***
Ferreting about in contemporary letters, as even so unsystematic and unscholarly a book critic as myself will from time to time, the figure of DH Lawrence looms up inescapably. I very much wish it were not so. How often I have closed one of the many outpourings about him with the thought that never, but never, will I so much as open another, come what may! Then another appears on the scene, perhaps by one of those unspeakable women who gathered round him, and I’m at it again, hooked!
Now at least I can hope that my addiction will henceforth be fed from a single source. By a happy chance I find myself in possession of Edward Nehsl’s three-volume D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, a magnificent piece of scholarship containing pretty well everything of significance written about Lawrence, whether by his friends and associates or by himself, all chronologically arranged, judiciously chosen, conveniently and exhaustively annotated, with an excellent index and bibliography. Next time I pine for a fix I shall turn to Mr. Nehls instead of sucking down, say, some of Frieda Lawrence’s raw spirit or Middleton Murry’s rancid cider, and calm will be restored.
One chapter of Mr. Nehls’s vast work riveted my attention for a particular reason: 1908-1912: Croydon, when I was at an elementary school in Croydon, Lawrence was teaching at another, and my teacher, Helen Corke, was a close friend of his, spending much of her spare time with him. Thus I was able, in considering this phase of Lawrence’s life, to fill in the background in a quite personal and vivid way. Also, I recently had a long televised conversation with Miss Corke - now an old lady in her eighties, but not all that older than me in my middle sixties -about her relations with Lawrence and her memories of him as a fellow teacher in Croydon.
Those early elementary or board schools were built on a standard plan provided by the old Board of Education. They had an air more of prisons than of schools, standing up stark and gaunt, all with a regulation asphalt playground into which the children were turned for their morning and afternoon break. I’ve never seen anything quite like them in America; they belonged, I fancy, to a phase of our Victorian social history which never got across the Atlantic. In the public estimation they were for the poor and the lowly; we who went to them, especially in a predominantly middle- or lower-middle-class South London suburban area like Croydon, were considered ‘rough,’ and if not actual delinquents, quite close to being so. The more respectable and affluent families sent their children to fee-paying private schools where they had caps and blazers; we were educated at the public expense - in those far-off days more a stigma then, as now, a right.
The school Lawrence taught at was built at a later time than mine, and so was less dismally institutional. But it was run in the same sort of way, with an inflexible syllabus, and subject to occasional inspection by a Scotsman named Robertson, now long since dead, whom I remember well. He had masses of white hair brushed back picturesquely from a rather florid countenance, and even then I sensed something bogus in him - confirmed now by his mannered, almost patronizing account of Lawrence, included by Mr. Nehls in his composite biography. Robertson obviously didn’t care much for Law-rence, and describes with some acerbity how he took him to a local literary society ‘at which each member or visitor was expected to speak for some minutes on a modern poet.’ (They suffered even then, didn’t they? Even before the coming of TS Eliot and The Beatles.) Lawrence, it seems, chose Rachel Annand Taylor, who, he announced dramatically, according to Mr. Robertson’s account, had ‘red hair, squirrel-red hair.’ I confess I had never heard of her. This Robertson examined me once for a scholarship examination, and passed me. It was said at the time that he did it only to ingratiate himself with my father, who was on the local Education Committee. I hope it may not be so, but honesty compels me to admit that it was the only examination of the kind I ever passed.
A vivid impression abides with me of Miss Corke standing by her blackboard, or coming among us, her charges, seated at our desks, to look over our shoulders to see how we were getting on with our writing and adding. (Remember, this was fifty-eight years ago, and we were still using slates which made an excruciating scratching noise as we made marks on them.) Now I have to add to this memory the thought that not so very far away, with a similar blackboard and similar desks, DH Lawrence was standing in front of his rather older pupils. Robertson remembers him as having ‘a pale face, stooping shoulders, a narrow chest, febrile hands, and a voice which I can only describe as contralto.’ He and Miss Corke met most weekends, going for long walks over the Downs, talking very seriously about literature and their emotions, breaking into fragments of foreign languages - German, French - going to concerts, all part of a general cultural assiduity which belonged to people of their sort in those times.
In the light of Lady Chatterley and other Laurentian ravings about sex, it seems somehow funny to me now - the two of them blamelessly reading Greek plays in translation to one another, and then poor Miss Corke between whiles having to cope with my and the other children in her class’s stubborn illiteracy. As I remember her in her early twenties, she was pretty and rather slight, with a lot of billowy hair; very much in the style of the mezzotint illustrations in a volume of Maupassant’s short stories on my father’s shelves whose pages I turned over at a very early age.
Talking it all over with Miss Corke nearly six decades later in my garden, with the arc lamps correcting the sunshine, the cameras turning, and clapper boards interrupting our talk, was a bizarre experience. To her he was ‘David’; the years rolled back, and I was in her classroom learning to spell (not that I ever did); she and Lawrence facing the wind as they made their way along the coast road from Brighton via Rotting-dean to Newhaven. They stayed in a boarding-house, Miss Corke recalls, at opposite ends of a long corridor, and in the middle of the night she ‘woke into an intensely silent sea fog, which swathed the house like a huge, clammy spider web, and filled me with cold terror.’ Terrified, she made her way along the corridor and stood outside Lawrence’s room. Then she heard him talking to himself in his sleep, was reassured thereby, and returned to her bed. She described the experience in some verses she wrote, entitled Fantasy; Lawrence took them over, and rewrote them as Coldness in Love, in which it is he who stands in the corridor outside her door. Both poems exist, and shed much light, particularly on Lawrence, but also on Miss Corke and the relationship between them - so much more actual and human than Mellors’ goings-on with Lady Chatterley in the woods.
Then again, Miss Corke was involved, as she told me, in a tragic happening during the time of her friendship with Lawrence. She had been having some kind of love affair, in the context of those days, with a musician who was married, with several children. After much hesitation they went away together to the Isle of Wight for a week, and then, when the musician came back and rejoined his family, in a mood of desperation he hanged himself in the bathroom. Lawrence took this tragic theme and used it for his novel The Trespasser, in which he calls the hero Siegmund and the heroine Helena. Together, he and Miss Corke worked over the theme, until Lawrence came to identify himself with Siegmund. Miss Corke wrote an account of the tragedy in her novel Neutral Ground. Some student, more diligent and scholarly than I, should find in this a fascinating subject for a thesis. Rarely can the actual process of literary composition have been so fully documented. There is also, as bearing on the same subject, Miss Corke’s perceptive and well-written D.H. Lawrence, the Croydon Years, and now, I have heard, all the tapes of our long conversation in my garden have been deposited with the University of Texas.
Another figure in Lawrence’s life who emerged into full dimensions as Miss Corke talked about her was Jessie Chambers, Lawrence’s first and probably best love, the original of Miriam in Sons and Lovers, his good genius who helped him with his early efforts at writing, and sent off a batch of his poems to Ford Maddox Ford at the English Review, where they were accepted and published -his very first publication. Jessie Chambers visited Lawrence in Croydon, and she and Miss
Corke became firm friends. Lawrence’s behaviour over the publication of Sons and Lovers, which Jessie Chambers considered scurvy, led to their estrangement, and was a blow from which she never recovered. No one in my opinion understood Lawrence so well; her D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, published under the pseudonym ‘E.T.,’ is a touchingly truthful account of him by someone who loved and understood him all too well.
And what of this, in a letter to Miss Corke after Lawrence’s death? ‘As an artist, when he is dealing with the immediate and the concrete, he is superb, but when he assays to be a thinker I find him superficial and unconvincing, and quite soon boring . . . His concern was to find some means of escape from the narrow prison of his own ego, and to do that he was prepared to assault the cosmos. So, whenever I read his almost delirious denunciations of what he pretended to regard as Christianity, I only see the caged panther lashing himself into a fury to find some way out of his strait prison. DHL was a man in bondage, and all his theorising and philosophising only bear witness to his agony.’
A man in bondage - exactly! When I compare these luminous thoughts and sentences with the congested disquisitions on Lawrence by, for instance, FR Leavis, I realize anew the chasm which divides real insight from academic criticism. ‘I am sure,’ Jessie Chambers concludes, ‘that he broke through his prison before the end, and died a free spirit, though he had lived in bondage.’ Let us hope she was right.
9
Dayspring From On High
Ever since I can remember I have [on occasion] felt myself abstracted from the world of time; impelled, in Lear’s words, to take upon myself the mystery of things. As a child I had vivid recollections of this happening -walking along the road, seated in a room talking to people, and then, suddenly, almost with a click, I was not there anymore; not a participant, just a spectator, looking on from afar. When I first read the phrase: ‘A stranger in a strange land,’ it was, to me, greatly poignant because it exactly fitted such a state of mind. Since then I’ve often used it in talk and writing. Sometimes there are long intervals when this feeling of being a stranger in a strange land doesn’t come, so that I almost forget what it is like; but, sooner or later, it always comes back - bringing inexpressible delight.
I believe this sensation to be the basis of all religion and all art. It may be called the ‘soul’ in contradistinction to the body, or the imagination in contradistinction to the will. Once it has been fully experienced, all other experiences seem trivial by comparison. No perceptive human being has ever been wholly content with mortality. Man cannot live by bread alone. Looking back, it seems to me that all the happiness I have ever known has been derived from glimpses beyond mortality; from pausing, say, in the Strand, and seeing people, traffic, shops, like particles of dust caught up in sunshine and therefore momentarily existing separately. Of course, other things conduce to this state of mind, as talk, especially with a wholly sympathetic friend, and sometimes sensuality - the body then dissolving in fire rather than light, made molten rather than translucent. Beware, however, of falling into the error of a Tolstoy or a DH Lawrence, and regarding sensuality as, in itself, good or bad. Hunger is neither good nor bad, but its satisfaction deserves a grace.
My instinct has increasingly been to be abstemious, and to see in death a promise of deliverance - like one confined in a cell seeing remote blue sky through prison bars. At the same time, I have often not been abstemious, and often despaired. Peace cannot be achieved through satiety, but only through seeing beyond appetite; the idea that desire can be eliminated, by being fed is an illusion, since desire grows by what it feeds on. Not renunciation and not indulgence (the same thing really), but serenity - a harmony between flesh and spirit, between time and eternity, between living and dying. This is the peace of God which passeth all understanding; this is a state of grace.
The opposite is despair. Then time closes in on one like low-hanging clouds. Not a gleam of light breaks through any-where. There is no horizon, and the sullen air is dry and heavy in the mouth. Then one is trapped and imprisoned indeed - a heavy iron gate which has clanged to; a windowless cell, utter silence and utter loneliness. Who, in such circumstances, would not cry out to die? Death seems the only release when there is no hope of otherwise escaping from the cold, dark dungeon of mortality. Thus situated, I have longed to die, and even tried to die.
It is the nature of the soul to soar beyond the flesh and beyond time. There are no conceivable circumstances, individual or collective, which can pin it down irretrievably to earth. Escape is always possible. I know this to be true with all my heart. The compulsions towards the earth -fear and desire and appetite- belong to the body, but ecstasy belongs to the spirit. Transmutation of the earth’s compulsions into the spirit’s ecstasy is being born again. In her sentimentally pious Journal, Eugenie de Guerin asks: ’What do you do when you are sad, you who pray no longer? What do you do when your heart is breaking?’ Something in the nature of prayer - a reference of earthly unease to a comforter beyond the earth - is necessary to save hearts, and sanity, from cracking. The circumstances of mortality -irretrievably imperfect beings capable of conceiving perfection - are otherwise unendurable.
Sleeplessness, from which I suffer habitually, is an eruption of the unconscious. The mind turns round and round, like the wheels of a motor car when they will not grip; horrors invade one - shapes and ideas which embody the terrors of living; Coleridge’s slimy things crawling about a slimy sea. Kipling described the condition as the night getting into his head. Thus, I dreamt of a sort of play. There was a man who was sick, and everyone was kind and considerate to him. Then in the second act he had gone mad. The curtain rose on a nurse and others playing cards on the floor, laughing; and he came on to the stage, immensely aged, bald and shrivelled, with an open book in his hand and babbling confusedly. The others paid no attention to him. On another occasion, I thought I was imprisoned and made for the window to escape, putting my hand through it, and, in the process, cutting an artery so that blood spouted up.
These are the horrors of life, the Evil One, who can be kept at bay by day, but at night can work his will. To keep him off, I try to think of all the most exquisite things I know - as, a summer’s day walking through a cornfield, a warm moonlit night by the sea, a congregation in a country church at Evensong with the light of the setting sun touching the brass eagle on which the Bible stands ,and say over lines I particularly like - as Donne’s ‘My dearest love I do not go . . .’ or the collect: ‘Dearly beloved brethren, I pray and beseech you as many as are here present to accompany me . . .’ or the Lord’s Prayer.
What is fear, which eats away at one’s heart and prevents sleep? Though it attaches itself to specific things, as bodily illness or other material disasters, these only focus what exists already. They give a name to what is nameless. Fear is darkness; fear is being excluded from the society of God; fear is servitude to fleshly appetites. The only way to exorcise fear is by its opposite, love - perfect love which casteth out fear. The more love there is in a human heart, the less room there is for fear. Without love a vacuum is set up which fear soon rushes in to fill. The same thing is true of a society. When it is based on the concept of hatred, its only mystique is fear. Everyone has to be afraid in order to hate; everyone has to hate in order to go on being afraid.
In Russia, in Hitler’s Germany, one sensed the omnipresence of fear -the sudden knock at the door, and everyone growing pale; the fear in people’s eyes, the furtive looks. When I left Russia by train, just across the Letvian frontier where there was a white stake in the ground with a G.P.U. man in his familiar long grey overcoat standing beside it, one of the passengers went out into the corridor and shook his fist in the direction whence we had come. We all spontaneously joined him and did likewise; then began to laugh hysterically. We had been delivered from the kingdom of fear.
Since that time its bounds have been greatly extended .Even, however, if they encompassed the whole world, it w
ould not be forever. Men look towards the light and away from the darkness; their hearts yearn after love, and release from fear.As a prisoner, however deep his dungeon, and however long he has been incarcerated there, never quite forgets the delights of liberty, so in the sunless land of fear there can never be any enduring acclimatisation. Though whole generations pass away, still in the soul of man there is the longing to behold the radiance of God’s love whence he is derived. Flowers in dark places which never feel the sun still lift their blooms in its direction, for such is their nature.
Efforts to establish a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth are wholly misguided, and those, like Gandhi and Tolstoy, who undertake the attempt are led inevitably into falsity. Thus, Tolstoy suffering the humiliation of having armed guards on his estate to prevent the peasants from stealing timber, and Gandhi being involved in Swaraj politics. The point is that perfection cannot be instituted in terms of imperfection, but imperfection can strive after perfection in terms of itself. It is the difference between the steeple of Salisbury Cathedral reaching into the sky and the Tower of Babel intended to mount to Heaven. The one is exquisite in its aspiration, the other ludicrous in its pretension; the one serene, the other clamorous and discordant. Tolstoy wanted to be wholly good and wholly spiritual; but in abolishing his appetites by the will he only enraged them, putting himself in the pitiable situation of fornicating furiously and disgustedly when he was seventy and over, abandoning home and wife when he was eighty. Appetite cannot be willed out of existence, but only, by God’s grace, transubstantiated - dying in the flesh and being re-born in the spirit.
Time and Eternity Page 8
