The Bad Side of Books

by D. H. Lawrence

  Hardwick Hall

  More window than wall.

  Built in the days of good Queen Bess, by that other Bess, termagant and tartar, Countess of Shrewsbury.

  Butterley, Alfreton, Tibshelf – what was once the Hardwick district is now the Notts-Derby coal area. The country is the same, but scarred and splashed all over with mines and mining settlements. Great houses loom from hill-brows, old villages are smothered in rows of miners’ dwellings, Bolsover Castle rises from the mass of the colliery village of Bolsover. – Böwser, we called it, when I was a boy.

  Hardwick is shut. On the gates, near the old inn, where the atmosphere of the old world lingers perfect, is a notice: ‘This park is closed to the public and to all traffic until further notice. No admittance.’

  Of course! The strike! They are afraid of vandalism.

  Where shall we go? Back into Derbyshire, or to Sherwood Forest.

  Turn the car. We’ll go on through Chesterfield. If I can’t ride in my own carriage, I can still ride in my sister’s motor-car.

  It is a still September afternoon. By the ponds in the old park, we see colliers slowly loafing, fishing, poaching in spite of all notices.

  And at every lane end there is a bunch of three or four policemen, ‘blue-bottles,’ big, big-faced, stranger policemen. Every field path, every stile seems to be guarded. There are great pits, coal mines, in the fields. And at the end of the paths coming out of the field from the colliery, along the high-road, the colliers are squatted on their heels, on the wayside grass, silent and watchful. Their faces are clean, white, and all the months of the strike have given them no colour and no tan. They are pit-bleached. They squat in silent remoteness, as if in the upper galleries of hell. And the policemen, alien, stand in a group near the stile. Each lot pretends not to be aware of the others.

  It is past three. Down the path from the pit come straggling what my little nephew calls ‘the dirty ones.’ They are the men who have broken strike, and gone back to work. They are not many: their faces are black, they are in their pit-dirt. They linger till they have collected, a group of a dozen or so ‘dirty ones,’ near the stile, then they trail off down the road, the policemen, the alien ‘blue-bottles,’ escorting them. And the ‘clean ones,’ the colliers still on strike, squat by the wayside and watch without looking. They say nothing. They neither laugh nor stare. But here they are, a picket, and with their bleached faces they see without looking, and they register with the silence of doom, squatted down in rows by the road-side.

  The ‘dirty ones’ straggle off in the lurching, almost slinking walk of colliers, swinging their heavy feet and going as if the mine-roof were still over their heads. The big blue policemen follow at a little distance. No voice is raised: nobody seems aware of anybody else. But there is the silent, hellish registering in the consciousness of all three groups, clean ones, dirty ones and blue-bottles.

  So it is now all the way into Chesterfield, whose crooked spire lies below. The men who have gone back to work – they seem few, indeed – are lurching and slinking in quiet groups, home down the high-road, the police at their heels. And the pickets, with bleached faces, squat and lean and stand, in silent groups, with a certain pale fatality, like Hell, upon them.

  And I, who remember the homeward-trooping of the colliers when I was a boy, the ringing of the feet, the red mouths and the quick whites of the eyes, the swinging pit bottles, and the strange voices of men from the underworld calling back and forth, strong and, it seemed to me, gay with the queer, absolved gaiety of miners – I shiver, and feel I turn into a ghost myself. The colliers were noisy, lively, with strong underworld voices such as I have never heard in any other men, when I was a boy. And after all, it is not so long ago. I am only forty-one.

  But after the war, the colliers went silent: after 1920. Till 1920 there was a strange power of life in them, something wild and urgent, that one could hear in their voices. They were always excited, in the afternoon, to come up above-ground: and excited, in the morning, at going down. And they called in the darkness with strong, strangely evocative voices. And at the little local foot-ball matches, on the damp, dusky Saturday afternoons of winter, great, full-throated cries came howling from the foot-ball field, in the zest and the wildness of life.

  But now, the miners go by to the foot-ball match in silence like ghosts, and from the field comes a poor, ragged shouting. These are the men of my own generation, who went to the board school with me. And they are almost voiceless. They go to the welfare clubs, and drink with a sort of hopelessness.

  I feel I hardly know any more the people I come from, the colliers of the Erewash Valley district. They are changed, and I suppose I am changed. I find it so much easier to live in Italy. And they have got a new kind of shallow consciousness, all newspaper and cinema, which I am not in touch with. At the same time, they have, I think, an underneath ache and heaviness very much like my own. It must be so, because when I see them, I feel it so strongly.

  They are the only people who move me strongly, and with whom I feel myself connected in deeper destiny. It is they who are, in some peculiar way, ‘home’ to me. I shrink away from them, and I have an acute nostalgia for them.

  And now, this last time, I feel a doom over the country, and a shadow of despair over the hearts of the men, which leaves me no rest. Because the same doom is over me, wherever I go, and the same despair touches my heart.

  Yet it is madness to despair, while we still have the course of destiny open to us.

  One is driven back to search one’s own soul, for a way out into a new destiny.

  A few things I know, with inner knowledge.

  I know that what I am struggling for is life, more life ahead, for myself and the men who will come after me: struggling against fixations and corruptions.

  I know that the miners at home are men very much like me, and I am very much like them: ultimately, we want the same thing. I know they are, in the life sense of the word, good.

  I know that there is ahead the mortal struggle for property.

  I know that the ownership of property has become, now, a problem, a religious problem. But it is one we can solve.

  I know I want to own a few things: my personal things. But I also know I want to own no more than those. I don’t want to own a house, nor land, nor a motor-car, nor shares in anything. I don’t want a fortune – not even an assured income.

  At the same time, I don’t want poverty and hardship. I know I need enough money to leave me free in my movements, and I want to be able to earn that money without humiliation.

  I know that most decent people feel very much the same in this respect: and the indecent people must, in their indecency, be subordinated to the decent.

  I know that we could, if we would, establish little by little a true democracy in England: we could nationalise the land and industries and means of transport, and make the whole thing work infinitely better than at present, if we would. It all depends on the spirit in which the thing is done.

  I know we are on the brink of a class war.

  I know we had all better hang ourselves at once, than enter on a struggle which shall be a fight for the ownership or non-ownership of property, pure and simple, and nothing beyond.

  I know the ownership of property is a problem that may have to be fought out. But beyond the fight must lie a new hope, a new beginning.

  I know our vision of life is all wrong. We must be prepared to have a new conception of what it means, to live. And everybody should try to help to build up this new conception, and everybody should be prepared to destroy, bit by bit, our old conception.

  I know that man cannot live by his own will alone. With his soul, he must search for the sources of the power of life. It is life we want.

  I know that where there is life, there is essential beauty. Genuine beauty, which fills the soul, is an indication of life, and genuine ugliness, which blasts the soul, is an indication of morbidity. – But prettiness is opposed to beauty.


  I know that, first and foremost, we must be sensitive to life and to its movements. If there is power, it must be sensitive power.

  I know that we must look after the quality of life, not the quantity. Hopeless life should be put to sleep, the idiots and the hopeless sick and the true criminal. And the birth-rate should be controlled.

  I know we must take up the responsibility for the future, now. A great change is coming, and must come. What we need is some glimmer of a vision of a world that shall be, beyond the change. Otherwise we shall be in for a great débâcle.

  What is alive, and open, and active, is good. All that makes for inertia, lifelessness, dreariness, is bad. This is the essence of morality.

  What we should live for is life and the beauty of aliveness, imagination, awareness, and contact. To be perfectly alive is to be immortal.

  I know these things, along with other things. And it is nothing very new to know these things. The only new thing would be to act on them.

  And what is the good of saying these things, to men whose whole education consists in the fact that twice two are four? – which, being interpreted, means that twice tuppence is fourpence. All our education, the whole of it, is formed upon this little speck of dust.

  REVIEW OF IN OUR TIME BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1927)

  In Our Time is the last of the four American books, and Mr Hemingway has accepted the goal. He keeps on making flights, but he has no illusion about landing anywhere. He knows it will be nowhere every time.

  In Our Time calls itself a book of stories, but it isn’t that. It is a series of successive sketches from a man’s life, and makes a fragmentary novel. The first scenes, by one of the big lakes in America – probably Superior – are the best; when Nick is a boy. Then come fragments of war – on the Italian front. Then a soldier back home, very late, in the little town way west in Oklahoma. Then a young American and wife in post-war Europe; a long sketch about an American jockey in Milan and Paris; then Nick is back again in the Lake Superior region, getting off the train at a burnt-out town, and tramping across the empty country to camp by a trout-stream. Trout is the one passion life has left him – and this won’t last long.

  It is a short book: and it does not pretend to be about one man. But it is. It is as much as we need know of the man’s life. The sketches are short, sharp, vivid, and most of them excellent. (The ‘mottoes’ in front seem a little affected.) And these few sketches are enough to create the man and all his history: we need know no more.

  Nick is a type one meets in the more wild and woolly regions of the United States. He is the remains of the lone trapper and cowboy. Nowadays he is educated, and through with everything. It is a state of conscious, accepted indifference to everything except freedom from work and the moment’s interest. Mr Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: getting connected up. Don’t get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don’t be held. Break it, and get away. Don’t get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away, for the sake of getting away. Beat it! ‘Well, boy, I guess I’ll beat it.’ Ah, the pleasure in saying that!

  Mr Hemingway’s sketches, for this reason, are excellent: so short, like striking a match, lighting a brief sensational cigarette, and it’s over. His young love-affair ends as one throws a cigarette-end away. ‘It isn’t fun any more.’ – ‘Everything’s gone to hell inside me.’

  It is really honest. And it explains a great deal of sentimentality. When a thing has gone to hell inside you, your sentimentalism tries to pretend it hasn’t. But Mr Hemingway is through with the sentimentalism. ‘It isn’t fun any more. I guess I’ll beat it.’

  And he beats it, to somewhere else. In the end he’ll be a sort of tramp, endlessly moving on for the sake of moving away from where he is. This is a negative goal, and Mr Hemingway is really good, because he’s perfectly straight about it. He is like Krebs, in that devastating Oklahoma sketch: he doesn’t love anybody, and it nauseates him to have to pretend he does. He doesn’t even want to love anybody; he doesn’t want to go anywhere, he doesn’t want to do anything. He wants just to lounge around and maintain a healthy state of nothingness inside himself, and an attitude of negation to everything outside himself. And why shouldn’t he, since that is exactly and sincerely what he feels? If he really doesn’t care, then why should he care? Anyhow, he doesn’t.

  FLOWERY TUSCANY (1927)

  I

  Each country has its own flowers, that shine out specially there. In England it is daisies and buttercups, hawthorn and cowslips. In America, it is goldenrod, stargrass, June daisies, Mayapple and asters, that we call Michaelmas daisies. In India, hibiscus and dattura and champa flowers, and in Australia mimosa, that they call wattle, and sharp-tongued strange heath-flowers. In Mexico it is cactus flowers, that they call roses of the desert, lovely and crystalline among many thorns; and also the dangling yard-long clusters of the cream bells of the yucca, like dropping froth.

  But by the Mediterranean, now as in the days of the Argosy, and, we hope, for ever, it is narcissus and anemone, asphodel and myrtle. Narcissus and anemone, asphodel, crocus, myrtle, and parsley, they leave their sheer significance only by the Mediterranean. There are daisies in Italy too: at Pæstum there are white little carpets of daisies, in March, and Tuscany is spangled with celandine. But for all that, the daisy and the celandine are English flowers, their best significance is for us and for the North.

  The Mediterranean has narcissus and anemone, myrtle and asphodel and grape hyacinth. These are the flowers that speak and are understood in the sun round the Middle Sea.

  Tuscany is especially flowery, being wetter than Sicily and more homely than the Roman hills. Tuscany manages to remain so remote, and secretly smiling to itself in its many sleeves. There are so many hills popping up, and they take no notice of one another. There are so many little deep valleys with streams that seem to go their own little way entirely, regardless of river or sea. There are thousands, millions of utterly secluded little nooks, though the land has been under cultivation these thousands of years. But the intensive culture of vine and olive and wheat, by the ceaseless industry of naked human hands and winter-shod feet, and slow-stepping, soft-eyed oxen does not devastate a country, does not denude it, does not lay it bare, does not uncover its nakedness, does not drive away either Pan or his children. The streams run and rattle over wild rocks of secret places, and murmur through blackthorn thickets where the nightingales sing all together, unruffled and undaunted.

  It is queer that a country so perfectly cultivated as Tuscany, where half the produce of five acres of land will have to support ten human mouths, still has so much room for the wild flowers and the nightingale. When little hills heave themselves suddenly up, and shake themselves free of neighbours, man has to build his garden and his vineyard, and sculp his landscape. Talk of hanging gardens of Babylon, all Italy, apart from the plains, is a hanging garden. For centuries upon centuries man has been patiently modelling the surface of the Mediterranean countries, gently rounding the hills, and graduating the big slopes and the little slopes into the almost invisible levels of terraces. Thousands of square miles of Italy have been lifted in human hands, piled and laid back in tiny little flats, held up by the drystone walls, whose stones came from the lifted earth. It is a work of many, many centuries. It is the gentle sensitive sculpture of all the landscape. And it is the achieving of the peculiar Italian beauty which is so exquisitely natural, because man, feeling his way sensitively to the fruitfulness of the earth, has moulded the earth to his necessity without violating it.

  Which shows that it can be done. Man can live on the earth and by the earth without disfiguring the earth. It has been done here, on all these sculptured hills and softly, sensitively terraced slopes.

  But, of course, you can’t drive a steam plough on terraces four yards wide, terraces that dwindle and broaden and sink and rise a little, all according to the pitch and the
breaking outline of the mother hill. Corn has got to grow on these little shelves of earth, where already the grey olive stands semi-invisible, and the grapevine twists upon its own scars. If oxen can step with that lovely pause at every little stride, they can plough the narrow field. But they will have to leave a tiny fringe, a grassy lip over the drystone wall below. And if the terraces are too narrow to plough, the peasant digging them will still leave the grassy lip, because it helps to hold the surface in the rains.

  And here the flowers take refuge. Over and over and over and over has this soil been turned, twice a year, sometimes three times a year, for several thousands of years. Yet the flowers have never been driven out. There is a very rigorous digging and sifting, the little bulbs and tubers are flung away into perdition, not a weed shall remain.

  Yet spring returns, and on the terrace lips, and in the stony nooks between terraces, up rise the aconites, the crocuses, the narcissus and the asphodel, the inextinguishable wild tulips. There they are, for ever hanging on the precarious brink of an existence, but for ever triumphant, never quite losing their footing. In England, in America, the flowers get rooted out, driven back. They become fugitive. But in the intensive cultivation of ancient Italian terraces, they dance round and hold their own.

  Spring begins with the first narcissus, rather cold and shy and wintry. They are the little bunchy, creamy narcissus with the yellow cup like the yolk of the flower. The natives call these flowers tazzette, little cups. They grow on the grassy banks rather sparse, or push up among thorns.

  To me they are winter flowers, and their scent is winter. Spring starts in February, with the winter aconite. Some icy day, when the wind is down from the snow of the mountains, early in February, you will notice on a bit of fallow land, under the olive trees, tight, pale-gold little balls, clenched tight as nuts, and resting on round ruffs of green near the ground. It is the winter aconite suddenly come.