by Bruce Duffy
And you think I ought to meet him? asked Russell dubiously.
Oh, absolutely, said Ottoline, walking on. Lawrence has quite changed my life. But he has had a bad time of it lately, what with The Rainbow being banned and no money. You know, no one will publish him now — they don’t dare. And because of her, the police have him down as a possible German sympathizer. He hates England now, he’s fearfully bitter. He wants to escape and found a colony in America.
Now the alchemist in Ottoline emerged as she said, I do think there’s a similarity in your societal aspirations. For England and the world, I mean. And Lawrence does so very much admire your work and your courage to speak out. He told me so.
This pricked Russell’s vanity. Nor was he a stranger to Lawrence’s work and reputation. Already, he had read, and much admired, Lawrence’s poetry. He had likewise been impressed with the opening of Sons and Lovers when Ottoline had put the book in his hands that morning. And Russell did want an ally of the visionary kind, as opposed to the rather laborious idealogues he found around him these days.
With his hands stuffed in his pockets, Lawrence, meanwhile, was picking down the rain-soaked path, intently checking the spring’s progress, the little stubs of green underfoot and the rude red buds protruding from the branches. For a suspected German sympathizer, Lawrence was not exercising much caution. Even his only suit was a provocation: a Rhenish cut, the color and texture of oatmeal, with too many pockets. Ottoline said he was still getting over a respiratory infection, and he looked it. He was a small, stooped, sick-looking man, not much over thirty, with reddish hair and mustache, weary red eyes, a large jaw and bony hands and wrists. His lips were coarse and sensual, like his thick Midland accent, and his eyes quickened when he saw Ottoline with Russell in tow. The matchmaker had left nothing to chance: Ottoline had also given Lawrence a thorough briefing on Russell.
Ottoline did not stay long after her introduction. Having lit the fuse, she quickly excused herself, saying that she had to speak to the gardener. There was awkwardness and a sense of electricity then as the two men walked along, probing each other with small talk about the spring and the beauty of Garsington.
Lawrence was the first to chafe at this mannered minuet. With a hungry, conspiring look, he suddenly said, Well, now. To the business at hand.
Business? demurred Russell.
That’s right, said Lawrence with a nod. I see your face, Bertie Russell. It tells the story. You look tired, man, bone tired, like a fox run across three counties. I’m another fox — aye, a little red fox, panting, with my slack ribs showing. And do you know what the little fox says? He says you must beware the pack, man, the pack! Alone they are nothing, but as a pack — good God, they’ll hound you forever!
Russell was as struck by Lawrence’s sudden vehemence as by the image he had chosen: lately, Russell also saw himself as a man pursued. Still, it was somewhat galling to be lectured by a stranger, at that a man some thirteen years his junior. But Russell was even more disturbed to find himself oddly afraid of this frail, clearly frightened man. Lawrence seemed to see clear through him, smiling as if to say, You can fool them, Bertie Russell, but you can’t fool me with your mental dodges and ring-the-rosies. Russell, making a mental mark, thought, This man is dangerous. But as they walked on, he found himself drawn to this menacing quality, instinctively feeling that if he made peace with the danger around him, the danger might spare him its worst.
And soon he felt close to the danger in Lawrence. He could feel the bitterness as Lawrence described the humiliation of submitting to an army physical the week before, of being forced to stand stripped in a line of men while a scabby little doctor with a fag end dangling fingered his groin. Lawrence felt he’d been raped.
What right has the state to poke my loins and peer up my arse as if I were a stud bull? he said. And then to tell me I’m not fit! For lovemaking I’m fit, but not for their filthy war. Lawrence spat with disgust. Dead men, all of them. May their brains burst and their black hearts rot.
Russell found this chilling. And hard as Lawrence was on soldiers, he was no less damning of C.O.s when they later came upon a field where some of Ottoline’s charges were working. Two digging a drainage ditch were standing on their shovels while another tried without much effort to pry up a stone. A fourth was off picking flowers. With a savage look, Lawrence turned to Russell:
Why do you bother to save men such as these? Better men are already lying fallow in Flanders. These are unclean. God, how I loathe them, these lilied, fagging public school boys, these lying, foolish cynics. Have you ever listened to their prattle? Blind to truth and the sacredness of life, they are, and they will laugh at me! These aren’t men or even boys — these are bloody fetuses. Let the cannon consume them, I say. They’re all done for — aye, and England, too.
Russell had never heard anyone curse with such cold-blooded malice. With a queasy look, he said to Lawrence, Don’t you think you’re being a trifle harsh? I care for sodomy no more than you, but they are still human beings. They deserve to live as much as anyone.
Living men deserve to live! Lawrence shot back. These are dead.
Giving him a measured look, Russell said, Well, if these are indeed dead, then we don’t need a war to kill them.
Lawrence’s face blackened, his tone accusing as he said, Don’t waste your philosopher’s cleverness on me! Let these drones be killed off and be done with it. The war, you know, is entirely biological — Malthusian. Do you seriously believe that all this evolution business, all these ages of lizards and man-apes and bloodthirsty life, were meant to lead to Christ’s dying on Calvary and our salvation? I don’t, I don’t for a second! I believe it has led to this — to decay and death and more death. And thank God, I say. Maggots eat only dead tissue — it’s a dying world’s way of purging itself of dead matter. You, Bertie Russell, you ought to occupy yourself building the new immanent world rather than saving this dying one. And you must speak the truth — I mean the actual truth of blood knowledge — and hang the corruption of this mentalizing nerve consciousness.
Here, Russell lost his patience. Blood knowledge? Nerve consciousness? What on earth do you mean?
Lawrence’s carotids flared up like two little asps. I mean the truth of the blood! Blood consciousness — instinct as opposed to febrile nerve consciousness and useless intellectualizing. Why do you stare at me? You make me feel fumbling, with your looks. No, I am not being logical, I am being truthful. And if I am not logical, then you as a philosopher must tell me where I do not make myself clear —
But at this Lawrence’s voice cracked, and he started coughing in deep, gurgling hacks, so that he had to lean against a tree.
I’m all right, he said, smiling almost pleasurably when Russell started to pat him on the back. Shyly, Russell stuffed his hand back in his pocket and slowly backed against the tree opposite. Lawrence was looking at him, just looking with the profound innocence of one human being coming into focus with another. Lawrence’s eyes were like circles in a pool of water, circles marking the spot where a chaste stone had fallen into uncertain depths. Russell feared losing himself in that pool; he wanted to look away, yet he couldn’t break from this gaze, which now shone with an almost unfathomable goodness. And then, just when Russell thought he could stand it no more, Lawrence twisted up his nose and laughed. A big brazen boy’s laugh. A hurdle had been passed. Beneath it, thought Russell, the man has a sense of humor. Yes, at least he could laugh.
Points of light stood on the new leaves unfolding. On the hillsides, flossy new grass was rippling in the sun. Suddenly Russell felt quite pleased with his young friend. He brushed off the sodden cuffs of his trousers and retied his wet shoelaces, then stood smiling, indicating that he was ready. Lawrence was still eyeing him playfully, on the verge of another laugh. Picking up a limber stick and flipping it around in his hand, Lawrence said:
But you are not dead, Bertie Russell, nor am I. And we shouldn’t be quarreling when we’ve only just met —
Ottoline would be furious! Come, let us walk some more. Look now, the primroses are out — let us be gay a while and each wear one as a sign in our buttonholes. There, now, he said, threading the stem through the hole. Look down into the flower’s throat — look as you would smell. Have you seen anything so fine?
You know, said Lawrence, swinging his coat over his arm. You must tell me your philosophy, and I will tell you mine. I know I am foolish, truly I am. But still I love this coming life of ours, and I swear I speak the truth. Truly, I do.
Ottoline’s match had caught fire. Later, when she asked Russell what he thought of Lawrence, he said:
He’s most wonderfully pure, absolutely passionate and intuitive. I felt as if he saw right through me.
Lawrence was no less impressed. Coming round to him later, like a nectaring bee, Ottoline was delighted to hear his assessment:
He is brilliant, as you said, and he will be useful in our new world. He will be our Zoroaster. Only I feel he needs seasoning. He is too hidebound by mind. Yet I feel certain we shall swear Blutsbrüderschaft. And I told him we must collaborate on a philosophy to rebuild the world. I shall speak about immortality and he shall teach ethics. The poet’s eyes twinkled. And after we have changed the world, we shall go to America and start a jolly colony in Florida, with you as our queen.
With me as queen, asked Ottoline fatuously. But what about Frieda?
Frieda? Lawrence thought for a moment. Why, Frieda shall be our Oracle at Fort Myers. Yes, he said, nodding, I think Fort Myers will be the eye of our new world.
The New World
TWICE MORE Lawrence and Russell met at Garsington. Letters were exchanged, and then the two men began to seriously discuss this program in which Russell would lecture on ethics and social reconstruction and Lawrence on immortality and the new world.
Almost inevitably, though, there were snags. Lawrence, Russell quickly realized, was not one to be bothered with trifling details or practicalities. Rather, he wanted to change the world by decree. He seemed to feel he had only to snap his fingers, had only to write the words, and the reality would magically appear. Everything was Let there be! and We must! Grandly he would say, Let there be an end to this economic thing. We must burst the bonds of this accursed money that enslaves us. Let industry and communications be nationalized, then every man and every woman, well or ill, will have his wages and that will be that.
Democracy, on the other hand, was wrong. The collier’s son had no faith whatsoever in the wisdom of the working man. Liberty, equality and fraternity he called the Three-Fanged Serpent. Rather, Lawrence said there must be an elected aristocracy led by a Caesar. Or better yet, a Supreme Man and a Supreme Woman, with man dictating the economic side and woman the domestic. And there must be spiritual marriage, not corrupt state marriage. The key was Woman. Woman must be the crucible through which Man must strive for his essential blood being, struggling up through her like a drowning man fighting for air.
Russell was alternately repelled and fascinated by these ideas, but he nevertheless saw them as an antidote to his own rationalism, which he found increasingly unreliable in the more mystical realms where he now liked to dwell. Not since Wittgenstein had Russell encountered one who sent such shivers down his spine. Yet while Russell thought Wittgenstein correct in most cases, he often found Lawrence wrong — wrong and faintly terrifying in his sweeping indictments of humanity.
There was something savage and paradoxical about Lawrence, this frightened man who inspired fear; like Wittgenstein, his knack for exposing anxieties and weaknesses in others was preternatural. Lawrence told Russell that he was blind as a newt, that spiritually he didn’t know himself in the least. Lawrence told him that he must be entirely cast forth from the fold of society, that, with a single woman, he must come into newness, bursting forth like a babe into the world.
Russell hungered for this transformation. Already he longed to cease being such a public creature, cut adrift without wife or children. Russell badly wanted the new Canaan that Lawrence promised, but he balked. Standing at the brink of that frontier, he shrunk into his lobster self, paralyzed by the sheer nullity of too much.
And Lawrence, for all his passion, could be stifling. It was always the same litany. London was falling. England was dead. Englishmen were dead. And then, just when Lawrence had pushed Russell to the edge with his hatred and nullity, he would reveal the warmth of sanity, in the way he could sing and be gay, or in the humble devotion with which he could knead bread or fall to his knees to scrub a floor.
What Russell found intolerable was Lawrence’s muddled thinking. For God’s sake, Lawrence, he would plead. In almost a single breath, you tell me that the world is dying and being born, that your colony will be both republic and kingdom, and that London has fallen yet must be pulled down. For once and for all, which way will you have it?
But rant as he might, Russell could not pin him down. Lawrence meant what he meant, he contradicted what he meant, he stuck by what he meant and revised what he meant.
And then, hearing the cock crow, Lawrence said it was time. It was time to write down their program. Or rather, he said that at this stage it most depended on Russell — heir to Plato and Heraclitus — to lay the foundation of their coming Utopia, which he would call Rananim. Russell did as directed: he drew up their preamble. Moving relentlessly from one institution to another, Russell tried to show that the very institutions that seem to make society work — the state, property, the church and marriage — lead instead to world suicide. Russell was bold, even sensationalistic, in his attack, saying that the disease was disintegration, and the cause, power lust. The symptoms differed but the disease was always the same. He said that states existed only to enforce internal peace and wage external wars, that marriage was to enforce fidelity, morality to protect property and God to justify murder in his name. But Lawrence said it was no good.
No, no, he scolded. Your approach is much too negative.
Negative? Russell was incredulous. You accuse me of being negative?
I do, Lawrence insisted. You mustn’t waste precious time saying what is wrong. You must instead say what is and must be. Say what we’ve agreed on — that acquisitive, murderous impulses must be replaced with the creative life essence and that instead of acting from self, man must act from an essential sense of truth. You must get in the positive idea that every living community is a living state. That the fundamental passion in man is for wholeness of movement, unanimity of purpose and oneness of construction. That this is the whole principle of construction.
Russell was in despair. Truth! There you go, bandying that word again. And what have you said? All is one! Life is a unity! Abracadabra! Russell sat staring at him, trying to soften his tone. Please, put yourself in my position. How am I to make anything out of this? And how, for that matter, am I to make it intelligible to the broader public?
Lawrence was indomitable. But you don’t understand! The point is not to make it popular! Oh, God, do not make it popular. We cannot waste our breath on the mob. We need to get to the root, to chop the snake off at the head! To kill the great falsity of subjectivism.
God help us! scoffed Russell. Now, it’s not just truth but subjectivism! And everything you’ve said — it’s all profoundly, impossibly subjective! You mistake your imagination for truth.
Aye, said Lawrence, waving his finger. And you, mon frère, fail to imagine!
Around and around they went, not able to frame even the opening bars of this overture. And then one night, not long after a zeppelin’s bombs struck an orphanage, a mob armed with clubs and stones burst in the hall where Russell was lecturing and rushed the stage.
Get out! Russell ordered. Out! All of you!
Russell was determined to stand his ground, but fortunately three associates managed to drag him off before the mob enveloped him. As it was, Russell barely escaped, with bruises and a throat deeply gashed by someone’s nails. To his shame, he was among the luckiest. Sixteen others were hurt, fou
r seriously, including one man who nearly lost an eye.
After meeting with the NCF leaders, Russell decided to go into seclusion and stop speaking for a few weeks. He and Lawrence were walking through the London Zoo when Russell explained his decision. Lawrence, ill for the last month, had grown a scraggly beard that reminded Russell of a swarm of red ants.
Nonsense, man, Lawrence insisted, appalled by this pusillanimous decision. You can’t stop speaking now. Good God, don’t you see? The time is ripe, the crowd’s ugliness is a good sign! They’re ready to revolt. Why, with only a few words from you, they would do so right now!
Russell was incensed. And do what? Hail you as their Caesar? Look! he said, pulling down his collar. Do you see their claws on my neck? Revolt? All they’re ripe for is murder.
Lawrence nodded. But they would pull down the bloody bunch over us now. Then the war would end and we all could truly begin to live. To live, Bertie. And a word, a word from you is all it would take. Aren’t you sick? Aren’t you sick to death of it? Death would be better. It’s time, I say. You must cast aside all fear and do it — do it for freedom’s sake.
Russell stopped short and faced him. You’re right. We’ll go straightaway to Hyde Park, and you can tell the people. You know the mood better than I. You know the word. You, of all people, have the common touch that I lack. Well, go on, man! That magical word from you will make it so.
Lawrence’s hot eyes bulged. With a look of rage, he admitted, I can’t speak to crowds — you know this.
Russell waved him off. Then don’t speak this nonsense to me.
Wait! ordered Lawrence, rushing to catch up. God damn you, wait!
I’ll not wait, remonstrated Russell. I have nothing more to say to you today.
Russell hoped this would end the matter, but Lawrence kept following, coughing and trying to catch his breath. They passed a clown and a man selling nuts, some children with their nanny. Lawrence was bearing down on him; Russell even wondered if he might physically attack him. But just as Russell was about to confront him, Lawrence streaked by and spat, with a screaming lunge, into the cage of a large male baboon. The ape, bent over with his back turned, whipped around with a hiss.
