The Bad Side of Books

by D. H. Lawrence

  Pierre was what we call ‘so human.’ Which means ‘so limited.’ Men clotting together into social masses in order to limit their individual liabilities: this is humanity. And this is Pierre. And this is Tolstoi, the philosopher with a very nauseating Christian-brotherhood idea of himself. Why limit man to a Christian-brotherhood? I myself, I could belong to the sweetest Christian-brotherhood one day, and ride after Attila with a raw beefsteak for my saddle-cloth, to see the red cock crow in flame over all Christendom, next day.

  And that is man! That, really, was Tolstoi. That, even, was Lenin, God in the machine of Christian-brotherhood, that hashes men up into social sausage-meat.

  Damn all absolutes. Oh damn, damn, damn all absolutes! I tell you, no absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless, like the limerick, the lamb is inside.

  They returned from the ride

  With lamb Leo inside

  And a smile on the face of the tiger!

  Sing fol-di-lol-lol!

  Fol-di-lol-lol!

  Fol-di-lol-ol-di-lol-olly!

  For man, there is neither absolute nor absolution. Such things should be left to monsters like the right-angled triangle, which does only exist in the ideal consciousness. A man can’t have a square on his hypotenuse, let him try as he may.

  Ay! Ay! Ay! – Man handing out absolutes to man, as if we were all books of geometry with axioms, postulates and definitions in front. God with a pair of compasses! Moses with a set square! Man a geometric bifurcation, not even a radish!

  Holy Moses!

  ‘Honour they father and thy mother!’ That’s awfully cute! But supposing they are not honourable? How then, Moses?

  Voice of thunder from Sinai: ‘Pretend to honour them!’

  ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’

  Alas, my neighbour happens to be mean and detestable.

  Voice of the lambent Dove, cooing: ‘Put it over him, that you love him.’

  Talk about the cunning of serpents! I never saw even a serpent kissing his instinctive enemy.

  Pfui! I wouldn’t blacken my mouth, kissing my neighbour, who, I repeat, to me is mean and detestable.

  Dove, go home!

  The Goat and Compasses, indeed!

  Everything is relative. Every Commandment that ever issued out of the mouth of God or man, is strictly relative: adhering to the particular time, place and circumstance.

  And this is the beauty of the novel; everything is true in its own relationship, and no further.

  For the relatedness and interrelatedness of all things flows and changes and trembles like a stream, and like a fish in the stream the characters in the novel swim and drift and float and turn belly-up when they’re dead.

  So, if a character in a novel wants two wives – or three – or thirty: well, that is true of that man, at that time, in that circumstance. It may be true of other men, elsewhere and elsewhen. But to infer that all men at all times want two, three, or thirty wives; or that the novelist himself is advocating furious polygamy; is just imbecility.

  It has been just as imbecile to infer that, because Dante worshipped a remote Beatrice, every man, all men, should go worshipping remote Beatrices.

  And that wouldn’t have been so bad, if Dante had put the thing in its true light. Why do we slur over the actual fact that Dante had a cosy bifurcated wife in his bed, and a family of lusty little Dantinos? Petrarch, with his Laura in the distance, had twelve little legitimate Petrarchs of his own, between his knees. Yet all we hear is Laura! Laura! Beatrice! Beatrice! Distance! Distance!

  What bunk ! Why didn’t Dante and Petrarch chant in chorus:

  Oh be my spiritual concubine

  {Beatrice!

  Laura!}

  My old girl’s got several babies that are mine,

  But thou be my spiritual concubine,

  {Beatrice!

  Laura!}

  Then there would have been an honest relation between all the bunch. Nobody grudges the gents their spiritual concubines. But keeping a wife and family – twelve children – up one’s sleeve, has always been recognized as a dirty trick.

  Which reveals how immoral the absolute is! Invariably keeping some vital fact dark ! Dishonourable!

  Here we come upon the third essential quality of the novel. Unlike the essay, the poem, the drama, the book of philosophy, or the scientific treatise: all of which may beg the question, when they don’t downright filch it; the novel inherently is and must be:

  1. Quick.

  2. Interrelated in all its parts, vitally, organically.

  3. Honourable.

  I call Dante’s Commedia slightly dishonourable, with never a mention of the cosy bifurcated wife, and the kids. And War and Peace I call downright dishonourable, with that fat, diluted Pierre for a hero, stuck up as preferable and desirable, when everybody knows that he wasn’t attractive, even to Tolstoi.

  Of course Tolstoi, being a great creative artist, was true to his characters. But being a man with a philosophy, he wasn’t true to his own character.

  Character is a curious thing. It is the flame of a man, which burns brighter or dimmer, bluer or yellower or redder, rising or sinking or flaring according to the draughts of circumstance and the changing air of life, changing itself continually, yet remaining one single, separate flame, flickering in a strange world: unless it be blown out at last by too much adversity.

  If Tolstoi had looked into the flame of his own belly, he would have seen that he didn’t really like the fat, fuzzy Pierre, who was a poor tool, after all. But Tolstoi was a personality even more than a character. And a personality is a self-conscious I am : being all that is left in us of a once-almighty Personal God. So being a personality and almighty I am, Leo proceeded deliberately to lionize that Pierre, who was a domestic sort of house-dog.

  Doesn’t anybody call that dishonourable on Leo’s part? He might just as well have been true to himself ! But no! His self-conscious personality was superior to his own belly and knees, so he thought he’d improve on himself by creeping inside the skin of a lamb; the doddering old lion that he was! Leo! Léon!

  Secretly, Leo worshipped the human male, man as a column of rapacious and living blood. He could hardly meet three lusty, roisterous young guardsmen in the street, without crying with envy: and ten minutes later, fulminating on them black oblivion and annihilation, utmost moral thunder-bolts.

  How boring, in a great man! And how boring, in a great nation like Russia, to let its old-Adam manhood be so improved upon by these reformers, who all feel themselves short of something, and therefore live by spite, that at last there’s nothing left but a lot of shells of men, improving themselves steadily emptier and emptier, till they rattle with words and formulae, as if they’d swallowed the whole encyclopædia of socialism.

  But wait ! There is life in the Russians. Something new and strange will emerge out of their weird transmogrification into Bolshevists.

  When the lion swallows the lamb, fluff and all, he usually gets a pain, and there’s a rumpus. But when the lion tries to force himself down the throat of the huge and popular lamb – a nasty old sheep, really – then it’s a phenomenon. Old Leo did it: wedged himself bit by bit down the throat of woolly Russia. And now out of the mouth of the bolshevist lambkin still waves an angry, mistaken, tufted leonine tail, like an agitated exclamation mark.

  Meanwhile it’s a deadlock.

  But what a dishonourable thing for that claw-biting little Leo to do! And in his novels you see him at it. So that the papery lips of Resurrection whisper: ‘Alas! I would have been a novel. But Leo spoiled me.’

  Count Tolstoi had that last weakness of a great man: he wanted the absolute: the absolute of love, if you like to call it that. Talk about the ‘last infirmity of noble minds’! It’s a perfect epidemic of senility. He wanted to be absolute: a universal brother. Leo was too tight for Tolstoi. He wanted to puff, and puff, and puff, till he became Universal Brotherhood itself, the great goose-berry of our globe.

&nb
sp; Then pop went Leo! And from the bits sprang up bolshevists.

  It’s all bunk. No man can be absolute. No man can be absolutely good or absolutely right, nor absolutely lovable, nor absolutely beloved, nor absolutely loving. Even Jesus, the paragon, was only relatively good and relatively right. Judas could take him by the nose.

  No god, that men can conceive of, could possibly be absolute or absolutely right. All the gods that men ever discovered are still God: and they contradict one another and fly down one another’s throats, marvellously. Yet they are all God: the incalculable Pan.

  It is rather nice, to know what a lot of gods there are, and have been, and will be, and that they are all of them God all the while. Each of them utters an absolute: which, in the ears of all the rest of them, falls flat. This makes even eternity lively.

  But man, poor man, bobbing like a cork in the stream of time, must hitch himself to some absolute star of righteousness overhead. So he throws out his line, and hooks on. Only to find, after a while, that his star is slowly falling: till it drops into the stream of time with a fizzle, and there’s another absolute star gone out.

  Then we scan the heavens afresh.

  As for the babe of love, we’re simply tired of changing its napkins. Put the brat down, and let it learn to run about, and manage its own little breeches.

  But it’s nice to think that all the gods are God all the while. And if a god only genuinely feels to you like God, then it is God. But if it doesn’t feel quite, quite altogether like God to you, then wait awhile, and you’ll hear him fizzle.

  The novel knows all this, irrevocably. ‘My dear,’ it kindly says, ‘one God is relative to another god, until he gets into a machine; and then it’s a case for the traffic cop!’

  ‘But what am I to do!’ cries the despairing novelist. ‘From Amon and Ra to Mrs Eddy, from Ashtaroth and Jupiter to Annie Besant, I don’t know where I am.’

  ‘Oh yes you do, my dear!’ replies the novel. ‘You are where you are, so you needn’t hitch yourself on to the skirts either of Ashtaroth or Eddy. If you meet them, say how-do-you-do! to them quite courteously. But don’t hook on, or I shall turn you down.’

  ‘Refrain from hooking on!’ says the novel.

  ‘But be honourable among the host!’ he adds.

  Honour! Why, the gods are like the rainbow, all colours and shades. Since light itself is invisible, a manifestation has got to be pink or black or blue or white or yellow or vermilion, or ‘tinted’.

  You may be a theosophist, and then you will cry: Avaunt! Thou dark-red aura! Away!!! – Oh come! Thou pale-blue or thou primrose aura, come!

  This you may cry if you are a theosophist. And if you put a theosophist in a novel, he or she may cry avaunt! to the heart’s content.

  But a theosophist cannot be a novelist, as a trumpet cannot be a regimental band. A theosophist, or a Christian, or a Holy Roller, may be contained in a novelist. But a novelist may not put up a fence. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and auras will be red when they want to.

  As a matter of fact, only the Holy Ghost knows truly what righteousness is. And heaven only knows what the Holy Ghost is! But it sounds all right. So the Holy Ghost hovers among the flames, from the red to the blue and the black to the yellow, putting brand to brand and flame to flame, as the wind changes, and life travels in flame from the unseen to the unseen, men will never know how or why. Only travel it must, and not die down in nasty fumes.

  And the honour, which the novel demands of you, is only that you shall be true to the flame that leaps in you. When that Prince in Resurrection so cruelly betrayed and abandoned the girl, at the beginning of her life, he betrayed and wetted on the flame of his own manhood. When, later, he bullied her with his repentant benevolence, he again betrayed and slobbered upon the flame of his waning manhood, till in the end his manhood is extinct, and he’s just a lump of half-alive elderly meat.

  It’s the oldest Pan-mystery. God is the flame-life in all the universe; multifarious, multifarious flames, all colours and beauties and pains and sombrenesses. Whichever flame flames in your manhood, that is you, for the time being. It is your manhood, don’t make water on it, says the novel. A man’s manhood is to honour the flames in him, and to know that none of them is absolute: even a flame is only relative.

  But see old Leo Tolstoi wetting on the flame. As if even his wet were absolute!

  Sex is flame, too, the novel announces. Flame burning against every absolute, even against the phallic. For sex is so much more than phallic, and so much deeper than functional desire. The flame of sex singes your absolute, and cruelly scorches your ego. What, will you assert your ego in the universe? Wait till the flames of sex leap at you like striped tigers.

  They returned from the ride

  With the lady inside,

  And a smile on the face of the tiger.

  You will play with sex, will you! You will tickle yourself with sex as with an ice-cold drink from a soda-fountain! You will pet your best girl, will you, and spoon with her, and titillate yourself and her, and do as you like with your sex?

  Wait! Only wait till the flame you have dribbled on flies back at you; later! Only wait!

  Sex is a life-flame, a dark one, reserved and mostly invisible. It is a deep reserve in a man, one of the core-flames of his manhood.

  What, would you play with it? Would you make it cheap and nasty!

  Buy a king-cobra, and try playing with that.

  Sex is even a majestic reserve in the sun.

  Oh, give me the novel! Let me hear what the novel says.

  As for the novelist, he is usually a dribbling liar.

  WHY THE NOVEL MATTERS (1925)

  We have curious ideas of ourselves. We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it. Mens sana in corpore sano. The years drink up the wine, and at last throw the bottle away, the body, of course, being the bottle.

  It is a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? Or my mind? My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe in touch, and learns a vast number of things, and knows a vast number of things. My hand, as it writes these words, slips gaily along, jumps like a grasshopper to dot an i, feels the table rather cold, gets a little bored if I write too long, has its own rudiments of thought, and is just as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my soul. Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand is absolutely alive, me alive.

  Whereas, of course, as far as I am concerned, my pen isn’t alive at all. My pen isn’t me alive. Me alive ends at my finger-tips.

  Whatever is me alive is me. Every tiny bit of my hands is alive, every little freckle and hair and fold of skin. And whatever is me alive is me. Only my finger-nails, those ten little weapons between me and an inanimate universe, they cross the mysterious Rubicon between me alive and things like my pen, which are not alive, in my own sense.

  So, seeing my hand is all alive, and me alive, wherein is it just a bottle, or a jug, or a tin can, or a vessel of clay, or any of the rest of that nonsense? True, if I cut it it will bleed, like a can of cherries. But then the skin that is cut, and the veins that bleed, and the bones that should never be seen, they are all just as alive as the blood that flows. So the tin can business, or vessel of clay, is just bunk.

  And that’s what you learn, when you’re a novelist. And that’s what you are very liable not to know, if you’re a parson, or a philosopher, or a scientist, or a stupid person. If you’re a parson, you talk about souls in heaven. If you’re a novelist, you know that paradise is in the palm of your hand, and on the end of your nose, because both are alive; and alive, and man alive, which is more than you can say, for certain, of paradise. Paradise is after life, and I for one am not keen on anything that is after life. If
you are a philosopher, you talk about infinity, and the pure spirit which knows all things. But if you pick up a novel, you realize immediately that infinity is just a handle to this self-same jug of a body of mine; while as for knowing, if I find my finger in the fire, I know that fire burns, with a knowledge so emphatic and vital, it leaves Nirvana merely a conjecture. Oh, yes, my body, me alive, knows, and knows intensely. And as for the sum of all knowledge, it can’t be anything more than an accumulation of all the things I know in the body, and you, dear reader, know in the body.

  These damned philosophers, they talk as if they suddenly went off in steam, and were then much more important than they are when they’re in their shirts. It is nonsense. Every man, philosopher included, ends in his own finger-tips. That’s the end of his man alive. As for the words and thoughts and sighs and aspirations that fly from him, they are so many tremulations in the ether, and not alive at all. But if the tremulations reach another man alive, he may receive them into his life, and his life may take on a new colour, like a chameleon creeping from a brown rock on to a green leaf. All very well and good. It still doesn’t alter the fact that the so-called spirit, the message or teaching of the philosopher or the saint, isn’t alive at all, but just a tremulation upon the ether, like a radio message. All this spirit stuff is just tremulations upon the ether. If you, as man alive, quiver from the tremulation of the ether into new life, that is because you are man alive, and you take sustenance and stimulation into your alive man in a myriad ways. But to say that the message, or the spirit which is communicated to you, is more important than your living body, is nonsense. You might as well say that the potato at dinner was more important.

  Nothing is important but life. And for myself, I can absolutely see life nowhere but in the living. Life with a capital L is only man alive. Even a cabbage in the rain is cabbage alive. All things that are alive are amazing. And all things that are dead are subsidiary to the living. Better a live dog than a dead lion. But better a live lion than a live dog. C’est la vie!