The most sympathetic obituary I have yet seen was an affectionate note on him as a man which appeared in The Times Literary Supplement.
I desire (if I can) [says the anonymous writer] to correct the impression, which is widespread, that D. H. Lawrence was a madman of genius, savagely bent on violating sanctuaries, and bruising the finer conscience of his fellow men. To defend Lawrence’s passionate convictions is no part of my hasty undertaking. These do not need to be defended, only to be understood, and understood in the light of an experience extraordinary in its depths and comprehensiveness. And again I am not invoking the beauty of his personality to excuse his work. It is right that I should make it clear that I do not consider his work needs any excuse.
It is true that the unknown goes on to say:
If it was wrong, it was passionately wrong; and to be passionately wrong is far better than to be coldly right.
a sentence which I find it impossible to record without expressing my dissent.
If it was not right, it was not right with attendant conditions that have no demonstrable connection with values, and to be not right with these attendant conditions that have no demonstrable connection with values is to be more right than to be right with other attendant conditions that also have no demonstrable connection with values.
Such a statement seems to me wrong in itself, and unnecessary as a defence of Lawrence, since he was passionately right. But we can follow this anonymous writer without question when he says:
Lawrence was the most remarkable and the most lovable man I have ever known. Contact with him was immediate, intimate and rich. When he was gay, and he was often gay – my dominant memory of him is of a blithe and joyful man – he seemed to spread a sensuous enchantment about him. By a natural magic he unsealed the eyes of those in his company; birds and beasts and flowers became new-minted as in Paradise; they stood revealed as what they were, and not the poor objects of our dull and common seeing. The most ordinary domestic act – the roasting of a joint of meat, the washing up of crockery, the painting of a cottage room – in his doing became a gay sacrament.
This is the poet; and this was Lawrence.
This article is just in its estimation of his wonder: and so too was an obituary in the Manchester Guardian. But, considering the sowing, this is a meagre harvest that his genius reaps from contemporary fame; and it might be supposed that the Frankfurter Zeitung was right in the leader it published the other day, which claimed with a sneer that Lawrence was better appreciated in Germany than in England. Yet it is not so. The grief caused by his death proves far otherwise. I do not speak of his friends and his intimates. They had all cause to regret him for purely selfish reasons. Such a gay companion as the article in The Times Literary Supplement delineates is not easily replaced; nor such a friend.
He was completely generous. At a moment when there were not ten pounds between him and destitution he thrust five of them upon a friend and because the friend refused them, flew into a transport of high-pitched rage.
It was not only with his money he was generous. He had caritas. That which was needed had to be given. These traits in him would explain the grief of his friends; but another explanation, which can only lie in his genius, must be found for the effect of his death on those who had never set eyes on him. I know nobody of middle age or less, above a certain standard of intellectual integrity or imaginative vigour, who is not stricken by his loss. The prevalent feeling was well described by a young man, a critic and a poet, who said to me the other day, ‘I’ve felt rather ill ever since Lawrence died.’ There is the general malaise one feels after a severe shock, after a loss that cannot be made good.
How deep the experience goes can be measured by the attempts the mind made to refuse it; for everybody I know, and myself also, refused to believe the news when it came. The first threat of trouble came to me between the acts of This Way to Paradise, a dramatization of Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. It is not so good as a play as it was as a novel. Curiously enough, although one usually thinks at a non-Shavian play that its intellectual content is pitiably below that of most novels, the dialectic stuff of this novel, which was far above the level of current fiction, seemed poor and unsatisfying when one heard it recited over the footlights. This was perhaps because Aldous Huxley’s novels are, for all their simulation of realism, half way to poetry. The characters, and the rhythm of their appearance, give an account of the phenomena in their creator’s spiritual universe. Young Quarles, the intellectual who cannot satisfy his wife Elinor’s need for emotion, so that she turns to Webley, the brainless man of action, represents the fantasy that vexes man with a nightmare vision in which his environment assumes a thousand forms to take his potency away from him. If he thinks, surely the power is draining away from him in a thin flood; if he turns to action, he does but bleed from a different vein; and there are always women. Old Quarles, with his perturbed tootings, ‘A babah? Surely not a babah?’ was the picture of the father the son makes in rebellion, the symbol of humanity that the individual invents when he desires to make the gesture of power that is his alone. These, and all the other figures of Point Counter Point, were real events in Aldous Huxley’s mind, and the sequence in which they appeared and reappeared revealed how his argument with himself about its values was going. It was therefore acceptable by all readers who had reached a certain level of self-consciousness, by reason of the comparison and contrasts they could find between his universe and theirs.
But when these same characters and events were presented in the terribly material medium of the stage, without any disguise of poetry, one had to judge them as if they were taking place on the plane of everyday life. Then one watched the young Quarles household only to imagine how Elinor would react to the torture, hardly to be described in the humanitarian pages of an Occidental publication, though the Chinese Police Gazette might like it, which one has long devised for all wives who interrupt their husbands when they are working to ask them if they remember those summer evenings in the garden at Wherever eight years ago. Old Quarles was exactly as significant in comparison with all the other senile libertines the stage has seen as his lines enable him to be, and no more. The dialectic speeches, put into the mouth of those who had diminished from real poetic creations to stage types, seemed irrelevant and papery. But certain things still emerged as important. Profound meaning rang out through lines that bore relation to matters not transplanted from the novel into the play, like bells heard across a lake from a church hidden in the hills on the other side. One was conscious of this whenever Mark Rampion, in whom Aldous Huxley has very obviously depicted Lawrence, came on the stage. One thought, ‘Even Aldous Huxley, who is so far above the rest of us, feels that he has to look up to Lawrence.’ When the curtain fell I said as much to my companion, who answered, ‘You know Lawrence is dangerously ill.’ For no reason at all I replied, ‘Oh, I don’t believe that, it’s quite impossible,’ just as lots of people, equally without reason, felt confidently, ‘There’s some mistake,’ when they read in the newspapers about his death at Vence. What would Aldous Huxley or anybody who had seen This Way to Paradise have done if they had suddenly heard that the producers of the play had decided to cut out the character of Mark Rampion? All alike would have cried out that the best thing would then be gone, that the producers could not meditate such a folly. Even so did those of us who heard of Lawrence’s death feel that from the spectacle of the universe, by the incredible stupidity of a destroying angel, the best thing had gone. Since we see nothing in the universe outside us which we cannot identify with what we see in the universe within us, this means that the forces which moved Lawrence seem to us the best part of our human equipment.
What were these forces? I can find an answer most easily, I find, by referring not to his work, but to my personal acquaint-anceship with him, though that was slight. One spring day about ten years ago I was lunching in Florence with Reggie Turner and Norman Douglas. Reggie Turner has been described by Max Beerbohm as
Artemus in his paper on wits in And Even Now, and there is no need to add a line save to commemorate a supremely imaginative act of charity. When Oscar Wilde came out of prison, Reggie Turner sent him one of the most expensive and completely useless fitted dressing cases that Bond Street has ever achieved. There is need to tell over again the tale of Norman Douglas’ accomplishments, because the mind finds them so incredible that it has a disposition to forget them. Besides being a master of English prose, he is one of the finest classical scholars in Europe, a great linguist (he can even speak and write Russian), a pianist, a composer, a caricaturist, a botanist, and a landscape gardener – all to the highest degree of accomplishment. By one of those ironies which forbids us to believe that nature is neutral, even when one has been forced to give up one’s faith that she is kindly, Reggie Turner, in whose heart is innocence, wears the winking face of a devil off a quattrocento choir stall; and Norman Douglas, whose heart, so far as innocence is concerned, is as the Gobi Desert, looks as one who has never seen Dr Cadman would imagine him to look. There are what one has been led to believe are the stigmata of moral earnestness: the penetrating eyes under level brows, compressed lips, head set sturdily between the shoulders, as if here reason were firmly rooted in the moral law, and hair white as if the scalp itself had renounced all such vanity as colour. And indeed there is here some of the quality suggested. There is in him an austere loyalty to an interpretation of life that might, if need pushed him to it, not baulk at renunciation. Less than paganism is his religion. Things are what they are. If the landscape seems to form a pattern and the figure of a god to emerge, then that does but prove that a god is but a landscape seeming to form a pattern. That being so, all things are equal and unrelated, perpetually dissolvent back to their point of least significance. Believing this he will not for-swear his belief. That day at lunch his conversation perpetually made and unmade the world till late in the afternoon; and then, though there would have seemed to an observer no reason why we should ever move, we were entertaining each other so well, we rose to our feet. Lawrence was coming in by some slow train that crawled up from Rome laden with poor folks that could not pay for speed, and would by now be installed in his hotel. To each of us, different though we were in type, it appeared of paramount importance that we should go and pay him our respects at the first possible moment.
He was staying in a poorish hotel overlooking what seems to me, since I am one of those who are so enamoured of Rome that they will not submit themselves to the magic of Florence, to be a trench of drab and turbid water wholly undeserving of the romantic prestige we have given the Arno. Make no mistake, it was the hotel that overlooked the Arno, not Lawrence. His room was one of the cheaper ones at the back. His sense of guilt which scourged him perpetually, which was the motive power of his genius, since it made him inquire what sin it was which he and all mankind have on their conscience, forbade him either enjoying comfort or having the money to pay for it, lest he should weaken. So it was a small, mean room in which he sat tapping away at a typewriter. Norman Douglas burst out in a great laugh as we went in and asked him if he were already writing an article about the present state of Florence; and Lawrence answered seriously that he was. This was faintly embarrassing, because on the doorstep Douglas had described how on arrival in a town Lawrence used to go straight from the railway station to his hotel and immediately sit down and hammer out articles about the place, vehemently and exhaustively describing the temperament of the people. This seemed obviously a silly thing to do, and here he was doing it. Douglas’ laughter rang out louder than ever, and malicious as a satyr’s.
But we forgot all that when Lawrence set his work aside and laid himself out to be a good host to us. He was one of the most polite people I have ever met, in both naïve and subtle ways. The other two knew him well, but I had never seen him before. He made friends as a child might do, by shyly handing me funny little boxes he had brought from some strange place he had recently visited; and he made friends too as if he were a wise old philosopher at the end of his days, by taking notice of one’s personality, showing that he recognized its quality and giving it his blessing. Also there was a promise that a shy wild thing might well give and exact from its fellows, that he would live if one would let him live. Presently he settled down to give, in a curious hollow voice, like the soft hoot of an owl, an account of the journey he had made, up from Sicily to Capri, from Capri to Rome, from Rome to Florence. There seemed no reason why he should have made these journeys, which were all as uncomfortable as cheap travelling is in Italy; nor did there seem any reason why he was presently going to Baden-Baden. Yet, if every word he said disclosed less and less reason for this journeying, it also disclosed a very definite purpose. These were the journeys that the mystics of a certain type have always found necessary. The Russian saint goes to the head of his family and says good-bye and takes his stick and walks out with no objective but the truth. The Indian fakir draws lines with his bare feet across the dust of his peninsula which describe a diagram, meaningless to the uninitiated, but significant of holiness. Lawrence travelled, it seemed, to get a certain Apocalyptic vision of mankind that he registered again and again and again, always rising to a pitch of ecstatic agony. Norman Douglas, Reggie Turner, and I, none of whom would have moved from one place to another except in the greatest comfort procurable and with a definite purpose, or have endured a disagreeable experience twice if we could possibly help it, sat in a row on the bed and nodded. We knew that what he was doing was right. We nodded and were entranced.
The next day Norman Douglas and I went for a walk with Lawrence far out into the country, past the Certosa. It was a joy for me to leave the city, for I cannot abide trams and Florence is congested with them. Impossible to pass through the streets without feeling that one is being dogged by a moaning tram one had betrayed in one’s reckless youth; and it had been raining so hard that there had for long been no opportunity to walk in the country. Now there had been a day’s sunshine, and the whole world was new. Irises thrust out of the wet earth like weapons suddenly brought into action. The cypresses, instead of being lank funereal plumes commemorating a foundered landscape, were exclamation marks drawn in Chinese ink, crying out at the beauty of the reborn countryside. About the grassy borders of the road there was much fine enamelwork in little flowers and weeds as one has seen it on the swards of Botticelli. Of the renascent quality of the day Lawrence became an embodiment. He was made in the angelic colours. His skin, though he had lived so much in the Southern countries, was very white, his eyes were light, his hair and beard were a pale luminous red. His body was very thin, and because of the flimsiness of his build it seemed as if a groove ran down the centre of his chest and his spine, so that his shoulder blades stood out in a pair of almost winglike projections. He moved quickly and joyously. One could imagine him as a forerunner, speeding faster than spring can go from bud to bud on the bushes, to tell the world of the season that was coming to save it from winter. Beside him Norman Douglas lumbered along stockily. Because he knew what emperor had built this road and set that city on a hill, and how the Etruscans had been like minded in their buildings before him, he made one feel that there have been so many springs that in effect there is no spring, but that that is of no great moment. Bending over a filemot-coloured flower that he had not seen since he found it on Mount Olympus, his face grew nearly as tender as a mother bending over her child. When a child tumbled at his feet from the terrace of an olive orchard, his face became neither more nor less tender than before. They moved in unison of pace along the road, these two, and chatted. They were on good terms then, Ormuzd and Ahriman.
We stopped for lunch at a place that was called the Bridge of Something: an inn that looked across a green meadow to a whitish river. We ate at a table on which a trellis of wistaria painted a shadow far more substantial than the blue mist that was its substance. The two men talked for long of a poor waif, a bastard sprig of royalty, that had recently killed himself after a life divided
between conflicting passions for monastic life, unlawful pleasures, and financial fraud. He had sought refuge at the monastery of Monte Cassino, that nursery of European culture, where St Thomas Aquinas himself was educated; but soon was obliged to flee down one side of the sugar loaf mountain while the carabinieri climbed up the other with a warrant for his arrest on charges connected with the Italian law of credit. Then he had gone to Malta, and played more fantasia on the theme of debt, till his invention was exhausted. This was the man* whose recollections of service in the French Foreign Legion were published with a preface by Lawrence which provoked Norman Douglas to a savage retort that stands high among the dog fights of literary men. But then they were joined in amity while they talked of him with that grave and brotherly pitifulness that men who have found it difficult to accommodate themselves to their fellow men feel for those who have found it impossible. They broke off, I remember, to look at some lads who made their way across the meadow and began to strip by the river bank. ‘The water will be icy,’ said Douglas, ‘it won’t be warm till the snow goes off the mountains.’ He began to chuckle at the thought of the shock that was coming to the boys who had been tempted by the first hot day. Lawrence let his breath hiss out through his teeth at the thought of their agony; but he seemed to find pleasure in it, as he would in any intense feeling.
The Bad Side of Books Page 48
