Some notes on D.H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence appears to me to be one of the most important writers in the past century. He was born in 1885 and died in 1930, and from 1911 to 1930 published more than many people today have in lives twice as long. He was cut down at age forty four by tuberculosis.

Focus on Lawrence commonly turns upon whether his novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover was obscene. From the 1930’s to the 1960’s the official pronouncement was that it was indeed obscene, but in the 1960’s in a famous legal trial this was overturned. Suddenly, the 1960’s heralded what was then described as greater freedom of artistic expression. Works by Lawrence and Henry Miller, among others, were deemed artistic because they dealt with men and women. The deeper meanings of their works became obscured by their presentation as being largely about men and women, and not much else.

The other aspects of these works are why they are important. Lawrence wrote LCL near the end of his life, and it reflects his views of Europe after the first world war. Lady Chatterly is married to a man who fought in the war, but has become an impotent cripple confined to a wheel chair. She then turns her attention to the gamekeeper, Mellors, and they eventually decide to leave England to live together. What is important about this tale is that it is about the conflict between industrial life and natural life. Lady Chatterly is described as being put off by her husband Clifford, because he is always focusing upon technology. His money comes from the mining industry, which he seeks to improve through the latest technology, and he spends his time listening to the radio.

Clifford eventually forms a relationship with his housekeeper, and older widowed lady, and their relationship is like mother and son. It is prescient of Lawrence to suggest that the industrialized man becomes like a child, and so becomes dependent upon the maternal for his survival. It is reflective of today’s world, which is being shaped into a soy based technological slave society.

The conflict between nature and industry is also reflected by money, and lack of it. Mellors may be poorer than Clifford, but Constance (Lady Chatterly), is more interested in him because he is physically strong, but also independent. He does not need anyone to look after him, yet he eventually decides to commit himself to living with Constance.

LCL might be summed up as a novel where modern industry is rejected in favor of a return to nature. In the conflict between mind and body, body is here favored in place of mind.

The real issues within LCL are also the real issues which face us today – how are we to live in a world where there is a conflict between nature and industry? Lawrence’s solutions seems to have been the rejection of industry in favor of the return to nature, much like the Romantics, like Wordsworth and Blake.

The following is the first few pages from an essay Lawrence wrote titled ON BEING RELIGIOUS, it was published in PHOENIX Vol.1, a large and interesting collection of Lawrence’s prose works.

ON BEING RELIGIOUS

“The problem is not, and never was, whether God exists or doesn’t exist. Man is so made, that the word God has a special effect on him, even if only to afford a safety-valve for his feelings when he must swear or burst. And there ends the vexation of questioning the existence of God. Whatever the queer little word means, it means something we can none of us ever quite get away from, or at; something connected with our deepest explosions.

It isn’t really quite a word. It’s an ejaculation and a glyph. It never had a definition. “Give a definition of the word God,” says somebody, and everybody smiles, with just a trifle of malice. There’s going to be a bit of sport.

Of course, nobody can define it. And a word nobody can define isn’t a word at all. It’s just a noise and a shape, like pop! or Ra or Om.

When a man says: There is a God, or There is no God, or I don’t know whether there’s a God or not, he is merely using the little word like a toy pistol, to announce that he has taken an attitude.

When he says: There is no God, he just means to say: Nobody knows any better about life than myself.. so nobody need try to chirp it over me. Which is the democratic attitude. When he says: There is a God, he is either sentimental or sincere. If he is sincere, it means he refers himself back to some indefinable pulse of life in him, which gives him his direction and his substance. If he is sentimental, it means he is subtly winking to his audience to imply: Let’s make an arrangement favorable to ourselves. That’s the conservative attitude. Thirdly and lastly, when a man says: l don’t know whether there’s a God or not, he is merely making the crafty announcement: I hold myself free lo run with the hare and hunt with I he hounds, whichever I feel like at the time . -And that’s the so-called artistic or pagan attitude.

In the end, one becomes bored by the man who believes that nobody, ultimately, can tell him anything. One becomes very bored by the men who wink a God into existence for their own convenience. And the man who holds himself free to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds doesn’t hold interest any more. All these three classes of men bore us even to the death of boredom.

Remains the man who sincerely says: I believe in God. He may still be an interesting fellow.

I: How do you believe in God?

HE: I believe in goodness.

(Basta! Turn him down and try again.)

I: How do you believe in God?

HE: I believe in love.

(Exit. Call another.)

I: How do you believe in God?

HE: I don’t know.

I: What difference does it make to you, whether you believe in God

or not?

HE: It makes a difference, but I couldn’t quite put it into words.

I: Are you sure it makes a difference? Does it make you kinder or

fiercer?

HE: Oh!-I think it makes me more tolerant.

(Retro me.-Enter another believer.)

He:: Hullo!

I: Hullol

HE: What’s up?

I: Do you believe in God?

HE: What the hell is that to you?

I: Oh, I’m just asking.

HE: What about yourself?

I: Yes, I believe.

He: D’you say your prayers at night?

I: No.

HE: When d’you say ’em, then?

I: I don’t.

HE: Then what use is your God to you?

I: He merely isn’t the sort you pray to.

HE: What do you do with him then?

I: It’s what he does with me.

HE: And what does he do with you?

I: Oh, I don’t know. He uses me as the thin end of the wedge.

HE: Thin enough! What about the thick end?

I: That’s what we’re waiting for.

HE: You’re a funny customer.

I: Why not? Do you believe in God?

HE: Oh, I don’t know. I might, if it looked like fun .

I: Right you are.

This is what I call a conversation between two true believers. Either believing in a real God looks like fun, or it’s no go at all.

The Great God has been treated to so many sighs, supplications, prayers, tears and yearnings that, for the time, He’s had enough.

There is, I believe, a great strike on in heaven. The Almighty has vacated the throne, abdicated, climbed down. It’s no good your looking up into the sky. It’s empty. Where the Most High used to sit listening to woes, supplications and repentances, there’s nothing but a great gap in the empyrean. You can still go on praying to that gap, if you like. The Most High has gone out.” (P 724 – 726)

From this selection we can gather that Lawrence is really only interested in the sincere believer. Later on he says that he believes God is constantly moving in heaven, and that God will send new teachers that will teach people beyond Christ’s teachings. He compares Christ and Mithra, saying that Mithra was the teacher for a previous time, and Christ for another time.

“Jesus, the Saviour, is no longer our Way of Salvation. He was the Saviour, and is not. Once it was Mithras: and has not been Mithras for these many years. It never was Mithras for us. God sends different Saviours to different peoples at different times. Now, for the moment, there is no Saviour.

The Jews have waited for three thousand years. They preferred just to wait. We do not. Jesus taught us what to do, when He, Christ, could no longer save us.

We go in search of God, following the Holy Ghost, and depending on the Holy Ghost. There is no Way. There is no Word. There is no Light. The Holy Ghost is ghostly and invisible. The Holy Ghost is nothing, if you like. Yet we hear His strange calling, the calling like a hound on the scent, away in the unmapped wilderness. And it seems great fun to follow. Oh, great fun, God’s own good fun.

Myself, I believe in God. But I’m off on a different road. Adios! and, if you like, au revoir!” (P 729-730)

I take it from these comments that Lawrence had a strange view of the trinity, believing in God and the Holy Spirit, but not Christ. He seems not to have seen that there are many people in the modern era who continue to worship Mithras, and to believe that God would send us a new revelation. This new revelation according to Lawrence must be perceived within ourselves via our contact with the Holy Spirit.

I should say that it appears from my experience that we cannot afford to get along without believing in the trinity sincerely, which is Christ, God, and the Holy Spirit. This would lead one to discover the ancient teachings of the Church, Christ giving the Keys to the Church to St. Peter, and this being the beginning of the Roman Church. It is true that the Roman Church incorporated many elements of Roman religion, such as the title of Pontifex Maximus, but I believe that by virtue of the Trinity these elements were turned to a higher purpose.

What I take from Lawrence is his wisdom as regarding the necessity of understanding one’s own spirit in conjunction with living with nature. For myself I believe the solution is more traditional than what Lawrence supposed, for it appears necessary to me to understand God’s purpose in history. As much as this can be accomplished it requires study of many things, including theology, philosophy, the lands of Babylon and Egypt, St. Augustine’s Civitas Dei, to name a few.

Lawrence’s view of life is that of the artist firstly. He believes in God, but he was not a member of an organized church, such as the Anglican or Catholic. He instead seems to have believed in something like the church of God without Christ, to quote O’Connor’s Wise Blood. He expected new teachings from new messiahs and did not believe that the teachings of Christ would be enough to challenge modern industry. I believe that the teachings of Christ in fact ought to serve quite well in opposing the evils of modernism. I may compare Lawrence to those scholars of the early middle ages who believed in Platonism, because they remained ignorant of Aristotle. It was only in the 13^th century that Aristotle truly began to be grasped, when St. Thomas wrote his Summa, and we were given a reconciliation between matter and spirit. That is what it comes down to, whether matter and spirit can come together in a sincere union. I think this can be done but not without a lot of effort in development of both the material and the spiritual. What I take from Lawrence is the fire of his expressive style, and recall that the Phoenix who rose from the flames was his emblem.

Matthew 3:11 “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire“

Certainly all the elements necessary to combining the fire of nature with the fire of the spirit are within Christian doctrine, but they require some work to perceive them. It was perhaps Lawrence’s focus upon the spiritual fire which he expressed mostly as natural passion which led to his early death. Lawrence very aptly expressed the problems of today, he proposed solutions, but I believe there must be a greater effort to discover solutions of greater severity. For the time is coming when all must be drawn down the line, and in Lawrence I see a beginning of the perception of this necessity for serious and sincere living.