasias of Consciousness John B. Vickery 163 v VI Contents 12 Bay: the Noncombatant as War Poet KeithCushman 181 13 'Strange, torn edges': Reading the Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence Holly A. Laird 199 14 The Retreat from Reason or a Raid on the Inarticulate R. N. Parkinson 214 15 Lawrence as Historian Gamini Salgado 234 16 D. H. Lawrence: the Hero-Poet as Letter Writer George A. Panichas 248 17 Rananim: D. H. Lawrence's Failed Utopia George J. Zytaruk 266 18 Lawrence as Fictional Character Maurice Beebe 295 19 Elegies for D. H. Lawrence James c. Cowan 311 Index 327 Foreword RAYMOND WILLIAMS Lawrence needed no centenary. No prompting of a date was required for him to be read and reread and continually discussed. Moreover, though he has remained a highly controversial figure, he has been, for two generations, a leading example, even at times a proud possession, of otherwise radically different movements in writing and thought. Today, in his centenary year, he is still being presented with these different and even alternative emphases. He is a major instance - perhaps, as in Leavis, the last instance - of the great tradition in English fiction: at once a highly original but in a key sense traditional novelist, exploring the health and sickness of a culture and a society through detailed and intensive analysis of personal relationships. Or, in quite a different tone, he gives us the first major example of the English working-class novel, extending the boundaries of fiction to kinds of work and living conditions which the earlier tradition had been unable or unwilling to reach : the novelist, then, of working-class culture and the movement out of it through education and a more general mobility. Or, yet again, he is the pioneer of a new kind of understanding and presentation of sexuality, moving beyond the concerns alike of tradition and of class. In one common form of this view, it is not only the new sexuality as such, but its direct association with forms of feeling and thinking distinct from and opposed to received forms of rationality and enlightenment, that is seen as linking him not to the social novel of the mainline tradition but back to such figures as Blake and forward to a radically dissident sub-culture of our own time. Can we say, consensually, that there is truth in each of these presentations? Not, usually, to those who are offering them. For quite apart from the deep-rooted attachments to the general positions which underlie the alternative presentations, there is the special problem that Lawrence is taken, again and again, not vii viii Foreword simply as an exemplary but as a campaigning figure . Indeed, he is often taken as in effect the private possession of this or that tendency. He is at once their justification, their promotional instance and, where necessary - which can produce the most curious results - the stick to beat the others with. It is true that the rest of us can observe, in this process, an interesting selectivity of his writings. For those of the great tradition, Women in Love, and behind it The Rainbow, are the really important works. For those of the working-class novel, Sons and Lovers, such early stories as Odour of Chrysanthemums, the early plays and some fragmentary late writings, such as Return to Bestwood. For those of the third persuasion, Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Plumed Serpent, Fantasia of the Unconscious and other stories and essays of the 1920s. The works beyond these leading instances are typically either gathered into their orbit or seen as secondary, even preparatory, incidental or decadent. Can we then say, consensually, that as against these selective interpretations Lawrence has to be seen as a whole? Perhaps, but it is doubtful if that plausible formulation will serve . The real question may be whether there is any whole, in that sense, to see. In an intensely productive but relatively short writing life, Lawrence undoubtedly went through certain periods and phases of emphasis. Yet, from any of the selective positions, elements can be traced, backwards and forwards, to illustrate alternative forms of continuity. The true wholes, the real figures in the carpet, turn out, on closer inspection, to be as radically selective as the more evident primary recommendations. Yet what does this then commit us to saying? That, following some recent theory, this is an author who must be dissolved into a series of texts? No case known to me seems less likely as a plausible example of this procedure. Lawrence's fingerprint, in his most diverse kinds of writing, must be one of the most recognisable anywhere. That particular liveliness of voice - at once strongly oral and relentlessly, monologically persuasive - is by now imitable but remains unique. Indeed, there are many who will settle for prizing this extraordinarily direct and immediately involving style, leaving all further questions to the secondary interests of ideologues and moralists. It is a point of view, but a curiously abstract one . It is not only that it would have infuriated Lawrence to have his style separated from what he had to say. It is also that, in any steady consideration, the particular qualities of Foreword ix Lawrence's writing seem inseparable from his specific stance within a complex cultural situation at a particular historical time. The writing is then an innovative response to the very experiences and issues which are made prominent, and general, in the selective interpretations and appropriations. Two new conditions are now affecting our understanding of this already complex problem. The most evident is the remarkable process, now well under way in the Cambridge edition, of reissuing and in very many cases re-editing his works. Already some quite new material has been published, such as the second half of the novel Mr Noon, and there have been a number of interesting new letters. Work I have seen on the relations between the manuscripts and the published texts of his plays suggests that important new perspectives will be gained when this editing is complete. It is said, further, that even in what have been taken as the most reliable texts the new editions will contain much that is new and significant. This process, much of it arising from Lawrence's publishing difficulties during his most mobile years, is important not only for what it may show us in the texts but for its evidence of the material and cultural conditions of this innovating and in the broadest sense unsettled writer. Nobody can yet say for certain whether the re-edited texts will in themselves make a significant difference to our specific readings of Lawrence . On what I have so far seen there is a great deal of local and specialist interest, but I take leave to doubt whether our general sense of the major works will be substantially affected. What is certain, however, to come more clearly into view is the condition of Lawrence's whole project: the social and material demonstration of the constraints and opportunities he was working to/ and the probable correlation of phases of this condition to what can otherwise be taken - and must still to some degree continue to be taken - as a simple development within the isolated and freely determined will of the author.

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