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D. H. LAWRENCE AND AMERICA:
A BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY OF THE
INFLUENCE OF THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO
ON THE THOUGHT AND WRITING OF
D.-H. LAWRENCE
A Dissertation
Presented to
the Faculty of the Department of English
University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
by
E. W. Tedlocfc Jr..
Summer 1950
UMI Number: DP22997
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL USERS
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and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.
Dissertation Publishing
UMI DP22997
Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
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unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code
ProQuest LLC.
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P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346
Ph. 0 E- 51 Tib"&
T h is dissertation, w ritte n by
ERHEST WARMOCK TEDLOCK, J r .
under the guidance o f F a c u lty C om m ittee
on Studies, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the C o u n c il
on G raduate Study and Research, in p a rtia l f u l
fillm e n t o f requirem ents fo r the degree o f
D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y
, . l 2 L L
Dean
Committee on Studies
Chairman
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION V
PART I 1 : 1913-1922 1
Chapter I Early Reading 1
II Imagist Poetry (1913-1914) 4
III The War Years (1914-1918) 9
IV Post-War Europe: Invitation and
Journey to Taos (1918-1922) 37
PART II First Visit to New Mexico . 1922-1923 6l
Chapter I The Life 61
II The Prose 73
III The Poetry 100
PART III First Visits to Mexico: The Pull
of Europe and the Past: A
Return 128
Chapter I The Life 128
II The Work 152
PART IV Return to New Mexico, 1924 193
Chapter I The Life 193
II The Work 207
PART V Return to Mexico: The Plumed
Serpent, 1924-1925 264
Chapter I The Life 264
II The Wor£ 273
TABLE OF CONTENTS (Con't.)
PAGE
PART VI Last Visit to New Mexico (1925) 329
Chapter I The Life 329
II The Work 339
PART VII 363
Chapter I Aftermath in Europe 363
II Conclusion 378
BIBLIOGRAPHY 386
INTRODUCTION
The title of this study of Lawrence may seem, at
first glance, to involve a tour de force, a strained group
ing of fragments. Yet America, first imagined at a distance,
then encountered first hand, was important to Lawrence from
World War I until his death in 1930. His early reading of
American literature verified for him the conflict between
the physical and the intellectual and spiritual he saw as
the crux of modern man’s problems, traceable through the
Christian era. Opportunities to go to America offered
refuge from an England and Europe of which he had sickened
and despaired, and a chance to create, in miniature social
experiment, the integration which always lay at the center
of his philosophy. In the midst of his search for clues to
a religion which would be real to him, he Was lured by re
ports of Indian New Mexico. His visits to the United States
brought the anti-democrat in him into contact with the most,
powerful of the democracies. The disintegration he found in
Europeans seemed to him, paradoxically, to have reached a
more advanced stage in the rootless, mechanical life of
’ ’white” America as distinguished from "dark" or Indian
America. In Mexico his imagination, struggling between old
and new, found a mixture, already seething with revolution,
that tempted the seer of problems and solutions. His re
turns to Europe formed contrasts which threw the convolutions
vi
of hie problems into relief. In view of all this, Lawrence's
American experience, with the sizeable literary production
accompanying it, is hardly a minor subject.
No sustained study of this phase of Lawrence's career
has been made before, although fairly numerous fragmentary
comments exist. The present studies of Lawrence use other
focuses. The justification of this one lies not only in
the sizeableness and importance of the American experience
but in the control thus gained over the'bewildering multi
plicity and extent of Lawrence's output. Study of a co
herent segment of the life and work reveals concerns and
themes which illuminate Lawrence's entire career.
This study attempts to answer two questions. What
was the effect of the American experience on Lawrence, the
man? What was its effect on Lawrence, the artist, who in
literature explored the man and his world? Thus a correla
tion of the life and the work is attempted. The method is
to preface each period of the American experience with a
short biographical sketch, and then to deal analytically and
comparatively with the work produced during that period, so
that the relationship between the conflicts and ideas of
the man and the themes of the writer may be revealed. An
understanding of overall direction and the development of
technique is, of course, also attempted.
Such a broad statement of the Intent of this study
vii
brings one, with a sigh, to a sense of inherent difficulties
and of inadequacy. To understand, one must formulate: the
danger is that one may distort through the imposition of a
single formula, as Tindall brashly did in D. H. Lawrence and
Susan, His Cow. Here one needs the humility of knowing that
literature always contains more than the commentaries on it
that the two are never the same thing. This study would
not be worth doing were not Lawrence primarily a skillful
artist rather than an erratic irrational theosophist, as
Tindall has him, or the religious and political leader of
a lunatic fringe. While the study may make some contribu
tion to literary history, its chief value to criticism will
lie in its usefulness to the exegesis of Lawrence’s works.
One'last warning: Lawrence dominates his material.
As a friend said to me with wry truth, perhaps the subject
of this study ought to be reversed and made the influence of
Lawrence on America. Well, there is at least reciprocity.
But as for ' ’local color” and startling change, these must
await some critical millennium.
I should like to acknowledge the help of Dr. Garland
Greever, without whose patience and counsel I should not
have been able to proceed this far, and of Dr. Prank Baxter
and Dr. Aerol Arnold, whose reading and suggestions amid
many other duties, have been invaluable. I have had, from
time to time, the opportunity to consult Mrs. Lawrence, and
viii
I am indebted for her patience, advice, and encouragement,
yet refusal to attempt to determine the conclusions of this
study. The shortcomings of the study are mine alone.
PART I: 1913-1922
CHAPTER I
EARLY READING-
Lawrence's, early years, from IS85 to about 1908, were
spent in the mining region of Nottinghamshire. The context
of his early intellectual and artistic growth was the ten
sion of family life and the relationship of the sexes in a
setting which contrasted old and new in the countryside, with
its farms and natural life, reminiscent of did England, and
the black pits, entered daily by father and neighbors. This
borderland setting gave Lawrence his strong sense of hidden
places in the earth, revealed in his later fascination with
snakes and his symbolic use of the earth and darkness as a
source of raw power, his revulsion from the modern scene
with its mechanization and bungling attempts at amelioration,
and his dream of escape into a new world. It was inevitable
that this dream should involve America.
Lawrence's very early work contains allusions to
America. In his first novel, The White Peacock. Canada and
California are mentioned, Canada as a place for a new start
and greater freedom as life on the little Midlands farm
begins to break up. America is again used as a potential
refuge in the early short story, "The Thorn in the Flesh";
Bachmann, the fugitive G-erman soldier, would flee there,
2
and, "Emilie would come and join him. They would be in a
fine, land then."'*’ These are but glimmerings, in plots in
volving untenable situations in the old countries, of a
hope that became extremely important to the writer himself
not many years later. They seem to indicate a young man's
share in the American dream. Sophistication was to come
later.
Indicative of the future, too, are his early encoun
ters with American literature^ When he was sixteen or seven
teen he read Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and The Path-
o
finder “with its impression of level lake and silence."
“He read and liked Emerson's Essays and became wildly
enthusiastic over Thoreau's Walden, especially the essay
3
on 'The Ponds."* William James* Pragmatism "especially ap
pealed to him. . . . What he read was to be applied here and
now; he seemed to consider all his philosophical reading from
the angle of his own personal need."^ “Whitman's Leaves of
G-rass was one of his great books." He would sometimes write
to Jessie Chambers,""I'm sending you a Whitmanesque poem®'
_ _
D. H. Lawrence, The Prussian Officer and Other
Stories (London, 191^), p. 55*
^ E. T., D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (New
York, 1936), p. 96.
3
Ibid., p. 101.
k
Ibid.. p. 113.
3
when he was .enclosing one of his own." Years later Cooper
and Whitman would he assigned chapters in Studies in Classic
American Literature (I923) ’. The early title of this hook was
The Transcendental Element in American Literature: its focus
was on pursuit of the ideal, hut Emerson and Thoreau were
omitted. Elsewhere, Lawrence noted the one-sidedness of
Emerson that both Melville and Hawthorne had felt; their
criticism seems to have escaped Lawrence, who, without noting
it, finds them also .victims of the ideal. He liked Emerson’s.
courage and genuine belief, hut not his idealism, which had
become a drug in an age which called for "a different sort
6
of sardonic courage." There does not seem to he much of
Thoreau in Lawrence's frugality and simplicity of living,
and in his sensitivity to natural life. The reverential
frugality seems to stem, rather, from his impoverished youth
in the Midlands. As for James, his influence is felt, per
haps, in Lawrence's eclecticism, dislike of absolutes, and
world in which all is relative.
5
Ibid.. p. 122.
6
Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence.
p. 318.
CHAPTER II
IMAGIST POETRY (1913-1914)
Lawrence's first important relationship with America
and Americans is that through the then avant garde of poetry,
the imagist poets such as Ezra Pound, H. D., and Amy Lowell,
. and Harriet Monroe and her Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.
In June, 1913> Pound asked Lawrence for some stories
1
for “an American publisher under his wing.” Two he re-
ceived from Lawrence were returned by The Smart Set. In
the July, 1913. number of Poetry. Pound reviewed Lawrence1s
third book (following two novels. The White Peacock and'
The Trespasser). ' Love Poems and Others. - In his review Pound
rejected certain .themes, and their treatment, that were to .
dominate Lawrence'1s work more and more. He began:
The Love Poems. if by that Mr. Lawrence means the
middling-sensual erotic verses in this collection, are
a sort of pre-raphaelitish slushy disgusting or very
nearly so. The attempts to produce the typical Lauren-
tine line have brought forth: •
I touched her and she shivered like a dead snake.
which was improved by an even readier parodist, to
I touched her and she came off in scales.
Jesting aside, when Mr. Lawrence ceases to discuss
his own disagreeable sensations, xirhen he writes low-life
The Letters of JD. H. Lawrence. edited by Aldous
Huxley (New York, I932T, p. 128.
2 Ibid.. p. 145.
5
narrative, as he does in Whether or Hot and in Violets,
there is no English poet under forty who can get within
shot of him. That Masefield should be having a boom
seems, as one takes count of these poems, frankly
ridiculous.J
In this Pound essentially was following the editorial line
of Lawrence's “discoverer," Ford Madox Hueffer, editor of
‘ tlie English Review, who had been struck by Lawrence's “real
ism," his authentic treatment of mining village life, and
his artist s sense for the significant detail.
Two months later, in the September number of Poetry.
Hueffer himself in the second part of “Impressionism — Some
/ Speculations" named Lawrence, with Yeats, De la Mare, Flint,
and Pound, as exhibiting "a new quality, a new power of im
pressionism, that is open to poetry and not so much open to
5
prose." Then, in the January, 1914, number, Poetry published
eight poems by Lawrence, introducing him under "Notes":
Mr. D. H. Lawrence has become conspicuous of late
both in England and this country. Besides such works
in prose as The White Peacock and The Trespasser, he
is the author of Love Poems and Others (Kennerley),
and of the recently published Sons and Lovers
(Kennerley).o
Thus Lawrence was gaining attention in the United States,
at least as far as the advanced criticism went, by the
3
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. II (July, 1913),
149.
4
Ford Madox Hueffer, Portraits from Life (Boston,
1937), P. 72 ff.
^ Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. II (September, 1913),
220-221. ------------
^ Ibid., Ill (January, 1914), 151•
j .
beginning of World War I.
In March and April, Amy Lowell corresponded with
Pound about the periodical, The Egoist. She wished to edit
it from the United States; Pound suggested that it contain
American and English sections, the latter to be edited by
Hueffer, Joyce, Lawrence and himself. Her reply to his sug
gestion contains an interesting contrast of reputations: “I
don't hnow who Joyce is. lou say he and Lawrence are the
best among the younger men. I quite agree with you as to
Lawrence, but I never heard of Joyce. What did he write, and
7
who is he?"
In the slimmer of 191^ she made the trip to England
which was to result in the Imagist anthologies and a life
long friendship with Lawrence. Lawrence had just been
married, after a two years' struggle for equilibrium and
Frieda's divorce. As far as money was concerned, the career
had gone slowly. In America Harriet Monroe had accepted six
8
of his poems for publication In November or December. On
July 30, while war impended, the Lawrences dined with Amy
Lowell, Richard Aldington, and Hilda Doolittle (Mrs.
9
Aldington), reading and discussing poetry afterward. Miss
Lowell and Pound were disputing over future anthologies.
7 S. F. Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle (Boston, 1935),
p. 223.
8
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 210.
9
Damon, ojc. . 0it.. pp. 235, 2L0.
Pound, who had issued Des Imagistes in February and was
now experimenting with Vorticism, objected to her idea of
republishing the same poets every year for five years, for
the cumulative effect on the public, allotting the same
amount of space to everyone, getting a reputable publisher
or, if that were impossible, paying for publication herself
All this was in lieu of Pound's wish that she guarantee the
money for his editorship of the Meroure de France. The
quarrel was a complicated one. Pound accused her of steal
ing his editorship; she, the Aldingtons, Flint, Hueffer,
and Lawrence decided to let Pound go his way. John Gould
Fletcher was added; unproductive poets of the last imagist
10
volume were struck out.
In the midst of this, on August k, Germany invaded
Belgium, and England declared war. But Amy Lowell carried
on her plans. On., the thirteenth, she had the Lawrences to
dinner, and he consented to contribute to the new antholo
gies although, in his usual attitude,toward movements and
literary coteries, he "thought that Imagism was merely an
advertising scheme; and as he hated French poetry, he sup-
11
posed her enthusiasm over it must be a pose."
Years later, in 1929, in an interview with Glenn
Hughes, Lawrence called imagism "an illusion of Ezra Pound1
10 Ibid., pp. 237-239.
Ibid., p. 246.
and said, "In the old London days Pound wasn’t so literary
as he is now. He was more of a mountebank then. He practiced
more than he preached, for he had no audience. He was always
amusing." In Imagism and the Imagists Hughes concluded that,
while one imagist has said that Lawrence was influenced by
the imagist credo and wrote certain poems in conformity with
it, there is no proof of this. The poems of his in the'
anthologies are only occasionally, and then accidentally,
12
imagistic. As he admitted, Whitman was the strongest in
fluence on him. He began writing free verse because it was
"so much easier to handle some themes without a regular
pattern."-*-3
Practicing imagist or not, Lawrence appeared in the
three anthologies, Some Imagist Poets, in 1915, 191&, and
1917* Throughout the war he was desperately poor, and the
royalty check Amy Lowell sent faithfully, acts of help by
her and other friends, as well as several small grants from
the Royal Literary Fund, and what Lawrence could eke from
his writing and occasional labor, enabled him to survive.
The tie with America established through imagism was to
increase in importance.
12
Richard Aldington has said that Look ! We Have
Come Through I shows the influence of the Imagists in its
"tight discipline." He liked Lawrence’s freedom of "mind
and body" and "revolt against stale, tame lives," if perhaps
"too vehement and scornful." "D. H. Lawrence as Poet," The
Saturday Review of Literature ii (May 1, 1926), 7^9-750*
13
Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists (Stanford
University, 1931), pp. 170-171*
CHAPTER III
THE WAR YEARS (1914-1918)
Hew lines Lawrence's art and thought were to take had
been indicated before the outbreak of the war. In January
of 1914 he had written of his work on The Rainbow: "I have
no longer the joy in creating vivid scenes, that I had in
Sons and Lovers. I don't ea£e much more about accumulating
objects in the powerful light of emotion, and making a scene
1
of them." The theme of the new novel was "woman becoming
2
individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative."
As for method, he had seen something of what he was after in
Marinetti's statement, "... the profound intuitions of life
added one to the other, word by word, according to their il
logical conception, will give us the general lines of an
intuitive physiology of matter." He did not "care about
physiology of matter," but was interested in non-human ele
ments rather than those which involved conception of charac
ters in certain moral schemes and a consistency within the
3
schemes. What he had in mind was a higher law, to be ap
prehended intuitively, a conception that henceforth character
ized his thought and art. As a consequence, words become
-
The Letters of D. H, Lawrence, p. 179•
2 Ifcid., p. 192.
3
Ibid.. pp. 199-200.
10
increasingly inadequate to represent experience, and there
enter repetitions of key words and images,- and other man
nerisms, and an apparent looseness of structure, as sugges
tion is attempted. The prophetic manner was necessarily
involved in the teaching of what became for Lawrence a new ,
religion. In this connection one notes his numerous allu
sions to the Bible, his use of parable, his preference for
the Old Testament, and1 a use of its rhetoric'and rhythms.
In America, his use of Indian symbol and ritual would often
demand such a manner.
The War accelerated his search for philosophical
/
foundations. Just after its outbreak he turned to the writing
of an essay on Hardy "out of sheer rage." But many parts,
as he predicted, were "about anything but Thomas Hardy."
The only good that could come from the war, he felt, was
. . . that we realize once more that self-preservation is
not the final goal of life; that we realize that we
can still squander life and property and inflict whole
sale suffering. That will free us, perhaps. . . ,
from the cowardice that . . . will only let us exist
in security, unflowerin'g, unreal, fat, under the c
cosy jam-pot of the state, under the social frame.
The self-reliance of his conception of life becomes apparent.
Is there not life enough in us to break out of this
system? Let every man take his own, and go his own
way, regardless of system and State, when his hour
4
Ibid., p. 212.
5
"Study of Thomas Hardy," Phoenix: the Posthumous.
Papers of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Edward D. McDonald (New
York, 1936), p. 407.
11
comes. Which is greater, the State or myself? My
self unquestionably, since the State is only an
arrangement made for my convenience. If it is not
convenient for me, I must depart from it. There
is no need to break^laws. The only need is to be
a law unto oneself.
A characteristic paradox of his anti-Christian attitude,
more fully and aggressively developed during the American
period, is made clear at one point:
This is what we have made of Christ's commandment:
'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself— a
mirror for the tears of self-pity. How do we love
our neighbor? By taking to heart his poverty, his
small wage, and the attendant evils thereof. And
is that how.we love our neighbors as ourselves?
Do I, then, think of myself as a moneyed thing
enjoying advantages, or a non-moneyed thing suf
fering from disadvantages? Evidently I do.
Then why the tears? They must rise from the in
born knowledge that neither money or non-money,
advantages or disadvantages, matter supremely:
what matters is the light under the bushel, the
flower fighting under the safeguard of the leaves.
I am weeping for my denied self.7
His solution was a dynamic individualism. "The final aim
of every living thing, creature, or being is the full
achievement of itself. This accomplished, it will . . .
8
bear the .fruit-of its nature."
Thus the essay on Hardy beeame a statement of his
answer to the challenge of the war, From the point of view
of his individualism, the war "was a monstrous mass operation
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. pp. ^28-^29.
7
"Study of Thomas Hardy," Phoenix: the Posthumous
Papers of D. H. Lawrence. p. 408.
8
Ibid.. p. 403.
13
sort of communism as far as necessaries of life go,
and some real decency. It is to be a colony built
up on the real decency which is in each member of
the community. A community which is to be established
upon the assumption of goodness in the members, in
stead of the assumption of badness.11
At the same time he was expressing the idea of death and
resurrection which was to appear strongly in the American
work:
I don't feel so hopeless now I am risen. My heart
has been as cold as a lump of dead earth, all this
time, because of the War. But now I don t feel so
dead. I feel hopeful. I couldn't tell you how
fragile and tender this hope is— the new shoot of
life. But I feel hopeful now about the war. We
should all rise again from this grave— though the
killed soldiers will have to wait for the last
trump.12
His hope was not for the past, but for the new community,
". . .in which the only riches is integrity of character.
So that each one may fulfill his own nature and deep desires
to the utmost, but wherein tho', the ultimate satisfaction
13
and Joy is in the completeness of us all as one."
Individual fulfillment, and yet the need for others;
this problem too was to torment Lawrence during the Ameri
can experience. Whether a psychological obstacle lay within
him is a pertinent question, for as a very young man, just
beginning his career, he had written of a friendship that
11
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 219.
12 Ibid., p. 222.
13
Ibid., p. 22k
14
was waning, “My soul has strenuous work in intimacies to
do. But then I scorn the intimacy, when it's formed; it is
always a lot short. ..." The entry into intimacy and
a plan for joint action followed by revulsion becomes a
pattern of his restless existence. Insight into the cause
and significance of this- pattern is contained in William
Troy's “The Lawrence Myth."’ * ’ " * Troy finds its origin in “a
surrender of the finite human self to the infinite nothing
ness of the flux" necessitated by Lawrence's rejection of
the intellect and emphasis on the blood-consciousness. This
is an over-simplification of Lawrence's theory; but I am
Indebted to Troy's consequent insight into the emphasis on
death in Lawrence, occasioned also by abdication of reason,
which makes a death the only possible ultimate “merging,"
in Nature. Lawrence is partially aware of this danger in
. • - » - ^ .. — v
his rejection of primitiviness and retrogression and in
his belief in higher cycles of life, but the death motif
becomes especially important during the American experience.
For Troy, “Laxsrrence1 s program is, in the last analysis, a
program for a mystery god— but hardly for a man. And
Dionysus in every age can terminate his agony only by dis
solving into his native element."
Troy also emphasizes, however, as one must, that at
1 4 Ibid.. p. 9.
^ Partisan Review. IV (January, 1938)*
15
the heart of Lawrence's philosophy is a salutary indict
ment of modern disintegration from the intellectual side,
born of an insight into modern sicknesses of being. In 1915,
Lawrence felt that his community could be a hope for the
"maimed and injured" soul after the War, Into the same dis
cussion enters his mistrust of the mob as representing "the
greedy soul," the view that the people themselves could
represent a tyranny, and that members of his community must
16
be “aristocrats . . . , wise . . , in dealing with the mob."
The theoretical basis of such an attack on democracy lay
in the idea of dynamic self-fulfillment. Individuals were
not capable of the same development. This belief was to
be a source of conflict and theme during the American visit.
Through the early months of 1915, bis anguish in
creased. He expressed faith that finally the English would
say, “‘We will not do these things, because in our know
ledge of G-od we know them wrong.' We shall put away our
17
greatness and our living for material things, ..." Of
the psychic depression that sometimes afflicted him, he wrote,
I've got again i^to one of those horrible sleeps
from which I can t wake. I can't brush It aside to
wake up. You know those horrible sleeps when one is
struggling to wake up and can't-g I was like it all
autumn— now I am like it again.
16
Ibid., p. 225.
17 Ibid., p. 231.
18
Ibid., p. 233*
16
Such a feeling receives expression much later in New Mexico
in the poem "Men in New Mexico."
1915 also marked the friendship with Bertrand Russell
and' the first of Lawrence's failures to carry out a plan of
action. Almost all the two had in common was the feeling
that the war threatened disaster to civilization. Russell
was the formal philosopher whose view of intuition and feel
ing was the reverse of Lawrence's. Russell's position is
clear:
It is the older kinds of activity, which bring out
our kinship with remote generations of animal and
semi-human ancestors, that show intuition at its
best.' In such matters as self-preservation and
love, intuition will act sometimes (though not alxirays)
with a swiftness and precision which are astonishing
to the critical intellect. But philosophy is not
one of the pursuits which illustrate our affinity
with the past: it is a highly refined, highly
civilized pursuit, demanding, for its success, a
certain liberation from the life of instinct, and
even, at times, a certain aloofness from all mundane
hopes and fears. . . . It is here, more than almost
anywhere else, that intellect proves superior to
intuition, and that quick--unanalysed convictions
are least deserving of uncritical acceptance. '
Russell and Lawrence planned-a series of lectures in London,
Russell to. treat ethics, Lawrence immortality. They planned
also to establish, in Lawrencels words, "a little society
20
or body around a religious belief, which leads to action."
In July Russell sent Lawrence an outline of his ideas.
^ Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (New York,
1929), pp. 17-18.
20 ,
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 243.
17
Prom one point of view, Lawrence’s action in covering
Russell’s typescript with disagreements and suggestions is
that of a brash young tyro unaware of the calibre of his
collaborator. Pron another point of view, it is that of an
individual gifted in his own way and exerting great force
of character. Lawrence liked Russell’s attack on the spirit,
"this great falsity of subjectivism," in the state, mar
riage, and elsewhere, but told him he must "dare to be
positive, not only critical."21
Lawrence’s acute shyness, involving, probably, a
feeling of-inadequacy, came out in his comment, "It will be
horrible to stand up and say the things I feel most vitally
before an audience." The paradox involved in his social
criticism is expressed in the comment:
Bertie Russell talks about democratic control and the
education of the artisan, and all this, all this good
ness, is just a warm and cosy cloak for a bad spirit.
They all want the same thing: a continuing in this
state of disintegration wherein each separate little
ego is an independent little principality by itself.
. . . That is what they all want, ultimately— that
is what is at the back of all international peace--
for-ever and democratic control talk: they all want
an outward system of nullity, which they call peace
and goodwill, so that in their own souls they can
be independent little gods, referred nowhere and to
nothing, little mortal Absolutes, secure from ques
tion.22
Lawrence’s objection may be seen from the other side
^ Harry T. Moore, D. H. Lawrence’s Letters to
Bertrand Russell (New York, 19I 4 - 8}, pp. 77-78•
op
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 2f?l.
18
in a memoir by John Maynard Keynes, who participated in
Lawrence*s meetings with Russell and a little group of in
tellectuals at Cambridge. Keynes thinks that during this
period Lawrence "was influenced by two causes of emotional
disturbance." One was the movement away from himVof Lady
Ottollne Morrell and David Garnett, who were attracted by
the Cambridge group. "Lawrence was jealous of the other
lot; and Cambridge rationalism and cynicism, then at their
height, were, of course, repugnant to him."
But . . . was there something true and right in
what Lawrence felt? There generally was. His re
actions were incomplete and unfair, but they were
not usually baseless.23'
Keynes then reviews the intellectual history of the Cambridge
group, and finds their chief deficiency in recognition of
"no moral obligation. . . , no inner sanction,to conform to
and obey," a code "flimsily based on an a ■priori view of
what human nature is like which was disastrously mis
taken."
. . . If I imagine us as' coming under‘the observation
Of Lawrence's ignorant, jealous, irritable,’ hostile
eyes, what a combination of qualities we offered to
arouse his passionate distaste; this thin rationalism
skipping on the crust of the lava, ignoring both the
reality and the value of the vulgar passions, joined
to libertinism and irreverence. . . . That is why I
say that there may have been just a grain of truth 24-
whep Lawrence said in 1914 that we were "done for."
John Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs (New York:
Augustus M. Kelley, 194-9), pp. 79-80.
2 k
Ibid., p. 103. David Garnett, in his "Introductory
Note" to Keynes' memoirs, finds Lawrence's attitude one of
religious intolerance. "He was a prophet who hated all those
whose creeds protected them from ever becoming his disciples."
19
In the Russell-Cambridge episode, one sees an im
portant aspect of the world Lawrence was in revulsion from--
the wasteland of the intellectuals. The American was
to be full of this revulsion, and of the discovery of a
religious life which rationalism and cynicism disparaged or
ignored.
During the debate with Russell, Lawrence continued
to formulate his philosophy. At one point, he felt that
he had come ’ ’ out of the Christian camp,” and that now he
"must come out of these early Greek philosophies.”^^
I have been reading Frazer's Golden Bough and
Totemism & Exogamy. Now I am convinced of what I
believed when I was about twenty--that there is
another seat of consciousness than the brain & the
nerve system: there is a blood-consciousness which
exists in us independently of the ordinary mental
consciousness. . . . There is the blood-conscious
ness, with the sexual connection holding the same
relation as the eye, in seeing, holds to the mental
consciousness. One lives, knows, and has one’s being
in the blood, without any reference to nerves and
brain. This is one half of life, belonging to the
darkness. And the tragedy of this our life, and of
your life, is that the mental and nerve consciousness
exerts a tyranny over the blood consciousness and
that your will . . .is engaged in the destruction
of your blood-being or blood-consciousness, the final ,
liberating of the one, which is only death in result
Here Lawrence not only drew the theoretical line, apart
from the disagreement over democracy, between Russell and
himself, but marked off the area of experience he was already
exploring, 2 "consciousness” far different from that
I1 116 Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 239.
p£y
Moore, D. H. Lawrence's Letters to Bertrand
Russell, p. 63.
20
of such writers as Joyce, and based on a disagreement with
Freud as to the nature and function of the subconscious.
At the same time, he rejected traditional Western culture
in favor of anterior religion which supported his belief in
the blood-consciousness. The search for a contemporary em
bodiment of this religion eventually led him to the Indian
of New Mexico.
While Lawrence was debating democracy and religion
with Russell, he made plans with J. M. Murry and Katherine
Mansfield to publish a little paper to be called The Signa
ture in which he would "do the preaching." Murry would
write of "freedom for the individual soul," and Katherine
Mansfield would do "her little satirical sketches." Russell
and Gilbert Cannan were invited to join them. Three issues
of the magazine appeared in October and November, before it
suspended. Lawrence contributed a long essay, "The Grown,"
27
in which with elaborate symbolism he formulated his idea
of the fundamental schism in modern man. The Crown is the
Absolute; under it.the unicorn and the lion fight, the uni
corn symbolizing the spirit and its attributes, the lion
the flesh and its attributes, fbrcen which elsewhere Lawrence
calls "virtue and virgin spontaneity," and "pox^er and
^ W. X. Tindall in P. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow
refers sneeringly to "the imagery of lions, lambs, and even
unicorns." He might have noted, without contempt, the ap
propriateness at the time of Lawrence’s using for his own
purposes the symbols of English kingship in the royal arms.
21
28
splendor." The duality is also represented by light and
darkness. Properly neither unicorn nor lion achieves
supremacy. "The direct opposites . . . imply their own
29
supreme relation." In our era “the seed of light has
come to supreme self-consciousness and has gone mad" while
the other clings "faster upon the utter night." Both beasts
30
have gone mad and "tear themselves and each other.0 . And
men go to both extremes. Lawrence’s idea of integration
involves man's taking the way of the blood to the darkness,
the source of power, through the woman in desire, then,
new-born, looking to the light, which is the end of his
31
Journey, "the oneness of the spirit." In the world of
governments, the triumph of power is like the lion of his
imagery beeome a beast of prey, as in Caesar and Napoleon.
And the triumph of democracy is like the unicorn become a
beast of prey; "it too become hideous with egoism, like
32
Russia now." The dualism integrated here would easily
appropriate the symbolism of invocation of earth and sky,
and other aspects, of the rites of the New Mexico Indian.
By October, 1915» Lawrence's colony idea involved
28
D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a
Porcupine (Philadelphia, 1925)V P* 13*
29
■Ibid.. p. 12.
50 Ibid.. p. 13.
Ibid.. pp. 2^-26.
32 Ibid.. pp. 32, 33.
22
going to America. He had been offered a cottage in Florida.^3
In a letter thanking Harriet Monroe for subscriptions to
The Signature, he thought he would be in New York in a month,
and asked her to tell Amy Lowell. He felt that the "whole
tree of life" was dying in England, and that in America one
could "feel hope." He proceeded to try to get passports,
asking Lady Asquity to help with Mrs. Lawrence's, since her
German origin might prove an obstacle.-^" The passports
arrived early in November, and Lawrence contemplated the
problem of "changing the land of my soul as well as my mere
domicile. It is rather terrible, a form of death.
Suppression of The Rainbow, published on September 30,
intervened. For a time Lawrence went ahead with plans to
leave, "so sick, in body and soul, that if I don't go away
I shall die."^ Only loans from friends made it possible
for him to raise enough money for the voyage, which he planned
for November 2ij.th. He was torn between discussing plans for
a fight for the book and his leave-taking, which he finally
postponed. In the same month he expressed a feeling that
characterized many of his later acts and produced a volume
of poetry, Birds, Beasts and Flowers: "I don't want to go
33
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 265. I have not
been able to discover the details of this offer.
3^ Ibid.. p. 267.
3^ Ibid., p. 273.
3^ Ibid., p. 27k.
23
to New York— not yet, not now. I would like to go to a
land where there are only birds and beasts and no humanity,
nor inhumanity-masks."3? He thought he might be able to do
something with the "very young people,"3® mentioning Aldous
Huxley and Dorothy Brett, who later was to go to America
with him. By early December he had declined a suggestion
that a trial of The Rainbow case be forced, saying, "But
my spirit will not rise to it. . . . I am not going to pay
any more out of my soul, even for the sake of beating them.”39
Apparently no organized opposition to the suppression de
veloped, though there were individual efforts by Henry James,
Arnold Bennett, Oliver Lodge, action by the Authors’ Society,
and a question by Phillip Morrell in the House of Commons.
A private issue of the book was proposed and arrangements
made for its American publication.
The Lawrences made plans for sailing late in December,
amid fears that he would not be permitted to leave the country.
On the eleventh he went to be examined at a recruiting sta
tion to secure a military exemption but left the line after
waiting two hours he "hated it so much."^ Gradually the
plan seems to have lapsed. On December 12 he said, "I shall
37 IMd., P. 282.
38 Ibid., p. 289-
39 Ibid-» P* 287.
Ibld•> P• 295.
24
not go to America until a stronger force from there pulls
41
me across the sea. It is not a case of my will." In
deed, he seems to have reached a state of fatalistic in-
difference, perhaps protective in natUhe: "We must all sub
mit to be helpless and obliterated. . . . There is something
will rise out of it. . . .Do not struggle with your will,
to dominate your conscious life— do not do it. Only drift,
42
and let go. . . ." He had given up his London flat and
sold the furniture, in anticipation of leaving; late in
December he and Frieda moved to remote Cornwall, to a cot
tage offered him by J. D. Beresford. Here Lawrence was to
remain, with one move to a cottage not far away, until Octo
ber of 1917, a period of about two years.
The plan to go to America was not completely given
- - 2*3
up; he considered Cornwall "the first move to Florida."
He thought he might be able to write again, and felt free
dom, "the world as it was in that flicker of pre-Christian
Celtic civilization, when humanity was really young." The
need of something to replace his English, indeed Western,
h.h
heritage, was strong, ' Conversion to Homan Catholicism
was, he thought, "for an Englishman . . . a piece of
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid.. pp. 289-290.
43
Ibid.. p. 305.
^ Ibid., p. 307*
25
retrogressive sentimentalism."^ There was little money,
and. no prospect of more, but he had ''lost the faculty" of
bothering, perhaps in "sheer self-preservation, I wish we
could go a long voyage, into the South Pacific. . . . I am
afraid now of America. I am afraid of the people. I daren't
, 46
go there. My will won t carry me either." Lawrence's
interest in the South Pacific may have been stimulated, in
February, 1916, by his reading of Moby Dick, which he found
“a very odd, interesting book" and which he eventually dis-
47
cussed in Studies in Glassic American Literature. When
he did voyage to America, it was via the Pacific, once "a
vast basin of soft, lotus-warm civilization," now "a huge
48
man-day swung down into slow, disintegration."
His appetite for knowledge of other civilizations
was strong now that his despair over contemporary England
and Europe had reached nihilistic intensity, "I curse my
age, and all the people in it. I hate my fellow men most
49
thoroughly," he wrote. While his correspondence with
individuals shows a sensitivity to their feelings and a
desire for rapprochement, iconoclasm dominated his work.
45 n
Ibid., p. 308.
^ Ibid., p. 320.
4?
Ibid., p. 322.
48
Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature.
P* 197.
^9 Ibid., p. 323.
2 6
I wish one could be a pirate or a highwayman in these
days. But ray way of shooting them with noiseless
bullets that explode in their souls, these social
people of today, perhaps it is more satisfying.
But I feel like an outlaw: All my work is a shot at
their veryninnermost strength, these banded people
of today.
Another enterprise began (and eventually failed
because of cross-purposes'); in the plans of Lawrence, Philip
Heseltine, and Murry to launch into private publishing,
the list to include The Rainbow^ Lawrence urged the Murrys
to take a house near him, and they came to form in miniature
the community of which he had so long dreamed. But in two
months the arrangement failed, and the Murrys moved to the
South of Cornwall, the ostensible reaaon being their dis
like of their house and the ruggedness of the coast; but
Lawrence felt Murry and he were not “really associates"
and that he had deceived himself. Again the intimacy had
*1 52
"fallen short," and there was a recoil. The quarrel
H
with Murry continues through Lawrence’s life, to appear
thematically in essay and story during the American ex
perience. . . , ,
Late in May Lawrence was conscripted, went through
the distasteful process of examination, and received an
exemption. Of the experience he said, "It is the annulling
5° IM&-, PP* 328-329.
51 Ibid.. p. 334.
52 Ibid., p. 357.
27
of all one stands for, this militarism, the nipping of the
very germ of one's being. . . . The sense of spiritual dis
aster everywhere was quite terrifying." He liked the men,
but "their manliness all lies in accepting calmly this
death, this loss of their integrity."£3 about the same
5lt
time, early in July, he had finished Women in Love. ^ In
it he had worked out in tense, turbulent situations much
that had actually taken place during the early days of the
war, using many people he had known, though the novel had
been begun as The Sisters back in 1913* Gudrun's love for
Gerald ends in the realization that men such as he, parts
of the industrial system, become "instruments, pure machines,
pure wills, that work like clock-work, , .
In the final chapter Birkin (Lawrence) feels that
"either the heart would break, or cease to care. Whatever
the mystery which has brought forth man and the universe,
it is a non-human mystery, it has its own great ends, man
is not the criterion.In the closing note there is a
cry characteristic of Lawrence's unsatisfied social need
when Birkin says to Ursula of the dead Gerald: "You are
enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You sire
Ibid., p. 359-
^ Ibid., p. 361.
55
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Hew York: The
Modern Library), p. 532.
^ Ibid., p. 5^5.
28
all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal
as you and I are eternal."^7 It might have been Lawrence
speaking to his wife. A source of future conflict lies in
Birkin1s denial of Ursula’s belief that he can’t have the
two kinds of love, "I don't believe that.”
The novel was a major accomplishment, and in a sense
a recovery, but Lawrence could not find a publisher. He
turned now to the idea of escape to America by writing, and
lecturing, on American classics which he had been reading.-'
On August 23 he wrote a long letter to Amy Lowell
about his plans and hopes.
Your remoter America must be splendid . . . Often
I have longed to go to a country which has new, quite
unknown flowers and birds. . . . Have you still got
humming birds, as in Crevecoeur? I liked Crevecoeur's
’Letters of ah American Parmer,' so much. And how
splendid Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick’ is, and Dana's
’Two Years before the Mast.' But your classic Ameri
can literature, I find to my surprise, is older than
our English. The tree did not become new, which was
transplanted. It only ran more swiftly into age,
impersonal, non-human almost. But how good these
books are.59
In September Miss Lowell, at Mrs. Lawrence's appeal, sent
Lawrence sixty pounds. In his letter of thanks, Lawrence
Ibid., p. ^ 8.
Mrs. Lawrence thinks that ”when Lawrence was
prowling in Charing Cross Road, London, where the cheap
second-hand books are, he found some Penimore Cooper,
and that and the idea of going to Florida set him off."
The purchase of books in London must have, taken place in
the last months of 1915>, before the move to Cornwall.
< q
Damon, Amy Lowell, A Chronicle, pp. 370-371*
29
explained further the point of view he was to take in much
of his criticism of American literature. The Americans
have
. . . gone beyond tragedy and emotion, even beyond
irony, and have come to the pure mechanical stage
of physical apprehension, the human unit almost lost,
the primary elemental forces, kinetic, dynamic. . .
never softened by life, that hard universe of Matter
and Force where life is not yet known, come to pass
again.
He found this in some of her own work. And he added that
if he ever came to America he would “write about these
60
things.1 1
Present now in his thinking was the idea that his
support must come primarily from the sale of his work in
61
America. In January, 1917-, he sought passports, hoping
62
it would be legal for him to leave. His plan had de
veloped into the idea of going to New York to “write a set
of essays, or lectures, on Cl&ssiG American literature.“
He already had them in mind.^ But in February indorse-
64
ment of his passport was refused. Probably there was
little consolation in a review of Amores. by Eunice Tietjens
in the February number of Poetry, that came to him from
60 Ibid.. pp. 387-388.
61
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 382.
62 Ibid., pp. 395-396.
63 Ibid.. p. 398.
Ibid.. p. 401.
30
f.c
Harriet Monroe. J
Seldom has anyone expressed with such vividness the
tinge that stifled flesh gives to the universe, the
urge that gives to flowers and stars the wine-color
of longing, and brings into these, passionate re
lief details that otherwise were meaningless. . . .
Read as a whole, the book has a cumulative effect
that set Lawrence definitely in the front rank of
English poets.
Most of this number of Poetry was givencover to poems from
"American-Indian motives” by Prank S. Gordon, Alice Corbin,
Mary Austin, and Constance Lindsay Skinner. While they may
have further interested Lawrence in the West, he found
American poetry "ungenuine. . . , blatant.
Meanwhile, among other work, Lawrence turned again
to philosophy, "a little pure thought, a little perfect
and detached understanding."^ In this, he did not alter
his major theses. As for the new Military Service Act,
which made him liable to re-examination, he felt he would
69
"go to prison rather than be compelled to anything." 7
70
He was re-examined and rejected for army service, though
he engaged in work on nearby farms.
In August, he turned to the American essays, which
• he now titled, The Transcendental Element In American
65 1
The Letters of D.. H. Lawrence. p. ^03.
66
Poetry; A Magazine of Verse, IX (February, 1917) •
^ Th.e Letters of I). H. Lawrence. loc. clt.
^ Ibid., p. iK)8.
69
Ibid., p. L06.
Ibid., p. 4-15.
31
Literature, ,!in the hopes of relieving my ominous financial
prospects.” He wrote to Miss Lowell of his idea:
It sounds very fine and large, but in reality is rather
a thrilling blood-and-thunder, your-money-or-your-life
kind of thing: Hands up, America !--No, but they are
very keen essays in criticism--cut your fingers if you
don't handle them carefully.--Are you going to help
me to hold up the "Yale Review” or the "New Republic”
or some such fat old coach, with this ten-barrelled
pistol of essays of mine, held right in the eye of
America? Answer me that, Donna Americana. Will
you try to suborn for me the conductor of one of
these coaches?--Never say nay.--'Tis a chef-d'oeuvre
of soul-searching criticism. Shall I inscribe it to
you? Say the word 1
To
Amy Lowell
Who buttered my bread
these few fair words
For she can butter her own parsnips.
Being well-to-do
She gave to the thankless
Because she thought it was worth it.'
Thus he approached the subject in a teasing, farcical mood
at the end of a letter which was serious on many other sub
jects . Pride made it difficult for him to plead seriously
for help; such a spirit of michievous fun, a recurrent part
of his complex nature, made possible an independent approach.
There ensued for the Lawrences the bitter experience
of being suspected of spying. (Lawrence has told the story
unforgettably in the Australian novel, Kangaroo.) There had
been a feeling of strain all through the war because of Mrs.
Lawrence's origin, as the Baroness Von Richtofen. In
71
Damon, Amy Lowell, A Chronicle, p. 1^22 .
32
October, 1917, after several lesser episodes, the Lawrences
were ordered to leave Cornwall, to live in an unprohibited
72
area, and to report to the police. The restrictions
haunted them for the remainder of the war. In London &e-
73
tectives bothered them from time to time. For a while
Lawrence considered a plan to go with some friends who knew
the country "to the east slope of the Andes, back of
74
Paraguay or Colombia," but this, too, never materialized.
The last year of the war was spent by the ha'pences
in the refuge of cottages in England loaned by friends.
75
There were efforts to get him money from the Literary Fund,
and in March Amy Lowell sent $200 with the Imagist anthology
76
receipts. 1 Bits of money came from other friends. Lawrence
began a new novel, a "blameless" one which would be "but-
77
toned up like a Member of Parliament," The Lpgt Girl.
78
There was talk of issuing Women in Love privately. He
was also at work on the American essays,^ and in March
felt that in them he had written his last page of philoso
phy.®0 Indicative of the future, he wanted to be "houseless
72 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 421.
7^ Ibid., pp. 428-429.
7 k
Ibid., p. 424.
7 5 Ibid., p. 431.
Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle, p. 443•
77
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 4-31.
I I Ibid., p. 427.
■Ibid., p. 433.
80
Ibid., P. 439.
33
and placeless and homeless and landless, just move apart.0
81
He abhorred “being stueH on to any form of society."
Lawrence continued to rely on Amy Lowell for help
in coming to America. In two lectures on "Imagism Past and
Present0 in March at the Brooklyn Institute, she spoke of
Lawrence and Look I We Have Come Through i which had been re^ly
ceived badly in England. Her comments reveal their essen
tial incompatibility. Lawrence is “a poet of sensation, but
of sensation as the bodily efflorescence of a spiritual
growth." He is "an erotic poet," but that is “only one
half of the truth. For his eroticism leans always to the
mystic something of which it is an evidence." He is "a man
of genius," despite the fact that "he does not quite get
his genius into harness; the cart of his work frequently
overturns. . . Look 1 We Have Gome Through. I is “a greater
novel even than Sons and Lovers" though as poetry it fails
"by & too loud insistence upon one thing, by an almost
,.82
neurotic beating, beating, upon the same tortured note."
Lawrence read the lectures (which he received from Hilda
Doolittle) and wrote to Miss Lowell:
. . . thanks for the nice things you say about me.
I don’t mind what people think of my work, so long as
their attitude is -passionately Honest— which I believe
yours is. As for intellectual honesty, I care nothing
for it, for it may rest on the most utterly false a
•priori.
81
Ibid.. p. *£8.
82
Damon, Amy Lowell- . - A. Chronicle, pp. 443-^7*
34
He thanked her now, after Frieda, for money sent in March,
explaining that "sometimes one's soul is a dumb) rock." He
wished to inscribe to her a new hook of poems, containing
go
both old and new work, just finished; this -was Hew Poems.
which appeared in October with the inscription. He still
84
wanted to come to America "when everything quiets down."
In her letter accepting the dedication, she counselled more
reticence in his work. "You need not change your attitude
a particle, you can simply use India rubber In certain places,
85
and then you can come into your own as it ought to be."
He replied that she was wrong in thinking that the eraser
would let him
through into a paradise of popularity. Without the
India-rubber I am damned along with the evil, with
the India-rubber I am damned among the disappointing.
Xou see what it is to have a reputation. I give it up,
and put my trust in heaven. One needn't trusg^a great
deal in anything, and in humanity not at all.
Earlier in the year he had felt himself a '^walking phenome
non of suspended fury" and had found "great satisfaction in
reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Homan Empire— the
87
emperors are all so indiscriminately bad." One may be
sure he was confirmed in his anti-Ghristian attitude.
----
Ibid., p. 462.
84
Ibid., p. 463.
Q £ j
Ibid., p. 483.
86
Ibid.. pp. 484-485.
87
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 444.
35
As the war neared an end, Lawrence was giving a final
going-over - £ < 5 the typed American essays, and a little series
of essays, Education of the People, in which he again made
a statement of his philosophy though he was aware that
others might say that he did not know "the terms of real
OQ
philosophy," that his terms were empty, "the empty self."
He was so little sure of the American venture that he con
sidered seeking a job under the Ministry of Education, re
marking angrily and defensively that he had "had all the
89
training and spent three years as a schoolmaster."
During the war years Lawrence's personal disappoint
ments and sufferings must have accentuated tremendously
the conflict with the contemporary world inherent in his
philosophy. As the cleavage grew, he moved toward a nihilis
tic position. Suppression of The Rainbow thwarted not only
the creative work of many years but the hope of relief for
a poverty so extreme as to threaten disaster constantly.
The recurrent frustration of plans to leave a bad situa
tion, the repeated failure of personal relationships and
enterprises, the revulsion of the poet of the sanctity of
the senses against the physical humiliation of the conscrip
tion, the culminating blow of suspicion of being a spy and
the consequent explusion from Cornwall with surveillance
88
Ibid.. p. 457.
89
Ibid., p. 46(3.
36
thereafter, all these would have disturbed a man less
sensitive and intelligent than Lawrence. He was harassed,
as well, by periods of ill health which he described as
colds and ’flu, but which were probably symptoms of the
tuberculosis that evantually killed him. It is surprising
that he kept balance as well as he did, and produced so
much work of such high quality. Probably the work itself
was of therapeutic value, and he cultivated an ability to
drift and lapse into indifference. By the end of the war
he had not given up entirely the constructive side of his
philosophy, but he had moved to an extreme anti-institutional
position and involved the idea that Western civilisation
was now hopelessly corrupt and must pass to make way for
some new form.
CHAPTER- IV
POST WAR EUROPE: INVITATION AND JOURNEY TO TAOS
(1918-1922)
The Armistice brought no more real peace to Lawrence
than to the world. Studies in Classic American Literature
began to appear in the English Review that month, continuing
in eight chapters through June, 1919. But they did not
then find publication in America and provide his entree,
as he had hoped. Indeed, they were revised in New Mexico
as late as 1922-1923 for book' publication, assuming a quite
different form, if not content, than they originally had.
Discussion of them will be found in the chapter dealing
with the first visit to New Mexico. He wrote "The Fox,"
the ending of which involves a break with the past and the
1
uncertain hope of a new beginning in America.
It was not until October, 1919* that Lawrenoe finally
achieved his desire to leave England, and then his desire
to go to Ameriea was again thwarted.
Early in 1919, Murry revived The Athenaeum and asked
Lawrence to contribute; Lawrence agreed, even'to accepting
2
anonymity, though he felt that he could not trust Murry.
But foremost in his mind must have been his plan to leave
The Letters of D_. H. Lawrence, p. 465*
2 ~
Ibid.. pp. il-7^-475*
38
England. He decided to go to Germany with Frieda to see
her relatives there as soon as he was well and peace was
signed. Afterward, that summer, he wanted to go to America.3
Of this desire, he wrote to Amy Lowell in April, in response
to a letter from her, HI want awfully to come to America--
first to the north, then later to go south, perhaps to Cen
tral America. It is what I intend to do when the world be
comes sane again, and one is free.”^- On May 26 he wrote
to her that he was coming, and planned to support himself
in part by giving lectures. In reply to his query if she
could arrange some lecture dates in Boston, she wrote that
she had found, in the "scruple” room of the Athenaeum,
where dubious books were locked up, not only novels by
Compton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan, and J. D. Beresford, but
Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. It would be the greatest pleasure
for her to see him personally, but she was afraid America
was not what he imagined. ”... What will be disgusting
to you, as it is to me, is that they cannot see the dif
ference between envisaging life whole and complete, physi
cal as well as spiritual, and pure obscenities like those
perpetrated by James Joyce.” To understand him people would
have to see and know him, and that would be a good reason
for coming; but she did not think he could get many lectures
3 Ibid., p. V78.
^ Damon, Amy Lowell, A Chronicle, p. 14-93.
39
5
at first because of the prejudice. Lawrence replied that
he did not want the "El Dorado" kind of success she had
mentioned, or to lecture, hut only "to he ahle to live. And
I helieve that, once in America, I could soon do that hy
writing." He was afraid of putting a burden on her friend
ship. "I want to feel that I may come to you, to stay
with you for a xveek or two, if I can't provide for myself
just at the very first." In August Miss Lowell wrote
6
separately to Frieda and Lawrence advising against coming.
Gilbert Gannan and Waldo Frank approached her to ask help
for Lawrence, and:.she\.answ.ered that■ shelwas sure his plan
was a mistake, adding to the arguments given him, two
others, one that he might be excluded because of his tubercu
losis, the other that Frieda, as a German, could not be
admitted for some time, so that he might encounter disap
pointment and die in a foreign land separated from his wife.
She offered to contribute to a fund, "but could not guarantee
7
all the expenses."
Apparently Miss Lowell's rather narrow view pre
vailed.' In October when the Lawrences left England, Frieda
8
went to Germany, he to Italy, where she was to join him.
5 II)Id.. pp. 497-W.
6 Ihld.. pp. 498-499.
7 Ibid.. p. 514.
8
The Letters of D, H. Lawrence. pp. 490-491.
4 . 0
Prom late in December, 1919> to March, 1920, the
Lawrences lived on Capri, then settled in a house in
Taormina, Sicily. There they remained, with some excur
sions, until in the latter part of April, 1922, Lawrence
was at last to fulfill his wish to leave Europe. In Capri
Lawrence had found Compton Mackenzie, Brett Young, and a
few others congenial, but he felt it to be "a gossipy,
villa-stricken . . . microcosmos that does heaven much
credit, but mankind none at all. Truly, humanly, it is a
bit impossible for long.”9 He was cheered by negotiations
with Martin Seeker for re-publication of The Rainbow and
issuance of Women in Love, but had "lived so long without
money" that he knew he could continue doing so— this in
rejecting Seeker's offer of a lump sum. He believed in
his "books, and in their future."-3 -^ In Sicily he found
for a time the greater isolation he preferred, and it was
"where Europe ends, finally."
In these first months away from England he began
the series of poems to be known as Birds, Beasts and Flowers
which significantly excluded the human from its title. His
attitude toward contemporary European civilization approached
nihilism. In January, 1921, in Taormina he commented that
if he knew how, he would join himself
9 Ibid., pp. 50k-505.
10 Ibid., pp. 501-502.
. . . to the revolutionary socialists. . . . I think
the time has come for a real struggle. That’s the
only thing I care for: the death struggle. I don’t
care for politics. But I know there must and should
be a deadly revolution very soon, and I would take
part in it if I knew how.11
12
A trip to Sardinia gave rise to Sea and Sardinia,
but he was so disappointed in the island as a place to
live that he made another effort to go to America. An
American farm, available before, was still offered, and
Lawrence wrote to his American agent, Robert Mountsier, to
investigate the feasibility of taking it at once. Mountsier’
cabled reply informed him that the cost of repairing it was
impossible, but at the same time, apparently urged him to
come to buy another farm.1 ^ Lawrence had taken his
Sicilian house until April, with the option of continuing
the year. In March he was still undecided whether or not
to take the farm originally offered.
I k
The venture did
not materialize. By October Italy had "gone a little
rancid" for him, and Taormina's set was "like a continental
Mad Hatter’s tea-party. If you’ll let it be, it is all tea-
party— and you wonder who on earth is going head over heels
into the teapot next."^
Ibid., pp. 517-518.
E. W. Tedlock, Jr., The Frieda Lawrence Collection
of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts [Albuquerque, 19^8), p. 92.
13 IWd*
^ Tke Letters of D. H. Lawrence» p. 5l8.
^ Ibid-» P* 533-
42
During the post-war Italian sojourn, Lawrence wrote
two poems and an essay which were directly concerned with
the problem of going to America.-
X6
One poem, "Turkey-Cock,1 1 was probably written
during one of three visits to the neighborhood of Florence
in 1919 and 1921, since Lawrence inscribed it "Fiesole."
He had used the turkey as a symbol of the new life as early
as 1915* In a letter he had described the English country
side in terms of decadence, and then turned to an encounter
with “clusters of turkeys that ruffled themselves like
flowers suddenly ruffled into blossom. . . , exiles of
another life." In Florida they would "go in droves in the
shadow, like metallic clouds,1 1 and there would be "a re-
17
surrection." Now, in post-war Italy, a turkey-cock be
comes the symbol of America, pondered in an attempt to
understand what might be encountered there. The turkey's
gorgeousness evokes “puzzled admiration." Its aborigi-
nallty, like that of an Indian, is like the "seeds of count
less centuries." Its wattles are the color of cooling
"steel-slag," and image the.bird's arrogance, the "asser
tion . . . of raw contradictoriness,“ or of "something
unfinished," or of "a raw, unsmelted passion." The bird's
Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers, pp. 141-145.
'Pbe Letters of D, H. Lawrence, p. 286,
l j - 3
movement Indicate "a raw American will, that has never
been tempered by life.” The drumming of its wings is
like the sound of the drums of Huichilobos during a Mexi
can sacrifice. May a new day be opened by taking "the
trail of the vanished American," before Christianity, with
his "more than human, dense insistence of will?" Is the
East dead, and Europe dying? Do the Aztecs and Amerindi
ans, "half-godly, half-demon," wait to be called back by
the cry of the turkey-cock? Or must the bird be smelted
again until pure?
The turkey-cock as a somewhat ambiguous symbol par
takes of both contemporary America and pre-European America.
The Lawrence who felt he must reject his intellectual and
spiritual tradition contemplates the uncertainties of the
non-traditional, and even non-human, he was committing
himself to seek out. The power of the bird comes through
with great intensity at times, and It is this that gives
the poem its immediate impact. But the contemplation of
arrogant power is the ambiguous contemplation of a man
seeking to escape into life from one form of death, only
to find the alternative uncertain, potentially impure, and
containing its own threat. Death of the moribund past must
precede the resurrection* that is the first struggle. But
the new life is both a recovery of lost ground and a
hazardous pioneering of new. One should note that the
theme of The Plumed Serpent, as well as the themes of minor
kk
American pieces, was already well developed, and that one
of the paradoxes in Lawrence is the large amount of In
tellectuality that went into the anti-intellectual philo
sophy .
18
The poem, "The Evening Land," may "be rather
closely dated, between April and July, 1921, at Baden-Baden.
In the first person, it is an explicit contemplation of
emigration. Is America "the grave of our day," the "open
tomb" of his race? He wishes it would cajole him, for he
confesses he is afraid of it. He fears its "more-than-
European idealism," "exggerate love," loss of "pristine,
isolate integrity," and inability to rise "from this
grave of mingling.1 1 But worse yet is the "Machine Ameri
can, " the "automaton" of the "uprisen self." Nevertheless,
a "New England uncanniness, " a "western brutal faery
quality," half-cajolec’ him. He fears the loss of the
"human" contact, but the mere word "human" should not de
ter him. After wondering if he is in love with his own im
aginings (one must remember how formulated his idea was),
he concludes with a series of statements of hope for a “new
throb," a nascent American.
Ideal love and the impersonality of the machine age,
both quite different from "intense, individual contact,"
are Lawrence’s two great fears. But he is fascinated by
_
Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers. pp. 28-32.
other aspects, the uncanniness, the ''"brutal faery quality,"
which may also be antipathetic to the human contact he
fears to lose. The conflicts sketched here will appear
in many forms during the American experience.
19
The essay, "America, Listen to Your Own," which
appeared in The Hew Republic December 15, 1920, evidently
was written earlier that year. It originates in Lawrence's
objection to the "sniffy amusement" of an Italian newspaper
at the awkward behavior and abject admiration of Old World
monuments by visiting American Knights of Columbus. To
Lawrence European cultural superiority is actually "the
stagnation of the ebb." The attitude of superiority makes
understandable "the barbarian rage against the great monu
ments of civilization." Now "the Americans can merely
leave us to our monuments" instead of destroying them.
Lawrence's idea of the chance America has to escape the de
cadence of Europe, hinted at in the poems, is made expli
citly clear. r
Americans must take up life where the Red Indian,
the Aztec, the Maya, the Incas left it off. . . .
They must catch the pulse of the life which Cortes
and Columbus murdered. . ., . A great and lovely llfe-
form, unperfected, fell with Montezuma. The respon
sibility for the producing and the perfecting of
this life-form devolves upon the new American ....
It means a departure from the old European morality,
ethic. It means even a departure from the old range
of emotions and sensibilities.
19
Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence.
pp. 87-91.
20 ifria... pp. 90-91.
k6
An important statement of Lawrence's philosophy,
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, was published in May,
1921. Its continuation, Fantasia of the Unconscious,
completed by October 8, 1921, is important to an under
standing of the American experience, supplementing the
poems and the essay.
The foreword shows that Lawrence was aware of and
disdainful., of objections to his eclectic disregard of
scholarly methods and rational, scientific exactness.
I warn the generality of readers, that this pre
sent book will seem to them only a rather more revolt
ing mass of wordy nonsense than the last. I would
warn the generality of critics to throw it in the
waste paper basket without more ado.
As for the limited few, in whom one must perforce
find an answerer, I may as well say straight off
that I stick to the solar plexus. That statement
alone, I hope, will thin their numbers considerably.
Finally, to the remnants of a remainder, in order
to apologize for the sudden lurch into cosmology,
or cosmogony, in this boolj:, I wish to say that the
whole thing hangs inevitably together. I am not a
scientist. I am an amateur of amateurs. As one of
my critics said, you either believe or you don't.^1
The foreword contains‘ .also an interesting state
ment of what he felt was the relationship between hie
philosophic essays and his fiction and poetry.
This pseudo-philosophy of mine— “pollyanalytics,"
as one of my respected critics might say— is de
duced from the novels and poems, not the reverse.
The novels and poems come unwatched out of one's
pen. And then the absolute need which one has for
21
D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious
(New kork, 1930), PP* vii-viii.
47
some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards
oneself and things in general makes one try to
abstract some definite conclusions from one's ex
periences as a writer and as a m a n .22
It seemed to him that art is "dependent on philosophy,"
on a metaphysic, even if unconscious and nowhere "very
accurately stated," since "men live and see according to
23
aome gradually developing and gradually withering vision. "
In the "Epilogue" there was a humorous, playful
salute to the United States which shows Lawrence's need
of a good reception and his refusal, perhaps inability,
to remain solemn or to be tractable. After describing
the fantastic announcements of Professor Pickering of
Harvard about life on the moon, he concluded:
Now I'm sure Professor Pickering's photographs
and observations are really wonderful. But his
explanationsi Come now, Columbia, where is your
Hlgh-falutin' Nonsense trumpet? Vast fields of
foliage which spring up at dawn ( i i i) and come'
into blossom just as quickly ( i i J) are rather too
flowery even for my flowery soul. But there, truth
is stranger than fiction.
I'll bet my moon against the Professor's, anyhow.
So long, Columbia. A rlverdici.
Most significant for the American future was his
statement of belief in a "golden age" which, in decaying,
left traces through which it might be apprehended. Tak
ing Belt's suggestion that during the Glacial Period "the
22 Ibid., p. xiv.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid., p. 29?.
1 4 - 8
sea-beds of today must have been comparatively dry," he
/
theorized that
... in that world men lived and taught and knew, and
were in one complete correspondence over all the earth.
Men wandered back and forth from Atlantis to the Poly
nesian Continent as men now sail from Europe to America.
The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science
was universal over the earth as it is today.25
By "science1 * he meant "the science which proceeds in terms
of life and is established on data of living experience and
sure intuition." He was willing to call it "subjective
science." Modern, "objective" science concerned itself
"only with phenomena as regarded in their cause-and-effect
relationship." After destruction of this theoretical civi
lization by a world flood, the refugees fled to the high
places of our time.
. . . Some degenerated naturally into cave men, neo
lithic and paleolithic creatures, and some retained
their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfection, as
the South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in
Africa, and some, like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans
or Amerindians or Chinese, refused to forget, but
taught the old wisdom, only in its half-forgotten,
symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge:
remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story.26
The theory of the blood-consciousness had bereft Lawrence
of a tradition, except as he might use that of the Christian
era in satirical reverse. Mysticism, including theosophy,
apparently could not fill this void. The reading of Frazer
^ •» P • x.
^ Ibid., pp. x-xi.
k9
"bore fruit. Lawrence sought evidences of a tradition for
his belief, and the voyage around the world soon to follow
found a part of its itinerary In the passage from the Fan
tasia.
A cue came on November 5, 1921, when Lawrence noted
In his diary: "Had a letter from Mabel Dodge Sterne asking
27
us to go to New Mexico— to Taos. Want to go.1 1 This un
usual American woman, after years spent among the literati
of the eastern United States and Europe as a wealthy hostess
and dilettante, had in middle age, after three marriages,
fhe latest to Maurice Sterne, the painter, discovered-Taos
and an interest in the Indians as the source of a new life,
and was living with Antonio Luhan, a pueblo Indian. As she
had done in Europe, she was engaged in making her home^a
literary and artistic center. A reading of Lawrence*s Sea
and Sardinia had moved her to write to him. It was,"one of
the most actual of travel books. . . , for In it, in that
queer way of his, he' glves the feel arid touch and smell of
places so that their reality and their essence are open to
28 • .-•
one. . . .’ • She felt "capacities in him that would enable
him to understand the invisible but powerful spirit that
29 : .
hovered over the Taos valley. Later, when he arrived,
Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H.
Lawrence Manuscripts, p. 93*
28
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York, 1932),
P • ^ • 29
Ibid., p. 12.
she putshim to work at once experiencing and writing ahout
the Indians. Now, in 1921, she sent him,a long, rather
fantastic letter, full of details she thought would attract
him, emphasizing the country's isolated, unspoiled nature.
Lawrence replied the same day, saying they would
like to come. He enquired ahout the cost of living, men
tioning that they lived frugally and did their own work, and
asked if there was "a colony of rather dreadful sub-arty
people,;” if the Indians were dying out so that it was sad,
what the "sound, prosperous Americans" did in that region,
and what the nearest port was. He believed "... what you
say— one must somehow bring together the two ends of human
ity, our own thin end, and the last dark strand from the
previous, pre-white era." He wanted "to leave Europe. . . ,
30
to take the next step."
31
Lawrence wrote to friends to enquire about Taos,
and to his American agent to enquire about ships. Late in
November, he was planning to come to Taos in January, having
" a very great desire to land on the Pacific coast."-^ The
plan persisted into late December, Lawrence feeling that he
had enough money, though he was poor, to come and to pay
33 '
the usual rent. But in January', 1922, he shrank "as yet
30 ifria-, P- 6.
^ Ihe Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 536.
32
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos.' p.
33 Ibid., p. 13.
51
from the States," though he felt he would ultimately go
there. His American friends, Earl and Achsah Brewster,
were in Kandy, Ceylon, where Brewster was studying Buddhism'
in a monastery, and Lawrence wished to join them. ". . .1
want to go east before I go west; go west via the east."
(This paradox of direction he used in the New Mexico poem,
"The Red Wolf.") It is noteworthy that the eastern route
made it possible for him to see at first hand many links
with the pre-Flood past. His stated reason was an inner
one.
I think one must for the moment withdraw from
the world, away towards the inner realities that
are real: and return, maybe, to the world later,
when one is quiet and sure. ... I don't believe
in Buddhistic inaction and meditation. But I
believe the Bur” * J ' ' ^
A few days later Mrs. Lawrence wrote to Mrs. Sterne that
Lawrence didn't "feel strong enough" to come just then.
"Strengthened with Buddha, noisy, rampageous America might
warned them about her. She had been involved in a good
many quarrels and scenes, and she had confided to Lawrence
something about her ventures in psychoanalysis. Lawrence
wrote to her that he wanted first “to get quite calm and
sure and ‘ istill and strong. I feel America is so unreligious:
from— not our
be easier to tackle."
35
Mrs. Sterne felt that someone had
3k
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. pp. 53?-5kO
35
^ Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 15.
52
it's a "bad word: and that it is on the brink of a change,
but the change isn't quite ready yet, so I daren't come.
And I feel you yourself are harried out there. There was
a proposal that she Join them in Ceylon, and that they con
tinue together to Taos.
On February 26, 1922, the Lawrences sailed for Ceylon.
He had at last left the Europe which had come to mean to him
the unbearable tensions of the War. On shipboard he thought
that "once beyond the Red Sea one does not feel any more
that tension and pressure one suffers from in England— in
Europe altogether— even in America, I believe— perhaps worse
37
there." But in Ceylon neither the people nor Buddhism
attracted him. A celebration for the Prince of Wales was
'gorgeous," but it made him realize "how very barbaric the
38
substratum of Buddhism is. " He felt that "all dark people
have a fixed desire to Jeer at us" and that Buddhism was "a
39
vulgar temple of serenity built over an empty hole in space,
His feelings fluctuated, as though the old, established pat
tern of recoil could not be broken. Most of the people on
the ship that brought him to Ceylon.had been Australians,
and he had an impression of the country as “full of life and
36 Ibid,. pp. 16-17.
37
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 5^6-5^7.
38
Ibid.. p. 5^8.
39
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 19.
53
4o
energy.“ He thought of going there, then in a revulsion
of feeling wrote to an English friend that he had made "a
mistake in forsaking England and moving out Into the peri
phery of life." Italy, Ceylon, Africa, America represented
a “running away." His hope for a hand of devoted indivi
duals revived. “I really think that the most living clue
of life is in us Englishmen in England, and the great mis
take we make is in not uniting together. ..." Conse-
41
quently he planned to return to England that summer.
However, at the end of April, after ahout a month
and a half of the contrast of the philosophy and "too hot
and enervating" if "lovely to look at" actuality of the
East, Lawrence sailed for Australia. After approximately a
fortnight at Darlington, West Australia, he moved to Sydney
and took a house ahout forty.miles south of the city,
"Wyewurk," Thlrroul, N. S. W. Australia, where he remained
until August. What he now encountered was the antithesis
of Ceylon with its ancient, Oriental past, its “glimpse in-
43
to the world before the Flood."
His first reaction was in the terms of the remark
to Amy Lowell that American literature was older, impersonal,
5o
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 546.
^ Ibid.. pp. 548-549.
42
Ibid., p. 550.
43
Ibid.. p. 551.
54
non-human. “G-od," he wrote, “how I hate new countries.
They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more
conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like
44
senility than anything." The egotistic bullying that he
detected in democracy, English as well as Australian, galled
him.
If every American is a King or Queen, I'm sure every
Australian is a little Pope all on his own, G-od's
Vicar. 'There is nothing better^-than me on earth, *
he seems silently to proclaim, not with tongues of
angels or tones of silver, either: and not always
silently. I've got a bitter burning nostalgia for
Europe, for Sicily, for old civilization and for
real human understanding— not for this popery of
sacfed {convenience'— everything is 'so convenient,'
they keep telling you. *
But another aspect of a new country exerted a fascination,
as it would later in the United States.
. . . there seems to be no inside life of any sort:
just a long lapse and drift. A rather fascinating
indifference, a physical indifference to what we
call soul or spirit. . . . Often I hate it like
poison, then again it fascinates me, and the spell
of its indifference gets me. I can't quite explain
It; as if one resolved back almost to the plant
kingdom, before souls, spirits and minds were grown
at all. . . .40
The same feeling was to appear in the American work.
He began almost at once the novel, Kangaroo, which
marks, among his major works, the transition from Europe.
One chapter, XII, “The Nightmare," $.ves in retrospect the
44
Ibid.. p. 554.
45
Ibid., pp. 553-554.
46
Ibid., p. 555.
crisis of life in England during the war. Here Lawrence
worked out as an imaginative unit stemming from a sense
of fear in Somers, his chief character, the reasons for
his sense of exile and isolation. During the war, he wrote,
“a man must identify himself with the criminal mob, sink
his sense of truth, of Justice, and of human honour, and
bay like some horrible unclean hound. ..." He refused
to do this. He had "detested the German military crea
tures." "But then the industrialism and commercialism of
of England, with which patriotism and democracy became iden
tified: did not these insult a man and hit him pleasantly
across the mouth? How much humiliation Richard had suffered,
trying to earn his living I" The entire experience is re
created in detail. There are the first medical examination
and rejection in the conscription with a sense of degrada
tion of the individual, Lbndon and the Zeppelin raids,
savagely ironic since Harriet (Mrs. Lawrence) might have
relatives aboard the airships, and the political bullying
of Bottomley and John Bull. There follow the retirement to
Cornwall in 1915 where the Somers are suspected of being
spies, the ensuing searches and indignities, a plan to go
to America, which step would be "the death of his own country
in him," and the feeling that it was "the end of the old
England" when Asquith's government fell and Lloyd George
came in. After re-examination and classification "for
light, non-military duties," there is the engrossment in
farm work and attraction to the mysticism of the Cornish
Celts. The climax is a secret search of the house and the
order to leave Cornwall, followed by harassment by the
police in London, and growing hatred of those suspecting
them, to counteract a feeling of terror, of being "a crimi
nal marked out by society . . . for annihilation." There
is a discovery of "the greatest secret of behaviour: to
stand alone, and judge oneself from the deeps of one's own
soul. , . and never to fear the outside world," and of a
new sense of sweetness and humanness there "in the heart
of England— Shakespeare’s England." After a move to his
own boyhood countryside, Somers feels “the alien spirit
of coal and iron" controlling people’s lives. A third
physical examination follows, with greater humiliation and
a decision not to submit to it again, and never again to
"be at the disposal of society." As the chapter ends,
Somers tries to understand why "the dread, almost the horror,
of democratic society, the mob," should erupt from his sub
conscious here in Australia. "He felt broken off from his
fellow-men. He felt broken off from the England he had
belonged to. . . . So be it. He was broken apart, apart
he would remain." The chapter concludes: "The judgments of
society were not valid to him. The accepted goodness of
^ D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (New York; 1923), pp.
24-8-302 passim.
society was no longer goodness to Mm. In his soul he was
48
cut off, and from his isolated soul he would judge.1 ’
Richard Somers is patently Lawrence working out for
himself, in the isolation of Australia where his identity
was little known, the intellectual and emotional problems
inherited from the war. In Taormina, he had said that if
he knex* how he would join "the revolutionary socialists"
49
for a "death struggle." Later he had commented that he
had heard the revolution would only "resolve itself into
the continued faction fights between socialists and facisti.
In Kangaroo Richard Somers becomes involved in a rather
similar fight. He is invited to join and work for the
political triumph of both a socialist organization and a
secret band of Australian war veterans headed by Benjamin
Cooley, nicknamed "Kangaroo," who plans to establish a
benevolent dictatorship.
As for the socialists' offer,
. . . he did love the working people. . . and did
also believe, in a way, that they were capable of
building up this great Church of Christ, the great
beauty of a People, upon the generous passion of
mate-love. All this theoretical socialism started
by Jews like Marx and appealing ohlyrto'.the will-to-
power in the masses, making money the whole crux. . .
— all politics, in fact— have conspired to make money
the only god. . . . A new great inspiration of belief
rbta-, P* 304.
49
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 51?*
50
Ibid., p. 518.
58
in the love of mates
might he achieved, hut it would he too great a “strain
on the hearts of man. . . . Men would go mad."^
As for “Kangaroo’s" dictatorship, it, too, is hased
on a concept of love that violates integrity,
. . . working everything from the spirit, from the
head. Xou worlj: the lower self as an instrument of
the spirit. Mow it.is time for the spirit to leave
us again; it is time for the Son of Man to depart,
and leave us in dark, in front of the unspoken God;
who is just-beyond the dark threshold of the lower
self. . .
When "Kangaroo" attempts to win him hy an appeal to love
between the two men, Somers finds “Kangaroo’s love only a
great general emotion" turned on him "like a tap.8^ When
he refuses to return this emotion, "Kangaroo’s" love turns
to a righteous hatred that arouses horror and fear in
Somers. At this point occurs "The Nightmare1 1 chapter analyz
ing the war-time fears, surging to the surface after the
quarrel with "Kangaroo."
The political struggle.between the Socialists and
"Kangaroo’s" veterans ends in violence and killing, which
is, for Lawrence, the revenge of "the spontaneous soul,"
which
. . . must extricate itself from the meshes of the
. almost automatic white octopus of the human ideal, the
Lawrence, Kangaroo. pp. 23^235.
52 Iftld., p. 155.
^ p» 2^3.
59
octopus of humanity. It must struggle clear, knowing
what it is doing: not to waste itself In revenge. The
revenge is inevitable enough, for each denial of the
spontaneous dark soul creates the reflex of its own
revenge. But the greatest revenge on the lie is to
get clear of the lie.54
Here Lawrence must have been struggling with the nihilistic
hatred and desire for revenge in himself which had resulted
from the war.
i k
In his struggle with himself Somers turns, as Lawrence
did, away from humanity to Nature. One passage in a scene
on the beach (suggestive of Whitman's "Out of the Oradle
Endlessly Rocking!1 ) expresses the conflict between human
warmth (the social) and the only partially compensatory
merging with Nature.
Richard rocking with the radium-urgent passion of
the night: the huge, desirous swing, the call clamour,
the low hiss of retreat.- The call, call J And the
answerer. Where was hisvahswerer? There was no
living answerer. No dark-bodied, .warm-bodied answerer.
He knew that, xdien he had spoken a word to the night-
half-hidden ponies with their fluffy legs. No animate
answer this time. The radium-rocking, wave-knocking
night his call and his answer both. This God without
feet or knees or face. This sluicing, knocking, urging
night, heaving like a woman with unspeakable desire,
but no woman, no thighs or breast, no body. The moon,
the concave mother-of-pearl of night, the great radium-
swinging, and his little self. The call and the an
swerer, without intermediary. Non-human gods, non
human human beings.55
This communion with non-human gods, sometimes the gods of
death, through Nature was to manifest itself more and more
& Ibid.. pp. 312-313.
Ibid.. pp. k Q O - k l Q .
60
in his work, and particularly in that to follow now, in
the United States and Mexico. Beside it, man was indeed
'•little," hut when human affairs went wrong, he could re
sort to it. The prophet of such gods had set for himself
a task of communication and reconciliation with the human
world that would trouble him as long as he lived. A merg
ing in death, and the act of drawing into death those aspects
of the human world that he despised, would tempt him more
than once, in an ancient, non-human America, and contem
porary America and Europe,
PART XI
FIRST VISIT TO NEW MEXICO, 1922-1923
CHAPTER I
THE LIFE
Both Frieda and Lawrence had come to lore Australia,
but "the restless ’questing beast”1 in Lawrence sent him
on to America.'*' The long voyage was broken by a stop at
Tahiti, linked in his mind with the study of Melville and
with his concept of a pre-historic golden age. He thought
the island beautiful, but Papeete "a poor, dull, modernish
place."2
Arrival in San Francisco was on Monday, September k,
1922. Next day, in a letter, he spoke of "such nice letters
and telegrams from Mabel Dodge" and his American agent. In
deed, Mrs. S't.erne had written that she considered the Lawrences
her guests from San Francisco, and had sent them railway
tickets,^
Lawrence's income was still uncertain, and his rapid
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited by 4'ld°us
Huxley (New York, 19327, P* 557*
2
Catherine Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage (New York,
1932), p. 169.
3
Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. ..." (Santa
Fe, 193^), P. 1^9.
62
movement at this time made it difficult for him to know
exactly the condition of his hank accounts and to keep
much cash on hand. This uncertainty had been communicated
in his letters to Mrs. Sterne. From San Francisco he sent
his mother-in-law thirty dollars by check, with the promise
to send more, and asked if Mrs. Lawrence's sister, Else,
needed any, adding: "I don't know how much I've got, but
if
our life in Taos will cost little— rent free and wood free."
At the moment he had less than twenty dollars cash, and re
mained in San Francisco several days awaiting the wiring
of money by his agent in Mew York.-^
Lawrence's arrival in America was marked by recur
rence of another old problem. On September 8, he wrote to
Amy Lowell: "Well here I am under the Star-spangled Banner—
though perhaps the Stripes of persecution are more appro
priate." After mentioning his plans to leave that night
for Santa Fe, he asked her to write to Taos "unless of
course the new prosecution of Women in Love makes you feel
£
that least said soonest mended." The "persecution" he
referred to had begun in July with a raid on the offices of
his publisher, Thomas Seltzer, by John S. Sumner of the Mew
k
5
Mabel Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York, 1932),
p. 28.
6
S. F. Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle (Boston, 1935),
p. 621.
Yor]£ Society for the Suppression of Vice. Copies of three
titles had been seized: Lawrence's Women in Love, issued
in 1920 in a limited edition; A Young Girl's Diary. “an
anonymous book by anyoung Australian girl with foreword by
Sigmund Freud"; and Casanova1s Homecoming by Arthur
7
Schnitzler. At the hearing on July 31, Seltzer had
vigorously defended all three books, producing such wit
nesses as Miles M. Dawson, Garl Van Doren, Gilbert Seldes,
Mrs. Dorothea Brande, Dr. Adolph Stern, and Dr. Gregory
8
Stragnell.
How much of these events Lawrence knew before his
arrival on September k is not certain. It is likely- that
among letters awaiting him, and arriving in the first few
days, was further news of the case. On September 12, near
the time of his arrival in Taos, the court rendered a de
cision in favor of the publisher and all three books. Of
Women in Love Magistrate George W. Simpson said: "The
author attempts to discover the motivating power of life.
9
He writes of the elemental passions of men and women."
Of all three he said:
. . . I do not find anything in these books which may
be considered obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, in
decent or disgusting. On the contrary, I find that
each of them is a distinct contribution to the
7
Publisher1s Weekly. (July 15, 1922), p. 118.
8
Ibid., (August 5, 1922), pp. 463-^6^.
9 Ibid.. (September 16, 1922), p. 802.
*4
literature of the present day. Each of the books
deals with one or another of the phases of present
thought. They are not written in a manner that
would incite impure imaginations and lustful desire
in the reader of ordinary intelligence.
Pornographic tides should be stemmed, but dis
tinction must be drawn between that which is merely
obscene and that which the higher Courts' tests allow
and sanction. It has been said, with some justice,
that the policy of pouncing upon books too frank for
contemporary taste, without regard to the motive or
purpose for which they were written, or the use to
which they are to be put, is objectionable and should
be curbed.10
The verdict may have afforded Lawrence some consola
tion later, but one must realize the bitterness to him of
such a prosecution during the approach to America. It must
have re-irritated the wound of The Rainbow suppression, and
it assuredly reminded him of Amy Lowell's strictures and
her resistance to his early attempt to come to America. The
things he disliked in the contemporary world must have seemed
to Lawrence as inescapable in America as in Europe.
Amy Lowell did reply with a "hearty welcome," and
said of Women in Love:
Are you really such a silly fellow as to suppose
that the suppression . . . can make a difference
to me? I think 'Women in Love' one of your very
finest books, and this suppression business makes
me sick. Everybody knows that I am one of your
chief champions in this country. . . .11
But the latter assertion is not altogether borne out by
the record.
^ Ibid., p . 80ij..
11
Damon, Amy Lowell, A Chronicle, pp. 621-622.
65
The Lawrences were met at Lamy, New Mexico, by Mrs.
Sterne and Tony Luhan, who had come down from Taos by
12
motor car. (The car is worth mentioning because it be
came f.br Lawrence a rather omnipresent symbol of modern-
society.)
Because of motor trouble, the party arrived in Santa
Fe too late to obtain rooms at a hotel, and Mrs. Sterne
took the Lawrences to the home of Witter Bynner, where
Lawrence also met Willard (Spud) Johnson and Alice Corbin. ^
ILl
Next day they proceeded to Taos.
That same week, after a few days of settling down,
Mrs. Sterne set in motion her plan to have Lawrence write
of. the Indians. 11. . .1 wanted Lawrence to get into the
Indian thing soon. * * she has said.^ He was sent off on
a five-day trip with Tony Luhan and Bessie Freeman, a friend
of Mrs. Sterne's from her Buffalo, New York, days, to an
12
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, 'p., 36. Evidently the date
was-Sunday, September 10, for the Lawrences, after the de
lay occasioned by short funds, had left San Francisco on
Friday, the eighth.(Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle, p. 621.)
On September 19, a Tuesday, Lawrence wrote that they had
arrived "last week," (The Letters of D* H. Lawrence. p. 556),
which makes Sunday, the tenth, the earliest date in that
week. Saturday the ninth is a possibility for the arrival
in Lamy if hems speaking of arrival in Taos.
^ 3 Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle. p. 623.
lA
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos. p. 39 •
Ibid., p. £i7.
66
Apache fiesta. Evidently "Indians and an Englishman, 1 1 an
accoufit of the trip, was written shortly after his return.
But Lawrence had anticipated that America, too, would
not betfree of the Ills he found in Europe. "The land" he
liked "exceedingly." Mrs. Lawrence and he rode horseback
16
a good deal and found it “great fun." But the people
were something else. To an old friend in England he wrote
recommending "a gentle faith in life itself" as "far better
than these women in breeches and riding boots and sombreros,
and money and motor-cars and wild west."
Only the desert has a fascination— to ride alone—
in the sun in the for ever unpossessed country— away
from man. That is a great temptation, because one
rather hates mankind nowadays. '
A visitor to Taos in October, Maurice Lesemann,
reported that Lawrence found "... our machine life . . .
an appalling thing. ... It would take the most Intense
individualism to escape the deep seated American impulse
toward uniformity. All that a sensitive person could do now
was to live totally to himself." Lawrence was amazed at
the American way of treating "everyone with the utmost
familiarity on first acquaintance," the presumption of "an
exact community of interest." He knew that the intention
was"kindly and generous" but had "the feeling of being
perpetually Insulted." He sensed a terrible latent power
16
Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle. p. 622.
17
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 562.
67
in Americans. He spoke also to Lesemann of his idea for a
colony, a farm or ranch for a group of young people who
would not attempt to make it pay, as the Brook Farmers did,
but would support themselves by writing, painting, and other
activities
There were signs of coming trouble in Lawrence's com
ments on women. To Harriet Monroe he wrote that Taos moun
tain was "like an unwilling woman." Thais was "far more
unwilling that Cassandra. The one woman who never gives
herself is your free woman, who is always .giving herself.
America affects me like that." He extended the comparison
to Alice Corbin, who was staying with Mrs. Sterne late in
September:
I like her very much. But her mouth talks of
freedom and her eyes ask only to have freedom taken
avmy: such freedom. The Land of the Free. Thank
God I am not free, any more than a rooted tree is
free.19
The theme of the woman whose freedom brings her to
unhappiness and a destructive relationship with men was not
new to Lawrence, appearing as it had in Women in Love and
other earlier works. In Kangaroo he had recorded the strug
gle in her own marriage, humorously and realistically:
She was to submit to the mystic man and male in him,
with reverence, and even a little awe, like a woman
before the altar of the great Hermes. She might
remember that he was only human, that he had to
change his socks if he got his feet wet, and that
he would make a fool of himself nine times out of
l R
Maurice Lesemann, "D. H. Lawrence in New Mexico,"
The Bookman, LIX (March, 192i|.), p. 30.
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 559-
ten. But— and the but was emphatic as a thunder
bolt— there was in him also the mystery and lord
ship of— of Hermes, if you like— but the mystery
and the lordship of the forward-seeking male.20
This though "he was not really lord of his own bread and
butter" and "not even master of himself, with his ungovern
able furies and his uncritical intimacies with people. . . .
This theme was to appear in the American work.
Submission to a higher power extended to himself,
who must "truly submit" to "the dark god he had sensed."
Life involved such a religious sense, and very early in the
Taos visit the crux of his criticism of America was that
the sense was not to be found. The "individual, egoistic
will" was superimposed "over the real genuine sacred life."
... And that's why I think Ameriea is neither free
nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little
wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else,
and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real cour
age of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity.
• They can't trust life until they can control it. So
much for them— cowards 1 You can have the Land of the
Free--ae much as I -knowogf it. In the spring I want
to come back to Europe.
At the same time he spoke of Mrs. Sterne as "very
nice to us— though I hate living on somebody else's property
and accepting their kindnesses." In connection with Mrs.
Sterne's desire that he write about Mew Mexico, he broached
a difficulty that confronted' him as an artist:
20 p. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (New York, 1923), p. 202.
21
Ibid., p. 203
22
Frieda Lawrence, "Not I . But the Wind, pp. 171-172.
69
. . . There seems to be no feeling at all— no
genuine bowels of compassion and sympathy: all
this gripped, iron, benevolent will, which in
the end is diabolic. How can one write about it,
save analytically.
For creation, as opposed to analysis, the artist must have
feeling. When Lawrence did begin to write stories of America,
the theme of the perverse results of living from will entered
strongly. Even in himself the moments of spontaneous crea
tivity seem to have come with some difficulty. And to reach
t-hem he passed through many relatively unproductive months.
The arrangement of living so near Mrs. Sterne in the
house she had carefully planned, lasted only until Novem
ber 30. She was partly successful in drawing him into the
battle she, with other intellectuals, was waging against
the federal governments treatment of the Indians, and
particularly the threat to the Indians1 land raised by the
Bursum Bill. But, as we have seen, the war years in Europe
had made Lawrence both weary and wary of such embroilments.
This, however, was not the major source of the trouble that
developed.
For a time Lawrence entered into a plan to write about
Mrs. Sterne’s own life, her "discovery" of the Indian country
and her feeling of entrance into a new life superior to that
in the East and in Europe. Notes and a small fragment of a
chapter of this projected American novel survive. Later
23
Ibid., P. 171.
70
Mrs. Sterne wrote the story herself in Intimate Memories
along lines recognizable in the Lawrence, fragments. But as
they worked together on the story, a struggle developed be
tween Mrs. Lawrence and Mrs. Sterne. There is no evidence
of sexual unfaithfulness by Lawrence; indeed, he was never
the promiscuous person those with superficial knowledge have
supposed, but was personally fastidious, somewhat Puritani
cally so. Orldinarily the relationship with his wife moved
dynamically between quarrel and rapport, maintaining remark
able stability between the two poles of feeling. When this
relationship was challenged by Mrs. Sterne, Mrs, Lawrence
fought, rather savagely and probably with more subtlety
than she has been credited with, to pull Lawrence back into
her orbit. She always opposed his enthusiasms and projects
xfhen they threatened her centrality, and often Lawrence was
adamant; but in this crisis there was no question of his
loyalty. On November 30 the Lawrences left Taos for a cabin
(belonging to Mrs. Sterne) high up on Mt. Lobo. Such a move
was Spartan as winter came on; but the Lawrences had lived
under such relatively primitive conditions before.
Involved in the quarrel was the Lawrence,y. friendship
with Knud Merrlld and Kai Gotzsche, two Danish artists who
had drifted into Taos that fall on their way to California.
Both men seem to have been non-sophisticates, sincere, not
easily won, and loyal. Merrild seems to have been the harder-
headed, more rational and questioning, Gotzsche the more
71
enthusiastic. In Taos they had met the Lawrences more or
less by accident, and had been liked and encouraged to be
come friends even when it was obvious that Mrs. Sterne dis
approved of them. Indeed Lawrence had defied her disapproval,
once mischievously giving Merrild a rather fantastic scarf
she had knitted for him, which Merrild wore for her to see.
It was they who drove the Lawrences to the Lobo ranch in
their Model-T Ford on Uovember 30. The Lawrences asked them
to stay, Lawrence suggesting that they work on designs for
his books.
Relations with Mrs. Sterne were not broken, though
the enmity persisted. In Merrild’s opinion Mrs. Sterne’s
next move was to oust the Danes, for she told the Lawrences
by messenger the next day that they could have only one
cabin, the other being needed by her son on hunting expedi
tions. Lawrence was furious, and that afternoon found and
rented two cabins from William Hawk at Del Monte Ranch
nearby.^ After much labor, these were made habitable, and
in them the little party spent the winter, making occasional
excursions and receiving some visitors, many of whom Lawrence
avoided by going off into the woods.
In December Lawrence thought of returning to Europe
^ Knud Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters (Hew York.
1939), PP. 36-28.
Ibid., pp. 6I 4 .-66.
72
when spring came, perhaps to try Russia. “After America,
it appeals to me. No money there (they say).M But in
January, 1923, he was thinking of Mexico. By the middle
of March, when the group at the ranch parted, he had evolved
a plan for the birth, in Mexico, of his long-dreamed of
colony. As Merrild puts it,
The one thing that Lawrence never got tired of speak
ing of was the "new life" that he wanted to start or
create. But that could not be accomplished in this
dreaded civilized America and less in suicidal Europe,
. . . It was an old idea of his, but he had not yet
found a suitable place for it, although he had circled
half the globe in its pursuit. Now he thought the
possibility might be in bid Mexico. And he was de
termined to go down there in search for a place, and
when he had found it we were to Join him and Frieda
there.27
T 28
The Lawrences proceeded to Mexico City in late March, 1923*
accompanied from Santa Fe by Witter Bynner and Spud Johnson.
Merrild and G-otzsche lingered awhile in Taos before driving
to California. Lawrence corresponded steadily with them
during the following months, his plan not forgotten.
26
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. pp. 566-567.
^ Merrild; A Poet and Two Painters, p. 251*
28
Ibid., p. 264.
CHAPTER II
THE PROSE
The first New Mexico visit was not a particularly
productive period for Lawrence, the artist. From the stay
in Mrs. Sterne's house at Taos until November 30 came the
essays "Indians and an Englishman" (from the Apache trip)
and "Taos," both collected in Phoenix: the Posthumous Pacers,
and probably an article against the Bursum Bill, the un
collected "Gertain Americans and an Englishman." Sometfhat
later, probably from the stay at the ranch from November 30
to the middle of March are the essays "Surgery for the Novel—
or a Bomb" and a review of Stuart P. Sherman's Americana,
both collected in Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers. From the
Taos stay there are the slight fragments of the abortive
American novel.
The opening paragraphs of "Indians and an Englishman"
are in the humorously realistic vein (rather overlooked by
his critics) Lawrence often used in such short pieces. He
had been maneuvered into the Indian thing early, and he
must have been well aware that an American audience might
think a consistently serious tone presumptuous. He was
not naive after his war-time reception in England. Then,
too, the Taos milieu threatened the detachment and inner
poise that was so necessary to him, and so easily broken;
Ik
this is implicit in the opening of the essay. Beyond this
he was adept at satire and inclined to speak his mind.
The Southwest is
. . . rather like comic opera. . . . all the wildness
and woolliness and westernity and motor-cars and art
and sage and savage are so mixed up, so incongruous,
that it is a farce, and everybody knows it. But
they refuse to play it as farce.
As for purpose, "the Indians and Mexicans don't even seem
very keen on dollars." As for sympathy, the wild-west is
"bad-on-purpose"; "commerce is a little self-conscious
about its own pioneering importance"; the highbrow is bent
on "saving the lost soul"; the Mexican "is bent on being
Mexican and not gringo; and the Indian is all the things
that the others aren't."^ Prom the comic-opera, farce
imagery, he turned to that of the circus.
In such a masquerade of earnestness, a bewildered
straggler out of the far-flung British empire, my
self I Don't let me for a moment pretend to know
anything. I know less than nothing. I simply
gasp like a bumpkin in a circus ring, with the horse-
lady leaping over my head.
Despite this, it is insisted that one "take sides."2
There are seven paragraphs of this satirical stock
taking. It is almost as if the artist is shaking himself
loose from the turmoil and pressure of his immediate situa
tion. In the eighth paragraph Lawrence turns to a serious
Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence,
edited by Edward D. McDonald (New York, 193S), p. 92.
2 Ibid., p. 93-
75
account of his trip to the Apache encampment. Tone and
style change markedly. As he begins to create scenes, the
sentences elongate and become rhythmic, the rhythm enter
ing even those paragraphs which are essentially commentary.
His earlier reading of American literature, and
writing on it, significantly affected his interpretation of
the first view o.f the encampment. ". . . To my heart, born
in England and kindled with Fenimore Copper, it wasn't the
wild and woolly West, it was the nomad nations gathering
3
still in the continent of hemlock trees and prairies."
His first hearing of the war-whoop of the dance produced
in him "an acute sadness, and a nostalgia, unbearably yearning
for something, and a sickness of the soul. . . ." He felt
nostalgia for a time "when man was dusky and not individual-
4
ized."
The first part of the essay, after the introduction,
is organized around two scenes, the encampment, and the
dancing and singing at the kiva, expressed chiefly in terms
o’f sound, the singing, the "pat-pat" of the feet, and the
"gobble-gobble-gobble" of the war-whoop. The latter part
is organized around the narrative of a visit alone to the
kiva at night after supper, and it too is done largely in
terms of sound, the voice of an old man reciting. The key
3
Ibid., p. 94.
4
Ibid*» P* 95-
76
feeling, the nostalgia for a distant past, links both parts*
In his approach to the kiva, the narrator, wrapped
in a serape, feels "warm inside" and "as good as invisible"
in "the dark air thick with enemies." However subjective
this may be, it;; keys, artistically, the evolvement of the
idea of distance between Indian and spectator. That side
of the West satirized in the introductory paragraphs in
trudes for a moment as he notes a soft-drink stand near the
kiva, and, among the white people, "one screechy, ungentle
cowgirl in khaki." Beyond, in the camp, he felt, what may
have been "the limitation of (his) European fancy, . . . a
stress of will,- of human.wills, in the dark air, gibing
even in the comic laughter. And a sort of unconscious
5
animosity."
As he stands at the kiva, listening to an old man
recite, a young Indian questions him and tells him he cannot
enter the Indian "church." Scene and dialogue are keyed
to the idea again of the separation of old and new. As he
remains watching and listening, he finds a "dauntless . . .
persistence" in the old reciter. He is far from being an
enemy of the Indians, and he does not need to understand the
words.
The soul is as old as the oldest day, and has its own
hushed echoes, its own far-off tribal understandings
sunk and Incorporated. . . . But I don't want to go
5 Ibid., p. 96.
77
back to them,vah, never, I never want to deny them
or break with them. But there is no going back. . . .
The greatest devious onward-flowing stream of conscious
human blood. From them to me, and from me on.
The challenge of the young Indian is used, in the last para
graph. n. . . I stand on the far edge of their firelight,
and am neither denied nor accepted. My way is my own, old
£
red father; I can't cluster at the drum any more."
So the initial Hew Mexico essay turns out to be
neither a sentimental effusion nor a prosaically factual
account. In parts it is Lawrence at his best, creating an
experience in much the manner of his best stories. He was
not without knowledge of the Indians beyond the Fenimore
Cooper version; a poem like “Turkey-Cock,u written in Italy
much earlier and only revised slightly in America, reveals
that; besides, there were the communications and gifts from
Mrs. Luhan, and his habit of reading up on strange civiliza
tions. But possession of factual knowledge is really not
the point. The important thing to observe is that Lawrence
could make of such an episode as the Apache trip an indivi
dual created experience because it was at once integrated
by his philosophy, without concession to conventional treat
ment. The artist who rejected the modern world here reached
tentatively for a tradition to support his belief in the
blood-consciousness. It was this above all that America
might give him.
6
Ibid., pp. 97-99•
78
Related somewhat to the Apache essay is an uncollected
one entitled “Certain Americans and an Englishman,1 1 which ap
peared in the New York' Times Magazine December 24, 1922. In
it Lawrence attacked the bill introduced in Congress by
Senator Bursum to settle the dispute between Indian, Spanish-
American, and the squatter of all origins over land and
water rights around Taos pueblo. Internal evidence indi
cates composition in December, since at one point the text
reads: "His famous Bursum bill has passed the Senate and
comes before the House, presumably this month (December)."'7
However, Mrs. Luhan in reproducing in Lorenzo in Taos frag
ments of the Apache essay, included five paragraphs which
8
appear almost verbatim as the first six of the Times essay.
Unless she mingled two fragments of separate origin, one
must conclude that Lawrence in a revision of the Apache
essay excised the five paragraphs and used them as the be
ginning of what was really a different subject. It is plain
that the attack on the bill resulted from Mrs. Luhan*s ef
forts to interest Lawrence in the Indian problem. While
Lawrence sincerely opposes the bill, he is also satirical
of the intellectual climate In which he found himself.
I arrive in New Mexico at a moment of crisis. I
suppose every man always does, here. The crisis Is
a thing called the Bursum bill, and it affects the
^ New York Times Magazine (December 24, 1922), p. 3*
8
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, pp. 52-58.
79
Pueblo Indians. I wouldn't know a thing about it
if I needn't.
But it's Bursum, Bursum, Bursum J the Bill, the Bill,
the Bill I Twitchell, Twitchell,- Twitchell,! f 0 Ms**
Secretary Fall, Fall, Fall. ' 0 Mr. Secretary Fall,
you bad man, you good man, you Fall, you Rise, you
Falli The Joy Survey, Oh, Joy, Ho Joy, Once Joy,
Now Woe Woe, Whoa i Wioa, Bursum i Whoa, Bill I Whoa-
a-a . ' — like a Yachell Lindsay Boom-Boora bellowing,
it goes on in ay unwonted ears, till I have to take
heed.
And then I sit down solemnly in a chair and read
the Bill, the Bill, the printed Bursum Bill, Section
one-two-three-four-five-six-seven, whereas and where
fore and heretobefore, right to the damned and distant
end. Then I start the insompeh-as of Mr. Francis
Wilson's Brief concerning the Bill. Then I read Mr.
C.'s passionate article against, and Mrs. H.'s hatchet-
stroke summary against, and Mr. M.'s sharp-knife jug
glery for the Bill. After which I feel I'm getting
mixed up. Then, lamb-like, ram-like, I feel I'll
do a bit of butting, too, on a stage where every
known animal butts.
But first I toddle to a corner,and, like a dog
when music is going on in the room, put my paws ex-
asperatedly over my ears, and my nose to the ground,
and groan softly. So doing, I try to hypnotize ray-
self back into my old natural world, outside the
circus-tent, where horses don't buck and prance so
much, and where not every lady Is leaping through the
hoop and crashing through the paper confines of the
universe at every hand's turn.9
There follows a clearly-written analysis of the land situa
tion and a resume of the Bursum Bill and its consequences
to the Indian, though as usual Lawrence refused the heavy
touch. Near the end, pleading that the Indian be kept out
of politics and be allowed to die at least a natural death,
he came to his theory of the crisis of his times.
Because, finally, in some curious way, the pueblos
still lie there at the core of American life. In
^ Hew York Times Magazine (December 2k, 1922), p. 3»
80
some curious way, it is the Indians still who are
American. This great welter of whites is not yet
a nation, not yet a people.
The Indians keep burning an eternal fire, the
sacred fire of the old dark religion. To the vast
white America, either in our generation or in the
time of our children or grand-children, will come
some fearful convulsion. Some terrible convulsion
will take place among the millions of this country,
sooner or later. When the pueblos are gone. But oh,
let us have the grace and dignity to shelter these
ancient centers of life, so that, if die they must,
they die a natural death. And at the same time, let
us try to adjust ourselves again to the Indian outlook,
to take up an old dark thread from their vision, and
see again as they see, without forgetting we are
ourselves.
For it is a new era we have now got to cross into.
And our own electric light won't show us over the gulf.
We have to feel our way by the dark thread of the old
vision. Before it lapses, let us take it up.i0
The brief eessay, "Taos," from this same time (pub
lished in the Dial for March, 1923), is a slighter piece
of work, episodic, if with a strand of feeling running
through it. The first paragraphs are unified by the idea
of the nodality of places. Beginning with the Indians'
belief that Taos was the heart of the world, he reflects
on the feeling he had once had that London was a "great
heart of the world," a heart that for him had broken during
the war. Other places had held it for him, and some had
lost it. The nodality of the pueblo was like that of "the
ruins:: of the old great monasteries of England. . . , one
of the choice spots of the earth, where the spirit dwelt."
There in the midst of devastation "those whose souls were
10
Ibid., p. 9*
still alive. . . kept the human spirit from disintegration.”
This is more than a comparison containing a reminiscence
of the beauty of the English countryside, which, Merrild
says, Lawrence frequently spoke of with nostalgia; some
thing of the mission he felt was necessary in his contem
porary world comes through. He continues with a descrip
tion of activity in the pueblo, moving at once to an evening
scene, with himself "on a pony, a far-off stranger with
gulfs of time between me and this. And yet, the old nodal
ity of the pueblo still holding. . . ."He finds, too, a
"sense of dryness, almost of weariness," and of the "in
alterable" that brings "a sick sort of feeling" over him.1^
With no transition, two episodes follow which illustrate
"the old, amusing contradiction between the white and the
dark races": the fining and the confiscation of the film
of a girl who was taking forbidden pictures, and the re
fusal of entrance to the Church to a woman doctor from
New York, who then excused the Indians. To Lawrence this
was not mere enforcement of rules; there was an "almost
jeering triumph" in the action. He had "heard the same
story at Buddhist temples in Ceylon." Perhaps there was
something of his sensitivity and accumulation of painful
experience in the feeling; the antagonism between the races
- * - 1 Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence,
p. 100. * ”
12 Ibid., p. 101.
82
would appear in his stories. The final episode of the essay
is a description of a religious procession. As the singers
dispersed, it seemed to Lawrence that "they were grinning
subtly." To him "it must have been a sort of ordeal" to
dance "between that solid wall of silent, impassive white
faces. But the Indians seemed to take no notice." In the
crowd he found a "strange, static American quality of laissez-
faire and of indomitable curiosity."13
It seems likely that the short essay, "Surgery for
the Novel--or a Bomb," was written during the first New
Mexico visit. Published in April, 1923» in International
Book Review, it sounds as though it may have been commis
sioned by an editor a few months earlier— commissioned be
cause there was no other particular reason for Lawrence’ s
doing an essay at this time on the state of the novel—
during the New Mexico visit because of allusions to The
Sheik and Babbitt among the popular novels and to Zane Grey
among the novelists. 14
In a teasing, satirical manner Lawrence finds the
"serious" novel, represented by Joyce, Dorothy Richardson
and Proust, occupied with a self-consciousness that is
"obvious senile prococity." It is "absorbedly, childishly
13 Ibid-» PP- 102-103.
^ Ibid., p. 519.
83
15
concerned with what I am.1 1 The popular novels are "just
as self-conscious, only they do have more Illusions about
themselves." As for himself, "the purely emotional and
self-analytical stunts" were "played out." He was not
cynical but "just interested in something else. . . . What
next? That's what interests me. 'What now?1 is no fun
16
any more." In the past, among the Greek philosophers,
philosophy and fiction were one. Later they had been split,
and now "should come together again in the novel."
The novel has a future. It'6 got to have the courage
to tackle new propositions without using abstractions;
it's got to present us with new, really new feelings,
a whole line of new emotions,' which will get us out of
the emotional rut. Instead of snivelling about what
is and has been, or inventing new sensations in the
old line, it's got to break a way through, like a
hole in the wall. And the.public will scream and
say it is sacrilege. . , . '
As we have seen, Lawrence began doing this himself with
The Rainbow. Now in America, physically as well as intel
lectually cut off from Europe, having a well-developed
philosophical belief, and in tentative possession of a
tradition, he must reach into the future and attempt pro
phecy, at first in short things, and finally at length in
The Plumed Serpent.
The review of Stuart P. Sherman's Americanst
IfricL. p. 518.
16
Ibid.. pp. 519-520.
17
Ibid., p. 520.
published in the Dial for May, 1923, is Lawrence in a mis
chievous mood, one that often possessed him in his relation
ships with people as well as in his work, and an aspect of
the man often overlooked by his supporters as well as his
detractors. Beneath the mischief is an underlying current
of seriousness that tells much of his direction*
In mood, tone and style the review is very like the
essays in Studies in Classic American Literature. which
Lawrence was revising during this period far publication in
book form. And when he comments on Sherman's treatment of
an American discussed in the Studies. Lawrence's Judgments
are consistent with those in his own book. The first six
paragraphs set the tone:
Professor Sherman once more coaxing American criti
cism the way it should go.
Like Benjamin Franklin, one of his heroes, he at
tempts the Invention of a creed that shall "satisfy
the professors of all religions, and offend none."
He smites the marauding Mr. Mencken with a velvet
glove, and pierces the obstinate Mr. More with a re
proachful look. Both gentlemen, of course, will purr
and feel flattered.
That's how Professor Sherman treats his enemies:
buns to his grizzlies.
Well, Professor Sherman, being a professor, has
got to be nice to everybody about everybody. What else
does a professor sit in",a chair of English for, except
to dole out sweets?
Awfully nice, rather cloying. But there, men are
but children of a later growth.-*-”
Sherman tells the Menckenites not to Jeer “at the Great
Past and at the Great Dead." He tells “the smaller and
18
Ibid., p. 314.
85
more select company of Moreltes: Scorn not the horny hand of
19
noble toll. . . . " When Sherman speaks glowingly of the
average man's religion of democracy, Lawrence remarks that
profiteers, place-grabbers and bullies of the war "were, of
course, outside the average. The supermen of the occasion."
Franklin's deity "turns out to be a sort of superlative Mr.
20
Wanamaker," Indeed, Deistic prudence and Lawrence's dark
gods had little in common. But Emerson, whom he did not
treat in the Studies, presents a more complex problem to
which Lawrence gives some sixteen paragraphs, more than a
fourth of his space. Emerson was still a great man, but
his idealism- (such a statement as "We are all aiming to be
idealists, and covet the society of those who make us-so,
as the sweet singer, the-orator, the ideal painter") was no
longer valid.
As a matter of fact we have worked the ideal bit of our
nature to death, and we shall go crazy if we can't -
start working from some other bit. Idealism now is a ,
sick nerve, and the more you rub on it the worse you"'
feel afterwards.. Your later reactions aren't pretty at
all. LlkegJostoievSky's Idiot, and President Wilson
sometimes.
As for the courage to "treat all men as gods," It took cour
age now not to treat them so. Perhaps this is in part the
realistic side of Lawrence, the pragmatism indicated by his
19 Ibid.. p. 315.
20
Ibid., p. 316.
21
Ibid., pp. 317-316..,
86
early interest in William James; at any rate there is a
strong affinity with the temper of his times in the mis
trust of idealism. Many writers, Hemingway for example,
were signaling its collapse, though they might not venture
into the future. There was prophecy in Lawrence's
We've got to have a different sort of sardonic
courage. And the sort of credentials we are due to
receive from the god in the shadow would have been
real hones out of hell-bggth to Ralph Waldo. Sic
transeunt Del homlnorum.
As for Hawthorne, in The Scarlet Letter he was not
interested in "what Hester and Dlmmesdale really felt. Only
with their situations as Sinners. The hook was a "master-
23
piece, hut in duplicity and. half-false excitement." J
Lawrence himself, as we have seen, had given up fixed moral
systems for what he thought a greater morality; and he had,
with whatever strength andWeakness, traced the feelings
as they, moved outside the fixed systems.
Whitman, whom he liked.in so many other ways, was no
longer valid in his identification of the self "with every
thing and everybody." "We don't want tot-be embracing every
thing any more., ..Or to be embraced in one of Walt's vast
promiscuous armfuls." Here, he used a phrase that he was
to repeat often: "Noli me tangere."
22 Ibid.. p. 318.
23 Ibid.. pp. 318-319.
2 k
Ibid.. p. 319.
, After brief treatment of Joaquin Miller, Sandburg,
Carnegie, Roosevelt, and the Adams family he concluded that
Sherman's "cookies," which his readers were to "eat and have
are "Tradition and Heroes, and Great Men, and $350,000,000
in your pocket. And eating 'em is Democracy, Serving Man
kind, piously giving most of the $350,000,000 back again."
In a "P.S." he adds: "You can't get past arithmetic."^5
Discussion of Studies in Classic American Literature
has been reserved until now because, although they were be
gun in 19l6, and appeared in the English Review in 1918-1919
it was in Taos, of at Del Monte Ranch, or both, that they
were revised for publication in book form in August, 1923*
The greatest change was in form. The English Review
essays were rather formally and conventionally expository
in style and paragraphing. That is, most of the paragraphs
were long, most of the sentences complete; there were no
eccentricities of capitalization; the tone was essentially
serious. All this is changed in the book form. The para
graphs are broken up at times into mere phrases, and in
general are shorter. There is widespread use of phrases
punctuated as sentences. Key abstract words, usually
those representing the ideas or emphases under attack are
often printed in capitals: NATURE, SPIRIT, KNOWING, GENTLE
MAN, IDEAL, IDEAS, IN LOVE, ONE IDENTITY, I AM HE THAT ACHES
Ibid., pp. 320-321.
88
WITH AMOROUS LOVE, EN MASSE.
Lawrence had humorously described the early essays
to Amy Lowell as "rather a thrilling blood-and-thunder,
your-money-or-your-life kind of thing: Hands up, America I "26
They were nothing to the colloquial assault, outraging all
the usual notions of propriety in the critical essay, that
he makes in the final form. The technique is somewhat sug
gestive of American newspaper headlines, and Mrs. Lawrence
remembers that he thought them interesting and effective.
Gone too, in the final form, was most of the phy
siological-psychological theory of the blood-consciousness
which Lawrence explored at some length earlier as a founda-
i
tion to his criticism. For example, the original essay
on Hawthorne had begun:
Before beginning the study of Hawthorne, it is
necessary again to consider the bases of the human
consciousness. Man has two distinct fields of con
sciousness, two living minds. First there is the
physical or primary mind, a perfect and spontaneous
consciousness located in the great plexuses and ganglia
of the nervous system, and in the hind brain. Secondly
there is the ordinary consciousness which we recognise
as mental, located in the brain. We are mistaken when
we conceive of the nerves and the blood as mere vehicles
or media of the mental consciousness. The blood itself
is self-conscious. And the great nerve-centres of the
body are centres of perfect primary cognition.2?
There follow four pages of discussion of the relationship of
art to these two minds, called later "the passional psyche."
Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle, p. lj.22.
English Review, (May, 1919)*
89
and "the rational psyche."
The nearest approach of the passional psyche to
scientific or rational reality is in art. . . . The
nearest approach of the rational psyche towards pas
sional truth is in philosophy. . . . When the unison
between art and philosophy is complete, then knowledge
will be in full, not always in part, as it is now.
Hawthorne attempts "to understand as deeply as he feels"
but does not succeed. The Scarlet Letter "contains the pas
sional or primary account of the collapse of the human psyche
in the white race. Hawthorne tries to keep up a parallel
rational exposition of this fall. But here he fails." Thus
Lawrence approached his criticism with careful effort at
consistent use of terms, setting up his conception of the
highest art before analyzing a failure to achieve it. We
have already noted his belief, stated also here, that in the
Christian era "the rational or upper or spiritual mind has
risen superior to the primary or physical being." Hawthorne's
Hester Prynne on the scaffold is a perverse symbol of this
triumph, Just as in Helville, Ahab seeks to kill in Moby Dick
his "primary or physical being." Hawthorne longs
.... for revenge, even upon himself. He is divided
against himself. Openly he stands for the upper,
spiritual, reasoned being. Secretly he lusts in the
sensual imagination in bruising the heel of this
spiritual self and laming it for ever. All his reasoned
exposition is a pious fraud, kept up to satisfy his
own upper or outer self.28
This paradox is the thread that binds the Studies to
gether. All of the American writers, in one way or another,
28 Ibid,
seek development of the upper, rational self at the expense
of rebellion by the passional self. In the far different
form of the book the idea appears thus;
Always the same. The deliverate consciousness of
Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under
consciousness so devilish. Destroy I destroy ! destroy
hums the under consciousness. Love and produce
cackles the upper consciousness. And the world hears
only the Love-and-produce cackle. Refuses to hear
the hum of destruction underneath. Until such time
as it will have to hear.
The American has got to destroy. It is his des
tiny. It is his destiny to destroy the whole corpus
of the white psyche, the white consciousness.29
Franklin’s moral code, within the mechanistic uni
verse of the Deist, was of course entirely antithetical to
Lawrence, and he had a field day satirizing the limitations
of prudential experience. In building the new democratic
state, Franklin in "his own tinder-consciousness. . . hated
England" and "the whole corpus of the European being."3®
Crevecoeur is the "emotional" prototype of the Ameri
can. He got his "emotional reactions" from "NATURE." And
here, despite apparent traces of it in himself, Lawrence
rejects, like a good realist, the primitivistic return to
nature. "I used to admire my head off; before I tiptoed
into the Wilds and saw the shacks of the Homesteaders.
Particularly the Amiable Spouse, poor thing."31 And in
29
7 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Litera
ture (New York, 1930), p. 122.
' 30 Ibid., p. 29.
3" ^ Ibid., p. 35.
91
another place: "Jean Jacques, Bernardin de St. Pierre,
Chateaubriand, exquisite Francois Le Vaillant, you lying
little lot, with your Nature Sweet and Pure i "32 But
Crevecoeur the artist, not the idealist, he greatly admired
33
for 1 1 glimpses of actual nature, not writ large."
Cooper’s “white" novels exhibited the destructiveness
of the ideal, here the democratic one. The Effinghams "felli
terribly superior to Mr. Dodge, yet, since they were his
equals in the sight of God, they could not feel free to say
to him: ’Mr. Dodge, please go to the devil,1 They had to say:
'Pleased to meet you.*"3^ Lawrence does not seem to have
known- of, or at least did not mention, the later Cooper
novels and essays that attempt to correct rudeness and levell
ing in democracy and brought Cooper such bitter embroilment.
The Leatherstocking Tales were almost another story, Lawrence
had loved them "so dearly." But they were "wish-fulfilment."3- 5
Pictures! Some of the loveliest, most glamorous
pictures in all literature.
Alas, without the cruel iron of reality. It is
all real enough. Except that one realises that
Fenimore was writing from a safe distance, where,
he would idealize and have his wish-fulfilment.-?®
Met at the end, in contemplating Deerslayer, Lawrence must
32 Ibid., p. 36.
33 Ibid., p. 37.
34- .
Ibid., p. 60.
35
Ibid., p. 67.
^ Ibid., pp. 80-81.
92
have seen something of his own position, if also something
of the threat he felt in America.
A man who turns his bach on white society. A man
who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact. An
isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, xdio
lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white.
This is the very intrinsic-most American. He
is at the core of all the other flux and fluff. And
when this man breaks from his static isolation, and
makes a new move, then look out, something will be
happening.37
He found in the friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumpo,
Cooper's dream of “a new human relationship, . . . the
stark, loveless, wordless unison of two men who have come
to the bottom of themselves.H It was "the new nucleus of
38 *'-~T ,
a new society." It was Lawrence's own dream.
Cooper represented both the "sloughing of the old
consciousness1 1 and the forming of a new one underneath;
39
but Poe was only disintegrative. His "'morbid' ;tales“
had to be written "because old things need to die. ..."
"Ligeia," which Lawrence discusses at some length, is "a
ghastly story of the assertion of the human will, the will-
to-love and the will-to-consciousness, asserted against
40
death itself. The pride of human conceit in KNOWLEDGE."
In the second chapter on Hawthorne, Lawrence works
37 Ihld., p. 92.
og
Ibid., p. 78*
39
XLid.. p. 93.
48
Ibid., p. 109.
93
chiefly with Blithedale Romance. in which, he thinks,
Hawthorne "came nearest to actuality." The people at
Brook Farm illustrated the failure of Idealism. The bal
ance Lawrence theoretically sought is expressed in the
comment, "You've got to learn to change from one conscious
ness to the other, turn and about. Not to try to make
i f - 2
either absolute, or dominant." Resort to spiritualism,
"psychic tricks," is "a certain sign of the disintegration
of the psyche."
In the Dana essay, he felt that Americans, making
only an ideal home-land of their soil, turned next for im
aginative conquest to the sea. For Dana, since "knowing
A/i
. . . is the slow death of being," knowing the sea was
a step in dissolution. But for having "lived this great
k- 5
experience for us, we owe him homage. And after all, we
have to know all before we can know that knowing is nothing.
. . . Then there is a sort of peace, and we can start afresh,
k 6
knowing we don’t know." Dana's reaction in the famous
flogging scene is rather perversely interpreted not as
^ Ibid., p. 153.
j j . 2
Ibid.. pp. 15^-155.
Ibid., p. 162.
Ibid., p. 166.
k 5
Ibid.. p. 185.
k S
Ibid., p;?192.
9k
salutary human! tarianism, but as the idealist "refusing
the blood-contact of life."^
But Melville was "the greatest seer and poet of the
sea. The South Seas adventures of Typee and Omoo show
a man hating the civilized, white world and "passionately
filled with the sense of vastness and mystery of life which
is n o n - h u m a n . " ^ But he was unhappy in his South Seas
paradise because "one cannot go back. . . . Melville couldn’t
go back: and G-auguin couldn’t really go back: and I know
now that I could never go back."^® Afterwards, however,
determined that Paradise existed, Melville "was always in
Purgatory," one of those souls destined for Purgatory
Even his marriage was a disillusionment "because he looked
for perfect marriage."^ In much of this, one is reminded
of Lawrence’s own "purgatorial" struggles. He concludes
the first Melville chapter:
Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist.
Perhaps, so am I.
And he stuck to his ideal guns.
I abandon mine.
He was a mystic who raved because the old ideal guns
shot havoc. The guns of the "noble spirit." Of "ideal
love."
W Ibid., p. 175.
Ibid., p. 193.
IMI-, P* 197-
IMd., p. 201.
^ Ibid., p. 205.
Ibid., p. 211.
95
I say, let the old guns rot. ^
Get new ones, and shoot straight .b-5
Apparently what he sought was a more relativistic dynamic
life as a solution.
In Moby Dick Melville "was a futurist long before
futurism found paint. The sheer naked slidings of the ele
ments. And the human soul experiencing it all. So often,
it is almost over the border: psychiatry. Almost spurious.
Yet so great.
«5ij-
Melville knew "his great white epoch"
was doomed. Moby Dick "is the deepest blood-being of the
white race. . . hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our
white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To
subject him to our will."^ Thus in Melville, in many
ways, Lawrence found a parallel to his own problems, and
an illustration of his major theses.
The chapter on Whitman ends the Studies. To Lawrence
he was "the one pioneer,^. . . the first to smash the old
moral conception, that the soul of man is something 'super
ior' and 'above' the flesh.
Europe has never got beyond the morality of salvation.
Ibid., pp. 212-213.
^ Ibid., p. 216.
^ Ibid., p. 238.
^ Ibid., p. 253.
^ Ibid., p. 255-
96
America to this day is deathly sick with saviourism.
But Whitman, the greatest and the first and the only
American teacher, was no Saviour. His morality was
no morality of salvation. His was a morality of the
soul living her life, not saving herself. Accepting
the contact with other souls along the open way, as
they lived their lives. Never trying to save them.
. . . It is the inspiration of thousands of Americans
today, the best souls of today, men and women. And
it is a message that only in America can be fully
understood, finally accepted.5°
Whitman's mistake was in confounding his watchword, sympathy,
with "Jesus1 LOVE and with Paul's CHARITY ."^9 Thls confu
sion resulted in the undiscriminating identification and
merging which led to his being also mechanical at times
and "a very great post mortem poet, of the transitions of
the soul as it loses its integrity."^ The last paragraphs
of the book sum up the Whitman criticism and define what
Lawrence could accept as good:
Love, and Merging, brought Whitman to the Edge of
Death ! Death ! Death I
But the exultance of his message still remains.
Purified of MERGING, purified of MYSELF, the exul
tant message of American Democracy, of souls in the
Open Road, full of glad recognition, full of fierce
readiness, full of joy of worship, when one soul
sees a greater soul. /_
The only riches, the great souls. 1
The contemporary reception of the Studies was some
what mixed. The reviewer in The Bookman, Raymond M. Weaver,
53 Ibid.. pp. 256-257-
£9 ibid., p. 257.
60 Ibld•* P• 2^2 •
^ itid•» P • 26I 4 ..
97
thought that
. . . In this last hook. . . , strange gods pranoe
into the clearing to do a stout menagerie prance of
self ostentation. Nor is freedom of what Mr. Lawrence
calls 'my own Holy Ghost' hampered by information.
His ignorance of American literature is comprehensive
and profound.
At the same time Weaver was reviewing Stanley T. Williams'
Studies in Victorian Literature, and he concluded: "...
Barbarian souls are likely to discover Professor Williams
atrociously harmless, insipid beyond human tolerance. Let
such hail Mr. Lawrence. He is as good as an Armenian mas-
62
sacre." The reviewer in The Dial. Alyse Gregory, found
that Lawrence's theme was buffeted "from page to page as
an excited school boy might bat at an evasive and recalci
trant baseball, emitting strange guttural noises the while
which we are, it is supposed, to understand as the 'real,
right' American vernacular." In general she finds him,
beginning with Women in Love, corrupted "by the disease of
ideology," but of his idea that the American soul is "hard,
isolate, stoic, and a killer," she says, with much reluc
tance: "And so with a chance cunning he thrusts his finger
straight through the flimsy draperies of our public pre
tences and touches the sharp and jagged blade beneath. For
can anyone deny that this is not true of America?" (Her
phrasing and her logic part company in the last sentence.)
62 The Bookman. LVIII (November, 1923), pp. 327-328.
63
The Dial (January, 19240, pp. 70-71.
98
Lawrence’s book has made its way into wide-spread
use in critical and academic circles. In 1928 in The
Reinterpretation of American Literature, edited by Norman
Foerster, Fred Lewis Pattee said of the new sort of his
tory of literature that he felt was needed:
First, it must be written primarily as a history,
with no thought of class-room use. If professors
can use it as a textbook let them, but it must be
as detached from class-room thinking as is D. H.
Lawrence's amazing volume.
Edmund Wilson reprinted the studies in The Shock of
Recognition. Willard Thorp, in editing selections from
Melville for the American Writers Series, cites Eawrence‘s
interpretation of Moby Dick as a fruitful one. F. 0.
Matthlessen alludes extensively to the Studies, and to
other Lawrence criticism, in The American Renaissance.
Lawrence's dictum, "Never trust the artist. Trust the
tale," sounds like a cogent bit from the present school of
"organic" criticism with Its focus upon the unity and mean
ing of the work Itself.
What Lawrence did was to apply his sense of and
theory of psychic unbalance in our era. Applied elsewhere
to such writers as Hardy, Tolstoy, and Galsworthy, it
1
yielded recognizably similar results. In early versions
of the American studies, exposition of his theory dominated
application. Later, much of the exposition was thrown away
K E—
The Reinterpretation of American Literature.
edited by Norman Foerster (New York, 1928V, p. 6,
99
for brilliant, if sometimes showy and disjointed, exploi
tation of the paradoxes the theory yielded. All of Lawrence’s
antipathies are involved, and these overshadow at times his
acutely sensitive appreciation of achievements compatible
with his own tendencies and strengths. In the historical
sense, he is relatively ignorant of American literature.
He seems unaware of how’far Hawthorne and Melville agreed
with him about transcendental over-optimism. But Melville’s
Promethean, sceptical storming of the gods, and Hawthorne’s
moral gloom, involved conflicts he himself was trying to
resolve. His philosophy dictated focus upon symptoms of
decadence, defined in his own terms. Headers who would
hesitate to embrace the whole of his philosophy, find that
its application often yields suggestive and illuminating
insights, as if Lawrence had shown a side of his subjects
their own theories had refused to recognize. It is astonish
ing to think with what critical intensity he must have read.
CHAPTER III
THE POETRY
Along with Studies in Classic American Literature.
Lawrence was preparing another manuscript for publication,
that of the booh of poems called Birds. Beasts and Flowers*
In November, 1915, in the midst of The Rainbow suppression
and the war, Lawrence had written: "I would like to go to
a lend where there are only birds and beasts and no human
ity, nor inhumanI'ty-masks. This may not have been the
conscious origin of the subject-matter and theme of the
volume, but it foreshadows the primary purpose of the
poems. They were to be a turning from humanity to the
significance Lawrence had found- in birds and beasts from
the time of his very earliest work. It is noteworthy that
not one of the poems was composed in England. They were
begun in Italy in late 1919 and continued through"the en
suing journeys and experiences to 1923 and the NewoMexico
ranch, where, on February 10, Lawrence wrote to Harriet
Monroe: “I have made up the complete MS. of Birds. Beasts
2
and Flowers and sent it to Seltzer.”
Nine of the forty-eight poems were written in New.
Mexico. "Eagle in New Mexico,” “The Red Wolf,” "Men in New
^ The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 282.
2 i^id*» P* 5^9.
101
Mexico," "Autumn at Taos," and "Spirits Summoned West"
are signed "Taos," and thus date from the period between
3
about September 11 and November 30, 1922, at Taos. "The
Blue Jay," "Bibbles," “Mountain Lion," and "The American-
Eagle" (though there may be some doubt about the latter)
are signed "Lobo" and date from the stay at Del Monte Ranch
between November 30 and. about the middle of March, 1923*
On October 19, 1922, Lawrence wrote to Amy Lowell
from Taos: “I have done two poems here: my first in
k
America." One of these is undoubtedly "Eagle in New Mex
ico." The other is not certain, since four others are
signed as written at Taos, and there is a possibility that
an early draft of "The American Eagle" dates from the Taos
stay.
The "occasion" of "Eagle in New Mexico" has been de
scribed by Mrs. Luhan in Lorenzo in Taos:
The "Eagle poem" . . . came from a drive we had
one day far out in the desert that leads down to
the Manby Springs. As we silently turned a curve,
we came upon an eagle sitting on a low tree close
to the road. . . . Lawrence was immensely moved by
the aspect of that bird.-'
3
Date of a farewell note by Lawrence, Lorenzo in
Taos (New Yorlc: Knopf, 1932) , p. 106.
Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle« p. 623*
5
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, pp. 101-102.
Evidently he wrote an early version of the poem on the same
i
day, since Mrs. Luhan remembers seeing it "that afternoon."
An early manuscript version dated October 11, 1922, may be
7
the text she saw.
8
The poem grow® from the initial image of "a
•scorched breast, breasting the sun like an answer." In
the second stanza, subject and setting are made explicit,
"an eagle at the top of a low cedar-bush" in the desert;
and another aspect of the bird is given, the threat of its
curved bill, dark as if dripping blood. The bird faces
the sun as if in-response, and is a Siller.
For the remainder of the poem, the rhetorical struc
ture is that of address, although the completing "you"
clause does not occur until the fifth stanza. The image
of the bird is intensified with such phrases as "erect,
scorched pallid," "erect, with the god-thrust entering him
from below,"the threatening aspect with the metaphor
"gloved in feathers." Other aspects are added. The eagle
looks two ways at once; helis mashed, "sickle-masked with
iron" between his eyes.
The aspect of looking two ways at once and the
z
Ibid., p. 102.
^ Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H.
Lawrence Manuscripts, pp. 100-101.
Q
D. H. Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers (London:
Seckor, 1923), PP* 147-14-9•
103
scorched "breast are "brought together in the concept that
only “the inner eye" of the breast “looks straight at the
sun." Only the breast is light in color; the rest is dark,
as is the bill, which "cleaves down" and is "weapon-hard,"
in one of the few similes, a relatively trite one for a
poised threat, "like a sword of Damocles." This threatening
of the bill is intensified and the dark dripping is made ex
plicit: the bill has been dipped into blood many times to
temper it.
Questions are put to the eagle. Why does it "front
the sun so obstinately" as if in an old grudge or an old
allegiance? Does it lift the hearts of rabbits or birds
to the sun as the Aztec priests did those of men? Does
the sun shriek for blood as if "a hovering, blood-thirsty
bird?" Is the eagle the sun’s priest? Is the continent
still cold from the ice-age "that the sun is so angry,"
its blood "somewhat reptilian still. . . that the sun" is
"greedy for it?"
At this point the image of hardness and rapacity
towards sacrificial victims is complete. In the last three
stanzas the poet makes explicit his implied defiance of the
eagle, using the first person. He yields neither to the
bird (now "jowl-faced," as if an obese bully) nor to the
sun “that sucks up blood / Leaving a nervous people."
He tells the eagle to fly off, reversing its appearance in
104 -
retreat, "a big black back” with a "rust of fire” in its
tail. Then, in the last stanza, defiance mingles with
affirmation:
Even the sun in heaven can be curbed and chastened at last
By the life in the hearts of men,
And you, great bird, sun-st&rer, heavy black beak
Gan be put out of office as sacrifice bringer.
The poem, then, is a confrontation by the poet of
the bird's essential power and deadliness. Lawrence creates
this essence unflinchingly and so objectively in the first
four stanzas that if the poem terminated here, one might
think this alone his theme.. But the rhetorical structure
has prepared for the poet's entrance in addressing the bird.
After the next three stanzas with their direct address and
element of challenge, the poem again might be terminated,
with the bird and poet plainly confronting- each other.
There is no traditional imagery beyond the "sword of Damocles"
simile.. The next seven stanzas with their questions further
the effect of confrontation and, of course, complete the
image of the bird as sacrlficial-priest to the sun. Finally,
the last three stanzas might be said to be like a physical
movement, as if the poet, after steadily regarding the
bird through most of the poem, startles it to flight with
his sudden defiance of its hardness.and threat.
There is, especially in the early part, a direct
apprehension of the bird that constitutes the poem's chief
p o w e r . The poet's reciprocal attitude in its own
105
unrelentingness maintains the hard tone. This element of
immediate, objective confrontation makes it difficult to
say how much of Lawrence's personal feeling about New
Mexico and the people he had met enters into the poem. We
have seen from his comments in letters and elsewhere that
he liked the country but felt the people wilful and in
wardly dead, and this seems to appear in the late lines
about "a nervous people.” The bird probably symbolized
for Lawrence this and the whole problem of reconciling
human feeling with the non-human, particularly with the
destructively non-human so immanent in the wild landscape
and in the terrible sacrificial religion that, as a part of
the true American tradition, must be faced. Death, es
pecially the sacrificial death, would haunt Lawrence hence
forward, as the white consciousness yields to the dark.
The free-verse technique is typical of the American
poems. The lines consist of complete phrases (and some
times clauses), varying in length from a single, short
phrase like "Masked-one,1 1 "Erect one," to a long phrase
or combination of phrases like "When you pick the red smoky
heart from a rabbit or a light-blooded bird." Punctuation
does not indicate complete sentences, with periods occurring
at the ends of sequences of phrases. Length of line is
not determined by meter but by the poet's choice of
linear arrangement of phrases or clauses widely variant in
io6
length. The grammatical unit is a determinant.
W. H. Auden has said: ". . .So far as I know,
Lawrence is the only poet on whom Whitman has had a fruit
ful influence; his free verse is quite new, but without
Whitman it could not have been written."9 Of course Lawrence
was impressed by Whitman quite early in his career; even
his early "rhyming poems" seemed Whitmanesque to him. An
early letter shows that he preferred rhetorical stress to
metrical stress.^ By the time of the hew Mexico poems he
has abandoned traditional forms altogether. Perhaps most
like Vs/hitman is the use of a series of parallel clauses,
as in the series of questions in "Eagle in New Mexico" and
the device of reserving the main clause as a climax. But
Lawrence’s use is much more incisive and terse than
’ Whitman’s rather obviously rhetorical rhythmic organiza
tion. Perhaps more of Whitman is to be seen in Lawrence's
frank identification of the poet and use of "I".
The "occasion" of another Taos poem, "The Red Wolf,"
was a visit to the pueblo during which an Indian used the
appellation for Lawrence. With this as a central idea,
he wrote a poem 7/hich extends In meaning and feeling both
into the past and the future and was a means of interpreting
his position between two cultures.
9 W. H. Auden, "Some Notes on D. H. Lawrence," The
Nation, l6ip (April 2o, 19I J . 7), p. J4. 82.
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 155-157-
107
11
In the early stanzas of the poem, Lawrence sets
up Images of loss and denial (later developed into sym
bols of loss of traditional Western faith and of denial of
admission into the religion of the Indian). Darkness, in
itself a part of the denial symbol, intervenes between him
and an eagle circling over the desert. The sun on the rim
of the mesa bids the poet "look for a last long time," and
sets (a part of the loss symbol). An Indian wrapped to
the eyes in a sheet tells the poet he is invisible — which
is again the denial symbol.
To the finality of the departed sun image are added
the autumnal falling of aspen and cotton-wood leaves, and
ponies shut up in the corral. The poet, in his loss and
in his approach' to an unknown, is symbolized by the coming
of a red wolf to the rim of the shadow.
The symbolism of the passing of day is extended by
being linked to an image of the loss of faith: it has "gone
to dust. , . like a white Christus fallen to dust from a
cross." Juxtaposed to this image is one of the Indian
past, "a black crucifix," linked to the early eagle image
with "maybe a black eagle with its wings out." In the
darkness and vagueness of night the traditional has given
place to something different.
There is a long colloquy between a demon (the Indian
Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers. pp. 190-193*
108
tradition) and the poet, the tone dropping to the collo
quial. The poet describes himself as "like a homeless
dog" (his own image for himself, the "red wolf" image
coming from the Indian). He has trotted "east and east
and east till the sun himself went home," leaving him
"homeless here in the dark" at the demon*s.door (the direc
tion links with Lawrence's journey from Europe to Taos via
the East, Geylon, Australia, and San Francisco). The de
mon asks where his "white God" is, and the poet answers
that "he fell to dust as the twilight fell." The demon
bids the ",thin red wolf" go home, and is answered that he
has no home, which is his reason for coming. When the
demon says they take no "hungry stray," the poet answers
that he does not ask him to; "the red-dawn-wolf" has come
unasked. The demon, in his last speech, warns of the fangs
of the pueblo dogs, and the poet*8 last unyielding reply
is to ask if the "red wolf" has "trotted" so far "to fear
a few fangs."
In the last stanza Lawrence comments on the colloquy,
reaching a defiant affirmation.
As for me. . .
Since I trotted at the tail of the sun as far as ever the
creature went west,
And lost him here,
I'm going to sit down on my tail right here
And wait for him to come back with a new story,
I'm the red wolf, says the dark old father.
All right, the red dawn wolf I am.
In this poem Lawrence,.positing the loss of his
109
traditional, Western-European faith, fronts the Indian
culture to which he has recently come. His hope of finding
a link between the pre-Christian past and the future is
evident here; but the poem contains aifeeling of denial
of the possibility of entering that past. We have seen
this idea put explicitly in other places. Here, in the
texture of the poem, it is put in terms of denial, homeless
ness, and defiance, a defiance that contains confidence in
a dawn, thus linking itself with the image of the departed
sun and the night that envelops the ancient pueblo.
12
Evidently “Men in Hew Mexico1 1 had no “occasion,“
in the sense of taking its origin in an event, but is
entirely the expression of a subjective feeling. Signifi
cantly, it is grouped with “Autumn at Taos" and “Spirits
Summoned West" in a section titled G-hosts. The book had
grown beyond the simple boundaries of birds, beasts and
flowers.
Back in 1915 Lawrence had written of a psychic state
heif.elt: "I’ve got again into one of those horrible sleeps
from which I can't wake- . I can't brush it aside to wake
13
up." This came during the conflicting feelings and the
anguish the early days of the war brought. In New Mexico
at Taos a dream-like:, esomnambulistic state is apparently
12
. Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers, pp. 197-198.
^ The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 233*
110
induced in many people by altitude and scene. For Lawrence,
there were conflicting feelings, too.
The first stanza sets up an image of sleep:
Mountains blanket-wrapped
Round a white hearth of desert—
To this static image is added one of activity which by
contrast develops the idea of frustration. "While the sun
goes round. . . the desert" the mountains "never get up
and walk about" because "they can't wake." The sleep is
linked to the lapsing of a faith. "They camped and went
to sleep / In the last twilight / Of Indian gods."
Idea futility of motion is extended. The Indians dance.
"No good. " The white man "make gold-mines and the mountains
unmake them / In their sleep." In the people, there is a
kind of sleep in activity.
"The Indians laugh in their sleep from fear" as a
sleeper whose "sleep is over" but who cannot wake, screams
silently "because his body can't wake up," and "laughs from
fear." Thus the waking sleep of the people is compared with
a semi-conscious state. This comparison is developed meta
phorically. The effect is that of "a dark membrane over
the will," in a linking with the early mountain image, "like
a black blanket."
We walk in our sleep, in this land,
Somnambulist wide-eyed afraid.
"The Penitentes lash themselves" in an effort to awaken,
"to tear" the membrane, The Indians thought the white men
Ill
would wake them, hut Instead they too engage In aimless
activity.
Evidently the central feeling is that of spiritual
and emotional emptiness while physical activity goes on.
Lawrence had expressed himself explicitly: ". . . There
is no inside life throb here— none— all empty— people in
side dead, outside bustling (sometimes). Anyhow, dead and
14
always on the move." In the poem he himself is not ex
cluded, and it is obvious that he feels the somnambulism
keenly. We have seen him elsewhere defiant but feeling
uprooted and denied (as in "The Red Wolf"), Like some of
the people in the poem, he had ridden horseback in the
mountains and desert "away from men." It had been "a great
15
temptation, because one rather hates mankind nowadays."
The somnambulism was a challenge to Lawrence, eventually
producing a detailed answer in. The Plumed Serpent. where
the summons is to awake,
* • ■ • t » • • ■ - • • , ■ . a ~ ■
The second poem in the Ghosts section, "Autumn in
16
Taos," moves within the narrative of a horseback ride
down from the mountains to the desert within an autumn
setting. The theme is fear and relief from fear.
The autumn aspens on the "rounded sides" of the
Ibid., p. 566.
^ Ibid., p. 562.
16
Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers, pp. 199-200.
112
mountains are "like yellow hair of a tigress brindled with
pins." Below, the desert, "my hearth-rug," is a wolf's
pelt. These images are the key ones of the poem, to which
other wild-beast images are added.
The rhetorical basis of the poem is the narrative of
a ride down the canyon, under the pines, through the foot
hills to the desert in terms of fear and a sense of relief.
Among the aspens the poet rides between the "great and
glistening-feathered legs of the hawk of Horus" (hawk
headed Egyptian god of day). Then he goes slowly under
the pines "as under the hairy belly of a great black bear."
He is "pleased" to be out in the foothills "past the
otter's whiskers" and onto the "wolf-pelt" of the desert.
There he can safely look back at the "jaguar-splashed,
puma-yellow, leopard-livid slopes of America
The last two stanzas are reassurance addressed by
the rider to his pony.
Make big eyes, little pony
At all these skins of wild beasts;
They won't hurt you.
Fangs and claws and talons and bea£s and hawk-eyes
Are nerveless just now.
So be easy.
The pony itself affords a contrast to the dominant imagery
in that it is a domesticated, defenseless animal, The
rider, in reassuring it, is in a sense transferring his
own feelings, and thus finding relief for them.
113
Why was the poem placed in the section titled Ghosts?
Certainly it evokes the ghost-like spirit of a savagery quies
cent "just-now." In that phrase lies a sense of suspension,
not abrogation. As we have seen, Lawrence felt a latent de
structiveness in America, stated in Studies in Classic Ameri
can Literature in terms of a destruction of the "white
t
psyche," in a letter in terms of will "turned against all
spontaneous life."-*-7 He was fully aware of the Aztec sacri
ficial horror, and New Mexico annals contained their own'
tales of violence. The poem is much more than an expres
sion of the sensuous vividness of the Taos autumn, though
that is one of its aspects. It expresses, in a new con
text, the fear that had lurked in Lawrence since the war.
Now, in this un-English landscape and tradition, truly
savage by comparison, it is little wonder that he trembled
at times.
The last poem in the Ghosts section is "Spirits
Summoned West."I® Its "occasion" was arrival of news of
the death of an understanding woman he had loved from the
days of his youth in Eastwood, Sallie Hoplcin, the mother
of Enid Hilton. The quality of the relationship is indicated
by his feeling after the elopement with Frieda in 1912,
that she was one of the few who would take them into her
1-7 Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. ..."
p. 171.
1 O
Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, pp. 201-20!}..
114
19
"heart, together." In the years that followed, Lawrence
wrote often to her and her husband, Willie Hopkin.
The poem is tender and sorrowful, richly nostalgic
for the dead past In England, unlike the other early Taos
poems with their confrontation of the new, the fierceness of
opposing spirits, and the ghostliness dfilack of an inner
life. The key image is contained in the first three stanzas:
England seems full of graves to me,
Pull of graves.
Women I loved, and cherished, like my mother;
Yet I had to tell them to die.
England seems covered with graves to me,
Women's graves.
They also Introduce the savage paradox about which the poem
revolves, the need to tell the beloved to die.
These women were gentle, loving and loved, "with the
beautiful eyes of the old days," believing in love and feel
ing the "sorrow of such belief," knowing the "full doom of
loving and not being able to take back.“ On the graves there
are "pansies and such-like" (a colloquial touch), and there
Is silence "where before was a moving of soft-skirted women."
Then Lawrence turns to his circumstances, one might
say to the point of separation and loneliness from which
the sorrow and nostalgia flow.
And I, I sit on this high American desert
With dark-wrapped Rocky Mountains motionless squatting
around in a ring,
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 5 0.
115
Remembering I told them to die, to sink into the grave
in England,
The gentle-kneed women.
The image of the mountains, "dark-wrapped and squatting
around in a ring," not only contrasts with the warmth of the
conception of the living women, but suggests somberness, and
watching, thus being keyed to the grave and death image, and
perhaps a kind of encirclement, even accusation.
A lyric summons begins with the refrain, "Come away,”
"Come back." The women are free now of "divided yearning,"
"husband to cherish like a child and wrestle with for the
prize of perfect love," the launching of children in "a
world you mistrust." They are "disemburdened of Man and a
man," "free of the toils of a would-be-perfect love."
In a new image of unrealized love, they are overlooked
virgins. In his mother, he alone "saw the virgin . . . that
had no home." The paradox of the unperceived existence of
virginity in wife and mother receives added irony in the one-
line stanza: "You overlooked her too." His reason for
telling her to die was that she might "be home at last. . .
inside my innermost heart / Where the virgin in woman comes
home to a man."
At the last the contrapuntal effect of the lyric
summons and the unitalicized lines, which might be called a
sort of commentary, becomes stronger as the parts are alter
nated more frequently. Interwoven, too, are bits of phras
ing from the early part of the poem. The last stanza links
virginity with the possibility of reconciliation:
116
For virgins are not exclusive of virgins
As wives are of wives;
And motherhood is Jealous,
But in virginity Jealousy does not enter.
The poem reaches far bach into Lawrence's past, in
deed to the childhood and young manhood out of which Sons
and Lovers was fashioned. There, both in reality and in
fiction, he had seen his mother struggle painfully and un
successfully for an ideal of love and motherhood. In what
sense had he told her and the other gentle women of the
past to die? Evidently in his attack on idealism, and
especially the selfconscious attempt at perfect love. The
story of this conflict alone could be traced all through
Lawrence, for example in his emphasis on the inviolability
of the individual soul, and a relativity of relationship
in which the spontaneous urgings of the soul, even anger,
were better than the corrupting tensions of the ideal. But
the intensity of his feeling that they were disastrously
wrong, showed how much he had loved such women and how much
he had been hurt by their failure. Nov/ at Taos, deliberately
severed from England and perhaps harassed by the antagonism
between his wife and Mrs. Luhan, both far different from
these “ghosts1 1 of the past, the depth of his feeling re
vived in a poem which is both requiem and summons.
Of the four poems signed as written at Del Monte
Ranch on Mt. Lobo, three concern scenes and happenings at
the ranch; the fourth is a satirical diatribe. "The Blue
117
20
Jay" catches a moment outside the cahin as Lawrence and
his dog, Bibbles, approach.
The bird, metallic and turning his back, is hard and
superior. An image of height and subtle sibilance linked
with a Biblical, image, makes possible the contrast, almost
as if set in relief, of the bird's "strident laugh" from
the tree, to which it has flown. Into the scene have come
the other participants in the experience, the poet and the
dog, which is incongruous in size and posture, and looks
up to the tree with "misgiving." The poet speaks mockingly
to the dog, intensifying its Incongruity of posture, ap
pearance and attitude, to both bird and tree, and asking
why it looks at him, first as if in blame, then perhaps
for interpretation and defense. Then the poet addresses
the bird in humorous defiance.
The poem moves with directness and economy from
setting to narrative to colloquy. In its clarity and
singleness of effect, it is one of the most successful;
and of those we have examined, it justifies most H. ’ - 7.
Auden's observation that the poems in Birds. Beasts and
Flowers escape "the anger and frustration which too often
intrudeein his descriptions of human beings. . . j agape
takes their place, and the joy of vision is equal to the
21
joy in writing." Despite the apprehending of jeering
20 Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers. pp. 150-151.
21
"Some Notes on D. H. Lawrence,” The Nation. 16L
(April, 19^7), P* ^82.
118
and bullying in the jay there is a tone of playfulness, a
complete rendering of the jay in terns of the setting, the
dog, and the human beings. Knud Merrild notes that when one
of them repeated the jay's line, "I ignore those folk who
look out," "Lawrence would answer, the outside world has
22
nothing to offer, one must look in, inside oneself!"
23
The poem entitled "Bibbles," devoted entirely to
the little dog appearing in "The Blue Jay," is a good il
lustration of the attachments Lawrence formed for animals
and hoir his thought and feeling about them could find its
way into his art. The poem contains almost the entire his
tory of the emotional relationship with the dog. A good
explication is to be found in Knud Merrild1s A Poet and Two
Painters, in which he tells the story of Lawrence's fond
ness for the dog, his habit of talking to her, her habit
of taking up with anyone, her angering of Lawrence by coming
to live with them for a while and then, in heat, running off
with the ranch dogs, and Lawrence's intense rage and punish
ment of her which almost led to a physical encounter be-
tween him and the Danes. In the poem the dog'e greedi
ness for love and her lack of discrimination are linked
22
Merrild, A Poet and-Two Painters. p. 109.
Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, pp. 179-196.
Zk
Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters. pp. 160-177*
119
with Lawrence’s mistrust of the democratic love-for-humanity
ideal. The poem is a monologue in which Lawrence re-creates
the experience and reflects on it while addressing the dog,
which is begging for reconciliation and protection. The
early stanzas set up the image of the dog's unreliability
in terms of description, illustrative incident, and "demo
cratic live-by-love humanity."
You love 'em all.
Believe in the One Identity, don't you.
You little Walt-Whitm&nesque bitch.
The loveable, funny, absurd ways and appearance of the dog
are presented; but the poem soon returns to her unfaithful
ness, and the theme becomes the conflict between "Fidelity 1
Loyalty i Attachment 1" and "LOVE." The last stanzas deal
with the immediate situation:' the dog, in heat, seeking
refuge from the "great ranch-dogs," asking for reconcilia
tion and protection. The last stanza reads:
All right, my little bitch.
You learn loyalty rather than loving,
And I’ll protect you.
In form, the poem is a good example of Lawrence's colloquial
technique under less control than elsewhere, though it
might be agreed that the subject called for such a handling.
25
The "occasion" of "Mountain Lion" xiras a walk by
Lawrence, Merrild and Gotzsche on which the encounter in
the poem took place.The first stanza swiftly gives the
25
Lawrence, Birds. Beasts and Flowers, pp. 187-189.
26
Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 106.
120
setting in the canyon. The next three sketch the situa
tion in staccato: the sudden encounter with men, “the only
animal in the world to fear," the hesitation, the stran
gers' possession of a gun, the advance to a meeting. Ques
tioned about their burden, a trapped mountain lion, one of
the strangers “smiles foolishly, as if he were caught doing
wrong" and is "quite gentle and dark-faced'.'" The eleventh
stanza makes clear the .central feeling of the poem, the
sense of loss of vitality and beauty.
Lift up her face,
Her round, bright face, bright as frost.
Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;
And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp,
fine dark rays,
hark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face.
Beautiful dead eyes.
The strangers go on. The poet finds the lion's lair, its
empty cavity a link with the feeling of loss, and stands
where she once moved and watched. Instead of her, he looks
out at the “dim of the desert, like a dream, never real,"
and at the rest of the scene. Here the poem could end
with its meaning implicit. But, as he does too often,
Lawrence comments explicitly at the end:
And I think in this empty world there was room for me
and a mountain lion.
And I think ine the world beyond, how easily we might
spare a million or two of humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost
face of that slim yellow mountain lion.
In its control and tension, this iscone of the more effective
121
of the New Mexico poems.
"The American Eagle,"27 the last poem in the hook,
placed outside the section headings, is entirely satirical.
Unlike the other New Mexico poems, it seems not to have
its origin in a single experience leading to utterance. The
existence of a manuscript version which immediately follows
the text of "Eagle in New Mexico" suggests that the idea
may have originated in the latter poem, with its awareness
and defiance of an eagle actually encountered. If so, al
though Lawrence signed the published version "Lobo," he may
have begun it earlier in Taos.
The basic incongruity of the satire is the eagle as
a symbol of America and the dove as a symbol of democratic
ideals of peace and benevolence. The dove, having hatched
an eagle, scorns all other birds save her offspring, who
uncomfortably tries to look like a pelican giving loose
feathers to "the new naked little republics." His mother
tries to teach him "to coo," but he always ends "with a
yawp" (one thinks of Whitman’s "barbaric yawp"). The bird
symbolism is sustained throughout. The eagle must make up
its mind whether it is a dove, a pelican, "a sort of prosper-
ity-gander / Fathering endless ten-dollar golden eggs," or
an eagle.
The new Proud Republic
Based on the mystery of pride.
^ Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, pp. 205-207-
122
Overweening men, full of power of life, commanding
a teeming obedience.
One curious item, entitled "0 J Americans 1". and pub-
T Hshedn in the linear form of a poem but in style and gram
matical form sounding like an essay, may serve to conclude
this study of the first New Mexico visit. It was written
on Easter Sunday, as indicated in the text; evidently word
had come to Lawrence at the ranch, probably through Mrs.
Luhan, of a meeting on Good Friday between the Indians and
government officials in which the Indians were told, as
Lawrence reported it, to give up their customs, to keep
the children in school and away from the ceremonials, not
to trust the “artists and long-haired people who pretend
to espouse their cause,1 1 to lease their land to the govern
ment and receive machinery in return, etc., etc. Lawrence's
“poem1 1 is a plea for the Indian and his way of life.
. . . when the outside world calls upon America to act in
certain ways, perform certain sacrifices,
Why should Americans immediately acquiesce?
America.will have to find her own way into the future,
the old lights won't show the way.
But if, taken at its very best, the title American is a
patent of nobility,
As it must be, taken at its very best,
Then noblesse oblige.
It is a point of honour.
And at the moment, there is an obligation.
It is the obligation of the citizens of this country towards the
aborigines of their country.2°
New Mexico Quarterly Review. VIII (May, 1938),
pp. 75-81.
123
The piece was sent to Lawrence*s agent, but evidently was
29
not published at the time. It is significant, however,
that Lawrence was sufficiently moved to write a protest and
an appeal, for one sees that along with the excoriation
went an individual generosity and affection.
To sum up: Lawrence approached America for the first
time with a well formulated philosophy and theory of civiliza
tion. It was a foregone conclusion that he would seek in
contemporary America symptoms of the general decadence he
found in his era, and that he should be reminded of the
failure of the old life from which he fled. San Francisco
was “noisy and full of the sound of iron.1 1 The old problem
of money (the artist unappreciated by his times) harassed
him at the very outset. The prosecution of Women in Love
reaffirmed his sense of persecution, and reminded him of
Amy Lowell's well meant advice and of her opposition to the
previous attempt at America. Life with Mrs. Sterne meant
motoring about the countryside, contact with an arty,
sophisticated set, and pressure to be evangelical regard
ing the Indian. It ended in abandonment of a first attempt
at an American novel, and in a domestic quarrel, enmity,
and further flight. Flight and forgetfulness in the "for
ever unpossessed country" were tempting since man was so
29
Lawrence Clark Powell, The Manuscripts of D. £L.
Lawrence (Los Angeles, 1937), P* 3$.
124
unsatisfactory. The “free" modern woman, wilful and resis
tant, was later to he broken in Lawrence's stories on the
sacrificial altar of the Indians (as Lawrence integrated
the Indian religion with the symbolism of his philosophy).
In general, the people exhibited a "gripped, iron, benevo
lent will."
The satire of modern America ran parallel, in much
of the first American work, with Lawrence's search for a
pre-Ghristian, prehistoric tradition with which to link
his solution of modern problems. Even the prophet could
not write a totally new tradition; he must have clues and
a background. He found modern New Mexico, with its mix
ture of "westernity and motor-cars and art and sage and
savage" farcical. But the sound of the Indian dance in
duced in him nostalgia for a time "when man was dusky and .
not individualised." The hope for a link with the past was
thus fulfilled. But "there is no going back." The stream
of "conscious human blood" flows onward. "My way is my
own," wrote Lawrence, thus indicating his future eclectic
use of Indian ritual and symbol to integrate past and
«
future. His forecast for modern America is that 1 1 some
terrible convulsion will take place." His plan is to
feel the way into the new era "by the dark thread of the
old vision."
Subjectively, confronting his two worlds, Lawrence
125
felt the 8sick” sense' of an unalterable gulf. He is the
stranger who cannot return, a transitional figure who must
struggle to the future through a terrible crisis. The
mockery he feels in the Indians is apart of the general
feeling of threat and fear that permeates much of the Ameri
can work. Part of the reason for this probably lies in the
actual violence occurring about him, both in the United
States and in Mexico with-her banditry and revolutions. Mew
Mexico was still relatively unsettled and wild. He already
possessed knowledge of the bloody Aztec sacrifices. But
it seems inescapable that more important than all these
reasons for feeling insecure is Lawrence's complete ideo
logical isolation from the present. He is not simply a
man without a country. He is a man cut off from all ac
cepted tradition. Only Mature and the remote, obscure past
can furnish him images and symbols with which to fashion
the future. In this, one should remark, he was only in a
more exaggerated and difficult position than many other
modern writers; even a T. S. Eliot, retaining Christianity,
turned to ritual and myth.
The only obvious American Influence on technique lies
in the staccato colloquialism of Studies in Classic American
Literature. a style which Lawrence never used again.' As
we have seen, an abandonment of traditional form in poetry
accompanied his early revolt. The American poems exhibit
126
• » *
the same free form as the earlier poems in Birds. Beasts and
Flowers. Lawrence's prose style seems to gain in colloquial
ease until it seems effortless, and the reader needs to he
reminded that Lawrence habitually worked through three full
drafts of everything. The prophet never completely subdues
the artist.
Indeed, Lawrence was working toward an amalgam of
philosophy and art. He was through with the "self-analyti-
cal stunts" ; • of such writers as Joyce and Proust. Fiction
must "tackle new propositions without using abstractions,"
presenting "really new feelings" instead of "snivelling
about what is and has been." For Lawrence, indeed, it must
fill the void left by loss of tradition. His supreme attempt
at the new tradition was to be The Plumed Serpent.
As far as major work was concerned, the first New
Mexico visit was a fallow season in which Lawrence stored
up scene and image, person and conflict, that would.emerge
later in the texture of stories. The thread from past to
future existed in Taos, but the quarrel with Mrs. Luhan
made staying there unpleasant, and his imagination had been
drawn toward Mexico for some years. Archaeologlcally it
surpassed New Mexico, and it must have seemed to contain less
of the anathema that was Europe and the modern. The sacri
ficial tradition of the Mexican Indian probably contributed
to Lawrence's "fear complex"; at the same time he had already
used the symbolism of death and resurrection for loss of
127
traditional faith and the emergence of new vitality and
hope. In much of the ensuing American work, just such, a
death is enacted in terns of Indian rites (not wholly Mexi
can). But the interest in Mexico was not merely artistic.
With Lawrence the life and the work are not easily separated.
Two kindred spirits and potential disciples had appeared in
the Danish artists, Merrild and G-otzsche. Lawrence hoped
to found in Mexico, with them as nucleus, his long-dreamed
of colony.
PART III
FIRST VISITS TO MEXICO: THE PULL OF EUROPE AND
THE PAST: A RETURN
CHAPTER I
THE LIFE
The Lawrences arrived in Mexico City on March 23,
1923. After trying a "big American hotel,1 1 which they did
1
not like, they found the rooms in a "little Italian hotel,"
which were to be headquarters for some weeks. In the Museum
they saw the Aztec relics, in the streets the excitement and
2
crowds of political revolution. They visited the Pyramid
of the Sun at Teotihhacah with Bynner and Johnson, as photo-
graphs sent to friends showed. After nearly three weeks,
Lawrence could write that they liked Mexico. The pyramid
was "very impressive,"
. . . far more than Pompeii or the Forumy The peons,
Indians, are attractive, but Mexico City rather
ramshackle and Americanized. But there ^s a good
natural feeling — a great carelessness.-'
This feeling contrasted, of course, with the tenseness and
-
Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 264-.
2
Frieda Lawrence, "Not I E But the Wind. . . , " pp.
154-155.
3
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 571.
129
absence of feeling Lawrence sensed in the United States,
and was always associated by him with southern, dark-skinned
people.
To Merrild in Taos he wrote that "a rich Englishwoman"
had offered them-a house in a suburb, but that he would rather
be farther away from the city. He would begin looking for a
house by making a tour to Puebla, Tehuacan, and Orizaba.^
He wrote Merrild from Orizaba, after an illness,
that he'd "had enough" and thought of going to Hew York at
the end of the month and thence to Europe.^ But immediately,
indeed on the same day if Merrild's dating is to be trusted,
back in Mexico City where he received a letter from the Danes,
he wrote that he was "still going to look for a place," in
deed was to see a Dane who had a farm the next day. He sent
them a note to give a man in Los Angeles if they needed
help, and added, "If ever you get really hard up, let me
know at once: both of you." The pillaging and destruction
by the revolutionaries made it difficult and dangerous to
L
find a house outside a town, but he would try Jalisco.
As Lawrence thus struggled with the difficulties of Mex
ico, news came from England that J. M. Murry was starting a new
magazine, The Adelphi. Murry proposed that Lawrence return
^ Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 265-
^ Ibid*, P- 27I 4-•
6 Ibid., p. 292.
130
to England and become editor.? 0n April 27 Lawrence, wrote
to him from Mexico City giving him permission to use material
from Fantasia of the Unconscious. He liked Mexico but,
though he was "still uncertain" of his movements, felt sure
he would be "in England before autumn." He might "stay the
summer here, and write a bit. I couldn't- do anything in U.
S'.A. " He added that he was to lunch with the Minister of
8
Education, and that he found the Mexican government "good
idealists and sensible," but felt himself "as usual outside
9
the scheme of such things."
He may have begun to plan the novel The Plumed Serpent.
Mrs. Lawrence wrote to the Danes in April: "We saw a ter
rible bull fight and ran away after ten minutes.The
opening chapter of The Plumed Serpent uses this scene.
Late in April Lawrence went to Guadalajara and Lake
11
Chapala. He liked the country, and within a few days the
Lawrences were installed at Zaragoza No. 4, Chapala (Jalisco).,
Lawrence wrote to the Danes describing the house near the
Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage, p. 180. -
8
This was Professor Jose Yasconcelos, who was one of
the intellectual leaders of the anti-positivist movement that
inspired the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Professor Vasconcelos
remembers Lawrence with warmth, but makes no detailed, speci
fic comment.
9
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 572.
10
Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 293.
11 Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . . ," p. 175.
131
lake and the village of Chapala, two hours from Guadalajara.
He thought they would like to paint there, hoped they would
come, and, evidently from a sense of obligation and responsi
bility, sent them fifty dollars for two book jackets Seltzer
1 ?
had said he had never received. 1 He advised them to get a
guarantee for the check from Will Levington Comfort, if they
needed the money quickly. Merrild tells how, when they called
on Comfort, he greeted them with "So you are the two homo
sexual lovers that stayed with him in the mountains all win
ter, do tell me about it." Merrild and Gotzsche made it quite
clear that there was no basis in their relationship with
Lawrence for such a prurient speculation. Put in his place,
Comfort guaranteed the check, and produced a letter from
Lawrence for them, which, they found at the bank, contained
another check.13. Both friendship and a leader’s responsi
bility for potential disciples seem involved in Lawrence's
concern.
The Lawrences remained at Chapala through June, 1923.
To Murry Lawrence wrote that he did not know why he found
it "so hard to come to England" but supposed it was the "in
digested novel" on which he was working. It should be
finished "in its first rough form" by the end of June, at
which time he planned to start for England via New York, to
1 2 Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 29I 4 -
13 Ibid.. p. 299-
132
arrive In London “"by early August.” The "first slight
scene" of the novel, "the beginning of a bull-fight in Mexico
City," was being typed, and he would send it "in two days'
time." It was "complete in itself," and Murry might use it.
At the end of the letter he returned to the problem of Eng
land. His reason for staying in Chapala was not that he
was "so very keen on leading a remote country life," and he
loathed "the ‘playboy1 attitude to liife. " But he thought of
England with "profound mistrust." He had been offered a
partnership in a "banana hacienda" but supposed he had "bet-
„1^
ter see England again first."
By May 31 he had finished ten chapters of the novel.
A comment on Mexico in a letter to Mrs. Lawrence's mother in
Germany showed the hope and vision that were taking shape.
The people are
. . . half civilised, half wild. If they only had a
new faith they might be a new, young, beautiful people.
But as Christians they don't get any further, are
melancholy inside, live without hope, are suddenly
wicked, and don't like tov/work. But they are also
good, can be gentle and honest, are very quiet,
and are not at all greedy for money, and to me that
is marvellous, they care so little for possessions,
here 4i America where the whites care for nothing
celse. ~
Life at Chapala was the source of some of the ten
sions and some of the people that appeared in the novel.
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 57^-575•
Frieda Lawrence, "Not I, But the Wind. . , " pp. 176-
177.
133
The threat of violence was omnipresent. A man armed with
a pistol slept on the Lawrences* verandah, and it was not
safe to walk outside.the village for fear of bandits.
Twenty soldiers were stationed in the village. At one end
of the house lived examples of the undeveloped people in
the servants, who were there "not because we want them,
but because they seem to have their holes there, like rab
bits— Isabel, Carmen, Maria, Daniele, Pedra and Francisco.
> Witter Bynner, staying at a nearby hotel with
Willard Johnson, afforded Lawrence an ideological antago
nist as he wrote. Johnson was; confided in.by both, and
saw, as he typed their manuscripts, >the Imaginative use
each made of their'disagreement. Bynner saw Lawrence as
a man "without a spui," in a "spirit of evil" choosing
the "dark side of the world," and put this conception into
his poetry. To Lawrence, Bynner was the democratic-idealist
gone soft and corrupt, seeking to compensate with sensa-
1?
tion the loss of an integrated life. Bynner and Johnson
he portrayed as "Owen" and "Villiers" In The Plumed Serpent.
If that novel contains much dialectic, the situation at
Sayula was calculated to call it forth.
Another American who encountered Lawrence at Chapala,
—
Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 301.
Bud Vill^rs (Willard Johnson), "D. H. Lawrence
in Mexico," The Southwest Review, 15 (Summer, 1930) ^25-
433 passim.
I3lf
Frederic W. Leighton, found Lawrence expressing a "doc-
trine of cosmic superiority” involving a "select fraternity
of ruling spirits. . . destined to rule the world.” This
accounted for Lawrence's being both radical and conserva
tive. Having fought his own way "against the restrictions
. . . imposed by vested interests (economic, moral, social
and literary)," Lawrence "asserted the rights of the esoteric
ones who command by cosmic patent." Leighton found this
aspect of Lawrence both fascinating and repelling.
About the middle of June, both the Lawrences wrote
/
to Merrild and Gotzsche. Frieda said that Lawrence did
"not want to go to Europe" but was "not sure of what he
wants." She felt that they could all "have a good time”
together at Chapala. Lawrence, finishing the letter, said
that they were going to look at a farm they might rent.
If they took it, he wanted the Danes to help manage it.
Business might take him to Hew York for a time, but he
planned a return in September. "It’s an uncertain life—
and things never behave as they should."^-9 At the end of
the month he wrote that they had looked at places, but that
expectations of more revolution made living on them risky,
and one would build something up "only to have it destroyed."
^ Frederic W. Leighton, "The Bite of Mr. Lawrence,"
Laughing Horse, D. H. Lawrence Humber (April, 1926), pp.
l6-l8 passim.
^■9 Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 3 0 i | . .
135
He was giving up the Mexican plan “for the present at least,"
and they were leaving soon for Mexico City, expecting to be
in Hew York by July 15. He planned now to go to England.
"It is no good, I know I am European, so I may as well go
back and try it once more." However, he was not giving up
the idea of "a life in common once more.1 1 If he couldn't
"stand Europe," they would return to Mexico and brave the
dangers. "But if Europe is at all possible, much better
there. Because the Mexicans are rather American in that,
that they would rather pull life doxm than let it grow
20
up."
One of Lawrence's last letters from Chapala, on July
2, to Miss M. L. Skinner, an Australian, indicated the writ
ing task that was to occupy much of his time in the next
months. It concerned the manuscript of a novel by her,
The House of Ellis. which he expected to find in New York.
He would "read it carefully," consider what publisher it
should be submitted to, and, if she didn't mind, make "a
21
few suggestions." The 'Suggestions" grew Into a complete
rewriting by Lawrence, The Boy in the Bush.
By July 15 the Lawrences were in New Orleans.
Lawrence found that his "old feeling of detestation" returned
in the United States. He planned to stay in New York only
20 Ibid., p. 306.
21
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 576-577.
136
long enough to have the manuscript of the first draft of
The Plumed Serpent. typed and to correct the proofs of
Kangaroo. Birds. Beasts and Flowers, and his translation of
Verga's Maestro don G-esualdo. ~ Then, rather than go to
22
England, he “would like best" to return to Mexico. On
August ? in New York he had “almost decided not to go to
Europe.’ 1 He wrote to Merrild and G-^tzsche that he thought,
when Frieda had sailed alone in a week or so, he would join
them in Los Angeles and “have a talk, about the future." He
proposed various plans, wintering at Palm Springs or in the
hills, going to Mexico, going “packing among the mountains,“
or sailing in the South Pacific, the Danes working as sai
lors, himself “as cook." Frieda, he supposed, would want
to join him “at the end of October," and hy that time they
23
could have made definite plans.
The new plan represented a breach between the
Lawrences. She wanted to see her children and other rela-
o i l
tlves in Europe. Catherine Carswell says that "on the
quay" they had “perhaps the very worst quarrel" of their
25
lives. There was, of course, the pull of Murry and The
Adelphi. but to him Lawrence had written of his editorial
22
Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters. pp. 307-308.
23
Ibid., p. 310.
2 k
Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . ," p. 157*
25
Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage, p. 190*
137
policy,
No, I don't feel we are enemies: why that? I was
disappointed with the apologetic kind of appeal
in the Adelphi: but you most obviously aren't my
enemy in it. And anyhow you make a success of the
thing: so what does it matter what I say?
He asked Murry to look after Frieda in England. The de
veloping difference between Murry and Lawrence is discussed
from two extremes by Mrs. Carswell in The Savage Pilgrimage.
and by Murry in Son of Woman and Reminiscences of D. H.
Lawrence.
Seltzer had found the Lawrences a house in the
country in New Jersey while they awaited her sailing. To
Lawrence the scene was unreal; the people were “quenched.“
New Kork was "like a house of cards set up." He liked "it
best down at the Battery, where the rag^tag lie on the
27
grass." He met "practically nobody." He wrote to Amy
Lowell, now not far away, of his whereabouts, and later--
she was in the midst of the Keats study and in ill health—
received an invitation to visit her. But the visit was
not made despite continued correspondence and even long
distance phone calls. Mrs. Lawrence sailed on August 18.
On the same day Lawrence wrote to Miss Lowell that he was
sorry they were not seeing her; he knew of her bad health
and hadn't been sure that "she wanted to be troubled by
26
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 578-579.
27
Ibid.. pp. 591-592.
138
visitors.1 1 He felt that he should have gone to England,
but his “inside self wouldn't let" him. In New York he
felt that people had a "sort of pre-determination to jeer,"
and he was left "with one great desire, to get away from
oQ
people altogether,"
He began his journey toward California at once. He
stopped in Buffalo, where he stayed with Mrs. Freeman, the
companion of the Apache trip during the early days with Mrs,
Luhan in the fall of 1922. Evidently he was curious about
Mrs. Luhan*s early life there, going to see her mother and
her old friends. He told Mrs. Luhan later that "it ex
plained so much to him."2^ Indeed, Mrs. Luhan was to figure
in his later stories of New Mexico and Mexico.
His trip also involved a stop of a day in Chicago,
where, perhaps indicative of his desire for isolation, he
evidently did not communicate with Harriet Monroe. Several
months later he wrote to her of Chicago as "a queer big
city with a sort of palpitation. I couldn't quite under-
30
stand.Then, on August 30. , - he arrived in Los Angeles,
where he was met at the station by Merrild and Ootzsche.^l
For a time Lawrence stayed at the Hotel Miramar in
28
Damon, Amy Lowell. A Chronicle, p. 639*
29
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 117*
30
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 59^*
^ Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 312*
139
Santa Monica, since the Danes were working on some murals
in that city. ". ♦ . Without Frieda he was restless and
32
in a lonely mood.'* On September 9 they drove to Lompoc
33
to witness the eclipse of the sun next day. There, too,
at Point Honde, the party saw the wrecks of seven destroyers
which had run aground. Lawrence noted the one event as
“very impressive,“ the other "depressive."-^ When the job
in Santa Monica was finished, the Danes rented Lawrence a
room with light housekeeping on Grand Avenue in Los Angeles,
near their own lodgings. Although they were somewhat skepti
cal of his plan to go to sea, "Lawrence was actually chasing
ships and seeking hire in Los Angeles Harbour, San Pedro
35
and Wilmington," without success. There was some gaiety
and high spirits, a visit to a dance hall where Lawrence,
though he chided them at times, grinned when teased for
not dancing, a visit to Hollywood Bowl where Lawrence "made
jokes" and they'irritated their neighbors, a midnight tea
afterward during which noise and laughter brought reprimands
36
from a landlady.
From Santa Monica on September 2, Lawrence had
32 Ibid-, p. 313.
33
There is a reminiscence of this event, without
much bearing on this study, by Jeanne d'Orge.
ih.
' The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 584.
35
Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters. p. 319.
36
Ibid.. pp. 320-322.
140
written to Miss Skinner that he wished to recast her novel,
apparently brought with him from New York.-^ This time— -
consuming and difficult task, carried on in the midst of
travel through rather wild sections of Mexico, occupied
°8
much of his time until November 15, when it was finished.' '
He wrote “it all out again," following her "MS. almost
exactly, but giving a unity, a rhythm, and a little more
psychic development." He was not sure that she would ap
prove his attempt, taking her 1 1 inner cue, to make a rather
39
daring development, psychologically." As we shall see,
this “development" was, in a sense, a projection of Lawrence's
own feelings as he struggled to make good his plans for a
colony in Mexico and to resist the voices that called him
back to England.
On September 5, 1923, Lawrence and G-otzsche left Los
Angeles to journey down the west coast of Mexico, "to look
again for a place to live." California had seemed "abso
lutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least,
not full of false effort." A stay had rather amused him,
but America exhausted "the springs of one's soul" and lived
"to see all real spontaneity expire." But it did not "grind
37
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 583*
38
Ibid.. p. 591.
39
Ibid., p. 590*
141
40
on an old nerve as Europe" seemed to. Merrild declined
to accompany•them. He felt that without Mrs. Lawrence the
enterprise would he a failure; he preferred the South Seas;
41
and he felt too much under t>he influence of Lawrence.
42
After they had gone, however, he felt regret. Letters
from hoth Lawrence and Gotzsche kept him informed of their
progress and of their feelings.
October 5 from Navajo Lawrence wrote that the west
coast was "a little too wild. . . . One wants a bit of hope
fulness. These wild lost places seem so hopeless." He
43
felt as if he "should wander over the brink of existence."
Their destination was Guadalajara, and Lawrence was already
thinking of the best way for Frieda to get there from Eng-
44
land. The trip was very uncomfortable and hot, an alter-
45
nation of slow train, horseback, and car. Merrild felt
it probable that the hardships "overtaxed" Lawrence's
strength, and that he longed for Frieda.
40
Ibid., p. 585.
41
Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, pp. 322-323.
42
Ibid., pp. 331-332.
43 Ifrid.. p. 333.
44 ,
ILld.. p. 334.
45 Ibid.. p. 337.
^ Ibid.. p. 339.
142
In a letter to Merrild from Guadalajara October 22,
Gotzsche analyzed Lawrence's fluctuating, conflicting feel
ings. He found Lawrence, while scorning sentimentality,
full of emotion. He had not liked going to Japala Ode]
without Frieda, with whom he had seen it in the spring;
then when he was there he was deeply moved by a change in
the "spirit" of the place, unaware, Gotzsche thought, that
"his own mood or frame of mind" determined "his impressions
of the moment, or the landscape."
He had willed himself into belief that this was the
place he loved, and the place to live. He is much
more sentimental than he will admit. And then he is
offended and cross because Frieda is happy to be in
England. She writes it is the best country in the
world, and wants him to come, etc. Deepest Inside
himself he is proud of England and if it wasn't for
his author ideas, he would go back at once. But he
wants to start that "new life" away d*om money," jjU^st
and greediness, back to nature and seriousness.
He had to agree with Lawrence that the farms they had found
were unsuitable. He felt that Lawrence needed
. . . something else to think about, and something
else to do besides his writings. . . . As he lives
now, he only writes a little in the morning and
the rest of the day he just hangs around on a bench
or drifts over to the market place, hands in pockets,
perhaps buying some candy, fruit, or something.
There are signs enough of trouble in this, but three
days later, on October 25, Gotzsche wrote that he was "avoid
ing Lawrence as much as possible at present, because,
a 7
Ibid., p. 340.
48
Ibid., p. 341.
143
considering all things, he is really insane when he is as
49
now." He felt that Frieda had “influenced his friends
in England, because they all. write that he must come back
and that England is beginning to be the leading country
in culture again." Frieda was not writing to Lawrence,and
Gotzsche sometimes thought that Lawrence was afraid he
50
would be l£ft alone. Afterward Mrs. Lawrence felt that
Lawrence had been right. “I should have gone to meet him
in Mexico, he should not have come to Europe; these are
51
the mistakes we make, sometimes irreparable."
Gn the same day that Gotzsche wrote of Lawrence*s
troubled mind, Lawrence wrote to J. M Murry in England:
"Yes, I think I shall come back now. I think I shall be
back by the beginning of December. Work awhile with you
on the Adelphl. Then perhaps we'll set off to India.
Qulen Sabe?1 1 The letter was essentially one of capitula
tion to the pressures from England, but in it Lawrence held
to his theory. England might lead the world again, but
she must
. . . pick up a lost trail. And the end of the
lost trail Is here in Mexico. . ... One hand in
space is not enough. It needs the other hand
from the dpposite end of space, to clasp and form,
the bridge. The dark hand'and the white.*2
------------
IMd., P. 343.
50
Ibid.
51
Frieda Lawrence, "Not 1 But the Wind. . . ," p. 160.
^ The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 588.
144
Lawrence and Gotzsche remained in Guadalajara until
the middle of N0vember, when Lawrence wrote to Miss Skinner
that he had finished The Boy in the Bush and that Seltzer
wanted to publish it. On the seventeenth they were in
Mexico City, where they spent a few days. On November 22
they sailed from Vera Cruz on a freighter, Lawrence for
England, Gotzsche to continue on to Denmark. After the de
cision to go to England, Gotzsche. had found Lawrence him
self again, although he thought a poor excuse the explana
tion that the changeable air made him 1 1 ‘crazy1 once in a
53
while." Lawrence had offered to pay his fare to Europe,
and a visit home was a partial solution of Gotzsche1s pro
blem now that the Mexican plan had failed. At the last
minute in Guadalajara, Lawrence had wanted to stay, feeling
that a visit to England would be fatal to him, then had
54-
changed his mind the next morning. Merrild, commenting
on the irresolution and unpleasantness, felt that Lawrence
should not be judged "from his attacks of hysterical out
bursts or when he was off balance physically or psycholo
gically, but rather when he was composed and stable. . . ."
Then he would be found "the good shepherd and great giant
55
that he really was. "
53
Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 34-5.
54-
Ibid., p. 350.
55 Ibid., p. 34-9.
1
There followed now a European interlude in the
American experience. Lawrence's revulsion and mistrust
followed him throughout the journey to England. From
Havana on November 25 he wrote that he was "already sick
of ship." Gotzsche reported that Lawrence now hated the
Atlantic Ocean and preferred the Pacific, whereas before
57
he had always said that the Pacific had "no life to it."
58
The ship touched at Plymouth on December 11, where
Lawrence debarked and'went by train to London, Gotzsche
continuing on to Denmark.
Met at the London station by Murry, and an old
friend, S. S. Koteliansky, Lawrence was at once confronted
by Murry's plan to collaborate in the editorship of The
59
Adelphl. Murry had been estranged from Lawrence since
the 1916 episode in Cornwall— an estrangement, he attributed
,6o
to "Lawrence's quest of 'mindlessness.'" His desire now
for reconciliation had resulted from a series of events.
Lawrence had learned of Katherine-Mansfield's (Mrs. Murry's )
56
Ibid.. p. 351.
57
Ibid.. p. 357.
58
Ibid., p. 352. In a letter to Merrild dated Decem
ber 20, Lawrence said that he had left Gotzsche on the ship
at Plymouth nine days ago.
59
J. M. Murry, Son of Woman; The Story of D. H.
Lawrence (New York: 1931), pp. 306-309 passim.
60 Ibid.. p. 303.
146
illness in December, 1922, and had sent her Fantasia of the
Unconscious, wanting her to read it.^ Aftfer her death in
January, Murry read the hook, and its declaration of faith
was convincing to him in his "new half-convalescent, half
confident condition. " It confirmed his decision to found
The.Ad e . Ip lit, which began by publishing chapters from the
Fantasia. His avowed intention was to prepare a place for
62
Lawrence. In his letter to Murry of October 25 Lawrence
had not committed himself to more than working "awhile"
with him. Now in London Murry evidently was not prepared
for Lawrence's thoroughgoing, nihilistic mistrust of the
status quo. Murry reports that Lawrence suggested "that
The Adelphl should attack everything, everything; and ex
plode in one blaze of denunciation." When Murry "turned
the notion aside," Lawrence proposed that he "give it all
up and go back with him to New Mexico, and there begin the
nucleus of a new society.Murry discusses the contro
versy from his point of view in Son of Woman, in which his
theme is that in Lawrence "we are witnessing a lapse -from
humanity," and disintegration. In the Fantasia. Lawrence
. . . had seen and admitted that his was a peculiar
destiny, a destiny which coming generations must avoid.
— _ . — _ g _
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 569.
62
Murry, Son of Woman. pp. 305-306.
63
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 588,
64
Murry, Son of Woman. p. 3°9.
14?
To make disintegration a universal necessity was, in
reality, to deny that his disintegration was disinte
gration, by making himself a forerunner on a path
which mankind must follow. This Lawrence was not;
he was the very opposite of this. And he could not
admit it. Lawrence could not surrender himself. His
pride is become a madness. He cannot admit that he
is wrong, that he has failed, that he is beaten, even
though^his mind is distraught in a chaos of contradic
tions.55
Here Murry expresses the extreme traditionalist view of
Lawrence as totally :&isintegrated. A defence of Lawrence
in the controversy may be found in Catherine Carswell1s
The Savage Pilgrimage. She finds that Murry was willing
to compromise with readers indignant about the ideas in
Lawrence1 ^ essays, and that the love of success usurped in
66
Murry the desire for courage and significance. Her
loyalty to Lawrence and her ultimate confidence in his
ideas for the future run throughout her book.
Who shall say that Lawrence was wrong? To him it
was as clear as in old time it was to Noah or to
Lot. It may yet be found that before a new spirit
can grow up in the world some men and women will
have to get together agd leave their homes in a
special kind of faith.
One thing is certain. While Lawrence did contribute
essays to The Adelphl, he did not long contemplate remain
ing in England.. On December 17, six days after hi a arrival,,
he was writing to Mrs. Luhan in Taos that he thought he
65
Ibid., pp. 312-313.
^ Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage, pp. 186-189 passim.
67 Ibid., p. 199.
1^8
would be back In America by March.
This is a very crucial time for all of us. I feel
if we can pull through to 1925, we have saved the
situation. Meantime it's hell. England is a tomb
to me, no more.— Yet perhaps it's as well I went
away from that revolution in Mexico.
But I don't belong over here any more. It's like
being among the dead of one's previous existence.®^
A reconciliation with Mrs. Luhan had taken place in October,
1923, when, alone with Gotzsche in Mexico, he had received
69
from her what must have been an apologetic letter.
Now he asked if they should come to see her in March.
Later, if there were no revolutionary trouble, he wanted to
70
go to Oaxaca in Mexico. On December 20 he wrote to Merrild
71
that "our old plans of having a ranch may still mature.”
At this time Lawrence felt that Murry wanted to come with
him, and "also, probably, Dorothy Brett, who paints, is
deaf, forty, very nice, and daughter of Viscount Esher.
The plan and his relationship with his English
friends reached a dramatic climax during this London visit
73
at a dinner given by the Lawrences at the Oafe Royal.
The guests were Murry, Kotleiansky, Mark Gertler, Mr. and
Mrs. Carswell, Mary Cannan, and Dorothy Brett. It was
68
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 128.
69
Ibid.. pp. 118-122.
70
Ibid. ' . p. 128.
It
Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 352.
72
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 130.
^ Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage, p. 205 ff.
149
evidently begun as a friendly gesture at gaiety on Lawrence's
part. After wine, a port that Lawrence protested did not
agree with him, and a speech of praise by Koteliansky,
Lawrence asked them to come with him to America. There were
various answers, and Mrs. Carswell records in particular
Murry's emotional , , yes, , and speech that he had "betrayed"
74
Lawrence in the past.but would not again. Murry defends
himself and reports the speech as "I love you Lorenzo, but
I won't promise not to betray you," in Reminiscences of
75
D. H. Lawrence.
The London visit lasted until January 23, when the
76
Lawrences crossed the Channel to Paris, where they planned
to stay a fortnight. There, refreshed by a few days' rest
he began "to amuse himself by writing stories.Mrs.
Carswell thinks that one story "must have been Jimmy and
77
the Desperate Woman.'" Prom Paris the Lawrences went to
Baden-Baden to visit Mrs. Lawrence's mother, arriving
78
February 7 for a two weeks' stay. A letter to Murry put
the decision to go to New Mexico up to him. Lawrence was
annoyed by his Adelphl articles because of a preoccupation
?4
Ibid.. p. 212.
75
J. M. Murry, Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence
(New York, 1933), pp. 186-187.
76
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 136.
77
Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage. p.. 215.
78
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 601.
150
with self. "Why make it so Important? Can't you focus
yourself outside yourself?" If he wanted "to go to America
as an unemotional man making an adventure, Men allons
Another important matter was pulling Lawrence to
ward America. He had heard from Selt&er, his publisher,
only once since leaving Mexico, did not know whether he
was depositing royalties in the bank, and was worried about
payment of his American income tax. The Lawrences left
Baden-Baden about the twentieth, stayed a few days in Paris,
whence Lawrence wrote of visits to Versailles ("stupid,
80
so very big and flat") and Chartres, and arrived back in
" ' ■ 81
London about February 26. The stay in Paris was pro
longed in the hope that he would receive a reply to his
w 82
cables to Seltzer. He wrote ahead to Mrs. Carswell ask
ing her tottell no one that he was returning to London,
After six days at a London hotel, the Lawrences and Dorothy
Brett sailed on March 5 for New York, arriving March 11.
On board the Aquitanla Lawrence wrote to Murry that it
go
was "good to get away from the doom of Europe." Next
day in New York he added a postscript describing their
79
Ibid., pp. 602-603.
80
Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . . ," p. 183.
81
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 603-60if.
82
Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage. p. 216.
83
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 605.
151
arrival and advising Murry to come on a smaller ship by
way of Galveston, Seltzer had met them.
He looks very diminished, and him so small already.
Apparently his business has gone very badly this
winter, and he has sleepless nights. So, it seems,
might I. My money is at present in thin air, but
I believe It will materialize bit by bit.
The money difficulty of earlier days had returned to haunt
him, but there was no recrimination in his attitude.
The return to Europe had been a failure at least as
far as Lawrence1s assumption of any place in its institu
tions, even one as small as The Adelphl, was concerned.
"The nightmare" of World War I described in Kangaroo had
certainly never passed entirely from his consciousness.
He had prevailed in a complicated, intense contest of wills
and aims, although Murry and others were never to join him.
Now he was ready to make another attempt to break with the
past and to realize in his daily life, and in his art,
chiefly through revision of The Plumed Serpent, the inte
gration of the "mental" consciousness and the "blood" con
sciousness needed to save both himself and the world.
_ _
Ibid., p . 606.
CHAPTER II
THE WORK
Not long after Ms first arrival in Mexico, in March,
1923, Lawrence wrote a brief essay, "Au Revoir, U. S. A.,"
which contrasted his feelings for the two countries and in
dicated the intense interest he took in Mexico and its
1
ancient religious symbolism. He found that the United
States "put a strain on the nerves," Mexico a "strain on
the temper." He preferred the latter. Most of the essay,
after this introductory contrast, which is returned to at
the end, reveals his interest in the spirit of place he
found in Mexico. Spanish culture had not penetrated deeply;
churches and palaces seemed "just on the point of falling
down." The peon.was still Indian "behind the Cross" and
had a more "lively light in his eyes" than the northern
Indian.1,2 He noted the paradox in the modern young Mexican
artist who was personally gentle but produced caricatures
hideous and grim like the ancient Aztec carvings. Despite
what prettiness anthropologists might make of Mexican myths,
"the gods bit.
Published in The Laughing Horse. No. 8, 1923,
a little magazine edited in the United States by Willard
Johnson, who was with the Lawrences during the early weeks
of the first Mexican visit.
2
Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence.
p. 105. --------------------------------------- --------
^ All of these impressions appeared later in The
Plumed Serpent.
153
There is none of the phallic proocupation of the
Mediterranean. Here they hadn't got even so far as
hot-blooded sex. Pangs, and cold serpent folds, .
and bird-snakes with fierce cold blood and claws .H-
He was bewildered by the dead-earnestness, the utter absence
of the "amiably comic." In this lack of concealment of
"the fangs" of the gods he found the reason for his feeling
of. exasperation. Apparently he meant by this that he felt
the antagonism of a constant threat of the human by the non
human. In the United States, where white culture had domi
nated, the same spirit, concealed, produced only a feeling
of "unbearable tension."-*
It must be remembered that Lawrence had gone to
Mexico in the spring of 1923 with the idea of founding,
with himself, Frieda, Merrild and Gotzsche as a nucleus,
the colony of which he had dreamed since the War days in
England. As he searched for'a place to live, the ancient
Mexican symbolism presented itself as a means of expressing
imaginatively the new way of life and the conflicts involved
in its attainment. By the end of June, at Lake Chapala,
he had completed the first draft of The Plumed Serpent♦
His first American months, in Hew Mexico, had been relatively
unproductive. Under the stimulus of.Mexico, where the old
gods seemed near and the modern civilization Lawrence
^ Ibid., pp. 105-106.
5
Ibid-> P- 106•
154
detested seemed only a veneer, easily penetrated, he be- -
gan to make what is perhapshhis most Important attempt at
integration in the novel form. The book was not finished
until February, 1925, in Oxaca, after the return to England
and a second New Mexico- sojourn. Discussion of it is re
served for that period of the American experience.
Lawrence's chief literary activity after the parting
with Mrs. Lawrence in New York was revision of Miss Skinner's
Australian novel, The House of Ellis. He wrote “it all out
again" between early September in California and November 15,
6
1923, in Mexico, making “a rather daring development, psy
chologically . “ What was there in this laborious task to
interest him besides the chance to help a friend', and to
improve a promising bit of work? One must remember his
situation. He had decided not to return to the past in EngL
land, and had come West to make another attempt to work out
a destiny with the help of Merrild and Gotzsche. Separated
from Mrs. Lawrence, and exploring country new to him, he
was in something of the same position as the hero of the
novel, a young Englishman x^orking out his destiny in the
strange environment of Australia. Here was a chance to
deal imaginatively once more with his central problem, re
bellion against the conventions of civilization and the
need forformulate new ideas and attitudes. Under Lawrence's
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. pp. 583, 591.
155
hand, Mias Skinner's chief character, Jack Grant, became
a Lawrencean hero, defiant of conventional codes, confused
and lost for a time, hut emerging mature and sure of his
essential desires.
The dominant note of Lawrence's non-conformity is
struck early in the first chapter in the description of
Jack's Australian mother, whom the hoy loves while he is
indifferent to his conventional, English father.
She was really the dearest thing imaginable. But
the feeling that there was no fence between sin
and virtue. As if sin were, so to speak, the un
reclaimed bush, and goodness were only the claims
that the settlers had managed to fence in. And
there was so much more bush than settlement. And
the one was as good as the other, save that they
served different ends. And that you always had
the wild endless bush al-1 round your little claim,
and coming and going was always through the wild
and innocent, but non-moral bush. Which non-moral
bush had a devil in it. Oh, yes . ' But a wild and
comprehensible devil, like bush-rangers who did
brutal and lawless things. Whereas the tame devil
of the settlement, drunkenness and greediness and
foolish pride, he was more scaring.7
Among the Ellis family Jack meets the sisters, Mary and
Monica, who become the Lawreneean heroines of his conflict
with the conventional world. Monica has a “dare-devil"
quality but tends to dominate; Mary has potentialities but
Q
is submissive to conventions. Jack also finds the men
who play the most important roles, Lennie and Tom who become
Lawrence, Kangaroo. pp. 6-7
^ Ibid., p. 86.
156
his comrades, and from another branch of the family,Easu,
who becomes his enemy. Jack and Easu become rivals over
Mionica, and they come to represent two kinds of power. At
one,.; point as Monica looks at them, J.ack is
. . . soft and warm with a certain masterfulness that
was more animal than human, like a centaur, as if he
were one blood with the horse, and had the centaur's horse-
sense, its non-human power, and wisdom of hot blood-
knowledge. She watched the boy, and her brow darkened,
and her face was fretted as if she were denied something.
She wanted to look again-at Easu, with his fixed hard
will that excited her. But she couldn't. The queer
soft power of theqboy was too much for her, she could
not save herself.-*
In part Easu represents Lawrence’s conception of the danger
and brutality of conscious will: Jack contains the subtler,
spontaneous poorer of the blood-consciousness.
Midway in the novel, after Father Ellis's death, Tom
and Jack, Lennie. refusing to go, make a horse-back trip
across Australia that is somewhat reminiscent of Lawrence's
and Gotzsche’s journey into Mexico. As they travel, Jack
struggles with the thought of England. "In England there
was a strong pivot to all the living. But here the centre
pin was gone, and the lives seemed to spin in a weird con-
10
fusion." Yet what he "had rebelled against in England
was the tight grip, the.fixed hold over everything. He
liked this looseness and carelessness of Australia. Till
^ Ibid., p. 130.
10 Ibid., P. 237.
157
11
it seemed to him crazy. And then it scared him." The
idea of disintegration is then extended into an image of
death.
One God or the other must take them at the end.
-it Either the dim white god of the heavenly infinite.
Or else the great black Moloch of the living death.
Devoured and digested in the living death.I*
Jack thinks that he is going the latter way.
Since I am travelling the dark road, let meogo in
pride. Let me be a Lord of Death, since the reign
of the white Lords of Life, like my father, has be
come sterile and a futility. Let me be a Lord of
Death.13
He hopes for a "defiant, unsubmissive life" and a "violent
14
death," 'The enemies are endless.
Always a new one cropping up, along the strange
dusky road of the years, where you go with your head
up, and your eyes open, and your spine sharp and
electric, ready to fight your man and take your
woman, on and on down the years, into the last
black embrace of death. 3
Thus, in his hero, Lawrence once more worked with the con
flicts that assailed him, and arrived at the solution of
pride, courage, and unsubmissiveness except to death,
After his return from the trip, Jack finds that
Monica has had a child out of wedlock, ostensibly by an
p. 238.
p. 239.
p. 241.
pp. 240-241.
11
Ibid.,
12
Ibid.,
13 Ibid.
14
lb id.,
15 Ibid.,
158
ineffectual man who is willing to take care of her, hut
actually by the brutal Easu. He kills Easu and flees into
the bush. As he wanders there, lost and dying, he thinks
of himself as a Lord of Death. Non-conformity in life
means mastery in death.
I hope I die fighting, and go into the black halls of
death as a master: not as a scavenger servant, like
Easu, or a sort of butler, like my father. I don't
want to be a servant in the black house of death. I
want to be a master.1°
Rescued by Tom, Lennie, and Mary, he passes through a long
illness. When he becomes well, he has changed from a boy
to a man. It as Has if he had lost his softness in the
other-world of death, and brought back Instead some of the
relentless power that belongs there. And the inevitable
17 ■ ' • r
touch of mockery."
Acquitted of murder, since he had shot in self-de
fence, he claims Monica and marries her. In her acceptance
of him she must make the choice of the Lawrencean heroine.
He would never belong to her. This had made her rebel
so terribly against the thought of him. Because she
would have to belong to him. Now he had arrived again
before her like a doom, a doom she still fought against,
but could no longer withstand. . . . It took away from
her her own strange and fascinating female poorer, which
she couldn't bear to part with. But at the same time
she felt saved, because her own power frightened her,
having brought her to a brink of nothingness that was
like madness. The nothingness that fronted her with
16
Ibid., p. 318.
1?
Ibid., p.. 327.
159
Percy was worse than submitting to this man beside her.
After all, this man was magical.-
After much hardship, Jack, Tom, and Lennie find gold on
their mining claim, ’ ’Jack wanted to make a place on earth
for a few aristocrats-to-the-bone." But "first he must
19
conquer gold." At the same time Jack inherits some pro
perty, and reluctantly returns from the Isolation of the
mine to Perth and the Ellises to receive it. In the last
three chapters, he has one more failure and one more
triumph in his battle with conformity. It seems possible
that this ending is related to Lawrence’s situation as he
wrote, alone in Mexico while Mrs. Lawrence sought to bring
him to her in England. Encountering Mary, he feels the old
potentiality in her. In a conversation with her, a young
friend of hers, Hilda Blessington, and her uncle and aunt,
he says:
I am faithful to my own inside, when something stirs
in me. Gran Ellis said that was God in me. I know
there's a God outside of me. But he tells me to go
my own way, and never be frightened of people and the
world, only be frightened of Him. And if I felt I
really wanted two wives, for example, I would have
them and keep them both. 0
Later, in a scene with Mary, he proposes that she come with
him to be a second wife, and she refuses. Afterwards he
feels Justified.
18
Ibid.. p. 335.
1 9 Ibid.. p. JkZ.
20
Ibid.. p. 35A,
160
He wanted, to pitch his camp in the wilderness: with
the faithful Tom, and Lennie, and his own wives.
Wives, not wife. And the horses, and the come-and-go,
and the element of wildness. Not to he tamed. . . .
He wanted to go like Abraham under the wild sky, speak
ing to a fierce^wild Lord, and having angels stand
in his doorway.
- .' t
There is again, perhaps, a reminiscence of his situation
with Mrs, Lawrence, whose recurring desire to see her chil
dren in England Inevitably brought trouble between them, in
22
a passage on Monica's absorption in her children.
On the return journey from Perth, Jack, stopping at
an inn, is overtaken by Hilda Blessington. Symbolic of
their meeting is the attraction and mating between the mare
she rides and his red stallion. She has sought him out be
cause of the conversation about marriage*
She had really a great dread of everything, especially
of the social world in which she had been brought up.
But her dread had made her fearless. There was some
thing slightly uncanny about her, her quick, rabbit
like alertness and her quick, open defiance, like
some unyielding animal. ^
In her non-conformity she is the successful Lawrence heroine,
unlike Mary. She dislikes the usual sort of men and the
usual idea of marriage. "She kept an odd, bright, amusing
spark of revenge twinkling in her all the time. She felt
that with Jack she could kindle her spark of revenge into
2 k
a natural sun." He feels that she has gone further in
21 Ibid.. p. 371.
22 Ibid*, p. 366.
23 Ifcld.. p. 383.
2 k
Ibid., p. 387.
161
rebellion against the world than he himself. . . Her
fearlessness was of a queer, uncanny quality, hardly human.
She was a real border-line being." (The "border-line" idea
is used later in the short story "The Border Line.") They
agree that an invitation will be sent her and that she will
Join Monica and him by Christmas. Then they part, he rid-
25
ing away through the bush "in which he had once been lost."
The Boy in the Bush occupied most of Lawrence’s writ
ing time nearly up to the day he sailed for England, Novem
ber 22, 1923. At some time during the summer, he evidently
was commissioned to write a review of A Second Contemporary
Verse Anthology which appeared in the New York Evening Post
Literary Review September 29, 1923. In it he found that,
instead of being "the spiritual record of an entire people,"
as the wrapper boasted, the book was "a collection of
pleasant verse, neat and nice and easy as eating candy.".
In having a rather witty time with the wrapper's boast, he
used some of the metaphors and ideas soon to appear in
essays written for Murry's The Adelphl: the conception of
moderns as like "fish in a glass bowl, swimming round and
" • • ' . V • T> ‘
round and gaping" at their own images; the "pot-bound"
consciousness, particularly in America since the European
consciousness "still has cracks in its vessel. . , strange
roots of memory" (this difference is not apparent to him
25 Ibid,, p. 388.
162
later when he is in England), and his insistence on "the
26
element of danger" in great poetry.
Earlier in the year, he had authorized Murry's use
in the newly-founded Adelphl of chapters from Fantasia of
the Unconscious, and had suggested other things already
written. Apparently, before he sailed from Vera Cruz,
Lawrence began a series of short essays with The Adelphl '
in mind. One of these, "The Proper Study of Mankind," ap
peared in The Adelphl in December, 1923, the month of
Lawrence's arrival in England. It was followed in February
and March of 1924 by "On Being Religious" and "On Human
Destiny." Months later, in September, 1924, "On Being, a
Man" appeared. (Rather incongruously, these essays, with
the exception of "On Being Religious," also appeared in
Vanity Fair for January, May, and June, 1924).
Evidence of the probable origin of some of these
essays before the return to England is the existence of a
manuscript notebook of Mexican origin containing, besides
notes for The Boy in the Bush, and notations of Spanish
songs, a fragment of what seems to be an early version of
"On Being Religious, 1 1 notes titled "On Being in Love, 1 1
which .contain key ideas for the essays, a fragment of
criticism of the English which is perhaps an early version
of "On Coming Home," a brief essay titled "On Taking the
Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence,
pp. 322-326 passim.
163
Next Step," and a list of titles, "On Bglng Religious, "
"On Being a Man," "On Writing a Book," and "On Reading a
27
Book." It is clear that Lawrence planned, and perhaps
completed, a whole series of reflective essays beginning
"On. ..."
"The Proper Study" begins, of course, with Pope's
couplet about not presuming "to scan" God but properly
studying only man. The emphasis on man is "the note of
our particular epoch, " but its wisdom is now "weary to
death." The remainder of the essay is an exposition of
this idea.
The Greek commandment "Know thyself" must be obeyed,
since man is nothing unless he adventures into the unknown.
At present "the only unknown . . . lies deep in the pas
sional soul." The writer is attacked for exploring it in
novels, but goes on, since "know thyself" is "the point of
all art." But all knowing eventually Impinges on the in
finite, and involves more than the self.
At this point Lawrence begins the metaphor that
unifies the rest of the essay. In the eighth paragraph he
uses a chemist's analysis of water, with its ultimate "I
don't know," as an illustration of the impingement of know
ledge on the infinite. The Idea of water leads to the image
of a voyage down the stream of knowledge. This stream becomes
—
Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H.
Lawrence Manuscripts, pp. 203-20^.
164
"the river* of human consciousness," flowing from a source
hut eventually, like a river, slowing , silting, and ending
in the vastness of the ocean.
Pope's commandment, like all "Shalt Nots," must he
broken because the "human consciousness is never allowed
pQ
finally to say: 'I don't know.'" BhKrwing oneself leads
inevitably to the "God mystery," the sea at the end of the
stream of knowledge. Once in the "sea of !_ Don't Know. . . ,
if you can but gasp Teach Me," you can, as if changed into
a fish, move in the new element. Jesus did it and "took on
a new way of knowledge." Eventually "even the most hard-
boiled scientist, if he is a brave and honest man, is
landed in this unscientific dilemma."
In Greece, India, and Jerusalem, from "various God-
aources, " the streams of human consciousness flow until
they "pass into the great Ocean, which is the God of the
End." Jesus had been able to turn and "like a salmon '
29
beat his way up stream again, to speak from the source." 7
But "we are in the deep, muddy estuary of our era, and
terrified of the emptiness of the sea beyond. Or we are
at the end of the great road, that Jesus and Francis and
2S
Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. K. Lawrence.
p. 720.
29
Ibid., p. 721. The figure of the stream and the
salmon seeking the source may have been suggested by a
description of the salmon run in California sent to him by
Mrs. Luhan at about the time of the departure for England.
See Lorenzo in Taos, p. 122.
165
30
Whitman walked." ¥e must enter the ocean and learn
there a new relationship with the deity. "Not the specific
deity of the inland source. The vast deity of the End."
We have exhausted the subjects of man in relation to
man, in relation to himself, and in relation to woman. In
those fields there remains only the literature of perver-
31
sity and of playboys, short-lived weeds. The new litera
ture must penetrate to the ocean, "where the first and
greatest relation of every man and woman is to the Ocean
itself, the great God of the End, who is the All-Father of
all sources. ..." Thus in this essay Lawrence adumbrates
#ery';. -:very gently his belief in the failure of traditional
faiths, and in the need to arrive at new conceptions of God.
He becomes more specific toward the end by giving a new
version of St. Paul
Not the St. Paul with his human feelings repudiated,
to give play to the new divine feelings. Not the St.
Paul violent in reaction against worldliness and
sensuality, and therefore a dogmatist with his sheaf
of Shalt-Nots ready. But a St. Paul two thousand •
years older, having, his own epoch behind him, and
having again the great knowledge of the deity. . .
which Jesus knew. . .
"On Being Religious," published two months later,
deals less solemnly and more sharply with tradition. In
form and style it is more typical of Lawrence on the attack.
30 Ifria., PP. 721-722.
31
Ibid., p. 722.
32 ifcia.. P- 723.
166
The real question is not the existence of G-od hut
the attitude taken toward the problem of belief and the
nature of G-od. The man who denies the existence of God is
simply asserting himself by taking the democratic attitude
that no one knows better than he does. The believer is
"either sentimental or sincere." If sincere, "he refers
himself back to some indefinable pulse of life in him,
which gives him his direction and his substance." If senti
mental, he implies an agreement to make a favorable arrange
ment for everyone, the conservative attitude. The man who
says he does not know, is being crafty and playing both
sides, the "so-called artistic or pagan attitude." All of
these attitudes become boring except that of the sincere
33
believer.
Some of the attitudes have been stated as dialogue.
Now various of the "sincere believers" are catechized about
the "how" of their belief, in very colloquial fashion. The
first is summarily rejected for saying he believes in good
ness, the second for saying he believes in love, the third
for saying belief makes him more tolerant. But the fourth
questions the right of the interrogator to examine him, and
himself becomes interrogator. When told that the important
thing is what God does with one, which is to use him "as the
thin edge of the wedge," he thinks he might believe in such
33
Ibid.. p. 72k.
167
34
a God "If it looked like fun."
Lawrence, the "I" of the dialogue, now comments on
it. Belief must "look like fun." God has had enough of
"sighs, supplications, prayers, tears and yearnings, " and,
as if oh /a great strike," has left heaven empty. This
idea, Lawrence at once interjects, is not "a deliberate
piece of blasphemy. 1 1 It is a way of stating a truth, that
God always exists but that, "as regards man, He shifts His
35
position in the cosmos."
Change of position becomes the dominant metaphor of
the remainder of the essay. Because of this change, man
feels lost and "let down.“ But he is not justified in so
feeling.
As a matter of fact, never did God or Jesus say
that there was one straight way of salvation, for
ever and ever. On the contrary, Jesus plainly in
dicated the changing of the way. And what is more,
He Indicated the only means to the finding of the
right way.
This means in the. Holy Ghost, -which is "never a Way or a
Word. Jesus is a Way and a Word. God is the Goal. But
the Holy Ghost is for ever Ghostly, unrealizable." It
36
must never be sinned against. In many of Lawrence's
stories, his characters feel the promptings of "the Holy
^ Ifcld.. p. 725.
35
■ Ibid., p. 72?.
36 I£ld*, p. 728.
168
Ghost" (the term is used) and struggle to follow them.
As it moves toward an ending, this non-conformist
essay makes an inevitable development. "Prom time to time,
the Great God sends a new saviour. . . . There have been
other saviours, in other lands, at other times, with other
messages." But "for the moment, we are lost. Let us admit
it. None of us knows the way to God." Jesus "is no longer
our Way of Salvation." Nevertheless,
. . . we go in search of God, following the Holy
Ghost, and depending on the Holy Ghost. . . . We
hear His strange calling, the strange calling like
a hound on the scent, away in the unmapped wilder
ness. And it seems great fun to follow.3?
The essential challenge of the essay is summed up in
the last two paragraphs:
Myself, I believe in God. But I’m off on a dif
ferent road. - n
Adios ! and, if you like, au revoir
"On Human Destiny," which followed "On Being Re
ligious" in The Adelphi, also argues for a dynamic concep
tion of ideas. The first part is taken up with man’s neces
sity to think. Modern talk of spontaneity is in itself an
idea, a product of self-consciousness. 3 9 "The simple in
nocent child of nature does not exist.
40
But Lawrence is
37 Ibid., pp. 729-730.
38 Ibid., p. 730.
3 9 D. H. Lawrence, Assorted Articles (New York, 1930),
p. 2^3.
^ Ibid •, P • 2l]l{..
169
not arguing for pure rationality. At any level of society
man has a mind and passions, which "between them produce
:*ne
42
ideas.^ Emotions ungoverned by mind are "just hysterics."
Mind by itself is sterile.
Paradoxically, the rebels against "the abhorred old
ideal suasion" find themselves "in the same old treadmill,
in the reversed direction,"
The Prince Consort turned us,giddy with goodness,
plodding round and round ln:the earnest mill.
Kind Edward drove us giddy with naughtiness,
trotting round and round in the same- mill, in
the opposite direction. So that the Georgian era
finds us flummoxed, because we know the whole
cycle bac£ and forth. ^
In Russia the complication between the old, barbaric ideas
and modern ideas of "equality, serviceableness, productivity
. . . had to be cleaned up," and the "bewildering, fascinat
ing circus of human anomalies" was turned into"the treadmill
of the one accomplished idea.
What is the solution? Man is like a plant confined
in a pot, "and the life is leaving him. " He must break
45
out. Most men, knowing that "our civilization has got
to smash," take the coward's attitude of "waiting for the
41
Ibid., p. 245.
42
Ibid., p. 246.
43
Ibid., p. 248.
44
Ibid., pp. 249-250.
4*5
Ibid., p. 250.
170
slow accumulation of circumstance" and living their own lives
ii-6
first. But in the Dark Ages, dfter the fall of Rome, a
"scattered, tiny minority" of Christians "who had found a
k 7
new way to God" kept "the knowledge burningly a4.ive."
The exquisite delicate light of ever-renewed
human consciousness is never blown out. The
lights of great cities go out, and there is
howling darkness to all appearance. But always,
since men began, the light of the pure, Gogj.gknowing
human consciousness has kept alight. . . .
Keeping!this light going constitutes human destiny. "To
day, the long light of Christianity is guttering to go
out and wethave to get at new resources in ourselves."
It is disastrous to wait for circumstance to bring the
debacle. "The Russians who have ‘escaped1 from the hor
rors of the revolution are most of them extinguished as
human beings." After such catastrophes, man "is left a
painful, unmanned creature, a thing of shame, incapable
i+ 9
any more."
Here it should be noted that Lawrence does not
take the nihilistic position that, immediately after the
War, tempted him. He does view civilization as moving
in cycles as ideas rise and perish. This view is in
tensified as he nears the end of the essay.
^ Ibid., p. 351.
Ibid.. p. 252.
Ibid., pp. 252-253.
49
Ibid., pp. 25^-255.
171
. . . Man Is destined to seek God and to form some
conception of Life. And since the Invisible God
cannot be conceived, and since Life is always more
than any idea, behold, from the human conception of
God and of Life, a great deal of necessity is left
out. And this God whom we have left out and this
Life that we have shut out from our living, must in
the end turn against us and rend us.-7
At such times, man must seek "the germ of a new idea. A
new germ of God-knowledge, or Life-knowledge," which will
51
in its turn grow and eventually die.
The essay closes on this note of the fatal cycle.
Despite knowledge of ultimate death, it would be "con
ceited cowardice" not to adventure and plant the seed. As
we saw in The Boy in the Bush, the idea of death w&s very
strong in Lawrence at this time as he adventured so far
from his English tradition into revolutionary Mexico, where
he also felt the menace - of' the Aztec gods. Counselling
courage and new beginnings, ’ which must be fought for, he
accepts the cycle and is reconciled.
I love the thin sapling, and the first fruit, and
the falling of the first fruit. I love the great
tree in its splendour. And I am glad that at last,.,
at the very last, the great tree will go hollow, and
fall on its aide with a crash, and the little ants
will run through it, and it will disappear like a
ghost back into the humus.
One is reminded of a very late poem, written not long be
fore his death, "The Ship of Death."
Ibid.. pp. 255-256.
51
Ibid., p. 256.
IMd.. pp. 257-258.
172
"On Being a Han" did not appear in The Adelphi until
September, 192**, but it was published in Vanity Fair in
June, and probably was written some months earlier during
the return to England.
The essay begins with the statement, "Man is a
thought-adventurer,0 which expresses essentially the same
dynamic conception which appears in the other essays.- Here,
however, Lawrence attempts a definition of thought-adven-
ture in terms of his long-held belief in the antagonism be
tween intellect alone and the "blood-consciousness." Heal
thought is not mere intellect but "an experience," beginning
in a "change in the blood" and ending as "a new reality in
mental consciousness." Consequently it involves the double
risk of meeting life and then facing the result in the
mind. ^
The self of the body, with its "strange attractions
and revulsions" can never be finally known. On the other
hand, the "‘ consciou's ego" has reasons "for everything it
does and feels,“ and "tries to steer a sensible and harm-
54
less course." Classifying people and things according
to known terms, it is only the partial adventure of "know
ing and understanding."'^
_
Ibid., p. 22o.
5 k
Ibid.. p. 228.
55
Ibid., p. 230.
173
Lawrence uses as his first example an encounter with
a person of different origin, selecting from Arab, Negro,
"or even a Jew," the Negro, with his "strange •presence."
One can simply label him "Nigger," or try to understand him
in terms of one’s knowledge of "any other individual," or
admit that "the blood is disturbed." Making.the admission,
one can either insulate oneself, as is usually done, or
"allow the disturbance to continue, because, after all,
there is some peculiar alien sympathy." But whether re
stricted or not, the reaction will develop "in dreams and
unconsciousness" until it becomes "a new.bit of realisa
tion, a new term of consciousness."
Then Lawrence turns to a “much commoner" example,
the marriage relationship.• As long as the "known" selves
alone are in contact, all is well; but in blood contact,
discord arises between the unknown selves. The effect is
like a crucifixion, the "so-called real self" crucified on
57
the "bodily self." The remainder of the essay is devoted
to this theme.
If the husband "forfeits his arrogance," his "Adam
56
Ibid.. p. 231. It is noteworthy that Lawrence
does not argue rational, biological racial eg^alitarianism.
Yet there is little or no expression of racial prejudice
in the ordinary, inimical sense in his work. Theoretically,
and usually emotionally, he preferred the "dark" Southern
peoples, though he felt in them a threat and at times
recoiled from them.
5 7 Ibid.. p. 233.
17U-
obstinacy," the children become the mothers and women
of the next generation must beware "the mother's boy."
If the mother "forfeits the old serpent-advised Eve from
her nature and becomes the instrument of the man," husbands
of the next generation will suffer "the daughter's revenge."
In this Lawrence was exploring a problem that dated from as
far back as Sons and Lovers.
What is the solution? "The thought-adventure ! We've
got to take ourselves as we are, not as we know ourselves
to be."^® Men and women must accept the risk to themselves
of real contact with each other. Men can "slowly make the
great experience of realizing" ; women have their own "realisa
tion," which knows without thinking. Men who dare take
thought, risk both the body and the blood first, then the
mind, to become a new, unexpected self.^ 9 it is noteworthy
that Lawrence allots his sex the greater risk.
Today men refuse to take the risk, and they repress
the body. But action from the head means that the "unknown
man . . . goes quite deranged." Thus "all suffering to-day
is psychic."6° Self-conscious modern man does not really
feel, though "he becomes extraordinarily acute at recognis
ing real feelings from false ones, knowing for certainty
Ibid., p. 235.
Ibid., p. 237.
k° Ibid., p. 238.
175
the falsity of his own.*1 His denunciation of falsity is
61
made so that he may "triumph in his own greater falsity.1 1
Daring “anything, except "being a man," out of fear of ex
tinction he erects "his creed of harmlessness, of relent
less kindness." He asserts that there should "be no danger
or friction "while all the time he is slowly, malignantly
62
undermining the tree of life."
A discernible thread of continuity runs through
all these essays. One notable thing is that Lawrence could
give such Protean forms to his essential ideas. For ex
ample, this conception of the relationship of the sexes
is used in the story "The Captain's Doll."
Besides these essays used by Murry in The Adelohi.
Lawrence wrote others that did not appear there or any
where else. It is possible that Murry rejected them. In
August, 1924, some months after the return to England,
Lawrence wrote:
Murry said to me last year: ‘Come, only come, and
do what you like with the Adelbhi.* I came in
December. He went green at my first article, and—
wouldn’t print it. No, Lorenzo, you’ll only make
enemies. — As if that weren't what I want. I hate
this slime of^all the world's my friend, my half-
friend. . . . 3
What was this first article? It may well have been "Qn
^ ILid., p. 239.
Ibid., p. 241.
63
The Letters of D. H, Lawrence. p. 615*
1 ?6
Coming Home," evidently never published, which from in
ternal evidence was written during the first days in
England. Beginning with the landing, and the train-trip
to London, it attacks English complacency and detachment.
The trick lies in tensely witholding oneself, tensely
witholding one's aura, till it forms a perfect and
transparent little globe around one. At the centre of
this little globe sits the Englishman, his own little
god unto himself, terribly complacent, and at the
same time, terribly self-deprecating. He seems to say:
My dear man, I know I am no more than what I am. I
wouldn't trespass on what you are, not for worlds. Oh,
not for worldsJ Because when all's said and done, what
you are means nothing to me. I am god inside my own
crystal world. . . . If ever men had to think in world
terms, they have to think in world terms today. And
here you get an island no bigger than a back garden,
chock-full of people who never realise there is any
thing outside their back garden, pretending to direct
the destinies of the world. It is pathetic and
ridiculous. . . . All that is left to them is to blame
the Americans. . . Just because the republican eagle
of the west doesn't ehqose to be a pelican for other
people's convenience.
There exists in manuscript an untitled fragment of an essay
that is perhaps an early version of "On Coming Home." It
attacks the "domesticated clique," and the avoidance of
"contact with anybody."
You mustn't butt into anybody's feelings, you really
mustn't. An occasional innuendo, perhaps, to show
that you're not such a fool as you look. An innuendo
which will reveal you with a soul as tough and im
pervious as shoe-leather. ^
Another evidently unpublished essay, "On Taking the
6h
Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of JD. H.
Lawrence Manuscripts, pp. 207-208.
65
Ibid*, P* 205.
177
Next Step," contains in stronger form the dilemma stated
in "On Being Religious." Its position in a manuscript
notebook, and a numbering it bears, indicate that it was
66
written after "On Coming Home." Lawrence expounds his
belief that World War I brought civilization to the end of
. . . democracy, the end of the ideal of liberty and
freedom, the end of the brotherhood of man, the end
; of the idea of the perfectibility of man, the end of
the belief in the reign of love, the end of the be
lief that man desires peace, harmony, tranquility,
love, and loving kindness all, the while. The end of
Christianity, the end of the Church of Jesus. The
end of idealism, the end .of the idealistic ethic.
The end of Plato and Kant, as well as of Jesus. The
end of science, as-; an absolute ‘ knowledge. The end of
the absolute power of the Word. The end, the end,
the end.0' : . . . . , , „ . . . . . . . , . '
The essay does not utter the. call to the future contained
in the published essays.. ’■
Lawrence’s sense of deadness and confinement, and
his longing for release, took* other forms during the European
visit .t In •January-'- l$vl»ond6h^V:K£>--> i*ee! eive& a copy .Pf Willard
Johnson’s unconventional, mischievous little magazine, The
Laughing Horse, with its emblem of the centaur. He wrote
a letter, which Johnson published in the May, 1924,' issue,
expressing his characteristic feelings in terms that were
to appear again and again in other work.
Two-legged man is no good. If he’s going to stand
steady, he must stand on four feet. Like the Centaur.
66
Ibid., p. 134.
67
Ibid., p. 206.
178
When Jesus was born, the spirits wailed round the
Mediterranean: Pan is dead. Great Pan is dead.
And at the Renaissance the Centaur gave a final
groan, and expired. ... In modern symbolism, the
Horse is supposed to stand for the passions. Pas
sions be blowedJ . . . Horse-sense, I tell you.
That's the Centaur. That's the blue Horse of the
ancient Mediterranean, before the pale Gallliean or
the extra pale German or Hordic gentleman conquered.
First of all, Sense. . . , then, a laugh. . . ,
After that these same passions, glossy, and dangerous
in the flanks. And after these again, hoofs, irresisti
ble, splintering hoofs, that can kick the walls of the
world down."”
Indeed, the "Pan" idea seems to have appeared almost
at once in a short story. After leaving London for the
Continent, the Lawrences spent a few days in Paris before
moving on to Germany. Here, encountering bad weather and
feeling tired, Lawrence tried "to amuse himself by writing
short stories." Mrs. Carswell thinks that one of these
■ 69
"must have been 'Jimmy and the Desperate Woman,'" pub
lished in October, 1924, in The Criterion. Perhaps another
is "The Border Line," published in Smart Set in September,
1924, although its use of a return to Germany seems to in
dicate composition after Lawrence's German visit. From
internal evidence, It seems probably that one of the stories
was "The Last Laugh," unpublished until its inclusion in
70
The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories in 1928.
68
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 599-600.
69
Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage. p. 215.
70
D. H. Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other
Stories (Leipzig, n.d.) pp. 165-187. Examination of these
stories is justifiable at this point even if composition, and
179
In "The Last Laugh" Pan returns to England with fan
tastic consequences. At midnight in Hampstead (where the
Lawrences*: lived during the London visit), Lorenzo says
goodnight at his door to his guests, a man and a girl. He
calls the snow-covered scene a "new world"; the girl, deaf,
her hearing-aid carried hy the man (undoubtedly she is Dorothy
Brett) is interested and laughs; the man, sardonic, says
that the snow is "only whitewash.:." There is in him something
of the "faun,and a doubtful martyred expression. A sort of
faun on the cross, with all the malice of the complication."
(He is undoubtedly Murry, whom, in letters, Lawrence scolded
for such a "complication.")
As the man and the girl go down the street, he thinks
he hears laughter. She, after adjusting the hearing-aid,
hears only his "slightly neighing laugh." A young police
man approaches them and is reassured by the girl that her
companion is not drunk. The three begin to search for the
source of the laughter, the policeman assisting the girl,
who is aware of him but who has "held herself all her life
intensely aloof from physical contact."
Now a change is coming over her. She sees among some
bushes a man she had always known she would see one day.
Her companion and the policeman cannot see him, but the
70 con "k*reTlsion took place later in the year in
the United States, since they obviously are imaginative
renderings of portions of the European experience.
180
former is led on by the laughter and is accosted by a woman
who emerges from a house to ask who had knocked at her door.
When he asks her if she has been expecting someone, she an
swers that "one is always expecting. . . that something won
derful is going to happen." He enters the house with her
when she says that anyone she "could like" would do.
The girl, coming up in time to see him enter the
house, now removes her hearing-aid (symbolic of loss of
dependence on her companion who has gone to the woman) and
feels a new "pride and a new dangerous surety. " She is no
longer afraid of the policeman as a physical man. Suddenly
it begins to snow, and the air seems "full of presences,
full of strange unheard voices, " which call,, "He's come back J
Aha I He's come back 1" She is amused by the "tame-animal
look" in the policeman's "frightened eyes." They come to a
church, the doors of which are open so that wind and snow
and voices blow through it. She hears the laughter that her
companion had heard, for the first time and without the
hearing-aid. Pieces of paper and leaves of books whirl out
the windows, and "the organ-plpes like pan-pipes" play "wild,
gay, trilling music* "
At her house she permits the policeman to come in
to warm himself before the fire while she goes to her bed
room, bars the door, and sleeps through the night. Next
morning she is gay and laughing in her studio upstairs.
181
Her housekeeper enters to ask disapprovingly if she has
called, to Inquire about the young man downstairs, who says
he is lame, and to ask if Marchbanks (the companion of the
night before) is coming to breakfast. The girls thinks of
the face she alone had seen, and the strange laughter. "He
laughs longest who laughs last," she muses. "He certainly
will have the last laugh. . . . How wonderful of him to come
back and alter all the world immediately." She wonders if
Marchbanks, who only heard the laughter, has been altered.
She has been in love with Marchbanks "in her head."
. . . Now she saw herself and him as such a funny pair.
He so funnily taking life terribly seriously, especial
ly his own life. And she so ridiculously determined
• to save him from himself . Oh, how absurd I . . • . Since
she had seen the man laughing among the holly-bushes—
such extraordinary wonderful laughter— she had seen
her own ridiculousness.71
Marchbanks arrives, to be told that he needn't shout
now that she can hear. He speaks to her maliciously. The
papers have reported a great storm the night before. He
questions her skeptically about what she saw, and says of
the change in her that it has left her without a soul. She
replies, "Oh, thank goodness for that
They go downstairs to see the policeman, look at his
lame foot, and find that it "i3 curiously clubbed, like the
weird paw of some animal." When Marchbanks is unable to
see how this could have happened, she hears the laugh again.
71
Ibid.. p. 181.
182
Marchbanks is suddenly stricken with agony and "the horrible
grin of a man who realises he has made a final, and this
time, fatal, fool of himself," and falls "like a man struck
by lightning." The girl asks if he is dead; the frightened
policeman verifies it; and the last line reads, "There was
a faint smell of almond blossom in the air.1 1
The story is plainly an imaginative use of Lawrence's
relationship with Murry and Dorothy, Brett. Brett used a
hearing-aid, and had been attached to Mrs. Murry (Katherine
Mansfield) and Murry. She.alone of the group of friends
Lawrence asked to come to New Mexico in 1924 made the trip.
Of Murry Lawrence wrote on January 9, 1924, to Mrs. Luhan:
. . . if we come back into our own, we'll prance in
as centaurs, sensible, a bit fierce, and amused. I
am sure seriousness is a disease, today. It's an
awful disease in Murry. So long as there's a bit
of a laugh going, things are all right.72
In the same letter he spoke of "the Great God Pan.,: who grins
73
a bit, and when he gets driven too hard, goes fierce."
Marchbanks, the divided man who cannot believe whole-heartedly
in Pan, dies under the shock of proof of the god's visit.
The donflict with Murry's ideas and attitudes probably
furnished also the conception of the titular hero of "Jimmy
74
and the Desperate Woman." Jimmy is"editor of a high-class ,
7 2 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, pp. 134-135.
73 ILid.. p. 135.
74
1 Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories,
pp. 132-164.
rather high-brow, rather successful magazine, and his rather
personal, very candid editorials” bring him ’ ’hosts of ad
miring acquaintances.”*^ He has the dual nature of March
banks in ’ ’ The Last Laugh.” ”In his mocking moments, when
he seemed most himself,” his face was ”a pure Pan face. . .
In his own opinion he was a sort of Martyred Saint Sebastian
at whom the wicked world shot arrow after arrow. . . The
feminine opinion of him is that he is in rather vague ways
"fine and strong” but that he needs ”a level-headed woman
to look after him.” He has lost one wife who tired of this
role, is himself galled by it, and sentimentally seeks a
’ ’really womanly woman. . , some simple, uneducated girl. . ,
to whom he should be only 'fine and strong.1”
Among his reader' correspondence he finds a poem
from a miner's wife which is a grim antagonistic interpre
tation of her husband's hardness, his soul "a strange engine
Jimmy does not print this, reflecting that she does not
”sound like one of the nestling, unsophisticated rustic
type.” But another poem she sends is "so splendidly des
perate” that he prints it and goes to see her, though he has
"scarcely set foot north of Oxford” before.
Here, on his sentimental adventure, he encounters
the ugliness of the country and the hostility of the people.
He finds the wife "with that changeless look of a woman who
See also the character, Burlap, in Aldous Huxley's
Point Counterpoint, in which Lawrence, as Mark Rampion, is
the only integrated character.
184
is holding her own against Man and Fate." But, though he is
frightened, he is excited by "a gamble in which he could not
lose desperately," and asks her to come to live with him.
In this he Is "like a man who is drunk— drunk with himself.
... He was only looking at himself-, inside himself, at
the shadows inside his own consciousness."
When she says that the matter must be settled with
her husband, he faces the miner, in whom Lawrence creates
vividly once more in the manner of such early work as Sons
and Lovers, the life in a miner’s cottage with its physicality
and tensions. Here, however, unlike Mr. Morel of Sons and
Lovers. the miner is heroic in his independence and is an
utter contrast to the false sentimentality of Jimmy, who
shrinks from "the other man’s harsh fightlng-voice." The
miner has decided that he is only "made use of" both in the
mines and at home, and that he will not endure it. He does
not want his wife writing poetry and always opposing him,
and making his child oppose him. He is having an affair with
another woman because someone must give in to him.
Jimmy, in reaction against his feeling of inferiority,
reveals his proposal. When the miner finds that she is will
ing to go, he turns hard and stoical, "relentlessly killing
the emotion in him, " and giving her "a blank cheque. " Jiihmy
cannot stand the tension. "He always had to compromise, to
become apologetic and pathetic. He would be able to manage
Mrs. Pinnegar that way." While he is fearful of her hardness,
he desires a triumph over the miner, since he hates the
feeling of “ being dominated by the other man.
She refuses to go to London with Jimmy at once, but
agrees to come in a few days. He, alone in London, is told
by a friend that he has been a fool, though "no doubt, by
playing weeping-willow," he will "outlive all the female
storms" he prepares for himself. Frightened, Jimmy sends
a letter giving the wife a chance to back out. But inexor
ably she arrives. He has to force himself to meet her, but
at the end of the story takes pleasure in the perversity of
his feelings.
. . - perverse but intense desire for her came over
him, making him almost helpless. He could, feel, so
strongly, the presence of that other man about her,
and this went to his head like neat spirits. That
other manJ In some subtle, Inexplicable way, he-was
actually bodily present, the husband. The woman
moved in his aura. She was hopelessly married to him.
And this went to Jimmy’s head like neat whiskey.
Which of the two would fa.ll before him with a greater
fall— the woman, or the man, her husband?'
Of course the true Lawrencean hero is the isolate .
male who will not yield to the woman’s will. The sentimen
tal Jimmy, perversely getting his way temporarily by yield
ing, yet facing, ironically, the ultimate scorn of the woman
is of course the antithesis to the hero, an antithesis made
clear by the perversity of his triumph over the other man,
whom he Is unable to face adequately in reality. There
seem to be overtones here of Mrs. Lawrence’s championship
?6 Ifrid , p. 6*K
186
of the return to England and work with Murry on The Adelphi♦
Like "The Last Laugh," "The Border Line"77 ends
with the death of an inadequate man. The chief character,
however, is a Lawrencean heroine, "a handsome woman of forty"
whose life has failed. There is a partial identification
with Mrs. Lawrence in her being the daughter of a German
baron whose fifteen years of marriage to an Englishman "had
not altered her racially," although "like most people in the
world" she was a mixture of German, Russian, and French
blood.
She is travelling alone to Germany, where her hus
band, Philip, a newspaperman, is working. Paris, her point,
of departure in the story, and the Gallic sensuousness of
the men, remind her of her first husband, Alan, a captain in
a Highland regiment, who is the Lawrencean hero of the story
in his "bony, dauntless, overbearing manliness." They had
loved each other but were separated by a Lawrencean conflict
(examined, for example, in Kangaroo) between his innate con
viction of lordliness" and her "amiable, queen-bee" belief
that she had "the right to the last homage."
After ten years, because of their unyielding pride,
they had stopped living together. She had fallen under the
spell of Alan's friend, Philip, whose "look of knowing" and
"feeling of secrecy," along with conveyance of a "sense of
77 Ibid., pp. 107-131.
187
warmth and offering, like a dog when it loves you," made
him interesting to women. (These are much the same quali
ties aA Jimmy's in "Jimmy and the Desperate Woman.") Philip
had had an "almost uncanny love" for Alan and called him a
"real man," who never let himself he swept away. This had
irritated Katherine, who was also irritated hy Alan's indif
ferent tolerance, and occasional contempt, of Philip. When
she had assailed Alan for this, he had answered that Philip
was "too much over the wrong side of the border." The
border-line idea becomes the key image of the story. The
transition suggested by it differentiates Lawrence from merely
pessimistic, so-called "lost generation" writers, although
at times he shares their desp-etation.
When, during the war, Alan had gone to France' with
his regiment, she had seen
. . . that the whole of her womanly, motherly concen
tration could never put back the great flow of human
destiny. That, as he said, only the cold strength of
a man, accepting the destiny of destruction, could
see the human flow through the chaos and beyond to a
new out-let. But the chaos first, and the long rage
of destruction.*"
Philip’s idea that the war was a "colossal, disgraceful
accident" had soothed her, though she knew that the war
was "inevitable, even necessary." When Alan was missing
in action, she had married Philip, who during the war had
thrown his "weight on the side of humanity and human truth
^ Ibid., p. 112.
188
and peace." At first she had found the relationship
"pleasant and restful and voluptuous." Later she had felt
"a curious sense of degradation." She had realized
. . . the difference between being married to a
soldier, a ceaseless born fighter, a sword not to
be sheathed, and this other man, this cunning civil
ian, this subtle7equivoc,ator,. this, adjuster of the
scales of truth. *
This distinction is the central, theme of the story.
On the trip she jfs now'making1 , she feels as if she
is going to a meeting with Alan. The train, as it moves
north toward G-ermany,'enters "the ghastly'Marne country, cen
tury after century digging the corpses of frustrated men
into its soil. " It is "the border country." , Now her life•
turns Martificial tprhqr. 1 1 Her "panic-lpve^and "Philip's
\ ' *’ * ■ " . . . * * ■ ■
salvation were an illusion^.!. . . What1 ; was'life? The
grey shadows of death?"
At Strasbourg, on the border, she must wait all
night for the train into G-ermany. Here, in the night with
an icy wind blowing and the spirit of the town seemingly
gone, she seeks the cathedral. She remembers how "her
spirit used. . . to soar aloft with it. 1 1 Now it looks down
"with vast,- demonish menace, calm and. implacable."
. . . Dimly, she realised that behind all the ashy
pallor and sulphur of our civilisation, lurks the
great blood-cfeature waiting, implacable and eter
nal, ready at last ■ to crush our wtiite brittleness
and let! the shadowy blood move erect once more,
79
Ibid., p. Ilk.
189
in a new impacable pride and strength. Even out
of the lower heavens looms the great blood-dusky
•Thing, blotting out the Cross it was supposed to
exalt. 0
As she turns to leave, she encounters Alan, and as he
silently walks with her, there comes over her again "the
feeling she had forgotten, the restful, thoughtless plea
sure of a woman who moves in the aura of the man to whom
she belongs*;" She wonders why she had fought against it,
and realizes that "her scratching efforts at getting more
than this" were "ignominous efforts at self-nullity."
The strong, silent kindliness of him towards her,
even how, was able to wipe out the ashy, nervous
horror of the world from'her body* . . . , the
supreme modern terror. 1
Here, in Strasbourg, they part. She continues her
Journey, passing through the "numbv,dreary kind of neu
trality" of the occupied zone, feeling in unoccupied
G-ermany "the old barbaric undertone of the white-skinned
north, under the waning civilisation." Philip meets her,
looking "hollow and defeated." He is unhappy under the
half-scornful gaiety and teasing of Katherine and her sis
ter, who refer to him as "the little one." "The defiant
men had been killed off in the war." He had "quite cun
ningly" triumphed so far. But now "in weird post-war
G-ermany, he seemed snuffed out again."
80
Ibid.. p. 119.
81
Ibid., pp. 121-122.
190
The story moves rapidly to a close. As Katherine
walks in the snow-covered forest she realizes "how very
quickly the world would go wild, if catastrophes overtook
mankind." Philip would he inadequate. She feels among the
trees the strong presence of Alan.
Philip becomes ill and is put to bed. She is ex
pecting a meeting with Alan, and Philip resents her walks
in the forest. One day Alan meets her in the forest and
takes her "in the silent passion of a husband." Afterward
she finds Philip seriously ill. Next day, when she, feeling
the call of Alan, wishes to leave the sick man, he tells
her that he will die if she leaves him. Reluctantly she
remains beside his bed. At midnight Philip, saying that
he cannot "bear it," asks her to hold him. As she begins
to embrace him, Alan enters and loosens the sick man's
clinging hands. ‘Philip dies, "on his face . . . a sickly
grin of a thief caught in the very act." Alan draws her
away in the "passion of a husband come back from a very
82
long journey."
For Lawrence the failure of modern life lay in the
desuetude and death of old truths and attitudes. The
death was inevitable, but there must be a struggle for a
resurrection and a future based on new truths and attitudes.
Philosophically he had arrived at a partial solution, but
82
Ibid,.,., p. 131*
191
to create his vision of the future there must "be symbols.
The Indian ceremonials in New Mexico were a start; but it
was in Mexico that the vision coalesced in his imagina
tion. The veiled threat to man that he had felt in New
Mexico was confirmed openly by the Aztec snake-symbolism.
The people, as Christians, were "melancholy inside," lived
"without hope," and were "suddenly wicked." But they were
also "good," "gentle and honest," "very quiet," and "not
greedy for money." "If only they had a new faith they
might be a new, young, beautiful people."
Almost immediately Lawrence set out to create this
new faith, and after only three months in Mexico had com
pleted the first draft of the novel later to be titled
The Plumed Serpent. Then he put it aside to begin the
halting, reluctant trip toward England that resulted in a
last minute revulsion and quarrel with Mrs. Lawrence in
New York, There followed his lonely journey west, and the
tortured return to Mexico that ended in temporary compro
mise with the call from England. Lawrence poured his con
flict into the unyielding hero of The Boy in the Bush. The
Australian setting did not matter as long as it provided
the means of expression of the fight against the deathli
ness of the past;,and the new, savage death that lurked
in the wilderness of the bush, or in the Mexican and New
Mexican mountains. Man's destiny was to face them and
192
work out his new life amid such extremities. The fighter's
death was preferable to that of the conservationist of an
effete idealism.
This conservatism Lawrence felt that he encountered
in England in Murry and The Adelphl. Almost at once he
planned a second leave-taking; indeed there is ground for
supposing that he merely came to claim his own. The essays
written for The Adelphi stated unequivocally his break with
Christianity, and hence with the total European past, and
his belief in a dynamism that rejected the absolute ideal
and accepted a cycle of birth, development, struggle, decay
and death.
In Paris he began to put into short stories his more
intimate feelings about the return. The Idealistic conser
vative, perversely seductive of women, becomes the victim
both of Pan's laughter and the fighter's unyielding spirit.
Only the "bbrder-line1 1 people, fighting and bravely perish
ing that the new life may come into being, are worthy. Thus
Lawrence left England for the second visit to Mew Mexico
with the old battle-lines even more firmly drawn. There
still remained the task of completing the vision of the
new life begun in the first draft of The Plumed Serpent.
PART IV
RETURN TO NEW MEXICO, 1924
CHAPTER I
THE LIFE
The Lawrences and Dorothy Brett arrived in New York
from England on March 11, 1924.^ After about a week, during
which Lawrence was concerned'with Seltzer’s business diffi
culties, they began the rail journey westward. In Chicago
they stopped briefly for the long-postponed meeting with
2 3
Harriet Monroe, and then continued to Taos. After a few
days in the main house on Mrs. Luhan’s estate, the Lawrences
moved to a guest house, Dorothy Brett taking another near-
4 5
by. This close arrangement lasted until early in May.
Lawrence was glad to be back in the Southwest. He
wrote to Harriet Monroe: "... There Is the pristine some
thing, unbroken, unbreakable, and not to be got under even
6
by us awful whites with our machines. ..." In a letter
to his agent, he remarked of The Plumed Serpent and his
The Letters of JD. H. Lawrence. p. 605.
2
Ibid., p. 606.
3
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos. p. 164.
4
Ibid.. p. 167.
^ ^Le Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 609.
^ Ibid., pp. 606-607.
19*
plans: “I shan't get my Mexican novel finished this year—
7
shall stay the summer, here, I think.1 '
Mrs. Luhan has dealt in detail with the events of
these first weeks with her. Lawrence told her, she reports,
that he had brought Dorothy Brett along "to be a kind of
8
buffer between him and Frieda." Mrs. Lawrence reports
that he said of Miss Brett: "You know, it will be good for
us to have Bfett with us, she will stand between us and the
world." Mrs. Lawrence did not really like the arrangement,
9
but decided to try it. Mrs. Luhan found Miss Brett's
omnipresence "worse than Frieda's restraining presence.1 1
She "never saw Lawrence alone any more or had him undi-
10
videdly." Mrs, Luhan places during this time Lawrence's
writing of the unfinished humorous play, "Altitude," in
volving a good many Taos people.11 Lawrence disliked the
12
Penitente activities at the nearby Morada. He loved
charades but disliked the modern dance and refused to
participate.1^ There were gay moments and quarrels. It
^ Ibid., p. 608.
8
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos. p. 166.
^ Frieda Lawrence, "Mot I. But the Wind. . , " p. 168.
1 0
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos. pp. 166-167.
11-
Ibid., p. 183 ff,
12
Ibid., p. 187.
13
Ibid., p. 190.
195
is plain that the tensions of the previous visit were be
ginning again, and that the life Mrs. Luhan portrays was
the kind Lawrence finally would rebel from.
Whatever the complicated causes, Lawrence was un-
1^
easy and longed to go to the mountain ranch at which he
had spent the winter of 1922-23. Mrs. Luhan persuaded her
son, John Evans, to trade the ranch back to her and gave
15 i
it to Frieda, but Lawrence's attitude was that they could
not accept such a gift. Mrs. Lawrence's sister in Germany
had, not long before, found the manuscript of Sons and
Lovers. It was now given to Mrs, Luhan in payment for
the ranch.^
On May 5 'tbe Lawrences and Brett moved to the
17
ranch. and, with the help of three Indians and a Spanish-
American carpenter, began to rehabilitate the long-neglec-
18
ted cabins. Lawrence, in sending Murry good-wisb.es for
his marriage to Violet le Maistre, remarked that on the
ranch England seemed "as unreal as a book one read long
ago, Tom Brown's Schooldays, or something of that fsicj ♦1 1
1L
Ibid., p. 191*
15
Ibid.. p. 192.
16
Frieda Lawrence, "Hot 1_ But the Wind. . , "p. loO,
17
Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Oollection of D, h.
Lawrence Manuscripts. p. 98.
18
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 609.
196
But life at the ranch could he trying— one had "to hear
up hard against it"— and the 8,600 foot altitude told on
19
one. Mindful of his plans for a colony, he wrote to
Caltherine Carswell, inviting the Carswells to come for a
visit. He planned to stay in New Mexico until October, then
go to Mexico to work on The Plumed Serpent. He was not writ
ing, did not want to write and did not care. He recalled
the "fatal evening at the Cafe Royal" du±ing his "coming
20
home," and said: "Never again, pray the Lord."
By June 7 the hard work at the ranch was finished,
and he felt that he "might even try a.bit of" his "own
21
work again." It seems probable that during the period
of hard work he had written at least one essay, "Pan in
America," using the "Pan" theme which had appeared in
earlier letters and essays and in "The Last Laugh," An
undated note to Mrs. Luhan mentions the essay and his in-
22
tention to finish the first half that evening; a later
note describes it as unfinished because there were "too
many things to do, till late evening" and he felt "a trifle
23
discouraged" and did not "want to write."
19~
Ibid. . • . ' .
PO
Ibid., p. 610.
21.
Ibid., p. 6ll.
22
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos. p. 198.
23 T
£bid., p. 200.
197
During a visit by the Luhans', Tony Luhan angered
Lawrence by killing a porcupine. Lawrence's distaste for
hunting appears frequently in his life and work. Mrs. Luhan
thought this incident the origin of the essay, "Reflections
on the Death of a Porcupine."^- If so, it was used in retro
spect, since there is evidence that the essay was not writ
ten -until the return to the ranch from Mexico in 1925*
Another incident, however, produced a story at once.
During this time, Mrs. Luhan reports, the Lawrences and she,
riding horseback from the ranch to Taos, visited the cave
on the side of the mountain above the village of Arroyo
Seco which Lawrence used in the climactic scene of "The
Woman Who Rode Away." As she describes it, the cave fits
Lawrence's use of it, even to an altar-like ledge with "a
faint sun painted high up to the east of it," for the sacri
ficial climax of the story. Then too, in keeping with the
conception in the story, Mrs. Luhan had had, during a pre
vious visit to the cave, an unusual psychic experience in
volving "terror and doom," loss of normal English speech,
the sense of "another language," and "something strong and
terrible and not to be forsworn, a floating relic out of
the stored past."^
The chronology of events and composition during this
Ibid., p. 20l\..
* Ibid., pp. 209-210.
198
time is confused. Only a broad outline can be established.
On June* 11, four days after his statement that he might be
gin writing, Lawrence requested Martin Seeker, the English
publisher, to send anything on his list he thought they
might like, since there was "nothing to read" on the ranch,
and to order "a couple of periodicals" for him, "not high
brow.. . . , the best of the popular magazines, like the
Strand, or Hutchinson1s or the Bystander." He had not "seen
one for years," and thought "it would be good" for him "to
know what popularity is. "2^ Was this a decision, in view
of Seltzer’s Insolvency, to try to earn more money by writ
ing something popular? "The Border Line" appeared simul
taneously in Hutchinson1s and The Smart Set in September,
though it may have been written during the European visit,
and hardly represents a "popularization." By June 28 Lawrence
27
could say that he had "written two stories." These cannot
be identified with certainty, but they may well have been
"St. Mawr" and "The Woman Who Rode Away." Mrs. Luhan places
her seeing of the manuscript of the latter just before a
28
note of Lawrence’s dated July 7.
Life at the ranch had gradually settled into a pat
tern that permitted Lawrence to write. He was up at five
26
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 611.
27
Frieda Lawrence, "Not I_ But the Wind. . . , " p. 186.
28
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p.. 239.
199
each morning, with his first chore to milk Susan, the cow,
who wandered off into the woods and had to he located by
means of opera glasses. Among the numerous other tasks,
baking,, irrigating, painting, and making cupboards and
29
chairs, he found time to write— out-of-doors, as was al
ways his custom when weather permitted, and usually in the
mornings. Dorothy Brett typed as he wrote.
The visits,to, and by, Mrs. Luhan continued both the
pleasant and the unpleasant side of that relationship. There
30
were little exchanges of gifts, Indian dances in her etudio,
but eventually a climactic scene in Taos involving Lawrence's
friendship with one of her visitors called "Clarence" in
Lorenzo in Taos. As Mrs. Luhan reports it, Lawrence and
Clarence became fast friends, and rather secretive and dis
tant from Mrs. Lawrence and herself. By questioning Clarence,
she found that Lawrence complained to him of feeling oppres
sed by her "will. " Despite explanations on both sides,
31
Lawrence attempting to define for her what he meant, the
tensions increased. She was particularly upset and offended
by his aloof behavior at a dinner she arranged for the Lawrences
with George Creel, his wife, Blanche Bates, the actress, and
a young Englishman who was her leading man. Creel was on
his way to Mexico and knew everyone of importance there. Mrs.
29
Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . . ," p. 161.
30
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 193.
31
Ibid., pp. 212-214-.
200
Luhan, having heard Lawrence say he would like to know
Calles, G-iamo, and other Mexicans (probably to gain know
ledge for The Plumed Serpent), thought Creel might give him
32
letters of Introduction. After a distant, strained dinner,
she reports, Creel offered the letters, and Lawrence rejected
them, saying gloomily that he distrusted reformers and up-
33
lifters. Evidently it was shortly after this incident that
Mrs. Luhan learned from Clarence that Lawrence had been
planning that the two men ride off together into the desert
3^
and "never be seen again, 1 1 These tensions reached a cli
max, reported only by Mrs. Luhan, one night during an im
promptu dance to phonograph music. Lawrence, whom Mrs. L'uhan
finally persuaded to dance, began roughly bumping Mrs.
Lawrence and Clarence. Afterward Lawrence went off to bed
alone, while Mrs. Lawrence and Clarence walked and talked
a while together. Mrs. Luhan waylaid and questioned Clarence
later, and he reported that Mrs. Lawrence had told him that
Lawrence planned to kill her, evidently by a sort of psychic
35
attrition, A year earlier the Danes had reported that
Lawrence's antagonism to Mrs. Luhan reached a point at which
he said he would "cut her throat.On that tangled night
32 Ibid., p. 217 ff.
33 Ibid., p. 220.
3^
Ibid., p. 222.
33 Ibid,, p. 230.
Merrlld, A Poet and Two Painters, p. 2k0.
201
Clarence moved from Lawrence's side to Mrs. Luhan's; Tony was
upset by Mrs. Luhan’s activities and came to think Lawrence
a "very sick man."37 Mrs. Luhan seems not to have been par
ticularly frightened. At any rate, before leaving the next
day Lawrence let her read the manuscript of "The Woman Who
Rode Away" and warned her not to trust Clarence. She read
"with great interest that story where Lorenzo thought he
finishes me up.
"38
Like other storms before it, this one blew over, and
quasi-friendly relationships continued between the Lawrences
and Mrs. Luhan. Lawrence, sending for trunks and things
left behind in Mrs. Luhan’s house,39 commented:
. . . you know quite well there is no need for either
Clarence or Tony to be "mad." It’s pure bunk. But
you always bring these things about. Think I care
about their madness? However, I refuse myself to
get "mad." We'll remain friendly at a distance--
or at least, I will.4-0
Mrs. Lawrence later said of Clarence's report: "As to the
destroying stuff, it’s all unreal and unwholesome bunk to
me I Not true— as if I would let it happen 1 . . . Come and
have a cocktail sometime and don't let your men bunk
’ T7
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 237.
38 Ibid., pp. 238-239.
39 P- 239.
Ibid., p. 2I 4 . 8.
^ Ibid.. p. 250.
202
For Lawrence another life went on by correspondence.
On July 4 he wrote to a young Englishman, Rolf Gardiner, that
he was
. . . sick to death of the Jewish Monotheistic string.
It has become monomaniac. I prefer the pagan many
gods, and the animistic vision. Here on this ranch
at the foot of the Rockies, looking west over the
desert, one just knows that all our Pale-face and
Hebraic monotheistic insistence^is a dead letter--
the soul won't answer any more. 2
The ideas of "world unison and peace," "oneness," did not
attract him.
I am essentially a fighter— to wish me peace is bad
luck— except the fighter's peace. And I have known
many things, that may never be unified: Ceylon, the
Buddha temples, Australian bush, Mexico. . . , Sicily
London, New York, Paris, Munich. . . . To me, chaos
doesn't matter as:..much as abstract, which is mechani
cal, order. To me it is life to feel the white ideas
and the "oneness" crumbling into a thousand pieces,
and all sorts of wonder coming through. It is pain
ful . . . . But there it is. I hate "oneness,." it's
a mania. 3
He had:.received;:a copy;, of lE.^'M.hForster1 a A Passage to India,
perhaps from Martin Seeker, in response to the appeal for
44
reading matter, perhaps from Forster himself. He wrote to
Seeker of it*.
It's good, but makes one wish a bomb would fall and
end everything. Life is more interesting in its
undercurrents than in its obvious; and E. M. does 45
see people, people and nothing but people: ad nauseam.
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 612.
43
Ibid., pp. 612-613.
44
Ibid., p. 621’.
45
Ibid., pp. 613-614.
203
In a later letter to Gardiner, he said:
What we need is to smash a few big holes in European
suburbanity, let in a little real fresh air. . . .
If it1s going to be Youth, then let it be Youth on
the warpath, not wandervogeling and piping imitation
nature tunes. . . and pitying itself. . . . °
In the middle of August the Lawrences made a long
motor trip with! the Luhans to the Hopl snake c-dance. On
the return trip, Mrs. Luhan reports, Lawrence wrote in Santa
Fe a first account of the trip which she thought a disappoint
ing, "dreary terre & terre account," This narrative appeared
in Willard Johnson's Laughing Horse, in September. He pro
mised her to write another "sketch for the Theatre Arts. . . ,
not for the Horse to laugh at.1 ' This second, serious,
account of the trip took on importance in his own mind.
Sending it to Murry in England, he said of it: "No doubt
it's too long for you, but read it, anyhow, as it defines
somewhat my position. . . . This animistic religion is the
48
only live one, ours is a corpse of a religion.” To the
editor of Theatre Arts he wrote that he felt "rather deeply"
about the essay, and rather than having it cut, would pre-
49
fer to write another.
In early July Lawrence had received a communication
46
Ibid., p. 614.
47
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, pp. 267-268.
48
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 618.
^ Ibid.. p. 621.
20^
from Edwhrd D” McDonald of the Drexel Institute about the
50
bibliography of Lawrence s works he proposed making. On
September 1, 192^-, at the ranch, Lawrence wrote a little
Introductory essay, "The Bad Side of Books, 1 1 for McDonald's
work. To be the subject of a bibliography.was to receive
an institutional form of recognition that stirred Lawrence
to reminiscence of his early struggle.
On September 3 0 the summer's achievement in writing
was partially outlined by Lawrence in a letter to his agent
in London. He was sending him that saine day "St.. Mawr, 1 1
which, with "The Woman Who Rode Away" and "another story
of out here that" he was "doing," "The Princess," would
"make a book." He enclosed also an epilogue to the illus
trated edition of Movements in European History, requested
51
by the Oxford Press. On the same day, in his diary,
Lawrence noted sending to his agent's representative in Mew
York "MSS." of "The Woman Who Rode Away," "The Last Laugh,"
"Jimmy and the Desperate Woman," "The Border Line," "The
Dance of the Sprouting Gorn," and "Indians and Entertain-
52
ment." Of these items, the first, fifth, and sixth
were certainly work of the summer of 192A, along with "The
Hopi Snake Dance."
50
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 242.
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 622.
52
Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D.
Lawrence Manuscripts, p. 98.
205
The second New Mexico visit now $rew to a close.
Lawrence wrote to his mother-in-law in Germany of his
plans: "I am glad to go to Mexico. I don't know why, but
I always want to travel south. It is already cold here,
especially at niight." The plan was to go to Oaxaca, where
it was "always warm," and where he "would like to finish"
53
The Plumed Serpent. ^ On October 3 in a letter to Murry he
added that the high thin air" affected his "chest, bron-
5^
chially." He was glad Murry liked "the Hopi dance article."
Forster "might not 'understand' his Hindu," hut in A Passage
to India "the repudiation of our white bunk" was "genuine,
sincere, and pretty thorough .... Negative, yes. But
King Charles must have his head off. Homage to the heads
man." He regretted the turn of their meeting the winter be
fore.
It is time to go south.— Did I tell you my father
died on Sept. 10th, the day before my birthday?—
The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into
colours. I want to go south, where there is no
autumn. , . . The heart of. the North is dead, and
the fingers of cold are corpse fingers.35
One must note the brief remark about his father's death.
Mrs. Lawrence remembers that he did not grieve at his
father's death. Perhaps not, after the storms of Sons and
53
Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . . , "
pp. 188-189.
5^4
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 623*
55
Ibid., pp. 623-62^.
206
Lovers and the pain to his mother; hut plainly here in a
dying season the past had touched him with something of
the despair of the old life at home.
By careful management, in the face of Seltzer's
bankruptcy, the Lawrences had two thousand dollars for the
56 57
journey. They left the ranch on October 11, Dorothy
Brett with them. She could not remain at the ranch alone,
58
and they did not know what else she could do. If they
took a house in Mexico,,she.must have "a little place of
59
her own. Not be too close."
^ Ibid., p. 626.
Tedloek, The Frieda Lawrence Oolleetion of D.
H. Lawrence Manuscripts. p. 99I
58
*rieda Lawrence, "Not I, But the Wind» . . ,1 1 p. 188.
59
The Letters J2. £L. Lawrence. p. 625.
CHAPTER II
THE WORK
The second visit to New Mexico was much more pro
ductive than the first, part.icula.rly the stay at the ranch
which afforded Lawrence the semi^isolafcion in which he
worked Lest.
The unfinished fragment of a play, “Altitude,1 1
begun as a prank one night at Mrs. Luhan's, with friends
and acquaintances of friends as subjects of playful cari
cature, is negligible, but is an evidence of Lawrence's
gift of mimiefy and of his more gentle satirical vein.
Indeed, he had in him the potentiality of becoming an
able writer of social comedy, as the early plays, “The
Married Man," and “The Merry-Go-Round," testify. The
characterization of Mary Austin indicates his r&bility to
poke fun at the solemn approach to the significance of the
Indian, and of America.
“Pan in America," unpublished until its inclusion
in the posthumous papers, rounds out the use of the Pan
image in the three stories dealing with the return to
Europe. More important, it makes clear the animistic
vision of life, implicit, in the early Lawrence, which now
under the stimulus of knowledge of Indian ceremonial, be
comes a dominant theme.
208
Even in the early days of the gods, Pan was an out
law, "to be feared, not loved or approached." Those who
saw him "by daylight fell dead as if blasted by lightning";
but sight of him by night filled "a man with power."
Lawrence had used this conception in "The Last Laugh." Pan’s
children, the nymths and fauns, also dangerous if seen by
day, gave power to plants, birds, and trees.
The movement to cities caused men to substitute for
Pan the display of people, the glory of war, and "the pomp
of argument and the vanity of ideas." Pan became old and
"degraded with the lust of senility," and "his nymphs be
came coarse and vulgar." At last he died and became the
Christian devil, responsible especially for "our sensual
excesses."
He has been reborn in strange shapes. In the
eighteenth century, "alas," he became the "ism" of the
pantheists, such as Wordsworth, sorshipping "Nature in her
sweet-and-pure aspect, her Lucy Gray aspect." In the
United States he became "the Oversoul, the Allness of
everything," of Whitman. The fallacy of this is that
"all Walt is Pan, but all Pan is not Walt." Pan manifests
himself also in the belief "that there is One mysterious
Something-or-other back of Everything," but not "back of
the Germans in I9li{-," and not yet demonstrably back of the
bolshevists. "But still, it's back of us, so that’s all
209
right." Thus Lawrence sums up the views of Pan that he
considers fallacious. He rejects the Rousseauistic idyll
of Nature, and the chauvinism of "God with us." Now the
essay turns to an exposition of what he considers the true
Pan spirit.
He takes as his first image of this spirit, the
great pine tree growing near the cabin at Kiowa Ranch.
Here his strong sense of vitality and interplay between
the forms of life, particularly the non-human forms,
evident in his very first novel, ‘ The White Peacock, finds
expression once more. Statement is interwoven with obser
vation of minute details.
I am conscious that it helps to change me,
vitally. I am even conscious that shivers of energy
cross my living plasm, from the tree, and I become a
degree more like unto the tree, more bristling and
turpentiney, in Pan. And the tree gets a certain
shade and alertness of my life, within itself.
Of course, if I like to eut myself off, and say
it is all bunk, a tree is merely so much lumber
not yet sawn, then in a great measure I shall be
cut off. So much depends on one's attitude. One
can shut many, many doors of receptivity in oner-
self; or one can open many doors that are shut.1
The method of alternating the vision with the logical,
materialistic view is followed in the remainder of the
essay.
The tree image moves into that of the tree used for
a campfire, forced by man to deliver its power to him in
1
Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of JD. H. Lawrence.
pp. 25-26.
210
this form, smoke and flame returning to the sky whence
the tree had stolen "the honey of the sun." Here there is
a transition to the Indian and his vision and feeling beside
the fire. As he leaves the fire in the morning to hunt,
he propitiates a cliff towering overhead, and moves on in
"a weird psychic connexion between hunter and hunted."
Among the creatures of Pan there is an eternal
struggle for life, between lives. Man, defence
less, rapacious man, has needed the qualities
of every living thing, at one time or other. . . .
Tree, stone, or hill, river, or little stream, or
waterifall, or salmon in the fall— man can be
master and complete in himself, only by assuming
the living powers of each of them, as the oc
casion requires.
But man learned to abstract; "he concentrated upon
the engines or instruments which should intervene between
him and the living universe." He conquered the "phenomenal
universe," but lost the real relationship and "sits stupe
fied with boredom upon his conquest."
The essay ends with the return home of an Indian
hunter with his kill, bringing the power of the deer,
troubled by the moon, which represents the waiting woman,
not bored "because everything is alive and active, and dan
ger is inherent in all movement." Pan is still alive,
though dying, among the Indians. "It is useless to glorify
the savage," who will himself kill Pan for the sake of a
motor-car. "And we cannot return to the primitive life. . ."
2 IBid., p. 29.
211
Yet "we can still choose between the living universe of
Pan, and the mechanical conquered universe of modern
humanity"
During the summer, Lawrence, further explored the
animistic vision in three essays on the Indian, "The Dance
of the Sprouting Corn," "Indians and Entertainment," and
3
"The Hop! Snake Dance." "The Dance of the Sprouting Corn"
deals with the post-Easter dance on April 20 at Santo
Domingo Pueblo. Lawrence is at his most effective, creat
ing a dynamic interplay of motifs and symbols.
The spectator approaches the scene of the dance in
terms of a world of drought through which the motor-car
"rocks and lurches and churns in sand." It passes "the mud
church standing discreetly" outside the pueblo, so as
"not to see too much," and enters among the "dried mud"
houses, mysteriously able to outlive Creek marble. In the
"dry, oblong aridity" of a street "there tosses a small
forest that is alive." To this dynamic image are added
the thud of the drum and the sound of singing.
■ Gradually, dominantly in terms of movement and
sound, with an accretion of descriptive detail, the outlines
and facts of the dance become clear. The women, forming
one group, make a broad impression of costume, flesh, and
movement, with the "noble, slightly submissive bending"
? D* H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico (New York, 1927),
pp. 125-138.
212
of the head, the bare feet that 1 1 seem to cleave to earth
softly/' and the "continuous outward swaying of the pine-
sprays" in their hands. The men, as a second group, are
presented in terms of continuous dance movement, inter
spersed with description of their costumes and appearance.
. . . the dancer dances the eternal dropping leap,
that brings his life down, down, down, down from the
mind, down from the broad, beautiful, shaking breast,
down to the powerful pivot of the knees, then to the
ankles, and plunges deep from the ball of the foot
into the earth, towards the earth’s red centre, where
these men belong, as is signified by the red earth
with which they are smeared.4
Here the early emphasis on the arid earth is linked with
the dance. A third group of dancehs is formed by the old
men around the drum, who also sway pine-twigs and dance
slightly as they sing.
A fourth group, the Koshare, has been kept subordi
nate to this point. Now the drum changes pitch, and step
and formation change, the shift forming a cue for the pre
sentation of the Koshare. Though there is a full paragraph
of descriptive detail, they, too, are presented chiefly in
movement.
Suddenly as they catch a word from the singers,
name of a star, of a wind, a name for the sun,
for a cloud, their hands soar up and gather in the
air, soar down with a slow motion. And again, as
they catch a word that means earth, earth deeps,
water within the earth, or red-earth quickening, the
hands flutter softly down, and draw up the water,
k
Ibid., p. 131.
213
draw up the earth-quickening, earth to sky, sky
to earth, influences above to influences below, ^
to meet in the germ-quick of corn, where life is.
The effect of movement, and its alternation, is main
tained to the last paragraph of the essay. In it Lawrence
completes the interpretation heretofore interwoven with
the dance itself.
The sky has its fire, its waters, its stars, its
wandering electricity, its winds, its fingers of
cold. The earth has its reddened body, its invis
ible hot heart, its inner waters and many juices
and unaccountable stuffs. Between them all, the
little seed: and also man, like a seed that is
busy and aware. And from the heights and from
the depths man, the caller, calls: man, the knower,
brings down the influences and brings up the in
fluences, with his knowledge: man, so vulnerable,
so subject, and yet even in his vulnerability and
subjection, a master, commands the invisible in
fluences and is obeyed.©
The gestures and symbols of the New Mexico dance ap
pear in The Plumed Serpent in a Mexican setting. There, in
the ritual invented by Don Ramon, prophet of a new religion,
the gesture with the left hand is to the earth, that with
the right is to the'sky. He invokes "the snake of the
heart of the world" to "send life into . . . feet and ankles
and knees, like sap in the young maize,*1, and the eagle of
the sky to perch on his wrist to give him "power of the sky,
and wisdom . . . , for the rains are here, and it is time
^ Ibid.. p. 135.
6
Ibid.. p. 137.
21k
7
for us to be growing in Mexico.” Of course there is a
question as to which came first, the symbolism of the novel
partly written the year before (but not to be completed
until late January or early February, 1925), or that of the
essay. Lawrence might well have acquired knowledge of
New Mexico dances during the first visit, and thus have
been able to use it during the first work on the novel, at
Ohapala. On the other hand, he very early insisted that
he must return to Mexico to complete the boo£, and a com
plete rewriting followed the experience recorded in the
Indian essays.
Two other essays may well be considered here, since
they deal with essentially the same subject within a period
of a few months. "The Hopi Snake Dance" is without doubt
the last written, while references to the corn song within
"Indians and Entertainment" indicate that this essay wa.s
written after "The Dance of the Sprouting Corn."
T -8
"Indians and Entertainment" begins with an analysis
of "our" form of entertainment. When we go to the theatre,
we detach ourselves from actual existence and "become
creatures of memory and of spirit-like consciousness."
In a typical Lawrencean thrust, the audience becomes "a
D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (New York, 1926),
pp. 196-197.
8
Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico. pp. 99-122.
215
little democracy of the ideal consciousness. They all sit
there, gods of the ideal mind, and survey with laughter
or tears the realm of actuality." This form of entertain
ment is satisfying as long as one believes in "some supreme,
universal Ideal Consciousness swaying all destiny." A few
"have grown uneasy in their bones about the Universal Mind.
But the mass are absolutely convinced." Particularly
at the movies, where "the shadow-pictures are thinkings"
of the mind, they enjoy an orgy of abstraction.
The Indian, on the other hand, has no conception of
entertainment. Most highbrow white people (even Adolf
Bandelier in The Delight Makers) have written sentimentally
about him, so that he must be de-bunked. "The common
healthy vulgar white usually feels a certain native dis
like. ..." Both reactions spring from the fact that
the Indian’s "whole being is going a different way from
ours: i* Two courses are open: one,' to detest him; the
other, to fool oneself "into believing that the befeathered
and bedaubed darling is nearer to the true ideal gods, than
we are." The latter idea is a lie. The truth is that the
two ways of consciousness may not be reconciled, and are
destructive of each other.
To accept this "great paradox of human conscious
ness" is to move toward "a new accomplishment." ^-t must
not "be turned into another sentimentalism. Because the
same paradox exists between the consciousness of white men
and Hindoos or Polynesians or Bantu. . . . To pretend that
all is one stream is to cause chaos and nullity." To ex
press one in terms of another, "so as to identify the two,
is false and sentimental."
The only thing you can do is to have a little Ghost
inside you which sees both ways, or even many ways.
But a man cannot belong to both ways, or to many
ways. One man can belong to one great way of con
sciousness only. He may even change from one way
to another. But he cannot go both ways at once.9
Lawrence turns to examples. The European peasant
singing ballads "identifies the emotion of the song with
his own emotion." The fishermen of the Outer Hebrides
sometimes sing songs without words, and in this mindless
ness approach the Indian, still, however, seeing themselves
"outside the great naturalistic influences." The Indian,
on the other hand, does not sing of an "individual, iso
lated experience." "The experience is generic, non-indi
vidual. It is an experience of the human blood-stream,
not of the mind or spirit." The essay develops now into
a series of examples of Indian songs and dances in which,
with something of the technique of "The Dance of the
Sprouting Corn," Lawrence creates the effect of mindless
ness.
The final turn of the essay comes in a discussion
of the difference between Indian dance and song and Greek
9
Ibid., pp. 105-106.
217
religious ceremony. The Greeks had a specific deity for
whose gratification the ceremony was performed.
To the Indian there is no conception of a defined
God. Creation is a great flood, forever flowing,
in lovely and terrible waves. In everything, the
shimmer of creation, and never the finality of the
created. Hever the distinction between God and
God's creation, or between Spirit and Matter.
The remainder of the essay develops this dynamic concep
tion. The Indian's acceptance of Christianity is the ac
ceptance of "two mysteries,1 ' one not excluding the other.
He has only two negative commandments: one against lying,
the other against cowardice. His one positive commandment
is: “Thou shalt acknowledge the wonder."
The essay ends with a final example, the Indian
races. The Indians do not run to win, to receive a prize,
or to show prowess.
They are putting forth all their might, all their
strength, in a tension that is half anguish, half
ecstasy, In the effort to gather into their souls
more and more of the creative fire, the creative
energy which shall carry their tribe through the
year. . . , on, on, in the unending race of humanity
along the. track of trackless creation,
The essential conception of "Indians and Entertain
ment" also found expression in Lawrence's letters during
the summer of 192^. In the light of the essay, the words
to Rolf Gardiner gain in significance: . . I am sick
Ibid.. p. 116.
Ibid., p. 121.
218
to death of the Jewish Monotheistic string. It has become
monomaniac. I- prefer the pagan many gods, and the animis
tic vision” ; and ". . .1 have known many things that may
12
never be unified. ...” The adumbration of such a re
ligion, embodying much of the Indian symbolism, is an im
portant part of the final version of The Plumed Serpent.
The third essay on the Indian, "The Hopi Snake
13
Dance," written shortly after a ■tfisit to the dance on
August 1?, 192^, brings together the essential ideas of the
other two. Lawrence considered the essay a definition of
his position, and felt "rather deeply" about it.
The, long, tiring trip to the Hopi country produced
a first, satirical account in a letter to Willard Johnson,
published in September in Johnson's magazine, The Laughing
Horse. Lawrence spoke of the "hideous" country, the dif
ficulty of reaching it, the disheartening ruin" of the
houses, and the incongruous crowd of "three thousand on
lookers piled" into the tiny plaza. The dance itself was
"like a children's game," without drums and pageantry. The
armfuls of snakes held by the priests were "like armfuls
of silk stockings that they vfere going to hang on the line
to dry." The account culminated in satire of the white
American attitude toward such "a tiny little show, for
12
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. pp. 612-613.
Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico. pp. 1^1-179*
219
all that distance."
Just a show I The south-west is the great play
ground of the white American. The desert isn't good
for anything else. But it does make a fine national
playground. And the Indian, with his long hair and
his hits of pottery and blankets and clumsy home
made trinkets, he’s a wonderful live toy to play with.
More fun than keeping rabbits, and just as harmless.
. . . He sure is cute with a rattler between his
teeth. You sure, should see him, boy. If you don’t
you miss a lot.
Mrs. Luhan thought this first account "a mere realistic
recital that might have been done by a tired, disgruntled
15
business man." Apparently she missed, or did not like,
the intended satire of the audience and its attitude towards
the dance.
The essay Lawrence wrote later begins in much the same
way as the letter. The aridity of the country, the difficulty
of the road, the ruins and the tinyness of the villages
again appear, and, as well, the three thousand people "of
all ages, colours, sizes of stoutness, dimensions of curio
sity . ’ ’
One point of view tovrard the dance is simply the
sensationalhdesire "to see this clrcus-performance of men
handling live rattlesnakes that may bite them any minute—
even do bite them. Some show, that i" Another is the
cultural.. A third is the religious. From the cultural
14
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 6l?-6l8.
15
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 267.
220
point of view the dance does not have the "Impressive
beauty" of the ceremonials at the pueblos of other Indians.
Instead, it is "grotesque . . . and rather uncouth in its
touch of horror. Hence the thrill, and the crowd." Prom
the religious point of view, it is necessary to see that
the dance does not represent "the religion of the Spirit"
and fraternal communion with the snakes, but the animistic
religion with its many spirits.
There follows a long discussion of the nature of
the Indian religion, much as in "Indians and Entertain
ment. "
. . . the gods are the outcome, not the origin. And
the best gods that have resulted, so far, are men.
But gods frail as flowers; which have also the godli
ness of things that have won perfection out of the
terrible dragon-clutch of the cosmos. ... He has
to conquer and hold his own, and again conquer all
the time. 3-6
This concept of men as gods, frail and conquering "the
powers of the cosmos" again and again to preserve them
selves, appears in The Plumed Serpent. The conquest is,
in the essay under consideration, not made through science,
as in our culture. ". . . To the Indian, the so-called
mechanical processes do not exist. All lives. And the
conquest is made by the means of the living will." Among
the Indians, the Hopi's is the hardest conquest, that of
"rocks and eagles, sand and snakes, and wind and sun and
16
Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico, p. 151-
221
alkali." We have made "the scientific conquest of forces,
of natural conditions."
But the other thing fails us, the strange inward sun
of life; the pellucid monster of the rain never shows
us his stripes. . . . We little gods are gods of the
machine only. It is our highest. Our cosmos is a
great engine. And we die of ennui.17
The essay now turns to a description of the Antelope
dance on Sunday evening, in which the snakes are not
handled. The chant reveals
. . . how deep the men are in the mystery, how sunk
deep below our world, to the world of snakes, and
dark ways in the earth, where are the roots of corn,
and where the little rivers of unchannelled, uncreated
life-passion run like dark, trickling lightning, to
the roots of the corn and to the feet and loins of
men, from the earth's innermost dark s u n . l ®
Lawrence presents the ceremony in some detail, with only
brief passages of interpretation.
On the next afternoon the incongruous crowd reas
sembles for the culminating ceremony, the snake dance.
Lawrence gives a detailed description of the snake-priests,
"hot living men of the darkness, lords of the earth's inner
rays," and their ritual of carrying the "pale, delicate"
snakes in their mouths with the "sacred aim" of harmony.
At the moment of final release of the snakes, the crowd is
cleared away, and Lawrence and his group follow to the edge
of the mesa the runners carrying the snakes into the desert
17 Ibid., p. 153.
18 Ibid., p. 159.
222
to set them
. . . free to carry the message and thanks to the
dragon-gods who can give and withold. To carry the
human spirit, the human breath, the human prayer, the
human gratitude, the human command which had been
breathed upon them in the mouths of the priests. . . ,
to carry this back, into the vaster, dimmer, inchoate
regions where the monsters of rain and wind alternated
in beneficence and wrath. . . , back to that terrific,
dread, and causeful dark sun which is at the earth's
core, that which . . . sends us food or death, ac
cording to our strength of.vital purpose, our power
of sensitive will, our courage.
There follows another long passage on the meaning
of the Indian animism. The compatibility between its
"becoming" and Lawrence's sense of failure in Western in
stitutions and desire for a new beginning, is clear.
To us, God was in the beginning, Paradise and the
Golden Age have been long lost, and all we can do
is to .win back.
To the Hopi, God is not yet, and the Golden
Age lies far ahead. Out of the dragon's den of
the cosmos,- we have wrested only the beginning
of our being, the rudiments of our godhead.^0
The essay ends with a strong contrast between the white
American and the Navajos. The former- "hurry back to their
motor-cars, and soon the air buzzes with starting engines, *
like the biggest of rattlesnakes buzzing." The latter ride
away quietly and remotely, "looking wonderingly around."
The three essays form a triptych marking Lawrence's
development of animistic.religion suggested by his encounter
19
Ibid., pp. 171-172.
20
Ibid., p. 177.
223
with the Indian. But the writing on September 1, 1924-, of
the brief introduction to Edward D. McDonald's A Bibliography
21
of the- 1 Writings of D. H. Lawrence. called for a backward
glance. As Lawrence sat out-of-doors in the vast landscape
at the ranch, he did not find much excuse for writing- such
ah introduction. Books to him were "incorporate." He did
not care about editions or printers' errors, and when he
forced himself to remember pa3t publications it was without
pleasure. In retrospect, he went straight to his first book,
.The White Peacock, and his mother.
The very first copy of The White Peacock that was
ever sent out, I put into my mother's hands when she
was dying. She looked at the outside, and then at
the title-page, and then at me, with.darkening eyes.
And though she loved me so much* I think she doubted
whether it could be much of a book, since no one
more Important than I had written it. Somewhere, •
in the helpless privacies of her being, she had wist- -
ful respect for me. But for me in the face of the
world, not much. David would never get a stone 22
across at Goliath. And why try? Let G-oliath alone P
In this brief passage is contained the insignificance of
his origin, the overwhelming strength and greatness of the
outside world, and the intense love of mother and son. One
could do worse than take as a title for much of Lawrence's
work: "Stones at G-oliath." As for the rest of the family,
his father thought of him as a "sort of eleverish swindler,"
getting "money for nothing." His sister thought him lucky.
21
Edward D. McDonald, A Bibliography of the Writ
ings of D. H. Lawrence (Philadelphia, 1925), PP* 9-l*K
22 Ibid.. pp. 9-10.
22k
The voice Inside his boohs was his "forever." The
copies themselves delivered him "to the vulgar mercies of
the world.William Heinemann, who published The White
Peacock, treated him "quite well," but gave him his first
experience with "the objectionable" by requesting an altera
tion, and later rejected Sons and Lovers, calling it "one
of the dirtiest books he had ever read,1 1 Mitchell Kennerley,
though generous about revision in the proofs of "The Widow
ing of Mrs. Holroyd," later made no payment for Sons and
Lovers so that nothing was received for it from America.
Then Lawrence came to the suppression of The Rainbow. He
dwelt upon it at some length that September day nearly ten
years afterward, and concluded:
-Since The Rainbow, one submits to the process of
publication as to a necessary evil. ..... I have
uuc J . 1 X X J . W w c ? j. c w ! v s cui uai. o •
The essay ends on a quiet, .unrecriminating note. ". . . To
every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book
that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and. is gone. First
it is amusing to save them, for they are like old costumes.
In them "we see the trophies once more of man’s eternal fight
with inertia."
I believe that only
2k
editions and forty-first are only the husks of it." let
23 Ibid.. p. 13
Ibid., p. Ik
225
Lawrence's own fight was carried on this summer in
the three long stories as well as in the Indian essays.
Three earlier stories, "The Last Laugh, 1 1 "Jimmy and the
Desperate Woman," and "The Border Line," Just preceding
the summer's work, had dealt with an unsatisfactory modern
man, though in the last the search of a woman for fulfil
ment dominated the story. In "St. Mawr," "The Woman Who
Rode Away," and "The Princess," Lawrence turned his atten
tion almost wholly to the woman, frustrated by the old .
patterns of love and being, and seeking a solution.
25
Of these "St. Mawr" is the longest and most elabor
ate (a short novel) and probably the first begun, though its
completion may have overlapped with composition of the others.
The first sentence of the story is thematic: "Lou Witt had
had her own way so long, that by the age of twenty-five she
didn't know where she was." The first ten pages are ex
position of this sentence. Lou is American, moderately rich,
her only close relation her mother. Educated in Europe,
with brief trips to America, she does not "quite belong,is
at home "anywhere and nowhere." In Rome she had had an
affair with Rico, son of an Australian baronet, who, in spite
of all his surface virtues and amiability, could be suddenly
wasteful, spiteful, ungrateful, rude, and detestable. : ;
The affair ended when "they reacted badly on each other's
^ D. H. Lawrence, St. Mawr, Together with the
Princess (London, 1925), pp. 7-186.
k
226
nerves." Later they met in Paris under the eye of Lou’s
mother, Mrs. Witt, who looked at everything "with her queer
democratic . . . sort of conceit1 1 and contempt for modern
life. Lou accepted his proposal over the opposition of her
mother, who was "at the age when the malevolent male in man,
the old Adam, begins to loom above all the social tailoring."
She would almost have preferred for her daughter "one of the
great, evil porters at Les Hailes." Their relationship is
"a curious tension of will, rather than a spontaneous pas
sion, " So that the marriage has become sexless. Thus
Lawrence sketches Rico as the unsatisfactory modern man, Lou
as the young, dissatisfied woman who does not understand the
nature of her trouble, and-Mrs. Witt as the disappointed
older woman who sees savagely the failure about her.
The remainder of the story is imaginative explora-
tion of the Lawrencean pattern of alienation and loss, dis
covery of clues to a mysterious, regenerative force, rejec
tion of contemporary European and American euhture, flight
from it, and search for integration in a remote, primitive
environment. The chief symbol of regenerative power is the
stallion, St. Mawr, purchased by Lou over the protests of
Rico. He is also symbolic of repression and rebellion, and
has killed two men. When Lou feels "the vivid heat of his
life come through to her, through the lacquer of red-gold
gloss, " an "ancient understanding" seems to fill her soul.
227
Although heretofore her heart has "felt as dry as a Christ
mas walnut," she cries "as if that mysterious fire of the
horse's body had split some rock in her." Now she cannot
"bear the triviality and superficiality of her human rela
tionships." Rico, in whom there is a "central powerless
ness," becomes a counter-symbol to St. Mawr.
Two men are contrasted to Rico. One is Geronimo
Trujillo, of mixed Mexican^and Navajo blood, who is called
"Phoenix" evidently because he has been salvaged by Mrs.
Witt after having been wounded during the war. He moves
through the story as servant and groom with the dark, im
placable quality Lawrence found in the Indian, and is
simultaneously a link with the lost religious past, an ex
ample of contemporary disintegration,, and a link with
America. He comes eventually to represent only the physi
cal, sexual half of Lawrence's integration of passion and
intellect, darkness and light. The other man, symbolic
of Lawrence's integration in another way and evidence of
his eclecticism of myth and philosophy, is Lewis, the
Welsh groom. His Celtic mysticism rejects the contemporary
world, and he too is an "enemy of the shite camp." As a
Lawrencean hero, he is a fore-runner of the gamekeeper in
Lady Chatterley's Lover, though Lawrence never raises him
to full stature and mastery but lets him disappear, still
aloof and in his place, toward the end of the story. In
228
moments of intensity he lapses into dialect. His eyes sug
gest those "of a wildcat peering intent from under the dark
ness of some bush where it lies unseen. 1 1 Physically he is
an utter contrast to the elegant Rico, whose beardless face
is "perfectly prepared for social purposes" while Lewis has
a bush of hair and beard. He seems a partial self-portrait
by Lawrence. Between Phoenix and Lewis there is "a latent,
but unspoken and wary sympathy."
Lawrence gradually builds toward a rebellion by St.
Mawr against the mastery of Rico. This takes place during
a ride which brings the general alignment of Mrs. Witt, Lou,
Lewis, and Phoenix into contrast with Rico and a group of
conventional young English people. The Lawrencean touch is
evident even in the timing of St. Mawr's explosion to the
whistling of a new dance tune. Rico pulls the horse on top
of him and suffers injuries, which will leave him with a
permanent limp; The fall of St. Mawr on his back is sym
bolic of Lawrence's concept of reversed values in the modern
world, also made-explicit at this point. *
. . . Ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself
million upon million, rear up city upon city, save
every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere
existence is swollen to a horror. But go on saving
life, the ghastly salvation army of ideal mankind. At
the same time secretly, viciously, potently undermine
the natural creation, betray it with kiss after kiss,
destroy it from the inside, till you have the swollen
rottenness of our teeming existences. .. . Two bad breaks
the secret evil has made: in Germany and in Russia.
Watch itJ Let evil keep a policeman's eye on evilJ
229
The surface of life must remain unruptured. . . .
What*s to he done? G-enerally speaking, nothing.
The dead will have to bury their dead, while the
earth stinks of corpses. The individual can but
depart from the mass and try to cleanse himself.
. . . Retreat to the desert and fight. But in his
soul adhere to that which is life itself, creatively
destroying as it goes: destroying the Stiff old
thing to let the new bud come through.
Lou now comes to this Lawrencean program, with the possible
exception of the fight, which she, not an artist, has no
means of carrying on except with the things immediately
concerning her.
First Lou must decide whether St. Mawr's dangerous
ness is merely the evil vengeance of the slave, so that he
should be destroyed as Rico first insists, or whether it is
a courageous struggle for freedom. In this, as in other
situations in the book, Lawrence explores imaginatively the
implications of his nihilistic position. This tentative
ness, somewhat substantiating his contention that his
philosophy was drawn from the works, gives the story more
roundness than a sketchy discussion can indicate adequately.
Here Lou sees in Phoenix a plight similar to that of St.
Mawr; cruelty, “an aloneness, and a grim little satisfac
tion in a fight, and the peculiar courage of an inherited
despair. People who inherit despair may at last turn it
into a greater herosim."
The forces of conventional society are turned against
26
Ibid., pp. 85-86.
230
St. Mawr. The Dean of the church advises shooting him,
and is faced down by Mrs. Witt. Rico decides to sell him
to one of the young ladies of his set, who will have him
gelded, an example of the "sneaking-,' sterilising cruelty"
of "our whole eunuch civilisation." Mrs. Witt circumvents
this by riding to visit some friends, Lewis accompanying
her on St. Mawr. Later she, Lou, Lewis and Phoenix will
take the horse to America. Lawrencean escape is all that
is left.
The ride of Mrs. Witt and Lewis constitutes the
Lawrencean situation of the dissatisfied woman who is at
tracted by the isolate male in possession of "the mystery
of power," but who perversely must try to dominate hiim.
Lewis expresses the Lawrencean animism in his talk of the
Celtic feeling toward nature.
Mou'll never make me believe the sky is like an
empty house with a slate falling from the roof.
The world has its own life, the sky has a life of
its own, and never is it like stones rolling down
a rubbish heap and falling into a pond. '
Mrs. Witt, despite her sympathy for this, talks of marriage
in terms of "give and take," and finds that he would refuse
to marry her because he could not give his body "to any
woman who didn't respect it." He will not be mocked and
despised. Although they love each other, he "guarding his
'body' from her contact," Lawrence does not here work out
_
Ibid., p. 12k.
231
such ultimate rapport between the classes as he does in
Lady Chatterley's Lover. His mood is evidently that of
Lou, who, when she hears of her mother's consideration of
marriage, cannot understand it, since she herself now under
stands Jesus' "Noli me tangere ." The phrase appears often
in Lawrence in the ensuing years, and represents both a
revulsion and subtleized view of sex with which he is sel
dom credited. It seems to have deep-lying psychological
roots reaching back into the conflict of the boy's home and
immediately into the conflicts of his marriage. Symbolically,
it should be noticed, Lawrence's career is in a sense achie-,
vement of what his father failed to do. His mother was
superior, and usurped the place of the father. Lawrence
married out of his class, and fought a running war for the
superior position. So do many of his male characters. They
must lead, and the women must respect them.
The journey to America of Mrs. Witt, Lou, St. Mawr,
Lewis, and Phoenix is significantly in the autumn. "To
go Southl Always to go South, away from the arctic horror
as far as possible !" Away from the "idealistic, Christian
ised tension of the now irreligious North !" Lawrence used
similar words in letters during the fall of 192lj.. Only in
the Gulf of Mexico is there "the marvellous beauty and
fascination of natural wild things," unlike the "horror of
man's unnatural life, his heaped-up civilization." The Gulf
232
Stream, it should be noted, represents exactly the same con
trast to Lawrence as to Hemingway in To Have and Have Not.
and Lawrence's rebellion is far from an isolated phenomenon
in modern literature, though more explicit and aggressive
than most.
In. Texas, there is "something new, something not
used up." Lou finds in the people "a strange, uninspired
cheerfulness, filling, as it were, the blank of incomplete
comprehension," but “the old screws of emotion and intimacy
are released." Lawrence's feeling of a dream-like existence
also appears in her.
St.Mawr is easily ridden, and now accepts sex by
making advances to a ranch mare. Years before, during the
war, the childless Lawrence had written to a friend that
it was criminal to bring children into such a world. Only
out of Europe does St. Mawr have his consummation.
The stallion and Lewis remain here, and the story
moves on without them. Indeed, the latter part is in many
respects a separate story. Lou not only continues her
search for a solution to her problems, but ends in tenta
tive renunciation of sex and the world. ^There is a failure
of unity in the disappearance of St. Mawr and Lewis, the
now unfrustrated symbols of power and the isolate male, and
in Lou's subsequent renunciation. The failure seems to lie
in Lawrence's own inability at this time to feel a complete
233
solution possible and true.
Lou tires of "the mechanical energy of making good"
and the "mystic duty to 'feel good.'" The women and Phoenix
go to Santa Fe, where Lou and her mother are oppressed by
the tourist atmosphere, worse than that in Europe. Lou de
cide® to find a place where they can be by themselves.
Phoenix and she set out by car to look at a ranch that is
for sale.
Lawrence is now near his own experience in New Mexico,
andbsfore long it takes over the story. But first he must
- v-
free Lou of the last male, Phoenix, and bring her to full re
nunciation of the world before she can enter the new life.
Lawrence gives the trip itself much space. Phoenix
now is sure of himself and feels that money is Lou's only
advantage. Lou feels that he desires to become her lover,
then marry her. She analyzes her position. In marriage
he would faithfully "stand between her and the world," but
his actions as "a private man and a predative alien-blooded
male" would have "nothing to do with her." She would not
be "his own real female counterpart."
. . . When he remembered the almost watery softness
of the Indian woman's dark, warm flesh; then he was
a male, an old, secretive, rat-like male. But be
fore Lou's straightforwardness and utter sexual
incompetence, he just stood in contempt. . . . Never
theless he was ready to trade his sex . . ^ e
white woman's money and social privileges.^
Lou does not judge him "too harshly" because she
28 Ibid.. pp. 159-160.
23k
knows that she too is "at fault." But she wonders if, in
his rootlessness and in "his opinion of himself a3 a
sexual male," he is really superior to Rico. She knows
that what she really wants if "relief from the nervous
tension and irritation of her life" and to "recover her own
s oul."
Even the illusion of the beautiful St. Mawr was
gone. And Phoenix, roaming round like a sexual rat
in promiscuous back yards !--Merci, mon cher I For
that was all he was: a sexual rat in the great
barn-vard of man's habitat, looking for female
rats.29
Thus Lou rejects men and sex from her present life. The
rejection is linked to acceptance of a higher value. "Sex,
mere sex, is repellent to her." She will keep to herself
unless something touches "her very spirit." She understands
now "the meaning of the Vestal Virgins. . ., symbolic of
... . women weary of the embrace of incompetent men," and
turning to "the unseen gods." She says to herself:
I ought to stay virgin, and still, very, very still,
and serve the most perfect service. I want my temple
and my loneliness and my Apollo mystery of the inner
fire. And with men, only the delicate, subtler, more
remote relations. No coming near. A coming near
only breaks the delicate veils, and broken veils,
like broken flowers, only lead to rottenness.3®
Phoenix and Lou arrive at a ranch which is undoubtedly
modelled after Lawrence's Kiowa Ranch. Lou decides at once
jhsid., p. l6l.
Ibid., p. l6i | . .
235
that "this is the place."
Now, in a long passage containing the most powerful,
vivid imagery of the story, Lawrence tells of the develop
ment of the ranch from its origin sixty years before. In
so -doing he adumbrates his theme of the conflict between
absolute conceptions and reality, and arrives at a relati
vist ic, animistic solution, thus gathering together the
strands of his thinking during this period.
First "a restless schoolmaster1 1 from the East, look
ing for gold and finding little, homesteaded the ranch.
Then, to pay his debts, the ranch had gone to a trader, who
tried to build it up and make it pay. He brought water for
irrigation two miles across the mountains and, "being a
true American. . . , felt he could not really say he had
conquered his environment till he had got running water,
taps, and wash-hand basins inside his house." He finally
achieved a bathhouse with a bath-tub, "but here the
mountains finished him."
His New England wife and he, despite the great cost,
tried to make the ranch pay by farming a little, and later
by raising goats in order to make and sell "goats' cheese."
But though the goats throve, there was little profit.
And it all cost, cost, cost. And a man was always
let down. At one time no water. At another a
poison-weed. Then a sickness. Always, some
mysterious malevolence fighting, fighting against
the will of man. A strange invisible influence
236
coming out of the livid rock-fastnesses in the bowels
of those uncreated Rocky Mountains, preying upon the
will of man. . . .31
The wife worked hardest of all, loving the ranch “almost
with passion. . . , a sort of sex passion, intensifying
her ego, making her full of violence and of blind female
energy." To her the beauty at the ranch was "pure beauty
absolute:'beautyv' ? :But - “while: she revelled in the beauty
. . . , the grey, rat-like spirit of the inner mountains
was attacking her from behind." Chickens were carried off.
Horses were struck by lightning. Finally the sight of
the lightning scar on a t;ree caused her to say, in spite
of herself:
There is no Almighty loving God. The God there
is shaggy as the pine-trees. and horrible as the
lightning. Outwardly, she^never confessed this.
Openly, she thought of her dear New England Church
as usual. But in the violent undercurrent of her
woman’s soul, after the storms, she would look at
that living seamed tree, and the voice would say in
her, almost savagely: What nonsense about Jesus
and a God of Love, in & place like thisJ This is
more awful and more splendid. I like it better.
. . . There was no love on this ranch. There was
life, intense, bristling life, full of energy^but
also, with an undertone of savage sordidness.
In a long, vividly-colored passage on the flowers at the
ranch, even their life “seems one bristling hair-raising
tussel.“
Sometimes her love turned into "a certain repulsion."
31 Ibid., p. 169.
32 Ibid., p. 175.
237
Finally, after many years, she admitted that she was glad
to leave the ranch in November when snow came, and live in
"a more human home" in the village. When she found that
she did not want to return to the ranch, 1 1 she hid from
herself her own corpse, the corpse of her New England be
lief in a world ultimately all for love.” Her "belief in
paradise on earth" had been maimed. The war added one more
blow to the attempt at civilization at the ranch, and every
where else.
Every new stroke of civilisation has cost the
lives of countless brave men, who have fallen
defeated by the "dragon," in their efforts to
win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece
of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome
the old, half-sordid savagery of the lower stages
of creation, and win to the next stage.
For all savagery is half-sordid. And man is
only himself when he is fighting on and on, to
overcome the sordidness.33
At last the New England woman's ranch was rented to „a
Mexican, "who was slowly being driven out by the vermin."
At this point Lawrence returns to Lou. She is
"new blood to the attack." She buys the ranch, called
Las Ohivas, and takes Mrs. Witt to see it. On the drive
up, Mrs. Witt looks at everything "with a sort of stony
indifference." At the ranch she sees the failure and aays
of a pack-rat perched on a cabin that he looks "as if he
were the real boss of the place." She is sarcastically
33
Ibid.. p. 179.
238
glad that Lou feels “competent to cope with so much hope
lessness.1 1 But when she climbs the slope above the cabins
and looks out over the landscape, she cannot “fail to be
aroused.1 1 She questions Lou about her purpose. Lou an
swers that “as far as people go,1 1 her heart “is quite bro
ken." As for sex and men, she says:
. . . Either my taking a man shall have a meaning
and a mystery that penetrates my very soul, or I
will keep to myself.— And what I know is, that the
time has come for me to keep to myself. No more
messing about,^
There is a spirit at the ranch for her.
I don’t know what it is, definitely. It's something
: wild, , that will hurt me sometimes and will wear
me down sometimes. I know it. But it’s something
big, bigger than men, bigger than people, bigger
than religion. It’s something to do with wild
America. And it’s something to do with me. It's
a mission if you like. . , . It saves me from
cheapness, mother.. And even you could never do
that for me.- ' ■ 5
The story ends swiftly as Mrs. Witt, rising and looking
at the distant mountains, asks how much Las Ghivas has
cost.
"Twelve hundred dollars," said Lou, surprised.
“Then I call it cheap, considering_all there is
to it: even the name.“36
“St. Mawr" is the only story in which Lawrence's
plot involves the transition from England to the New Mexico
Ibid., p. 185.
35
Ibid., pp. 185-186.
Ibid., p. 186.
239
ranch. The Europe versus America theme appears elsewhere,
but only here does it use so directly this aspect of his
adventure. Beyond the matter of locale, Lou Witt's con
flict and her solution are also his.
Why did he make his protagonist a woman? It is
not an unusual practice for him. In most of the stories
of this period, as well as in many before and after the
American experience, the chief character is a woman. Often
she represents qualities Lawrence finds inimical; she is
destructive of male integrity,, or blind to it, and the
resulting conflict is one of his major themes, though in
a larger sense the conflict is an aspect of total evil in
the modern world. But Lou is a positive rendering of
woman, as is Constance in Lady Chatterley1s Lover. She
gives up the deadness and nervous tension, the surface
motives of conventional social life, and becomes the
Lawrencean seeker. When she does this she becomes both
Lawrence, and the woman he irngainatively seeks, expressing
his own struggle and search and agreeing with his solutions.
She also affords him an anonymity and objectivity that he
may have found desirable, and needful, as an artist. He
always felt publication asi.an exposure of the naked self
to misunderstanding eyes, and in "St. Mawr," as well as in
The Plumed Serpent and other stories, woman as chief
character, beyond the interest her problem held for him,
ZkO
may well have been an alter ego interposed between himself
and the world.
Lou's revulsions are Lawrence's. Love, instead of
being a sacrament, has become a mechanical contest of wills,
a cheap flirtatiousness, and a rat-like contact. Conver
sation is a hideous dissection of individuals. Social
reform ignores man's need of joyousness and adventure. In
short, life under the rule of absolute Ideals has become
static and perverted. What is Lou's solution? It is
first of all the recovery of individual integrity through
isolation. ”... The time has come for me to keep to
myself," says Lou. She must participate in, commune with,
the undefined, wild, larger spirit, she feels at the ranch,
that saves her "from cheapness."
In this Lou represents only one aspect of Lawrence's
struggle. It Is in the passage on the New England woman's
defeat at the ranch that Lawrence adumbrates the dynamic,
animistic philosophy expressed that same summer in the
Indian essays. Man,-.must acknowledge that there is a
savage spirit, an evil, opposed to him, and that the ab
solute paradise cannot be achieved in a static, final sense.
Man must fight "on and on . . . to overcome the old, half-
sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win
to the next stage." In Lawrence's contemplation of this
there seems to be a sad awareness of the irony and tragedy
241
of the position. "Every new stroke of civilisation has
cost the lives of countless "brave men, who have fallen
defeated "by the •dragon,1" he writes, and one is reminded
of the snake dance of the Hopls, with its winning of "per
fection out of the terrible dragon-clutch of the cosmos."
The irony and tragedy lie in tii.e rejection of the absolute,
and hence the inevitability of partial failure. The values
lie in the courage to make the struggle and to accept the
cycle of birth, development, and death, not only of indivi
duals but of eras of civilization.
As for the use of the American scene, it is magnifi
cent in the passage on the ranch.* The vast landscape be
comes a symbol of beauty and of the New England woman1s
longing for the absolute. .Within it the "birds, beasts,
and flowers" move constantly and vividly as images of the
struggle against the sordid, savage spirit lying within
the mountains. There is no hint of mere local color. Every
thing is integrated with the theme.
37
"The Woman Who Rode Away" came from- the visit with
Mrs. Luhan to the mountainside cave between the ranch and
Taos. The cave's altar-like ledge; Mrs. Luhan's information
that the sun, at the winter solstice, shone through the
frozen waterfall at the entrance to strike the ledge; her
37
D* H. Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other
Stories (Leipzig, n.d.).
zkz
psychic experience of terror and doom there— all play a
part in the story.
Again Lawrence's chief character is a woman whose
marriage has failed. Although the setting is not New Mexico
but the wilds of the Sierra Madre in Mexico, country that
Lawrence had traversed the year before, many of the details
are plainly New Mexican. The husband, twenty years older
than his wife, is ’ ’ still a little dynamo of energy" who
has accomplished everything alone, Including ownership of
the silver-mlnes at which they live. Her heart quails
before his accomplishment, the naked, ugly mines "in the midst
of the lifeless isolation. " Even the town nearby is "thrice-
dead" with its "great, sundried dead church" and a "hopeless
covered market-place," where, the first time she visited
it, she saw a dead dog "lying among the stalls." (Lawrence
reported such a scene in a letter from his trip the year
before.) It was "deadness within deadness."
To her husband, essentially still a bachelor, she
is another possession to be guarded jealously. He is also
"a squeamish waif of an idealist" and hates "the physical
side of life." Her nerves go bad, and she feels that she
"must get out." A visiting young mining engineer gives
her the idea for her escape. Curious about what lies
behind the "great blank hills," he questions the husband,
who talks disdainfully of "howling and heathen practices."
2^3
It is said that one tribe, the Chilchui, maintain the
ancient religion of the Aztecs and offer human sacrifices.
The young engineer’s "peculiar vague enthusiasm for un
known Indians" finds "a full echo" in the wife’s heart.
She was overcome by a foolish romanticism more
unreal than a girl’s. She felt it was her des
tiny to wander into the secret haunts of these oq
timeless, mysterious, marvellous Indians. . . .
There is irony here in her lack of understanding, and per
haps a touch of satiric allusion to Mrs. Luhan.
She finds a pretext to ride alone, silencing the
protests of a servant and her son by exerting her will. In
her break from deadness she is Lawrence's heroine,escaping;
but in her exertion of will she is his inimical modern woman
who must be broken.
On her journey toward the Ghiichuli country, she is
not frightened by the natives’ avoiding her, by the "fatal-
seeming" mountains, or by the carrion birds that hover in
the distance. Instead she feels at first "a strange ela
tion. " Throughout the details of her journey, Lawrence
builds a sense of foreboding of death and simultaneously an
anticipation of something more than death. As she nears
her destination, the elation at freedom disappears, and she
becomes "vague and disheartened." Having partially lost her
will, she does not care and cannot turn back.
38 Ibid., p. 56.
2kk
She is stopped by three Indians, a young man who
can speak; Spanish, and two older men. As she talks to the
younger one, her "assured, American woman's voice" contrasts
with his quiet questions in Spanish. To her the men are
like all natives except for their long hair, "full of life."
Thus, as with Lewis in "St. Mawr," Lawrence uses uncut hair
as a symbol of greater life and religious awareness. The
Indian, with his "inhuman" eyes, sees her "half-arrogant
confidence" but also her "curious look of trance." When he
transmits her statement that she wants to see the Chilchui
"houses and to know their gods," all three Indians accompany
her on the trail. When, in spite of her protest, one insists
on slapping her horse to urge him on, "all the passionate
anger of the spoilt white womg.n" rises in her; but she sees
in the Indian's eyes that she is not a woman to him but
"some strange, unaccountable thing, incomprehensible to him,
but Inimical.1 1 She was "powerless. And along with her
supreme anger there came a slightthrill of exultation. She
knew she was dead."
Here the meaning is both figurative of the loss of
her old self, and of the sacrificial death to follow. Since
she lives by will, once it is overcome, she has nothing to
live by. Yet this may be a step to a new life. Echoes of
this death and resurrection theme are contained in Lawrence's
correspondence in September with Mrs. Luhan, who had placed
24-5
herself In the hands of a psychiatrist.
On the journey to the Chilchui, the old men look at
her “as if, perhaps, her whiteness took away all her woman
hood, and left her as some giant,.female white ant." They
reach a point where the horse must he left behind, and tra
verse a narrow path across a cliff, she, unable to trust
her riding boots, on hands and knees, the Indians erect and
sure-footed in sandals. She wonders why she does not "hurl
herself down, and have done i The world was beloxv her. “
On the other side she sees, three thousand feet below,
a green valley and a village. The view is rather like that
from Kiowa ranch down into Taos Valley. Only the white
ness of the houses is unusual and frightens her. Probably
the suggestion is of the other-worldly- and, perhaps, of
greater purity than she has known. On the descent, through
a New Mexico landscape, she sees the bright autumn flowers
"as pale shadows hovering, as one who is dead must see them."
Near the village they are met by three elders, the
chief of whom looks at her with eyes of "extraordinary pierc
ing strength, without a qualm of misgiving in their demonish,
dauntless power." He looks past her resistance and challenge
"into 6he knew not what. 1 1 The Indians' eyes and their way
of looking at her are a motif all through the latter part
of the story, and it is noteworthy that Lawrence often uses
eyes as symbols of both blindness to spiritual qualities and
perception of them. "Foolhardily" she tells him that she
2 A6
seeks "the God of ..the Chilchui, " and assents, thinking it
is what they want, to the idea that she is "weary of her own
God.1 1 Their exultance at this has nothing of the "sensual
or sexual" but rather a "terrible glittering purity."
The village lands are "a network of little paths,
small streams, and little bridges among square, flowering
gardens." ' “No hoof of horse nor any wheel" has disfigured
the paths. In the central plaza are two larger houses
which Lawrence describes as much like the main buildings
at Taos Pueblo. She is conducted to a kiva-llke house and
led before the cacique, a very old man "with a far-off in
tentness, not of this world.". He asks if she brings her
heart to the Chilchui god, and when she answers "yes" new
clothing is brought her. At her refusal to change while
the men are present, powerful guards hold her while two old
men slit her clothing with knives and-remove it. At the
cacique’s order, her hair is loosened. Moistening his
fingertips, he "most delicately" touches her breasts, body,
and back. Each time she winces "as if Death itself were
touching her," but does not feel shamed. Her new clothing
is simple, colorful, embroidered with flowers. She is led
to a little house where, though kept a prisoner, she is
treated with Impersonal solicitousness.
The young Indian of the trail is her attendant.
From time to time he brings her a strange drink which,
2 4?
though pleasant-tasting, causes her to vomit violently.
Evidently this is a purification rite, as is much else.
Afterward she experiences a "soothing languor," and her
perceptions are heightened so that she feels that she can
"distinguish the sound of evening flowers unfolding*"
From the young Indian she learns that his forebears
have been caciques since before the Spaniards. He has
worked as a laborer in the United States and has traveled
as far as Ghlcago. When she asks what he did with his
long hair (*a symbol of life) while there, he is tormented,
and says that he hid it beneath bandana and hat. He had
gone only to gain knowledge at the behest of the old men,
because he would one day be cacique. His presence never
makes her self-conscious or sex-conscious, yet she sees
"that in some other mysterious way" hecis "darkly and
powerfully male."
Weeks pass for her in a contentment broken by mo
ments of horror and uneasiness at loss of "her own power!;"
The mere presence of the Indians takes away her will. Some
times the drinks brought her are emetics, but they bring
her the languor and mystic perception. Then as the days
grow shorter and colder, her will revives. When she in
sists on going out, she is led to the top of the big house
on the day of the great dance. The dance is described
much as Lawrence does the dances in the Indian essays.
248
Evidently he uses elements of a fall dance, perhaps that
at Taos Pueblo on San (Jeronimo. She feels her own death.
In the strange towering symbols on the heads
of the changeless, absorbed women she seemed
to read once more the Mene Mene Tekel Upharsln.
Her kind of womanhood, intensely personal and
Individual, was to be obliterated again, and
the great primeval symbols were to tower once
more over the fallen individual independence of
woman. The sharpness and the quivering nervous
consciousness of the highly-bred white woman
was to be destroyed again. . . .39
Here Lawrence states the theme of the story. Only the
Sacrifice remains to be told.
The young Indian explains the colors of the costumes,
the red, yellow, and black over white of the men, and the
black of the women. The men "are the fire and the day
time, " the women "the spaces between the stars at night."
The conception of the relationship of men and women, and
a touch of the symbolism, are to be found in such early
essays of Lawrence's as "The Crown." She is terrified by
his adding that when a white woman sacrifices herself to
the Indian gods, the Indian gods will take the ascendancy
once more. The return of the Indian gods receives full
scale treatment in The Plumed Serpent.. In a sense, "The
Woman Who Rode Away" affords Lawrence a proving ground for
the conception.
Now the sacrifice is consummated. As winter comes,
39
Ibid., pp. 82-83.
249
she feels always now the ' ‘ heightened, mystic acuteness and
a feeling as If she were diffusing out deliciously into the
harmony*of things." She hears the stars and the snow
speaking, and smells the sweetness of the moon "relaxing
to the sun in the wintry heaven."
Near December she is taken before the aged cacique,
stripped of her clothes, and touched by him as before.
She obediently makes the sign of peace and farewell; he
makes the sign of peace and is ready to die. A day of
ceremonial follows. During it her mystic perception is
further heightened. She passes more and more into the
"state of passional cosmic consciousness." She wears
blue because it is the color that retreats and is distant.
The blue-eyed people are "messengers from far-away," and
must now go back. It should be remembered that Lawrence
felt that the blue-eyed, blonde people were more abstract
and mentally conscious than the dark peoples of the south.
She will take a message to the sun, who will return to
the Indians when he sees among the Indian women the moon,
heretofore held bac£ by the white woman,
Lawrence treats the final ceremonies and the sacri
fice in great detail, not varying the rather deliberate
movement of the story. The elaborate preparation of her as
sacrifice involves perception on her part, though she is
in a trance-like state, of "the immense fundamental sadness,
250
the grimness of ultimate decision, the fixity of revenge,
and the nascent exultance of those that are going to
triumph." The old cacique and she are carried in litters
to the cave in a procession that Lawrence makes colorful
and rich and full of movement. At the cave she feels most
the frozen waterfall, “a fanged inverted pinnacle of ice."
She is taken into the cave by the priests, the people re
maining in an amphitheatre below, but participating through
the transparency of the ice. The final suspense comes as
she, upon the altar, and the old cacique, with upraised
knife, await the moment when the sun will reach her through
the ice. Here Lawrence leaves them. The knife does not
fall in the story. But the final concentration on the spirit
of the priest is, perhaps, more terrible in its sense of
relentless intensity. In the "black, empty concentration"
of his eyes
. . . there was power, power intensely abstract and
remote, but deep, deep to the heart of the earth,
and the heart of the sun. In absolute motionless
ness he watched till the red sun should send his
ray through the column of ice. Then the old man
would strike, and strike home, accomplish the
sacrifice and achieve the power.
The mastery that man must hold, and that passes
from race to race. 0
Mrs. Luhan too^ this story personally, as one in
which Lawrence thought he "finished" her "up.1 1 There is
little doubt that Lawrence had her in mind; yet it is
AO
Ibid.. p. 99.
251
equally clear that she and the cave near Taos afforded
him the imaginative means for another statement of a theme
that had appeared in his work before he knew her. Indeed
the conflict between seeking man obstructed by the wilful
consciousness of modern woman is present in Lawrence's
earliest work, although there it has no philosophic systema
tization. As for an element of triumph through imaginative
revenge, it is not unlike that of the stories from the
return to England. In "The Last Laugh" and "The Border
Line" corrupt modern man, bearing a resemblance to Murry,
is brought to death.
Actually "The Woman Who Rode Away" combines several
Lawrencean themes. The antagonism of the Indian conscious
ness and the white, and the mystic achievement of control
of the forces of the universe, may be found, of course,
in the animistic tendency of the summer, expressed in
letters and in the Indian essays. In the story, the
ritual is not only the means of destroying the woman's
"sharpness and quivering nervous consciousness" but of
bringing her release into a greater life. The concep
tion of a victory by the Indian gods over the white gods,
and a return to earth of the older gods, brings the story
closer than any other to the theme of The Plumed Serpent,
not to be revised and completed until the ensuing visit
to Mexico.
252
Technically, Lawrence's theme in' “The .Woman Who
Rode Away" called for a difficult hiend of reality and
fantasy. He must achieve suspension of disbelief by sug
gesting the mystic through believable detail. Perhaps
this accounts for the slow pace of the story through an
accumulation of detail. The detail always suggests the
culminating fate of the woman. Even her subjection to
her husband accounts in part for the trance-like state
that makes believable her increasing acquiescence in her
fate. The potential horror of the saerificex is ameliorated.
The Indians are considerate. The preparation for the sacri
fice is slow, impersonal, and calculated to render it less
painful. Nevertheless the movement is inexorable. It is
this that gives the story its tenseness, inevitability,
and doom. Despite complex detail, Lawrence never relaxes
this unifying tone.
As for his use of the American scene, it is eclectic.
The setting in the Sierra Madre is more New Mexican than
Mexican, and the Chilchui resemble the New Mexican Indians.
Lawrence's only concern with factual accuracy is to achieve
enough versimilitude to sustain belief.
_ hi ,
"The Princess" was the last of the summer's
stories to be completed, on October 8, three days before
A2
the Lawrences left the ranch for Mexico. Lil^e "The
^ Lawrence, St. Mawr Together with The Princess, pp.
189-238.
llO * - r\
Tedloch, The Frieda Lawrence Collection o f D. H.
Lawrence Manuscripts, p. 99.
253
Woman Who Rode Away," it has as its chief character a
modern woman unintegrated in the Lawrencean sense.
The first part of the story sketches her background
at great length. Dollie Urquhart received her informal
title of Princess and her peculiar training from her father,
Golin. Colin, "Just a bit mad," claimed royal blood from
his Scottish family. He was "one of those gentlemen of
sufficient but not excessive means who fifty years ago
wandered vaguely about, never arriving anywhere, never doing
anything, and never definitely being anything." When nearly
forty, he married a Hew England woman of twenty-two. But
"living with a fascinating spectre" broke her, and, having
"no great desire to live," she died when the Princess was
two. Thus Lawrence gives the Princess a double heritage
of other-worldliness, Celtic and Hew England.
Her father taught her to 'treat people as commoners.
You peel everything away from people, and there is
a green, upright demon in every man and woman; and
this demon is a man’s real self, and a woman's real
self. It doesn't really care about anybody, it
belongs to the demons and the primitive fairies,
who never care. But, even so, there are big demons
and mean demons, and splendid demonish fairies, and
vulgar ones. But there are no royal fairy women
left. . Only you, my little Princess. . . . You and
I are the last. When I am dead there will be only
you. And that is why, darling, you will never care
for any of the people in the world very much. Be
cause their demons are all dwindled and vulgar. ^
Thus, even as a child, the Princess was "as impervious as
Lawrence, St. Mawr Together with the Princess.
p. 192.
25k
crystal.1 1 She seemed 1 1 to understand things in a cold
light perfectly, with all the flush of fire absent." This
quality brought her violent antipathies from men, 1 1 she
was so assured, and her flower of maidenhood was so scent
less." A cabman in Rome, "to whom the phallic mystery was
still the only mystery,1 1 would turn against "the blasphemous
impertinence of her own sterility." She mistakenly attributed
this to her New England mother, not..seeing the truth about
herself.
When she was thirty-eight, virginal and looking ten
years younger, her father died after "fits of violence
which almost killed the Princess," to whom physical Vio
lence was horrible. His nurse, Miss Cummins, became her
companion.
All of this, some nine pages, is preparatory to
the Princess’ adventure in New Mexico. She is now alone
"in the raw, vast, vulgar open air." Her passion for her
father has already been transferred to Miss Cummins, so
that she herself is empty of feeling. The abstract idea
of marriage imposes "a sort of spell on her." She and
Miss Cummins, who is also virginal, decide to go to New
Mexico, which seems less vulgar than the Pacific coast.
In late August they arrive at a dude ranch in the
desert a mile from "San Cristobal Pueblo." There college
boys, and other men, hint at marriage but fail "before-
255
the look of sardonic ridicule in the Princess1 s eyes.*'
Only one man intrigues her, Romero, now a guide, but once
the owner of the ranch. His Spanish family has been de
feated by the white men, the failure of sheep-raising,
“and the fatal inertia which overcomes all men, at last,
on the desert near the mountains." He has the static
quality of the Mexican, "waiting either to die or to be
aroused into passion and hope." The Princess sees the
"spark of pride, or self-confidence, or dauntlessness" at
the center of his eyes and knoxirs that "his ’demon, 1 as her
father would have said," is a "fine demon." In a fishing
scene, his help causes her to feel in him "a subtle, in
sidious male kindliness.1 1 "A vague, unspoken intimacy"
grows between them. At the same time she feels that death
is not "far from her.1 1
The Princess and Miss Cummins ride horseback and
make camping trips with Romero. No white man has ever
shown the Princess "this power to help her across a dis
tance." At times she is "elated into her true Princess
self." But she does not think of marriage, "It was as If
their two ’daemons' could marry, were perhaps married. Only
their two selves . . . were for some reason Incompatible."
Thus is indicated the essential split between the true
self and its realization, and between the Princess and
L lL l
Ibid., p. 205*
2 56
Romero, dramatized in the remainder of the story.
She has complained that they never see deer, hears,
or lions. Romero tells her that these are found only in
remote, high places. With a "naive impulse of reckless
ness" she wishes to go to a shack far up that belongs to
him. He warns her of the hardships and loneliness, hut
"an obstinacy characteristic of her nature" seizes her and
she overrules Romero’s objections.
The trip is made through an October New Mexico land
scape. Miss Cummins, bringing up the rear, is a rather
ludicrous figure of inadequacy. The Princess, with
Romero's "black unheeding figure always travelling away
from her," feels "strangely helpless, withal elated."
As they 'travel upward in the shadow of "San Cristo
bal Canyon," a chill enters the Princess as she realizes
"what a tangle of decay and despair lay in the virgin
forests." When Miss Cummins* horse is lamed, she will
not continue because, despite Romero's assurances, "the
thought of a hurt animal always put her into a sort of
hysterics. " The Princess refuses to turn back. She
looks at Romero squarely and meets "the spark in his eye."
(It is as if she made him a promise.) He accompanies
Miss Cunnlms back as far as the end of the canyon, while
the Princess rides on alone, until he can rejoin her. She
is sure that Romero will not "do anything to her against
her will." She has a "fixed desire . . . to look:,into
2 57
the inner chaos of the Rockies."
In a valley, "soft and delicate as fairy-land,"
she camps to wait. Beyond were "the beautiful, but fierce,
heavy, cruel mountains with their moments of tenderness."
Two Indians, riding down from a hunt, join her. They say
that they have shot nothing, but she sees the hidden bulk
45
of a deer. This is evidently another foreshadowing note
of lawlessness. As they eat the food she provides, Romero
joins them, rests and eats; then the Princess and he ride
on alone. Romero now looks at her "with such a hard glint
in his eyes" that "for the first time she wondered if she
was rash."
Now an almost invisible trail crosses burned-over
forest, and the wind blows "like some vast machine." Over
the crest there is "nothing but mountains . . . empty of
life or soul." The Princess is frightened by the "anti
life." They pass evidence of the failure of a gold-miner,
and leave the Forest Service trail. Romero seems to her
"strange and ominous, only the demon of himself." On
foot, leading the horses, they slide down a great slope
(the approach to the village in "The Woman Who Rode Away"
was also downhill), and, after a rest, ride into a valley,
arriving at the shack,as the sun is "jnst about to leave
it."
45
^ Such an encounter is mentioned by Dorothy Brett
in Lawrence and Brett.
258
Almost all the details of the trip have built
atmosphere and mood for the struggle that now takes place.
As they make camp, the Princess feels that the shadow
will soon "crush her completely. 1 1 As she gets water at a
pool, a bobcat frightens her. In the shack with Romero,
she feels cornered. She will sleep in a bunk. Romero pre
pares a bed for himself on the floor. Outside Mars seems
to her "the blazing eye of a crouching mountain lion."
In the night she dreams of snow. Awaking, she can
not bear the cold, and wants "warmth, protection. . . , to
be taken away from herself."
And at the same time, perhaps more deeply than any
thing, she wanted to keep herself intact, intact,
untouched, that no one^ghould hare any power to
her, or rights to her.
She calls to Romero, and he, when she says that she wants
him to, warm her, takes her in his arms.
And he was warm, but with a terrible animal warmth
that seemed to annihilate her. ... She had never,
never wanted to be given over to this. But she
had willed that it should happen to her. \
In the morning she offends his pride by wishing to go back
at once. When she tells him that she did not like what
had happened the night before, she sees that she has
"given him a cruel blow." But she does not relent. She
wants "to regain possession of all herself." He says,
1 ^ 6
Ibid., p. 227.
kl
Ibid., p. 228.
259
"You Americans, you always want to do a man down. 1 1 When
she insists she did not "li^e last night," he says, "I
make you." He throws her clothes, and their saddles into
the water, and disappears with the rifle, leaving her
helpless. In the evening, he returns with a deer (a part
of the male role indicated, for example, in "Pan in America").
He draws her into the warmth of the sun, and, "stony and
powerless, 1 1 she has to submit.
Later, when she tells him that he can never conquer
her, he looks at her with "wonder, surprise, a touch of
horror, and an unconscious pain that crumpled his face
till it was like a mask." After flaying the deer, he
tells her that he will keep her there until she says that
she wants "to be with" him. "In a sombre, violent excess"
he expends his desire. She wishes to be "alone again, ;cool
and intact."
On the fourth day she sees two horsemen at the top
of the incline. Romero gets his gun, and when she tells
him not to shoot, asks for the last time if she likes
staying with him. At her "no," he shoots and hits one of
the horses. The Princess, watching Romero crouching behind
a rock wonders why she does not feel sorry.
But her spirit was hard and cold, her heart could
not melt. Though now she would have called him
to her, with love.
But no, she did not love him. She would never
260
love any man. Never i It. was fixed and sealed in
her, almost vindictively. a
This occurs just at the denouement. Romero is shot from
behind. Forest Service men appear and examine the body
with an offhand carelessness. When the blanketed Princess
is asked why Romero fired, she lies, saying that he had
gone out of his mind.
Brought down to the dude-ranch, the Princess is her
self "not a little mad." She pretends that a demented man
had shot her horse from'under her. The real affair is
hushed up. She departs "the Princess, and a vi-hgin in
tact. " Her hair is gray at the temples, and she is
"slightly crazy." She tells people her version of the
affair. "Later, she married an elderly man, and seemed
pleased."
In this story the conflict has, at first glance,
a certain ambiguity. The Princess seems a Lawrencean
aristocrat in her inheritance of a philosophy of the
essential self, varying among people from big and splen
did to mean and vulgar. Indeed, the demons of most people
are "dwindled and vulgar.1 1 Yet it becomes clear, as the
story progresses, that her abstraction from the world
£eeps her from the Lawrencean synthesis of intellect and
feeling, spirit and body. She has her chance to make it
when she encounters the "fine demon" of Romero, but fails
rwh.
Ibid., p. 236.
261
when she finds physical love repulsive. Although she
loses, physical virginity, she keeps intact the "hard and
cold" virginity of her spirit. In so doing, she destroys
Romero, who is the Lawrencean hero proudly refusing to
accept her rejection of the physical part of himself even
to the extremity of death at the hands of the organized
law that protects her.
Lou, in "St. Mawr," on the other hand, has known
only the physical side of sex without its mystery, and re
fuses contact until she may know both. Her revulsion is
from the trivial and promiscuous aspect of the flesh,
while the Princess cannot accept its true value when she
encounters it. Against her the man is broken. In the
third story of the summer, "The Woman Who Rode Away,” the
"individual independence" of the woman is broken, her
"quivering nervous consciousness" giving way to the "pas
sional cosmic consciousness."
In all this Lawrence himself clearly abhors the
personal and the self-conscious, an awareness of self that
brings emotional atrophy and death. Such a state seems
not far removed from what religionists have called "spiri
tual dryness," although recovery from it involved for
Lawrence the more strenuous task of integration, not rejec
tion of, the physical. In "The Border Line" he had named
as "the supreme modern terror" an "ashy, nervous horror of
262
the world." Our "white "brittleness" must "be crushed be
fore "the shadowy blood" can "move erect once more, in a
new implacable pride and strength." This conflict never
disappears from Lawrence's work. It is implicit in his
earliest writings, and thenceforward, with increasing for
mulation, finds expression in various forms, images, and
symbols, through his very last work.
Simultaneously he worked out a solution. It appears
in the work of this summer in New Mexico most positively
in the essays on the Indian ceremonies and beliefs. Man's
conquest of the phenomenal universe brings boredom. Only
consciousness of a relationship in which "everything is
alive and active, and danger is inherent in all movement,"
can overcome the boredom. Thus, the answer for Lawrence,
foreshadowed by the love of flowers and animals, of vitality
and movement, in the early work, lay in an animistic view
of the world. In this dynamic world, life was a dangerous
adventure, not in mere survival, or in recovering a lost
G-olden Age, but in becoming. "Out of the dragon's den
of the cosmos, we have wrested only the beginnings of our
being, the rudiments of our godhead,"
In this view, there is no resting place for the
alienated spirit. The flight from England and society
had taken Lawrence not only into a kind of essence of the
disorder of modern society in Mrs. Luhan's circle, but to
263
a New Mexico landscape that exhibited its own natural
savagery and sordidness. Lawrence’s struggle is now de
fined as a double one. Man must both destroy the old
social order and grapple with the cosmos itself to create
the new. Progress can be made by the indomitable fighter,
but the struggle is eternal. The role of the Promethean
hero-god Is complete.
PART V
RETURN TO MEXICO: THE PLUMED SERPENT:
1924-1925
CHAPTER I
THE LIFE
Lawrence’s purpose in returning to Mexico in
October, 1924, was manifold. His frequent illnesses were
*
usually described by him as colds and flu. During one
such illness at the ranch that summer he had spit blood,
but a doctor summoned over his protests had diagnosed the
trouble as bronchial and reassured him that his lungs were
strong.'*' He had a strong dislike for the recession of
vitality in nature which winter brought. The southern
climates with their warmth and color had become synony
mous with his thesis of the blood-consciousness. Just be
fore leaving the ranch, Lawrence wrote: ■ :
1 loathe winter. They gas about the Nordic
races, over here, but I believe they’re dead,
dead, dead. I hate all that comes from the
north.2
Life and the future lay both in the warmth of Mexico and'
in the novel which had been interrupted by the return to
Brett, Lawrence and Brett, pp. 139-141.
2
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 626.
2 65
England.
3
In Taos there was a last farewell with Mrs. Luhan
who was never to see him again, although they corresponded
in the following years, and he read and criticized her
autobiography. In Santa Fe there was a brief visit with
Bynner and Johnson. By the middle of October, the Lawrences
and Brett reached Mexico City after a train trip through
country still pregnant with violence.
Lawrence found the city "shabby and depressed, 1 1 and
expected nothing of the intellectuals and artists to whom
he had letters of introduction.. ". . I feel they're all
a bit of a fraud, with their self-seeking bolshevism."
No more revolutions were expected, but there was news of
murder and "messes." Both of the Lawrences suffered from
"terrible colds.
Nevertheless there was quite a round of social
activity, for Lawrence, and some lionizing. The F. E. N.
Club gave a dinner for him ;at which his statement that
being men together was more important than nationality
or profession failed to achieve his intention. However,
his friendship with the young Mexican poet, Luis Quintanilla,
3
Luhan. Lorenzo in Taos, p. 278.
k
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 627-628.
5
Reported somewhat differently by Brett, Lawrence
and Brett, pp. 162-16^, and Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But
the Wind. . . ," pp. 162-163.
266
was begun,^ from which was toremerge the satirical frag
ment, "See Mexico After." He met, and sat for, Edward
Weston, the photographer. Weston found him "frankly up
set, distressed" on this second Mexico visit after having
7
been "thrilled" by the first one.
Lawrence found the British Consul "very attentive."
The Vice-Consul, whose brother was a priest In the Cathedral
Chapter at Oaxaca, recommended the climate there. His
8
brother would "sponsor" them. Later Weston, in a visit to
Brett, Lawrence and Brett, p.. 164.
7 .
Edward Weston, "Lawrence in Mexico," The Carmelite.
Ill (March 19, 1930), ix-xi. Looking back on this in 1930,
Weston surmised that Lawrence was in a "highly neurotic
state" and found evidence of this in The Plumed Serpent,
where "trivial inaccuracies persist, and form a wrong or
one-sided impression of Mexico. Lawrence was bewildered,
he was frightened, but he over-dramatized his fear." De
spite fine passages, it is "a book on Mexico which could
have been written only by a neurotic Anglo-Saxon." Weston
attributed the neuroticism to Lawrence's bad health, al
though he admitted that Anglo-Saxons in normal health
feel awe of the Mexican landscape. In Mexico City, after
publication of the novel, Weston found the artists and
writers laughing over it. "Covarrublas cartooned Lawrence
at his desk, writing, triple outlines around him to in
dicate shaking with fear." Weston offered his remarks
not as literary criticism but as his "intense reactions."
He was more acute in dealing with Lawrence's interest in
drawing and painting. Showing Lawrence drawings and
photographs, and reading in The Plumed Serpent the remarks
on Rivera's frescoes, he felt that Lawrence had no plastic
sense and that his later "venture in painting must be a
carrying on of his literary viewpoint in paint." What
Weston did not note about The Plumed Serpent was that,
despite a present and localized nervous state In Lawrence,
the novel contained Lawrencean themes of long standing,
as we shall see.
8
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 627-628.
267
Oaxaca, found that the brother, Padre Ricardo (Richards),
had been arrested and deported to Mexico City. Apparently
9
this was after Lawrence’s stay, but hints of the coming
religious-civil war could not have failed to impress him
as he replaced Christianity with the religion of Quetzalcoatl
i‘ n The Plumed Serpent.
The Lawrences and Brett left Mexico City November 8
10
and arrived m Oaxaca on November 10 after a long, slow
journey on a train bearing armed guards. After a week in
the Hotel Francia, the Lawrences rented a room with patio
and garden from the priest, Richards, Brett remaining in
the hotel.'1 ' 1
The sojourn in Oaxaca lasted from November 10 to
late February, 1925. Here in landscape and flowers, and
in the market-place, were the color and strangeness that
stimulated Lawrence. In the Zapotec Indians, "quite fierce,"
he found again raw material for the vision of The Plumed
Serpent. Again he noted the overlay of modern materialism
that disturbed him.
The Indians are queer little savages, and awful
agitators, fsic! pump bits of socialism over them
and make everything just a mess. . . . The Spanish-
Mexican population just rots on top of the black
Weston, pjD. cit.. p. xi. Weston found Lawrence's
name on the register of the Hotel Francia, but did not meet
him again.
Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection .of £. H.
Lawrence Manuscripts, p. 99*
11 Brett, Lawrence and Brett, p. 173 ff.
268
savage mess. And socialism here is a farce of
farces: except very dangerous, ^
As he thought of trying to finish the novel that winter,
he felt again the bitter contrast of natural beauty with
mankind.
The world gives me the gruesomes, the more I see
of it. That is, the world of people. This country
is so lovely, the sky is perfect, blue and hot
every day, and flowers rapidly following flowers. ^
The conflict with Murry was revived by an exchange
of letters. Lawrence wrote to him:
The Adelphl was bound to dwindle: though why not
fatten it up a bit. Why~in the name of hell didn t
you rouse up a bit, ls.st January, and put a bit of
gunpowder in your stuff,- and fire a shot or two?
But you preferred to be soft, and to go on stirring
your own finger in your own vitals. . . . Spunk is
what one wants, not introspective sentiment,1^
Of his own conflict, he wrote that sometimes, when America
got on his nerves, he wished he had gone to 1 1 Sicily or
South Spain for the winter." After a few months, if he
still felt “put out by the vibration of this rather
malevolent continent," he would try "the mushiness of
Europe once more, for a while."
Fancy, even a Zapotec Indian, when be becomes
governor, is only a fellow in a Sunday suit grin
ning and scheming. People never, never, never
change: that’s the calamity. Always the same mush.
12 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 630-631.
13
^ Ibid,. p. 631.
14
Ibid.
15 Ihld.. p. 632.
2 69
Lawrence found subjects for short essays in the vil
lage and country life about him, broadly observed and in
intimate contact, as with the mozo of his own household.
Despite warnings against bandits, there were walks into the
countryside, and even use of the shade of a bush in the
16
desert as a place to write. . By January 10, 1925, he was
able to send to his agent the four articles originally
titled as a unit, "Mornings in Mexico.M He was "getting
ahead" with the novel, and, if heaven were with him,
"should finish it this month." He hhd "a good deal done
17
from last year." As for changes in that portion, he
said to Dorothy Brett, who typed as he wrote: "Chapala
has not really the spirit of Mexico; it is too tamed, too
18
touristy. This place is more untouched." While the
scene of the novel remained Chapala, the life he found at
Oaxaca entered by transposition.
As the work went forward, there were, besides the
strains of a daily life restricted by fear and regulations,
tensions between the Lawrences and Brett. These had be
gun at the New Mexico ranch,„-but now reached.a crisis.
Mrs. Lawrence felt that Brett "was becoming too much part"
of their lives and wished her to leave. Lawrence at first
Brett, Lawrence and Brett. p. 192.
^ Tbe Letters of jD. H. Lawrence. p. 633*
xs
Brett, Lawrence and Brett, p. 181.
270
19
thought Mrs. Lawrence "a jealous fool,” hut when she
insisted, Brett returned to New Mexico by way of Mexico
City. Lawrence wrote to her in a vein typical of his haru.
dl ing of' love ‘ -in s t orie s and e s say s:
Love is chiefly bunk: an over-exaggeration of the
spiritual and individualistic and analytic side.
. . . I do not want your friendship, till you have
a full relation somewhere, a kindly relation of both
halves, not In part. as all your friendships have
been. That which is in part is in itself a be
trayal. . . . I refuse any more of this “dedicate
friendship1 ' business, because it damages one's whole
ness.
Nevertheless, I don't feel unkindly to you. In
your one half you are loyal enough. But the very
halfness makes your loyalty fatal. . . . Try and
recover your wholeness, that is all. Then friend-
ship is possible, in the kindliness of one's heart.
The ties with Europe were another source of con
flict. Mrs. Lawrence felt that she must see her aged
mother in G-ermany and her children. Lawrence's sister
in England, under the stress of their father's death,
wished to see him. If all went well with the. novel,
2l
Lawrence planned to be in England by March. At times
he thought with homesickness'of the beauty of ah English
spring, which he had not seen for years. He felt also
22
the need of supporters, who might be found at home. But
Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . . ,“ p. 165.
20
The Letters of D. H.- Lawrence. pp. 635-636.
21 „
Ibid.. p. 633,
^ Brett, Lawrence and Brett. p. 198.
271
letters from Murry again reminded him of the fiasco of the
previous return. He wrote to Murry that if he returned, he
wanted to see only his sisters and his agent. “Last time
was once too many." As for Murry's relationship with him, he
said, "You can’t betray me, and that's all there is to
that. Ergo, Just leave off loving me. Let's wipe off all
23
that Judas-Jesus slime."
The letter to Murry was dated January 28, and the
Lawrences were planning to leave Oaxaca in a fortnight.
But a serious illness, at first thought to be malaria,
forced a change of plan. Lawrence fell ill as he was
oh
finishing The Plumed Serpent. When the local native
doctor would not attend him, he was nursed by Mrs. Lawrence,
generously helped by the little colony of Englishmen and
Americans. Lawrence felt he would die in Oaxaca, but he
slowly became a little better and was taken to Mexico City.
There a specialist told them that he had tuberculosis.
Evidently this was the first such diagnosis and came as a
25
shock. He had a "year or two at the most." March 11
Lawrence wrote to his agent that he must not risk the
voyage to England or the English climate. His only al
ternatives were Mexico or the ranch, and he chose the
The Letters of D, H. Lawrence. pp. 636-637.
oil
Mrs. Lawrence thought this had some effect on the
ending., For a discussion, see the analysis of the novel
in the next section.
p C
Frieda Lawrence. "Hot I But the Wind. . pp. 165-
167. ------------------
2?2
latter. "This is rather a blow indeed, it's been a series
of blows lately.
The journey back to New Mexico, difficult at best,
was complicated at the border by the immigration laws, Mrs.
Lawrence reporting that the immigration officials "made
all the difficulties in the ugliest fashion to prevent us
from entering the States." Only intervention by the Ameri
can Embassy made entry possible.Indeed, Lawrence had
resorted to rougeing his cheeks to simulate health, both
at El Paso and earlier in Mexico City, where he could not
stand the stares of people in the streets.^® By early April
he had begun a slow convalescence at the ranch.
^ betters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 638.
Frieda Lawrence, "Not I But the Wind. . .," p. 167.
The immigration laws operated against those with such a
disease as tuberculosis. Bond might be permitted to insure
that the ill person would not become a public charge.
Brett, Lawrence and Brett, pp. 2l£-2l6.
CHAPTER II
THE WORK
At some time during this Mexican visit, perhaps
in Mexico City, Lawrence produced the bit of satire titled
"See Mexico After, by Luis Q.1,1 It is Lawrence at his
most mischievous. Taklng the United States tourist slogan,
"See America First," he weaves about it, from the point
of view of a Mexican, fantastic satire of the exploitation,
egotism, and shallowness of Mexico*s northern neighbor.
"Luis Q." is evidently intended to be Luis Quintanilla,
the young poet Lawrence met in Mexico City. Later, in the
Mexican diplomatic service, Quintanilla must have looked
on Lawrence's rendering of his complaints with mingled-
feelings.
Lawrence *s major work at Oaxaca was, of course,
revision and completion of The Plumed Serpent. But he
found stimulus and time to do the four Mexican sketches,
originally titled by him "Mornings in Mexico, " finally
retitled for publication in the book of that name,"Corasmin
and the Parrots," "Walk to Huayapa," "The Mozo," and
"Market Day," They date roughly from the beginning of
the Oaxaca sojourn in October, 192L, to January 10, 1925,
when they had been typed and were sent to his agent.
1 Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence.
pp; 111-116.
274
"Corasmin and the Parrots” may be dated by its
reference to "Christmas next week.” In something of the
manner of the poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Lawrence
contemplates the relationship of the parrots, Corasmin,
the dog, Rosalino, the servant, and himself.
The opening paragraphs cut away the conventional
and the pompous. The setting in the patio is given with
deliberate bareness that substantiates the thrust.
All it amounts to is one little individual looking
at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the
page of his exercise book.
It is a pity we don’t always remember this. . .
when books come out with grand titles, like The
Future of America or The European Situation. . .
Perception of this particular morning follows in terms
of scents and sounds, the latter leading to the whistling
of the parrots on which the essay is. focused.
First the birds imitate the whistling of Rosalino,
who is sweeping the patio. It is unlike him to whistle
when his masters are about. His appearance, with his
head "rather dropping and hidden," makes one laugh, as
does the parrots’ exaggeratedly exact imitation.
The birds begin imitating a human calling the dog,
Corasmin, and pour over the human voice "a suave, prussic-
acid sarcasm." Then they "yap" like Corasmin, who moves
^ D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico (New York,
1927), P. 4. K-----------
3 IMd., p. 3.
275
"with slow resignation" to the shade. "Unspeakably re
signed, " he is "not humble. He does not kiss the rod."
The birds continue to torment him with "antediluvian
malevolence. . . rippling out of all the vanished, spite
ful aeons;" but he remains master of his soul without the
"lust of self-pity" of such "human bombast" as Henley's
"Invictus." Such self-pity belongs "to the next cycle
of evolution.1 1
The mention of past ages, and evolution, prepares
for reflection on the origin of the relationship of parrots,
man, and dog. The Aztec idea of "worlds successively
created and destroyed" pleases Lawrence's "fancy better
than the long and weary twisting of the rope of Time and
Evolution." He likes to think of the end of the world
of lizards and the beginning of the world of birds, humming
birds, flamingoes, parrots, peacocks, and apart from them
"unwieldy skinny-necked monsters;" then the end of. this
with the carrying over to the world of' animals of a few
parrots*, peacocks*, and flamingoes* eggs. Among the
animals was ''curly, little white Corasmin. " In this
world of new sounds, the birds felt superseded, only the
larks and warblers cheering up to sing. The parrot, among
others, felt particularly bitter, and began to jeer at and
mock Corasmin.
Then, according to the Aztecs, out of the floods
2?6
that destroyed the previous Sun "rose our own Sun, and
little naked man." Corasmin "began to answer the call of
man, and the parrot began to jeer and imitate this call
too. The monkey, "cleverest of creatures," but unable
to imitate man, now only gibbers
. . . across the invisible gulf in time,
which is the "other dimension" that clever
people gas about: calling it "fourth dimen
sion, " as if you could measure it with a foot-
rule. ...
Corasmin recognizes the other dimension, as does
his master. The parrots wriggle "inside the cage of the
other dimension, hating it." Even Rosalino, looking
up "with his eyes veiled by their own blackness. . . ,
hiding and repudiating" is separated by "the gulf of the
other dimension." He can- imitate his master.
And I have to laugh at his me, a bit on the wrong
side of my face, as he has to grin on the wrong
side of his face when I catch his eye as the parrot
is whistling him. With a grin, with a laugh we
pay tribute to the other dimension. But Corasmin
is wiser. In his clear, yellow eyes is the self-
possession of full admission.
The Aztecs said this world, our Sun,, would
blow up from inside, in earthquakes. Then what
will come, in the other dimension, when we are
superseded?-?
The entire sketch evolves from the little scene
in the patio and from Lawrence's acute non-mechanistic
sense of individuality among the forms of life. It:.is as
^ Ibid.. p. 15.
5 Ibid., p. 18.
277
though the consciousnesses of parrots, dog, Indian, and
white artist, impinged on each other without blurring.
Parrots and dog are saved from anthropomorphic sentimen
tality by the aggressiveness of the first and the lack
of self-pity in Corasmin. Lawrence1s' fascination with the
moment and the contact, unambiguous as so many human
relationships were, is plain. The Aztec “Suns1 1 live
brilliantly and sharply without the boredom and desuetude
he felt in the historical and scientific framework.
He himself uses the term “fancy," and it is clear
that he is not advancing any sort of material explana
tion. He is trying to capture the qualities of a drama
involving consciousnesses separated by a dimension other
than the measurable; hence the refusal to use the Einsteinian
"fourth dimension" as completely analogous. Despite an
air of improvisation, the essay grows steadily from the
initial setting and tone and is highly unified.
In "Walk to Huayapa" both tone and encounter with
the "other dimension" are continued. On Sundays one must
"go somewhere," though Lawrence would prefer to remain
in the patio with Corasmin and the parrots. "...
Humanity enjoying Itself is . . . a dreary spectacle."
Rosalino, asked if he wishes to go, answers iirith hs
eternal, indefinite "How not, Senor." A few steps take
them outside Oaxaca to plain and mountains, which dwarf
278
the tiny efforts of men. There is a note of irony, and
perhaps exasperation, in "?I will lift up mine eyes unto
the hills, whence cometh my strength.' At least one can
always do that, in Mexico." Two tiny, ephemeral towns
are visible in the distance. Rosalino cannot identify
them. "Among the Indians it is not becoming to know any
thing, not even one's own name. . . . Americans would call
him a dumb-bell."
Thus, on the walk that follows, Rosalino is the
Indian consciousness puzzling and frustrating the white
consciousness, but somewhat closer to it, as companion,
than the totally strange Indians encountered. The
farthest village is chosen as destination because it is
"so alone and, as it were, detached from the world in
which it lies." Even when one approaches a big city like
Guadalajara, his "heart gives a clutch, feeling the
pathos, the isolated tininess of human effort."
Indian women encountered on the road avoid the
little party as if they "were potential bold brigands."
Rosalino, catching his master's grin, laughs in derision.
A hawk swoop's so low they can hear the hiss of its wings.
Cattle tended by two boys approach, and a young bull eyes
them "with some of the same Indian wonder-and-suspicion
stare." in this brief scene Lawrence introduces a
complementary physical note in the "rich physique" and
279
dark ""bluish hair" of one of the boys. This, with the
different consciousness, distinguishes the Indians.
At Huayapa the grandiosely-named streets are only
tracks, and no one is visible. There is "a sense of
darkness among the silent mango trees, a sense of lurking,
of unwillingness." For orientation, they seek the church
and its plaza. "The great church stands rather ragged, in
a dense forlornness, for all the world like some big white
human being, in rags, held captive in a world of ants.1 ^
Under a shed the men of the village are gathered amid a
silence that is "heavy, furtive, secretive." Rosalino
is reluctant to tell what they are doing. Inside the
church they find a "Gulliver's Travels fresco" and a
Christ "wearing a-pair of woman's frilled knickers."
An Indian prays with his "back stiff, at once humble and
resistant," and. reveals himself as Verger when he "child
ishly, almost idiotically" removes the candles.
Back in the plaza, they find that the men are
being canvassed for votes. The system of voting arouses
Lawrence's satlBe of democracy.
My dear fellow, this is when democracy becomes real
fun. You vote for one red ring inside another red
ring, and you get a Julio Echegaray. You vote for
a blue dot inside a blue ring, and you get a Socrate
Ezequiel Tos. . . . Independence:; Government by the
6
Ibid., p. 3d-.
280
People, of the People, for the People: We all
live in the Calle &e la Reforma, in Mexicol?
Now the little party tries to buy fruit, visible
on trees. Lawrence builds their frustration to a comical
climax, as they are turned away by person after person.
Finally they are told to see Ruiz, and find him to be a
man who had turned them away before. "But we don't belong
to the ruling race for nothing. Into the yard we march."
With a few oranges and limes, costing more than
the market price, they seek high ground outside the vil
lage, where the water will be safe. They pass gangs of
men leaving the plaza who eye them as if they were "coyote,
a zopilote, and a white she-bear." The men's "Adios" is
'like a roll of cannon shot." When they encounter an old
woman at an orchard, Rosalino, "getting bold," asks for.
fruit and is told it is not ripe. They eat lunch beside
a i-fater-channel above the gully in which the water used
for bathing runs. Hearing a sound Lawrence investigates
and sees.
. . . a woman, naked to the hips, standing washing her
other garments upon a stone. She has a beautiful
full back, of a deep orange colour, and her wet
hair is divided and piled. In the water a few
yards upstream two men are sitting naked, their
brown-orange giving off a glow in the shadow, also
washing their clothe s.g Their wet hair seems to
stream blue-blackness.
7 IMd.. p. 37.
8
Ibid., p. k6.
281
This use of color to Indicate separateness of the native
from the white increases toward the end of the sketch.
There is an incident with the old woman of the orchard, who
now offers them fruit free, with her eye on the bottle
holding their lemonade. Rosalino’s laughing prediction
that the fruit is no good later turns out to be true,
bat she had obtained the empty bottle, which to her was
"a treasure." There is a last encounter with a bather.
. . . I thought again what beautiful suave, rich
skins these people have: a sort of richness of the
flesh. It goes, perhaps, with the complete absence
of what we call "spirit."9
The next and last paragraph ends the essay on a note of
repose and satisfaction in the immediate moment. ". . .
Even the next five minutes are far enough away, in Mexico,
on a Sunday afternoon."
The negative resistance of the Indian, and the positive
value of richness of physique are both used thematically
Plumed Serpent. Also used are the tremendous
distance, the overwhelming landscape, and the pathos of
"the isolated tininess of human effort."
The narrative thread of "The Mozo" extends from
"Waikato Huayapa." In,the latter, and in "Corasmin and
the Parrots," Rosalino is obliquely portrayed in both
his separateness, as an Indian, and in his intimate re
lationship with his masters. In "The Mozo" he becomes
9 Ibid., p. Ip9.
0
282
the center of attention.
He may have Indian blood other than Zapotec, or
he may be "only a bit different," the difference lying
“in a certain sensitiveness and aloneness, as If he were
a mother’s boy." There follows a brief fantasy on the
Aztec gods to account for the usual hardness of the Indian
made, contrasted with Rosalino.
The goddess of love is goddess of dirt and prostitu
tion. . . , blatant and accessible.
And then, after all, when she conceives and brings
forth, what is it she produces? What is the infant-
god she tenderly bears? Guess, all ye people, joy
ful and triumphant I
You never could.
It is a stone knife.
. . . To this day, most of the Mexican Indian
women, seem to bring forth stpne knives. . ., sons of
incomprehensible mothers, with their black eyes
like flints, and their stiff little bodies as
taut and as keen as knives of obsidian.10
The tone of the passage mingles distaste for this native
concept and a satirical thrust at Ideal religion, an
irony that appears elsewhere.
There is a difference in Rosalino’s size, In his
eyes, not "glaring, " ana. in his awareness of other beings.
"Usually, these people have no correspondence with one
at all." Such a lack of correspondence had been explored
in "Walk to Huayapa."
There follows a long passage on how the white man
appears to the Indian. He is "a sort of extraordinary
10 PP- 5^-55
white monkey that, by ounning, has learnt lots of semi-
magical secrets of the universe, and made himself "boss
of the show. 1 1 Horrible to the Indian are the white man's
notion of “exact spots of time," of distance, money,
and honesty. To the Indian "... . the before and the after
are the stuff of consciousness. The instant moment is for
ever keen with a razor-edge:of oblivion, like the knife of
sacrifice.^’ He is not naturally dishonest or avaricious.
"He doesn't care. 1 1 But- "he has to learn the tricks of the
white monkey-show." Here Lawrence thrusts at "the strange
monkey virtue of charity" as opposed-to the Indians' simple
sharing and explains the Indians' incomprehension of medi
cine by their lack of concern for all but the moment. They
adapt themselves "so long as the devil does not rouse" in
them, seeing the white men "get the work out of us, the
sweat, the money, and then taking the very land from us,
. 112
the very oil and metal out of our soil," All this is
somewhat in the nature of a digression in which Lawrence
lashed at exploitation and other things he dislikes in
white civilization. The essay then returns to Rosalino,
who also finds the "white monkey-tricks" amusing.
The details of Rosalino's life are now given a
simple, bare enumeration, leading to his retirement, when
_
Ibid., p. 59.
1?
Ibid., p. 62.
ZQk
his duties are over, to a "bench, his bed, in the open
entrance-way;. His anomalous position between the two
civilizations is made clear. He studies Spanish, the
futility of which is illustrated by his writing out a
Spanish love-poem which has no meaning for him. After two
more years of night-school he may be able "to read and
write six intelligible sentences" and return to his native
village to become, perhaps, alcalde. More Important to him
than his meager salary whould be the glory of ".being able
to boss."
There follows the sequel to the walk to Huayapa,
and a further explanation of Rosalino's anomalous posi
tion in the Mexican world. After the return from Huayapa
he suffered a revulsion from the happiness and association
of the walk and fell into hatred and "the Indian gloom."
We had some devilish white-monkey trick up our
sleeve; we wanted to get at his soul, no doubt,
and do it the white monkey's damage. We wanted to
get at his heart*, did we? But his heart was an
obsidian knife. *
Through several days he fluctuated between wishing to
return to his village and to stay. What had struck him,
on the visit of Huayapa, was "the black Indian gloom of
nostalgia."
The Mexican who had helped find a replacement,
13 I^ld.. p. 69.
eventually not needed, added another bit of information.
Recruited in the last revolution, Rosalino, having a
"horror of serving in a mass of men" that was like Lawrence1
had refused to leave the village and had been beaten and
left for dead by the soldiers. The Injuries explained his
refusal to move furniture. The mozo of the Mexican friend
had fared even worse because a cousin had given informa
tion to the losing side. Imprisoned, and then carried
away, he had reappeared with his neck horribly swollen from
torture by hanging.
Is it any wonder that Aurelio and Rosalino,
when they see the soldiers with guns on their
shoulders marching towards the prison with some
blanched prisoner between them— and one sees it
every few days— stand and gaze in a blank kind
of horror, and look at the-patron, to see if
there is any refuge?
Not to be caughtJ Not to be caught 1 It must
have been the prevailing motive of Indlan-Mexico
life since long before Mgntezuma marched his
prisoners to sacrifice.
This brutality, with its accompanying fear, is
also used thematically in The Plumed Serpent.
In "Market! Day," the last of the sketches, the
continuity of character of the other three is lost, but
continuity of tone and interpretation is partially main
tained. The first three sentences present the time as
one of transition, the "last Saturday before Christmas,"
Ibid., p. 77.
286
the old year nearly gone, and a momentous one coming.
The fourth sentence initiates the transitional movement
and imagery which pervade the rest of the essay. "Dawn
was windy, shaking the leaves, and the rising sun shone
under a gap of yellow cloud."
Despite the cloud, the sun touched "at once"
yellow flowers, the magenta of the hougainvillea and the
red of poinsettia, which in Mexico takes the place of
holly-berries. Yucca is blossoming; coffee-berries are
turning red; there are hibiscus, and a tree of "the acacia
sort" puts up "fingers of flowers" with a circular motion
in the wind. Later this image of motion is linked to
the movement of people coming to market.
There is a brief reflection on this "wheeling and
pivoting upon a centre" and upon the anomaly of concep
tions of straight lines "when space is curved, and the
cosmos is sphere within' sphere. 1 1 "The straight course
is hacked.out in rounds, against the will of the world."
A transition to the plain leading from the mountains is
made by the sentence: "Yet the dust advances like a ghost
along the road. . . ." Every image is in terms of move
ment as the natives travel townward, accelerating gradually
to a run. The slow movement of oxen forms a contrast.
The reflection on circular movement is returned to in
mention of the Serranos, Indians from the hills, who have
287
"no goal, any more than the hawks in the air, and no course
to run, any more than the clouds," and will simply return
home tomorrow.
The market itself follows, first in terms of noise
after the continuous movement of the first part. The
purpose of the market is "to exchange, above all things,
human contact. " Market and religion are "tx-ro great ex
cuses for coming together to a centre."
The unity of sound continues in the swift bargain
ing, in dialogue, for flowers, in which the vendor "had
had one more moment of contact, with a stranger, a per
fect stranger. 1 1 The arrangement of the market is sketched
swiftly, the assault of the serape men is safely passed,
and there follows another bargaining in dialogue, terse
and sharp, for huaraches.
The essay approaches its end in a description of
the natives as a group, like the other essays in terms
of "brown flesh," "wild, staring, eyes," "black hair"
gleaming "blue-black," and falling "thick and rich over
their foreheads, like gleaming bluey-black feathers."
Some will spend the night in town, but many will begin
an exodus that night.
There is no goal, and no abiding place, and
nothing is fixed, not even the cathedral towers.
The cathedral towers are slowly leaning, seeking the
curve of return. As the natives curved in a strong
swirl, towards'the vortex of the market. Then on
a strong swerve of repulsion, curved out and away
288
again, into space. . . . Everything is meant to
disappear. Every curve plunges into the vortex and
is lost, re-emerges with a certain relief and takes
to the open, and there is lost again.
Only that which is utterly intangible, matters.
The contact, the spark of exchange. • ' * ■ 5
Thus Lawrence contemplated the life at Oaxaca in
four integrated sketches. In the first he accounted
imaginatively for the jeering of the parrots in terms of
another dimension, a lingering from a different cycle of
life. A clmracteristic of his perception, from his very
earliest work, is the rendering of sharp impingement and
conflict of individualities, both human and non-human.
It is clear that this is one of his important qualities
as a person and as an artist, bringing him vitality and
greshness. He loved the new and strange, and preferred
- the clean break of cycles of life to a chain of continuity
that, to him, brought a sense of weariness and decay,
qualities he came to identify with the Institutions of
western civilization in his time. There is an important
personal reason, not emphasized heretofore in this study,
for his love of immediate vivid life. That reason is
the continual•precariousness of his health. There is
little doubt that his aggressiveness and worship of
vitality is linked with his constant fight against the
threat of illness, and increasingly in revolutionary,
disease-ridden Mexico, against the imminence of death.
15 ILid.. pp. 95-96.
289
In "Walk to Huayapa" Lawrence contemplated the dif
ferent, resistant consciousness of the Indian. He succeeds
in creating Vividly the contretemps. He participates in
the frustration and exasperation of the white conscious
ness, yet is more sympathetic with the Indian than with
the church "held captive" hy him, satirizes the mechanics
of democracy, and is drawn irresistibly by "the richness
of the flesh" which "goes, perhaps, with the complete
absence of what we call ‘spirit The essay ends in
repose and satisfaction in the moment.
"The Mozo" is most filled with the unresolved con
flict. In the passage on the Aztec goddess of love and
her bearing "a stone knife," there is both repulsion and
a touch of parody of Christian hymns. This is followed
by satire of the white man as a monkey performing charitable
acts, practicing methodical medical cures, and exploiting
labor. It is apparent ths.t to Lawrence neither civiliza
tion is entirely satisfactory, but he inclines heavily
to the Indian. As for the modern Mexican revolutions and
their ideologies, Rosalino and Aurelio have suffered tor
ture from the zeal to reform. A threat hangs over every
thing, and "the prevailing motive of Indian-Mexico life
since long before Montezuma" must have been, "Hot to be
caught.1 1 Lawrence had felt keenly in his own civilization
such fear, however much more the coercion of the individual
290
had been refined. In Mexico he found it again in a more
violent essence.
In "Market Day" the brief contact, "the spark of
exchange," within the flux of movement in curves without
fixed goal, is important to the natives. How much more
so to Lawrence, cut off from the ordinary aims of his
culture, despising the fixed and static, loving movement,
vitality, rich color?
The essays are little flashes of the■Mexican- ex- -
perience, but the synthesis of Lawrence's experience on
the American continent was 'being worked out in The Plumed
Serpent. His chief protagonist was again a woman, Kate
Leslie, struggling with the doubts and conflicts of her
"white" consciousness and her relationship with men. She
finds at least a partial resolution of her-problems in a
revival of the "dark" gods, who are not a factual equivalent
of the Aztec gods but Lawrence's conception of a vital
synthesis. The Lawrencean heroes are Don Ramon, prophet
of the new religion, and Don Cipriano, his lieutenant,
and soldier of the movement, whom Kate eventually marries.
All other characters are subordinate to these three, throw
ing into relief their struggle.
Kate begins as a Lawrencean heroine who is already
in rebellion against the values and relationships of modern
Europe and Mexico, let she fears the manifestations of
ancient Mexico with its primitive forces, and approaches
with much resistance and many revulsions the modern incarna
tion of those forces in Ramon and Cipriano. Her will and
individuality must he lost in a vaster world of feeling
and participation. As the rebellious, and hence warrior-
woman, she must take her place beside a warrior-husband
whom she is to sustain. The focus of the novel is on her
inner tensions as she struggles to mahe the transition.
Her problem is a major Lawrencean problem, stemming
from the artist's own need. It can be observed in his very
early work, and, as we have seen, it occupied him in the
summer of 1 9 2 b in “The Woman Who Rode Away,1 ' in “The
Princess,1 1 and in “St. Mawr," where the questing woman, Lou,
is left in withdrawal from the world. It.was an aspect
of his own marriage.. When Kate feels that she must return
to the children by a former marriage, and to her mother>
one recognizes the long-standing difficulty of Mrs. Lawrence*
children by her first marriage, and the tie to her.aged
mother in Germany, whom ■ Lawrence loved and admired. In
deed, Mrs. Lawrence's return to Europe in 1923 had brought
a separation which illustrated the conflict more vividly,
perhaps, than any other event in their relationship, in
terrupting.' as it did both the plan for a colony in Mexico
and completion of The Plumed Serpent. It seems inescapable
that much of Lawrence's handling of women in his stories
is symbolic action. In "The Woman Who Rode Away" he de
stroys his prototype of the inimcal woman, as once in real
life he had threatened to hill Mrs. Luhan. In "The Princess"
he gives up that fantastic abstraction o'f a woman, aloof,
and untouchable, to the force of one of his "primitive"
men, although she breaks him with her will and escapes
*
less damaged than he. It is as though the Lawrence of the
mother-complex, hating a brutal, lower-class father, yet
seeing at length his humiliation and despair, and seeking
to reverse the pattern, had created an imaginative world
in which the superior woman, both of class and ego, must
be brought to subjection. Lawrence's heroes are usually
lower-class men of subtle, primitive power, as in "The Fox,"
and Knud Merrild believes,the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterlev's
Lover to be a partial portrait of Lawrence's father. In
The Plumed Serpent Kate shares the common fate of the woman
in opposition to the Lawrencean philosophy and direction,
and marries at last the pure Indian, Cipriano, full possessor
of the "dark" forces of sex.
But Kate's conflict contains much more than this.
She is in many ways Lawrence himself, coming from the
spiritual fear and failure of Europe to an unformed country
where primitive physical fear and forces are dominant.
While both Ramon and Cipriano know Europe and the failure
of European culture in Mexico, it is chiefly Kate's scruples,
293
individual will, and repulsions that must be resolved.
Her perception of the violence proceeding from lack of
realization, of the opposition and lack of sensitive re
sponse to other individuals, and her overwhelming sense
of fear and death, are Lawrence* s,It is true that Ramon
feels these things too, but not dominantly, for he is the
propounder of the solution, the prophet. Cipriano feels
them far less, for he is the man of action, warrior and
administrator. All three characters are, in a sense, alter
egos to Lawrence as he creates his own experience and
works with his own conflicts.^
The line of descent is clear. The novel stems from
the announcement of belief in a superior, pre-Flood civili
zation in Fantasia of the Unconscious through the search
for traces of thisr civilization in the journey eastward
to the complete newness and lack of tradition of Australia,
created in Kangaroo, to the discovery of a link with the
past in the Indian religion of New Mexico and Mexico, with
the challenge of a modern overlay and corruption. In the
next to the last chapter, Kate, still struggling with the
“great change . . .being worked in her," feels in the
life and scene about her "the old prehistoric humanity,
the dark-eyed humanity of the days, perhaps, before the
glacial period." Sometimes this feeling is so strong that
she begins "to approximate to the old mode of consciousness,
294
the old, dark will, the unconcern for death, the subtle,
dark consciousness, non-cerebral, but vertebrate." As
Lawrence works with her thoughts, he makes a prophetic
statement in the vein of the earlier, American essays
as if, in a loss of point of view, he has momentarily for
gotten that his story concerns the attempt to realize
such a prophecy:
That, which is aboriginal in America still belongs to
the way of the world before the Flood, before the
mental-spiritual world came into being. In America,
therefore, the mental-spiritual life of white people
suddenly flourishes like a great weed let loose in
virgin soil. Probably it will as quickly wither. A
great dea.th come. And alter that, the living result
will be a new germ, a new conception of human life,
that will arise from the fusion of the old blood-and-
vertebrate consciousness with the white man's present
mental-spiritual consciousness. The sinking of both
beings, into a new being. °
£ate knows that this fusion is what Ramon Is trying to
effect, and the Indian Cipriano's role is "the leap of
the old, antediluvian blood-male into unison with her."
The plot in the sense of action is closely knit as
Kate moves toward acceptance of Clpriano and the Ideology
of the men of Quetzalcoatl as formulated by Ramon; yet
there is a constant element of ambiguity in the pro
longation of her conflict to the very last paragraph,
where even then she must depend upon Clpriano's'immediate
presence and power to hold her. Her conflict tends to
proceed along a single, fluctuating, somewhat weary line,
* !
D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (New York.
1926), p. 415.
295
rather than rise to a climax and a resolution. But this
prolonged tension is the very essence of Lawrence’s art,
the real theme about which all his incident and imagery
cluster, the governing force of his imagination. ^ate*s
duality and doubt are the quality of Lawrence's world,
intensified and heightened by the . experience on the Ameri
can continent.
There are echoes of such earlier work as Studies
in Classic American Literature in Kate.Js wondering
. . . whether America,really was the great death-
continent, the great No . 1 to the European and Asiatic
and even African Yes i . . . Plucking, plucking at
the created soul in a man, till at last it plucked
out the groiving germ, and left him a creature of
mechanism and automatic reaction, with only one
inspiration, the desire to pluck the quick out of
every living spontaneous creature.1*
Lawrence's experience of this automatism is revealed
in such New Mexico poems as "Ghosts,1 1 and seems allied
to the hatred of the status quo that filled him during
the. war, and to the necessity in his development, of
the death of traditional idea and feeling before re
generation could be accomplished. Primitivism and
death might be terrifyingly thorough-going. Kate,
as she contemplates this threat, is reassured by Ramon's
words:
Mexico pulls you down, the people pull you down like
a great weight I . . . ^aybe they draw you down as
17 Ibid.. p. 73.
296
the earth draws down the roots of a tree, so that
It may be clinched deep in soil. Men are still
part of the Tree of Life, and the roots go down to
the centre of the earth. . . . To me, the men in
Mexico a.re like trees, forests that the white men
felled in their coming. But the roots of the
trees are deep and alive and forever sending up
new shoots. . . .Soon the dark forest will rise
again, and shake., the Spanish buildings from the
face of America.
The cyclical theory of renewed civilization implied here
appears throughout the earlier American work.
Again and again Kate recoils from the threat, a
Lawrencean saint in seasons of spiritual dryness, and
is reillumined and confirmed. As she journeys to her
first meeting with Ramoh' at Sayula, after'her removal
from the modern horrors of Mexico; City, she. seems,
. . . in the great seething light,Hpf the lake, with
the terrible blue-ribbed mountains of Mexico beyond..
. . , swallowed by some, grisly skeleton, in the
cage of his death-anatomy. She was afraid, mystically,
of the man crouching there in the bows with his
smooth thighs and supple loins like a,-snake:,- and
his black eyes watching., . A half-being, with a
will to disintegration and^death.1?o,
' - 'f r ‘1 - ' '
- t i ;'•
But she feels that there is "no fixed evil" in the men
who accompany her, that they can "sway both ways."
So in her soul she cried aloud to the greater
mystery, the higher power that hovered in the
interstices of the hot air, rich and potent. . . .
As the boat ran on, and her fingers rustled in the
warm water of the lake, she felt the fulneB's descend
18
Ibid.. p. 76.
19 Ibid.. p. 103.
297
into her once more, the peace and the power. . . .
She thought to herself: "Ah, how wrong I have been
not to turn sooner to the other presence, not to
take the life-breath sooner! How wrong to be afraid
of these two men.”20
Immediately her vision of the people and the scene about
her changes from the ugly and repulsive to the vivid and
rich. Much of the structure of the novel depends upon
this alternation.
At Sayula Kate hears "a new sound, the sound of
a drum," and is attracted to the singing and dancing of
the men of Quetzalcoatl. She is given a leaflet bearing
the first of the free verse poems which, written by
Ramon, serve as the hymns and the propaganda of the new
religion. In image and symbol the leaflet tells of the
passing of Jesus the Crucified back to the source, "the
womb of refreshment," and the return of his brother,
Quetzalcoatl, to earth and a bride, Mexico. In it is
Lawrence's belief in the desuetude of the Christian era,
and his dynamism, the recurring cycle of birth, maturity,
and death.
Jesus the Crucified
Sleeps in the healing waters
The long sleep.
Sleep, sleep, my brother, sleep.
My bride between the seas
Is combing her dark hair, _
Saying to herself: "Quetzalcoatl."21
20 I M d - , P. 10i|..
21 Ibid., p. 117-
298
The wounded physical self of Christ is contrasted to an
Image of wholeness and fulfilment. The dying god is to
he replaced hy an old god recreated and modified in
Lawrence1s imagination.
Kate Is hoth attracted and repelled, attracted
hy the “strange nuclear power of the men," repelled hy
"the silent, dense opposition to the pale-faced spiritual
direction." An old man speaks of Quezalcoatl, his words
arranged in prose form, hut his voice reminiscent- of the
sound of the drum, now silent. He tells of Quetzalcoatl1s
growing old and heing withdrawn;, hy the sun, and of how
M s place was taken hy the dead god of the white men,
whose priests have now grown old, and who will now give
way to the returning Quetzalcoatl, the Morning Star.
The prophetic recitative is followed hy the sing
ing of a hymn, "really the music of the Old American
Indian." Gradually the entire crowd Joins in. Dancing
follows, strongly reminiscent of that of the New Mexico
Indians. The peons also join in it, Lawrence creating a
sense in them of recovery of something lost. At last the
women, too, are drawn into the dance, even to Kate when
she is chosen as partner hy one of the men. As she dances
she feels "a virgin again, a young virgin."
How strange, to he merged in desire heyond
desire, to he gone in the hody. heyond the indi
vidualism of the hody, with the spark of contact
lingering like a morning star between her and the
299
man, her woman's greater self, and the greater
self of the man. 2
In her first visit to Ramon’s hacienda, Kate
hears the sound of a drum and learns that he has "brought
two Indians from the north" to teach its use. She finds
also that in opposition to him is his wife, Dona Carlota,
a devout Catholic, drawn by Lawrence as the "spiritual"
woman who is inimical to the male power.
In contrast to the women's doubt and opposition,
Lawrence presents Ramon's activity and purposiveness.
Withdrawing to his room, and darkening it, he prays until
he has broken "the cords of the world" and is "free in
the other strength." Then,"taking great care . . . not
to disturb the poisonous snakes of mental consciousness,"
he wraps himself in a blanket and sleeps.
On awakening, he first enters into the life about
him by hearing the sounds of activity. At the sound of
the women still talking, he lifts "his breast again in
the black, mindless prayer, and the sense of opposition"
and his rising anger depart. He inspects, now, the
hacienda, over which his spirit is spread "like a soft,
nourishing shadow." At the smithy, a petal symbol is
partially completed, an eagle inside a seven-pointed sun.
In the secrecy of a barn-loft, Ramon visits a
22 Ibid* > P* !28.
300
sculptor who Is making a head, in wood, of Ramon. He
sits for a while, "throwing out the dark aura of power,
in the spell of which the artist worked." The pose is
with the right arm above the head, reaching to the sky,
the left arm hanging by the side, toward the earth. At
Ramon's command, the artist, too, assumes the pose, his
face taking on "an expression of peace, a noble,motion
less transfiguration." Here Lawrence uses the New Mexico
Indian gestures and appeals to earth.' and sky as symbols
of integration.
Then Ramon visits a family spinning and weaving
the serapes of the men of- Quetzalcoatl, rich in symbols, the
chief one being the eagle and sun of the iron-work. He
goes to the upper terrace of the house and, naked to the
waist, begins a summons on the drum. Seven men gather
about him. Together they sing "in the strange blind
infallible rhythm of the ancient barbaric world." Ramon
utters a>.long prayer containing the symbolism of the
"snake of the coiled cosmos," out of whose sleep "worlds
arise as dreams, and are gone as dreams." The form of
the prayer, in short prose verses, is somewhat Biblical.
It ends with the Lawrencean emphasis upon the immedia.te
moment in the dynamic flux.
For each dream starts out of Now, and is accomplished
in Now.
In the core of the flower, the glimmering, wakeless
snake.
301
And what falls away is a dream, and what accrues
is a dream. There is always and only Now, Now and
I Am.
There follows a song employing rhyme rather
tightly hut Irregularly, and using lines irregular in
length and rhythm, though; some can he scanned. Then Ramon
speaks, as if in a sermon after a religious service, but
in much the prophetic, symbolic manner of prayer and song.
We will he masters among men, and lords among men.
But lords of men, and masters of men we will not
he. • Listen I We are lords of the night. Lords of
the day and night. §pns of the Morning Star, sons
of the Evening Star. ^
The speech, too, expresses Lawrence’s dynamism and animism,
using New Mexico Indian symbols. In the midst of flux,
the creative moment counts.
There is no giving, and no taking. When the
fingers that give touch the fingers that receive,
the Morning Star shines at once, from the contact,
and the jasmine gleams between the hands. . . .
The star between them is all.2- ?
Nothing may be possessed.
Say of nothing: It is Mine.
Say only: It is with me.2fe
This is true of land, love, life, peace. The attitude of
acceptance applies to sorrow, loss of strength, and death.
23 Ibid.. p. 176.
2 k
lb id.. pp. 177-178.
Ibid., p. 178.
26 Ibid., p. 179.
302
And say to thy death: Be It so J I, and my
soul, we come to thee, Evening Star.. Flesh, go
thou into the night. Spirit, farewell, * tis thy
day. Leave me now. £76° 3 - as' k nahedness now
to the nahedest Star.
An older "carelessness" is also to he found In The G-olden
Bough.
As her friendship with Ramon and Giprlano develops,
Kate hears more of the movement and observes more of its
ritual. The president of the republic, Ciprano says,
"has the cravings of a dictator." He has bounded Gipriano
for loyalty and been told by Gipriano that he cares only
forrRamon and Mexico. The president's answer expresses
the difference between Lawrence's philosophy and the
dominant materialistic programs.
I want to save my country from poverty and unen
lightenment, he wants to save its soul. I say,
a hungry and ignorant man has no place for a soul
. . . Ramon says,- if a man has no soul, it doesn't
matter whether he is hungry or ignorant. 0
However, he has given Clpriano his word that he will not
have Ramon "interfered with."
Gipriano suggests that Ramon try for political
power, and is answered, "I must stand in another world,
and act in another world." As the discussion continues,
Ramon, angered by the opposition of Kate and Dona Carlota,
is tempted to nihilism, saying to Gipriano, "Wouldn't
it be good to be a serpent, and be big enough,to wrap one's
27
Ibid.
28 Ibid., p. 189.
303
folds round. . . the world, and crush it like an egg?“
It would "be "one good moment." But then he rejects it,
saying, "... What could we do but go howling down the
empty passages of darkness. What's the good, Gipriano?"
Alone in his room, he prays until his rage is gone in
"the greater, dark mind, which is undisturbed by thoughts."
There follows a religious ceremony, reminiscent of
the fertility rites of the New Mexico Indians, invoking the
first rain of the rainy season. • To the summons of the
drum, the people gather in the courtyard. Ramon prays to
"the serpent of the earth" to send life into feet and
.ankles. Then, raising his right arm, he invokes the eagle
of the sky to send power and wisdom, the symbolism involving
the perching of the eagle upon his hand, the coiling of the
serpent about the lowered left arm. As he speaks, the wind
rises.
Then the people are seated, and Ramon, in his natural
voice, gives what might be termed -a sermon on the new
faith, ending:
The earth is stirring beneath you, the sky is rushing
its wings above. Go home to your homes, in front
of the waters that will fall and cut you off forever
from your yesterdays.
G-o home, and hope to be men of the Morning Star,
Women of the Star of D a w n . ^ 9
With the hastening away of the people, Lawrence mingles
the wind and movement of the coming storm. It is clear
29
Ibid.. p. 199.
304
that not only the coming of rain is involved but a purifi
cation of spirit.
Later Kate finds her servants reading leaflets bearing
the Hymns of Quetzalcoatl. One tells of the replacement of
the old tired Indian gods by Christianity, Jesus promising
the retiring Quetzalcoatl:
I will bring peace into Mexico. And on the naked
I will put clothes, and food between the lips of
the hungry, and gifts in all men's hands, and
pea.ce and love in their hearts.
A second hymn tells of the return of Quetzalcoatl. To
him the defeated Jesus says of the people of Mexico:
They are angry souls, Brother, my Lord. They vent
their anger. They broke my Churches, they stole
my strength, they withered the lips of the Virgin.
They drove us away, and we-crept away like a totter
ing old man and a woman, tearless and bent double .
with age. . . . We seek but rest-, to forget forever
the children of men who have swallowed the stone of
despairs.-5
Quetzalcoatl answers the statement that Mexico does not
want his return:
. . . I am lord of two ways. I am master of up and
down. I am as a man who is a new man, with new
limbs and life, and the light of the Morning Star
in his eyes. Lo J I am I . ' The lord of both ways.
Thou wert lord of thepone way. Now it leads thee
to sleep. Farewell r
Evidently Lawrence means by Jesus' one way, asceticism,
30 Ibid.. p. 221.
Ibid., p. 226.
32 Ibid.. p. 227.
305
resignation, and the negation of death. By Quetzalcoatl1s
two ways he evidently means the unity of spirit and flesh,
life and death.
Kate's relationship with Cipriano develops to a
point at which he asks why she should not "be the woman in
the Quetzalcoatl pantheon. . . , the goddess," and his wife.
A new Hymn of Quetzalcoatl chides the Mexicans for their
angry, inert hearts. In this free verse poem, Quetzalcoatl,
on his return, appears above Mexico, looks at the people,
calls to them, and blows upon them, without securing at
tention, until he throws the "stone of change"into the lake.
To the two men of Quetzalcoatl who lool£ up he gives his in
structions, saying in part: ' •
Let us have a spring cleaning in the world.
For men upon the body of the earth are like lice,
Devouring the earth into sores.
. . . Tell the men I am coming to,
To make themselves clean, inside and out.
To roll the grave-stones off their souls, from the
cave of their bellies,
To prepare to be men. 33
Or else prepare for other things.
Also, in a foreshadowing of the burning of church images,
they are ordered to "send Jesus his Images back."
Despite Hamon's intention “to keep free from the
taint of politics/' the Church, the Knights of Cortes, and
"a certain 'black' faction" are antagonistic to him, though
he has not much to fear with Cipriano and his army behind
33 Ifeid., p. Zkl.
30 6
him. But he tells Cipriano that he “had better abandon
everything" rather than “be pushed in the direction of any
party." Cipriano advises a conference with Bishop Jiminez.
Y/hen he asks Ramon what, if he were successful in Mexico,
his attitude toward the rest of the world would be, Ramon
answers, seeing "in Cipriano*s eye the gleam of a Holy
War":
I would like . . . to be one of the Initiates of
the Earth. One of the Initiators. Every country
its own Saviour, Cipriano: or every people its own
Saviour. And the First Men of every people, forming
a Natural Aristocracy of the World. One must have
aristocrats, that we know. But natural ones, not
artificial. And in some way the world must be
organically united: the world of man. But in the
concrete, not in the abstract. . . . Only the
Natural Aristocrats of the World can be inter
national, or cosmopolitan- , or cosmic. . . . The
peoples are no more capable of it, than the leaves
of the mango tree are capable*of attaching themselves
to the pine.— So if I want Mexicans to learn the
name of Quetzalcoatl, it is because I want-them to
speak with the tongues of their own blood.^
He then goes on to enumerate the ancient religions in
whose terms the various peoples might think, Thor and
Wotan in the Teutonic world, the Tuatha De Danaan in the
Druidlc world, and so on. Thus Ramon expresses Lawrence's
eclectic use of many things to symbolize his belief, his
real desire to be a religious prophet, his anti-democratic
belief in the inability, of the masses to understand fully,
and the need of an aristocracy to lead and unify. His
3
Ibid., p. 246.
307
ultimate goal was a world “organically united," as he
united it imaginatively in his work. The prophet rejected
politics; hut in The Plumed Serpent politics were necessarily
involved. The individual and the social again clashed.
Kate dislikes "masses of people" and hence joining
movements. Since childhood she has thought of people as
monkeys performing. Ramon, too, despises masses, but says
that "one must be able to disentangle oneself from persons
. . . , and turn beyond them to the greater life." This
is, as we have seen, one of Lawrence's own major problems.
. t
Now, as they discuss the monkey aspect of mankind, Ramon
groxfs bitter, and there is a long analysis of his thoughts.
Men and women should know that they cannot,
absolutely, meet on earth. In the closest kiss,
the dearest touch, there is the small gulf which
is none the less complete because it is so nar
row, so nearly non-existent. They must bow and
submit in reverence, to the gulf.35
He becomes "sad with the sense of heaviness and inadequacy."
Hig third Hymn has been angry; his ideas have been burlesqued
by someone who has replaced the sacred images of a church
with "the grotesque papier~mach£ Judas figures" used at
Easter; Gipriano has slipped back into personal ambition;
and now Kate has brought "this center of sheer repudiation"
in her satirical view of people. When they are Joined by
Gipriano, and talk of Kate's role as goddess, Ramon speaks
35
Ibid., p. 250.
308
bitterly and sardonically, and rushes away. Kate returns
home.
That same day Ramon writes his Fourth Hymn of
Quetzalcoatl, containing a bitter attack on. foreigners in
Mexico and the machines they introduce, and a threat of
revenge and death. He takes this himself to the printer
in the city, and then Gipriano1s soldiers distribute it
to the "recognized Reader of the Hymns" in each town.
In thus accentuating-Ramon*s bitterness, the aggressive
ness of the Fourth Hymn, and the machinery of distribu
tion, Lawrence prepares for the encounter with the Ghurch
that follows. The Church has begun to move, though
gingerly, since it is already under governmental re
strictions. The priests have forbidden the people to
participate in the Quetzalcoatl movement, but President
Montes has given it protection.
How Ramon and Cipriano have an interview with
Bishop Jiminez. In the Bishop, Lawrence creates a
shrewd, somewhat furtive, old man playing an equivocal
game. Ramon asks for peace.
. . . The time has come for a Gatholic Ghurch of
the Earth, the Gatholic Ghurch of All the Sons of
Men. The Saviours are more than one, and let us
.pray they will still be increased.'. . . I would
speak about Quetzalcoatl in Mexico, and build his
Ghurch here.3°
Yet he has already ifcold the Bishop of his Intention to
36 Ibid., p. 263.
309
remove the images from the church at Sayula and replace
them with those of Quetzalcoatl, Thus, reasonably, there
is an ambiguity in Ramon's plea; the peace would be rather
one-sided, except in its aim at avoidance of bloodshed.
The Bishop accuses Ramon of nthe madness of pride." After
ward Cipriano describes him as an "old Jesuit," wanting
"to keep his job and his power, and:prevent the heart's
beating." It is rumored that already his Knights of
Cortes have sworn to assassinate Ramon and Cipriano.
There follow events leading to the taking over
of the Sayula church by the men of Quetzalcoatl. Ramon
is angry and weary and wonders why he "started this
Quetzalcoatl business." Then, putting himself aside, he
asks Kate if she will marry Cipriano.. When she says that
they could not meet half-way, he ponders his Pwn failure
with Carlota. They could not meet because they had not
met in their souls, but had engaged in ravishment. She
had turned to Christ, he to his "uncrucified and uncruci-
fiable Quetzalcoatl, who at least cannot be ravisehd."
He says to Kate:
I am a man who has no belief in abnegation of the
blood desires. I am a man who is always on the
verge of taking wives and concubines to live with
me, so deep is my desire for that fulfilment. Ex
cept that now I know that is useless— -not momen
tarily useless, but in the long run— my ravishing
a woman with hot desire. . , . Wine, women and song
— all that— all that game is up. Our insides won't
really have it any more. Yet it is hard to pull
ourselves together.
He feels that it would he easy for him to make the mistake
of becoming "arrogant and a ravisher" or of denying him
self and making "a sort of sacrifice" of his life. Yet
if he had to end in a mistake, he would prefer being a
ravisher, attacking "the hateful, ignoble desire" men
have to be ravished. The conflict betxireen hatred of the
status quo and exaltation and creation is plainly Lawrence1
Ramon'"s doubts, -and particularly the problem of attack, are
a prelude to the scene at the church which follows.
Recently a sermon has been preached against the
m e n o f Quetzalcoatl. Soldiers are present in the town.
Lawrence contrasts the impressive exterior of the church
with the blatance and barrenness of the interior. The
worship is "a sort of numbness and letting the soul sink
uncontrolled," rather than a gain in integrity. The
church has been closed for several weeks before the Sunday
on which the men of Quetzalcoatl enter it.
First a leaflet is distributed bearing a little
rhymed poem titled, "Jesus1 Farewell." Then Ramon arrives,
accompanied by a young priest in his clerical garb. The
entrance into the church and the carrying thence of the
images is described in great detail, with the grotesque
37
Ibid.. p. 2?1.
3X1
irony of a reversal of the usual religious processions.
The priest himself officiates at this repudiation, and
it is he who carries the heavy crucifix to the boat that
transports the images to an island for burning. Indeed,
Lawrence’s chapter title, “Auto de Fe," is ironically
reminiscent of inquisitional practices. As a last rite,
the priest removes his vestments, casts them into the
flames, and stands revealed in the garments of a man of
Quetzalcoatl. As Bamon returns to Sayula to loch the
doors of the church, there is, perhaps, a touch of Bibli
cal miracle in the clouding of the shy “for the thunder
and the rain.”
The crowd scattered in the wind, rebozos
waving wildly, leaves torn, dust racing. Sayulaqfi
was empty of God, and, at heart, they were glad.*^
There follows a melodramatic attempt on Bamon1s
life by the Knights of Cortes, vividly created by the
Lawrence who later at the New Mexico ranch could not shoot
a porcupine xtfithout much soul-searching. His treatment of
violence and death involves~his' synthesis. After the bloody
fight, Bamon has the quality in his face of a boy,
. . . very pure and primitive, and the eyes underneath
had a certain primitive gleaming look of virginity.
As men must have been, in the first awful days, with
that strange beauty that goes with pristine rudimen
tariness. 39
38
Ibid., p. 285.
Ibid., p. 29^.
312
Here violence is a part of the fighting nature of the male,
but it is also retrogressive, though accompanied by purity
and beauty. Kate, who is present during the attach and
helps Ramon, afterward contemplates the dead bodies of the
attackers.
For a pure moment, she wished for men who were
not handsome as these dark natives were. Even their
beauty was suddenly repulsive to her; the dark
beauty of half-created, half-evolved things, left in
the old, reptile-like smoothness. . . . If only the
soul in man, in woman, would speak to her, not always
this strange, perverse materialism, or a distorted
animalism. If only people were souls, and their
bodies were gestures from the soul
Here violence is associated with his concept of an unformed
past, of which the Indian is a modern remnant. Attraction
to the primitive, as a part of the needed synthesis and re
vulsion from it in the felt need of an upward rising spiral
of being, .are again the Lawrencean pattern.
The experience serves to draw Kate into a closer
relationship with the men of Quetzalcoatl. Afterwards,
she feels that “the common threads that bound her to
humanity'1 seem "to have snapped." She Is plunged into
"a wan indifference, like death. . . . Away inside her a #
little light was burning, the light of her innermost soul,"
lighted by Ramon. Here occurs something of Lawrence's
death and resurrection theme, reminiscent of his revulsion
during World War I.
4-0
Ibid., p. 302.
313
As for Clpriano, she feels him "casting the old,
twilit Pan-power over her," and feels herself "submitting,
succumbing.1 1 It is "the ancient phallic mystery, 1 1 and
she can "conceive now her marriage" with him,"the supreme
passivity, like the earth below the twilight. . . . . Ah,
what an abandon. . ., of so many things she wanted to
abandon.",
Ramon sees at once the change in her. In answer
to her indecisions, he counsels: "Something happens in
side you, and all your decisions are smoke.— Let happen
what will happen." When they talk of the possible success
of the movement, and Kate considers Cipriano1s trustworthi
ness, Lawrence; makes a distinction, in a subtlety that
often seems to the reader an ambiguity. To her Cipriano
is "that old, masterless Pan male, that could not even
conceive of service" but sees only "the black mystery of
glory consummated." Thus his trustworthiness is limited.
He is a lesser creature than Ramon.
When they talk of the attack of Ramon, and the
betrayal by a servant, Kate feels that "there will
always be a traitor," One is reminded of Lawrence's
sense of betrayal, and of his controversy with Murry with
its "Judas" theme. Hamon will continue the movement.
Soon Cipriano, as First Man of the warrior god, Huitzilopo-
chtli, will join him in the new pantheon. Then they must
314
have a goddess, and Ramon suggests her as the First
Woman of "Itzpopolotl, just for the sound of the name. "
(The name is not retained. ) He laughs at her idea that
she would feel shame.
There must be manifestations. We must change back
to the vision of the living cosmos; we must. The
oldest Pan is in us, and he will not be denied.
... I am the First Man of Quetzalcoatl. I am
Quetzalcoatl himself, if you like. A manifesta
tion, as well as a man. I accept myself entire,
and proceed to make destiny.^1
She sees Ramon as "like a messenger from the beyond. . . ,
remote from any woman,1 1 whereas Cipriano has opened to
her "the world of shadows and dank prostration, with the
phallic wind rushing through the dark." Thus at this
point the distinction between the two men is not only
that of prophet and warrior, but of the spirit and the
physical.
Kate goes now with Cipriano to a town at the end
of the lake. The journey is imaginative preparation for
their physical consummation, Lawrence packing the scene
with life and movement through which she moves without
sense of time. Cipriano finds a room for her as his
esposa, and takes her as his wife.
She fused into a molten unconsciousness, her will,
her very self gone, leaving her lying in molten
life, like a lake of still fire, unconscious of
everything save the eternallty of the fire in
which she was gone. . . . And Cipriano the master
41
Ibid., p. 314.
315
of fire. The Living Huitzilopoehtli, he had
called himself. The living firemaster. The god
in the flame; the salamander.
Afterwards Cipriano takes her to weavers working for the
men of Quetzalcoatl. They buy especially-designed serapes
for Cipriano and Ramon, Lawrence describing them in great
detail. Among the serapes in one designed for the god
dess who will one day join them. A new dress, too, will
be made for her.
Their ceremonial marriage by Ramon follows.
Lawrence treats it with elaborate symbolism. The first
part takes place out-of-doors in the rain. The man is
"the rain fbom heaven." The woman:'is "the earth," to
"be strength to him, throughout the long twilight of
the Morning Star." Then, indoors, they bathe and anoint
their bodies, for the final ceremony. Ramon’s final
words concern not only faithfulness between man and wife
but between man and man.
. . . The star that is between all men and all
women, and between all the children of men, shall
not be betrayed.
Whosoever betrays another man, betrays a man
like himself, a fragment. For if there is no
star between a man and a man, or even a man and
a wife, there is nothing. But whosoever betrays
the star that is between him and another man,
betrays all, and all is lost to the traitor.
Where there is no star and no abiding place,
nothing is, so nothing can be lost. *
42
Ibid.. p. 318.
43
Ifrid., p. 330.
316
Immediately after the marriage, Ramon opens the
church for the rites of Quetzalcoatl, Armed men give
Kate passage through the crowd to the side of Cipriano.
She feels as if she is to he the victim in a saarifice.
Then Ramon appears in the doorway and begins the service,
the Guard repeating his words, which end with a warning
to these who will not follow not to watch. Then he and
the Guard enter the church. Cipriano tells the crowd
that it may enter, women to the center, men to the right
and left, with no kneeling to the new god.
The interior has been decorated in bright,
' symbolic colors. A wooden statue of Quetzalcoatl dominates
the altar, which is of stone with a small fire upon it.
Ramon sits on a low throne. Kate and the other women
crouch on the floor as the men salute Quetzalcoatl. Ramon
speaks in a free verse passage beginning, "I am the living
Quetzalcoatl.1 1 Then the drum beats, and candles are
kindled at the altar fire. There follows a little cere
mony, the symbolism of which is uttered by Ramon:
And save I take the wine of my spirit and the
red of my heart, the strength of my belly and the
poxtfer of my loins, and mingle them all together,
and kindle them to the Morning Star, I betray my
body. I betray my sou^ I betray my spirit and
my God who is Unknown.
Thus the ceremony indicates the integration Lawrence de
sired to make.
A i l ,
Ibid., p. 3^0.
317
An interruption comes from Carolota, who, clad
in black, works her way forward on her knees, appeal
ing to Mary and Jesus, and calling upon God to take Ramon’s
life and "save his soul." Ramon stands adamant, and it
is she who collapses in a convulsion, Gipriano carries
her out, and Ramon continues the service with a Hymn of
Quetzalcoatl.
After the hymn, Gipriano and Kate visit the dying
Csxlota, into whose room comes the sound of the service.
Gipriano defends Ramon from her accusation of murder,
and says that she has never been really married to Ramon,
and that she kills herself.
I tell you the water of charity, the hissing water
of the spirit, is bitter at last in the mouth and
in the breast and in the belly, it puts out the
fire. You would have put out the fire, Dona
Carlota.— But you cannot. You shall not. You
have been charitable and compassionless to the
man you called your own. So you have put out your
own fire.^3
When she speaks of her children, he says:
It is good for you to steal from them no more,
you stale virgin, you spinster, you born widow,
you weeping mother, you impeccable wife, you
just woman. You stole the very sunshine,out
of the sky and the sap out of the earth. ^
Kate’s reaction is mixed. Her "primeval" self
laughs, but the modern self causes her to sit through
ii-5
Ibid., p. 345.
46
Ibid., p. 3^6.
the day with Garlota while the sounds of the drum and
dancing come from outside. Cipriano returns with "the
Song-Sheet of the Welcome to Quetzalcoatl," hearing four
line stanzas Irregularly rhymed.
Tie my spotted shoes for dancing,
The snake has kissed my heel.
Like a volcano my hips are movlngu„
With fire, and my throat is full. '
As she listens to the voices outside, she feels that
"the people had opened hearts at last. They had rolled
the stone of their heaviness away, a new world had begun.
Peeling .'frightened, she finds refuge in Cipriano.
With the new religion formally established and
welcomed, Lawrence turns to Cipriano's approach to
assumption of the divinity of Huitzllopochtli. Cipriano
is in favor of advancing the new religion as the official
one of the state; but Ramon insists that it spread of it
self, and writes open letters to the clergy calling for
a greater Catholicism, and to socialists and agitators
urging them to put away grudges for living. Meanwhile
Cipriano struggles to discipline his army, Lawrence
devoting much space to his varied devices.
Discipline is what Mexico needs, and what the
whole world needs. But it is the discipline
from the inside that matters. The machine,
discipline, from the outside, breaks down.^°
There is a long passage on Cipriano's use of the warrior
^7 Ibid., p. 3*1-9.
48 Ibid.. p. 363.
319
dance.
Ramon presses him "openly to assume the living
Huitzilopochtli.“ In a ceremony with Cipriano, he in
duces in him the mystic darkness, until both men pass
Into "perfect unconsciousness, Cipriano within the womb
of undisturbed creation, Ramon in the death sleep," This
49
is evidently a ritual symbolic of the renewal of the gods.
Afterward Cipriano calls on Kate, to tell her that he has
been "where there is no beyond,, and the darkness sinks
49
W. Y. Tindall says that this initiation and "the
spiritual exercises of Don Ramon, . . are based upon the
initiation described by" James M. Pryse in The Apocalypse
Unsealed (1910). Thus Tindall finds a mixture of theosophy,
the Atlantis legend, and Aztec symbol. "Among the anthro
pologists . . . consulted for this novel was Lewis Spence,
authority on Atlantis and Rosicrucian of Los Angeles.
("Transcendentalism in Contemporary Literature, The Asian
Legacy and American Life. edited by Arthur E. Christy (New
York, 1945), PP* 186-188.) It is not the purpose of this
study to trace in detail Lawrence's sources. Tindall has
over-emphasized his reliance on modern occultism. It is
evident that he read quite widely among the anthropologists.
As early as 1916 he said that he preferred Edward B. Tylor:' s . -
Primitive Culture to Frazer ' s The Golden Bough and the work
of Gilbert Murray. (Letters. p. 348’ . " ) Tylor devoted seven
out of nineteen chapters to animism. Here, surely, Lawrence's
developing animism found impetus. Tylor pointed out that
later allegorical and moral interpretations of myth were
corruptions of the animistic spirit. Tylor also challenged
the status quo. "To impress men * s minds witty.-a doctrine
of development, will lead them in all honour to their an
cestors to continue the progressive work of past ages. , . .
It is a harsher, and at times even painful, office of
ethnography to expose the .remains of crude old culture
which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark
these out for destruction.1 1 (II, 453.) Among the many
studies of the Indian, Lawrenee may have known such works
of Lewis Soence as The Myths of the North American Indians
(1914), The Myths of Mexico and Peru (1917). The Civiliza
tion of Ancient Mexico (1912),Mexico of' the Mexicans (1917).
320
into the water, and waking and sleeping are one thing.”
He asks her to be Malintzi, the bride of Huitzilopochtli.
The Huitzilopochtli ceremony follows, taking place
at night and beginning in front of the church. Prom a cen
tral fire, Cipriano throws brands to his dancing men, who
kindle four others, in the corners of the churchyard. When
the fires die, the dance ceases, and the "First Song of
Huitzilopochtli” is sung. It is the male warrier song, the
last stanza reading:
I am the sleeping and waking
Of the anger of the manhood of men.
I am the'leaping and quaking
Of fire bent back again.50
Then Cipriano, followed by five prisoners, comes
from the church to a platform. He speaks, in free verse,
of punishment:
From the liars, from the thieves, from the false and
treacherous and mean
I see the grey dogs creeping out, where my deer are
browsing in the dark.
Then I take my knife, and throw it upon the grey dog.
And lo! it sticks between the ribs of a manlbl
Then "The Song of the Grey Dog” is sung, calling for the
killing of ”a traitor, a thief, a murderer of dreams."
The prisoners are led forward, and their guards
are interrogated by Cipriano about their crimes. All
were involved in the attack on Ramon. A man and woman,
£° Ibid.. p. 373-
51 Ibid., p. 375-
321
servants of Ramon, hence guilty of betrayal, are garrotted.
The four men who attached from without are permitted to
draw twigs, three black for death, one green, “the green
leaf of Malintzi who pardons once." The three who draw
black are stabbed by Cipriano.
Now the men enter the church, where a statue of
Huitzilopochtli stands beside that of Quetzalcoatl. The
five dead bodies lie at its feet. Ramon meets Cipriano
at the altar. Blood from the three who were stabbed is
sprinkled on the fire. The souls are given to Quetzalcoatl,
Ramon saying: "... Make peace now with the sun and wind
and waters, and go in courage, with the breath of Quetzal
coatl around you like a cloak." The ritual is in prose
dialogue.
Thus the "grey-dog" spirit is exorcized. Two guards
sing a song titled,"Huitzilopochtli's Watch." At the end
of the ceremony, Ramon speaks in free verse of the journey
of the dead. The goddess, Malintzi, has already played the
role of pardoner. She, and Quetzalcoatl, are the reconcilers.
When the blue wind of Quetzalcoatl
Waves softly,
When the water of Malintzi falls
Making a greenness:
Count the red drains of the Huitzilopochtli
Fire in your hearts, Oh. men.
And blow the ash a w ay.
Now Kate is made the goddess, Malintzi. She has been
52 Ibid., p. 384.
322
shocked and depressed by the executions.
. . . beep in her soul came a revulsion against
this manifestation of pure will. For herself,
ultimately, ultimately she belonged elsewhere.
Not to this terrible, natural will which seemed
to beat its-wings in the very air of the American
continent.-^-5
It has another, x^onderful, aspect to her. “But where was
woman, in this terrible interchange of will? Truly only a
subservient, instrumental thing Again Lawrence analyzes
her conflict at great length. The hardest thing she must
face is loss of individuality.
It meant a submission she had never made. It
meant the death of her Individual self. It meant
abandoning so much, even her own very foundations.
For she had believed truly that every man and ^
every woman alike was founded on the individual.
In the midst of this doubt, Oipriano appears. She
sees now in him, the executions once over, the “flame of
virgin youth. Now, not will at all. . . . The living, flicker
ing fiery Wish. This was first. The Will she had seen
was subsidiary and instrumental, the Wish in armour." She
goes to the church with him, where they stand before the
statue of Huitizilopoehtli, and she agrees to be Malintzi,
bride and goddess. In ritual they salute both gods, fill
the lamp, take two candles and blow them out, then sit side
by side on the throne. Kate, "watching the bud of her life
53 Ibid.. p. 385.
5k
Ibid., p. 388.
323
united with his. . , and feeling his dark hand softly hold
ing her own, with the soft, deep Indian heat," feels "her
own childhood coming back on her."
So, when she thought of him and his soldiers,
tales of swift cruelty she had heard of him: when
she remembered his stabbing the three helpless
peons, she thought: Why should I judge him? He
is of the gods. And when he comes to me he lays
his pure, quick flame to mine, and every time I
am a young girl again, and every time he takes the
flower of my virginity, and I his. . . . What do I
care if he kills people? His flame is young and
clean.55
With Kate as Malintzi, one might suppose her con
flict to be resolved, and £he climax of Lawrence’s theme
to have been reached. But her conflict continues through
three more chapters. In contrast to her, and to the dead
Carlota, Lawrence creates as a wife for Ramon the shy,
gentle, loyal Teresa, who has "an almost uncanny power, to
make Ramon great and gorgeous in the flesh," while she her
self becomes "inconspicuous, almost invisible, save for her
great black eyes." Kate hates what seems to her Teresa's
subjection.
The trouble was, that the power of the world, which
she had known until now only in the eyes of blue-eyed
men, who made queens of their women--even if they hated
them for it in the end--was now fading in the blue eyes
and dawning in the black.3°
Clearly the problem of woman's relationship to man has become
^ Ibid., p. 393.
& Ibid., p. 399.
324-
dominant in Lawrence's imagination, extending itself beyond
the problem of man's relationship to the world. Kate realizes
that all her "handsome, ruthless female power" is "second-
rate" compared with Teresa's "own quiet, deep passion of
connection with Ramon," and Ramon she Knows "to be a greater
man than Cipriano." As symbolic action, this may be
Lawrence's answer to Mrs. Lawrence. Recently she said that
she thinks Lawrence was not quite convinced by Ramon's mars-*-
riage to the young girl; she seems to think that he is
speaking to her in it— "he had to hand me this."
Kate determined not to submit, makes plans to leave
Mexico. Cipriano is at first angry, but she sees "the
stoic indifference, the emotionlessness of centuries, and
the stoic kind of tolerance" come over him, and fears losing
"his contact." He goes to Jamiltepec, and, left alone-,
she thinks of the future, and struggles with the desire for
individuality, the gratification of the ego, "If one tries
to be unlimited, one becomes horrible. Without Cipriano to
touch, me and limit me and submerge my will, I shall become a
57
horrible, elderly female." She has seen her friends lose
"all their charm and allure" and become "real grimalkins,
greyish, avid, and horrifying, prowling around and looking
for prey that became scarcer and scarcer. As human beings
they went to pieces."
—
Ibid.. p. 4-39.
32£ '
At Jaxniltepec she finds the men singing to the drum.
The hymn concerns the relationship of men and women.
A man cannot tread like a woman,
Nor a woman step out like a man.
The ghost of each through the leaves of shadow
Moves as it can.
But the Morning Star and the Evening Star
Pitch tents of flame
Where we foregather like gypsies, none knowing
How the other came.5°
She goes to the men "to make a sort of submission."
But even this is handled by Lawrence with the irony of con
tinuing conflict. As she says that she wishes to stay,
she rebels at Ramon's gentleness and feels that she is a
fraud. Ramon.tells her sternly to listen to her "own best
desire." But Cipriano tells her that she is not Ramon's,
to be advised, and asserts his desire and mastery. When
she pleads, "You don't want me to go, do you?" his speech
of desire "sounded so soft, so soft-tongued, of the soft,
wet, hot, blood, that she shivered a little. 'You won't
let me go'.' she said to him."^9
Kate's final conflict overshadows and dwarfs
Lawrence's conclusion to the movement of the men of
Quetzalcoatl. A "kind of war" arrays the Church and the
Knights of Cortes, against the men of Quetzalcoatl. Ciprano
and his army defeat one opponent. Then President Montes
Ibid., p. 1\)\P .
^ ^Lid., p. l \ l \ S •
326
outlaws the Ghurch and makes the religion of Quetzalcoatl
the national church. But there is little emphasis on this
triumph.
Nevertheless, Lawrence had pushed his imaginative
triumph to its ultimate conclusion. In marrying Kate to
Cipriano, he had not only subdued the antagonistic woman
but had symbolically united his Europe, and .his-America, the
blue-eyed with the black-eyed, the fair-skinned with the
dark-skinned, the abstract and ideal with the physical
source from which it had divorced itself to its threatened
extinction. He had linked his moribund present with a
revivifying^past that shone dimly and inehoately through
the Indian. He had found a tradition from -which to adum
brate his vision of the future. He had met the temptation
to retrogressions to the primitive, with its brutality and
ugliness, and had withstood it, at least as far as his con
scious synthesis was concerned. Only in Ramon's despair
and anger at human limitations, and his temptation to
nihilism, does the prophet lose patience and wish to merge
all in the black source in death.
The images and symbols of Lawrence's solution have
gathered throughout the American experience, although
the underlying philosophy has its origin much earlier. He
introduces into Mexico, in combination with some Aztec
symbolism, and with some reference to his favorite Greek
327
god, Pan, the animistic religion of the New Mexico Indians,
which drew him so strongly with its mindless, non-Individual
sense of universal life, and with its impression of ancient
continuity. Christianity is decadent; he will replace the
dying god, as did Frazferi'4.-- primitive peoples, with another
god, but not with a totally new one, nor entirely with a
revivified Quetzalcoatl. One misses the point if one does
not see the importance of the incarnation in Ramon, Cipriano,
and Kate. Human beings, in the animistic communion, pos
sess godlike p o w e r wrested from the unformed forces of the
universe, and hence become gods. But human beings, eras,
and gods are subject to decay and death. One must accept
the cycle, but the total struggle is ever upward.
At the time, Lawrence believed The Plumed Serpent to
be his "most important novel so far," and he said that he
thought “most of it.“ It was his most direct, politically
challenging, imaginative triumph over the real world.
Its program of an elite leadership, though he never quite
abandoned it, came into question later as Europe moved
V
toward fascism. In 1928 while he was putting the finishing
touches on Lady Cha.tterley1 s Lover, he wrote to Witter
Bynner, with .whom he had quarreled over democracy during
the initial stages of The Plumed Serpent, that he thought
him right about "the hero" of the earlier novel.
The Letters of £. H. Lawrence. p. $kk.
328
The hero is obsolete, and the leader of men is a back
number. After all, at the back of the hero is the
militant ideal: and the militant ideal, or the ideal
militant seems to me also a cold egg. . . . The leader-
cum-follower relationship is a bore. And the new
relationship will be some sort of tenderness, sensi
tive, between men and men and men and women, and not
the one up one down, lead on I follow, ich dien sort 51
of business. So you see I’m becoming a lamb at last. .. .
As we shall see, the return to Europe and what he felt to be
’ ’ ■the spirit of place1 1 there was partially responsible for
his shift. Pre-eminently in America he felt the antagonism
of vast, raw forces which must be conquered.
61
Ibid., p. 719.
PART .71
LAST VISIT TO NEW MEXICO (1925)
CHAPTER I
THE LIFE
At the ranch Lawrence showed the surprising re
cuperative powers which characterized his recurrent strug
gles against ill health. During his convalescence his
intense vitality, with its accompanying restlessness, al
lowed him no real quiet.^ Letters concerned with important
personal and professional problems appear in the very first
days of this period. By the latter part of May the long
2
play David was ready for the typist. By mid-June he was
beginning to feel himself again and was engaging in the
3
chores of the ranch, milking, irrigating, chopping wood.
By June 23 he was able to promise a corrected typescript of
4
The Plumed Serpent to his agent. He embarked on a series
of essays, to appear in December of the same year (1925)
as Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays.
A continuing personal problem was the relationship
1 ✓
See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. p. 16, for an
early example of this.
2
Ibid., p. 642.
3
Ibid., p. 644.
4
Ibid.. p. 645.
330
with Dorothy Brett. (Mrs. Luhan and he avoided each other;
so that old conflict was not renewed.)'* Sent away from
Oaxaca, she had gone to the ranch. Very soon after his
arrival, Lawrence wrote her a note expressing his concep
tion of the flaw in their friendship.
It * s no good our trying to get on together—
it xron't happen. Myself— I have lost all desire
for intense or intimate friendship. Acquaintance
is enough. It will be best when we go our separate
ways. A life in common is an Illusion, when the
instinct is always to divide, to separate indivi
duals and set them one against the other. And
this seems to be the ruling instinct, unacknowledged.
Unite^with the one- against the other, and it*s no
good.
Though Lawrence continued, over.the next years, to show in
terest in ideas of group activity, extensions of the old
dream of’a communal life, in his work there is no longer
such an attempt as that of The Plumed Serpent to conceive
of, and create, a total social solution. More and more
salvation is the object of the individual's isolated
struggle.
Brett remained on the scene, taking a cabin at Del
Monte Ranch below the Lawrence ranch. She saw Lawrence oc
casionally, typed for him, and now and than braved the
displeasure of Mrs. Lawrence by visiting. At times, there
were brief reconciliations.^ Lawrence recognized the
" * Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 281.
6 ,
The Letters of D. H, Lawrence, p. 639*
7
Brett, Lawrence and Brett. p. 225
331
responsibility for her he had assumed when she threw up the
old life in England to Join him in another effort toward
the ideal community— an effort not Joined by others who
during the last English visit had promised it would be.
Mrs. Lawrence's tiring of the relationship, and sense of
interference with her own, is humanly understandable, as
is Brett's dogged hero-worship and discipleship. The
strained situation continued'through the summer, aggravated
by Mrs. Lawrence's desire for closer relationship with her
children, opposed by Lawrence. In the fall Lawrence, it
seems clear, was forced to take the initiative in working
out a solution for Brett, now that he was going to England.
He called her aside, attacked her indecision and fear of
travel because of her deafness, and settled it that she would
go to Capri, with a letter of Introduction to his friends
8 •
Earl and Achsah Brewster. Altogether it was a kindly
move on his part; and his concern for Brett's welfare was
to continue through the remainder of his life.
As we have seen in the earlier chapters of this study,
these strains involving friendship and the relation between
husband and wife were of long continuance. What cumulative
effect, in combination with the artistic and ideological
struggle, had they had on Lawrence the man? A tentative
idea of this may be gained by the report of Friedl Jaffe
8 I*>id.. pp. 236-237.
332
(now Jeffrey), Mrs. Lawrence's nephew, who visited the
ranch that summer and saw Lawrence after the lapse of some
years. In an interview in 19^7 he told me that at the time
he had felt that Lawrence had changed greatly since the ill
ness, and that he was irritable, held people off, and seemed
fighting what had assailed him so seriously. Perhaps he
knew for the first time that he was really ill. Mr; Jeffrey
remembered the earlier Lawrence for his vigor and joy in
life. He had gone out to people, and had sought to draw
out the value he saw in them, at the same time openly assail
ing what he felt was weak in them. The post-war years and
the Illness had changed that. As for the central relation
ship with Mrs. Lawrence, Mr. Jeffr.ey felt that after the
illness Lawrence was too weak to hold her in check. One
must conjecture much of what he meant by this. It is
plain that the relationship of the Lawrences had always
been one of violent alternations: the conflicts, during
which Lawrence seems never to have yielded, succeeded by
a rapport precious to both of them. Certainly Mr. Jeffrey
Q
witnessed quarrels. Perhaps Lawrence was no longer able
to. maintain so tenaciously the male mastery he had always
considered essential, let as one views the remaining
years, there is no evidence of complete capitulation. It
is true that the search for Utopia in the present, opposed
9 Ibid.. p. 232.
333
by "the wife in Kangaroo and Kate in The Plumed Serpent.
was to he abandoned, although Lawrence did not yield
theoretical interest in it. It is true that he nox? returned
to the England he had rejected on the previous visit, and
that the remaining years of his life were spent in a search
for health and a chance to live and write in Southern
Europe. But this is a limitation of activity rather than
a final break of strength and courage. Perhaps most
significant in his later work is an increasing emphasis on
sex. The idea of the importance of sexual freedom (or
freedom in sex, never license) had originally come from
Mrs. Lawrence via a young disciple of Freud. Mrs. Lawrence's
advocacy was triumphant in Lady Chatterl.v1 s Lover, at least
as far as dominance of theme was concerned, though once
again modern woman must put all the false gods of ego be
hind her.
The recuperating Lawrence had also to cope with pro
fessional problems. After only a week at the ranch, he
wrote, on April 15, to his agent, Curtis Brown, to defend
■ r 10 ‘
himself from an attack by Norman Douglas on his portrayal
of Maurice Magnus in the long introduction to Magnus's
Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, edited by Lawrence with
•* i
considerable labor. He left* it to Brown's discretion whether
11
or not to publish, as a defence, a letter from Douglas.
R ' S* Lawrence and Maurice Magnus: A Plea for
Better Manners.
11 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 639.
33k
By May 26, no longer "sore” as he was during the sickness of
April, Lawrence did not care what was said and did not wish
to engage in controversy, ' ’neither pamphlets nor articles.”
He thought "public 'controversies' infra dig. , anyhow
In a letter to Miss Nancy Pearn in the Curtis Brown
office, who was entrusted with the detailed handling of his
work, Lawrence expressed disappointment at not having
been able to come to England. He concealed the fact that
his illness was really tuberculosis, as he did from then on
even, apparently, to himself, referring to it as a combina
tion of malaria, typhoid, and 'flu. There was recognition
of his estrangement from conventional taste in his con
gratulations on her handling of "those difficult stories."
The subject of "Mornings in Mexico," not yet sold, brought
him to the old problem of .relationships with Murry. He was
"not so very keen" on giving them to Murry for The Adelphi.
He felt that often he could "see Murry's words coming out"
against him "through people who frequent him." He did not
like "that kind of friendship," but she might use her own
judgment.13 "Corasmin and the Parrots" appeared in The
Adelphi in December, but no others appeared there until
1927, when two were printed. As for future work, he told
12 I£id-, p. 6if2.
Ibid. . p. 6i j . O .
335
Miss Pearn, with regard for her difficulties, that he wished
he “did some nice popular little stories.1 1 He would have
to see how the summer went with him. With prophecy he felt
14-
it would he "a long time" before he wrote another novel.
In a letter to Dr. Trigant Burrow, xtfhose The Social
Basis of Consciousness he reviewed several years later,
there was a flash of Lawrence's philosophical, crusading
self.
I am in entire sympathy with your idea of social
images. In fact, I feel myself that the Jewish
consciousness is now composed entirely of social
images: there is no new-starting "reality" left.
Hothing springs alive and new from the blood. . . .
[Old racesj lose the faculty for real experience,
and go on decomposing their test-tubes-ful of
social images. One fights and fights for that
living something that-stirs way down in the blood,
and creates consciousness. But the world won't
have it. To the present human mind, everything is
ready-made. . . . ^
To the relatively unpublished Burrow, from whom he had two
reprints of articles, he mentioned the lack of success of
his own "Unconscious things." His statement that he was
“not going to bother any more about that side of things"
obviously arose from the anger of the moment. . The essays
written that summer were full of the old themes and the
old crusade.
By the latter part of June, the corrected typescript
l4
Ibid., p. 6 M > ,
3-5
Ibid.. p. 6^3.
336
of The Plumed Serpent, ready to he sent to his agent,
brought to his letters his estimate of that climactic
American effort in,* the statement to the faithful Catherine
16
Carswell: “It's very different. But I think most of it."
The reservation (assuming a strees on "mosli) indicates that
Lawrence did not consider the book final and absolute
truth. But it was to him his "most important novel, so far,"
Later, as we have seen, he rejected the hero-leader theme.
More than any other of his friends Mrs. Carswell
represented home and England, and there is in this letter
to her a nostalgia which seldom found expression in his
letters but which was noted by people in contact with him.
Even then it came through in: an offhand manner and in under
statement:
Lovely to think of cherry trees in bloom: here
the country is too savage, somehow, for such
softness. I get a bit of a Heimweh for Europe*
We shall come in the autumn— D.V.— and winter
somewhere warm/'
Late in August Lawrence wrote to M. L. Skinner, the
Australian writer whose The Boy in the Bush he had revised
Ibid.. p. 644. The judgment was repeated to his
agent along with a wish to show it "to a Mexican friend in
Mexico City, and have his opinion" before publication. He
was afraid, however, to send the manuscript there, evidently
fearing its loss. I have not been able, so far, to identify
the friend. Mrs. Lawrence thinks this may be a reference
to Witter Bynner, but the description as "Mexican" does not
fit. The strongest possibility is Luis Quintanilla.
17 Ibid.
337
so drastically, concerning the death of her brother. It was
essentially a letter of consolation in which Lawrence identi
fied himself with the man who, to him, had no luck, and "at
the bottom of his soul . . . preferred to drift penniless
through the world" and had "lived his life and had his mates
wherever he went." He added, "so many old bourgeois people
live on and on, and can11 die,, because they have.never
been in life at all." At the end his thoughts turned to
their common interest in writing:
. . . One can live so intensely with one's characters
and the experiences one creates or records, it is a
life in itself, far better than the vulgar thing
people call life, jazzing or motoring and so on.
No, every day I live' I feel more disgusted at the
thing these Americans call life. Ten times better
die penniless on a gold-field.-^g
But be sure of my sympathy.
Preference for the imaginative life is rather un
usual in Lawrence, at least in expression. Like many
Lawrence letters, this was written to meet a specific situa
tion; yet there is no doubt of his own vivid imaginative
sharing in his characters' lives, however "unrealistic"
these lives were at times. Much more characteristic is the
scorn of "the vulgar thing people call life." He identi
fied it, though not exclusively by any means, with the
United States.
" L f t
Ibid., pp. 646-6^7*
338
In September the fortuitous stay at the ranch came
to an end. Lawrence had apparently recovered. On Septem
ber 25, 1925, "two days at sea, he wrote to his mother-in-
law that he “was quite glad to be out of that America
for a time. . . , so tough and wearing, with the iron
springs poking out through the padding.“ As if in answer
to a question, he said: “I don't feel myself very Amerl-
19
can: no, I am still European.“
He was not to return to New Mexico, though he
sometimes longed to. The problem of quotas and legal
red-tape, and fear of the hard life in the high altitude
of the ranch, were too much. The few years of his life
that remained were to be spent chiefly on the Mediterran
ean— in Italy and Southern France.
—
Frieda Lawrence, “Not I_ But the Wind. . . ,"
p. 192.
CHAPTER II
THE WORK
The three-act play David was an old project. During
the previous summer, Ida Rauh, the actress, had "become a
friend of,the Lawrences. The story is that when Lawrence
asked her what kind of play she liked best, she answered
that she preferred stories from the Bible. When asked
how she liked the story of Michal and David, she thought
it perfect, and he promised to make a play of it for
1
her. Prom the first, he had her in mind for the role of
Michal, who becomes a complex Lawrencean woman. (There
is a pathetic sequel in her feeling, on reading the play,
that she was too old for the part.) But composition was
delayed. On October 29, from Mexico City, he wrote to
Mrs. Luhan in general disgust with his situation, that
there was "not a play-word" in him. If he could "sit still
in Oaxaca,1 1 he would "probably pull off a play. But quien
2
sabe i"
Lawrence followed the Bible story rather closely
(whole sentences are used intact, as are some of the Psalms),
and it is only gradually that the reader becomes aware of
his shift of emphasis and meaning. At first, Saul's doom,
1 Brett, Lawrence and Brett, p. 60.
2
Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 280.
conveyed by Samuel, echoes the Biblical mood. Only Michel
strikes a different note. She is a mischievous Lawrencean
woman from the very first scene, in which she leads her
maidens in mockery of the captive enemy Agag, and in de
light in the spoils of battle. When Saul tells her that
Samuel will take the spoils and curse her youth, she answers
That he shall not ! Oh, Merab, you got the blue
shawl from me i Run i Maidens ] Run J Farewell,
King Agag, your servant thanks your lordship 1
r--Caw J — Nay, he cannot even say caw F
As the play advances, one begins to get, however,
not so much the love of Michal and David, as Lawrence’s
ideological slant. The advent of David does not mark the
coming of a glorious era. Rather it symbolizes the be
ginning of the evils of the; modern era. Jonathan is torn
between father and friend:
The Lord sees fit to split me between King and
King-to-be, and .already I am torn asunder as be
tween two wild horses straining opposite ways.
Yet my blood is my father’s. And my soul is
David's.
The Lawrencean split between blood and soul should be
noted.
As for Saul, he becomes not merely the lamenter of
vanished glory but the prophet of a godless future.
Yea, David, the pits are digged even under the
feet of thy God, and thy God shall fall in. . . .
The world shall be Godless, there shall no God
walk on the mountains, no whirlwind shall stir,
3
Lawrence, The Plays of D. H. Lawrence, p. 188.
3^1
like a heart in the deeps of the blue firmament.
And God shall he gone from the world. Only men
there shall he, in myriads, like locustg, click
ing and grating upon one another. . . .
At the end, as Saul casts himself down in helplessness on
«
the hill before the prophets, a soldier says:
Oh, it is good to live now, with the light of the
first day’s sun upon the hreast. For when the
seed of David have put the Lord inside a house,
the glory will he gone. . . .
Jonathan, in the last speech, sums up the Lawrencean
theme. His heart, and Saul's, yearn over David, hut David,
in his triumph of intellect over strength, exemplified in
the encounter with Goliath, knows "no depth of yearning."
Take thou the kingdom, and the days to come. In
.the flames of death where Strength is, I will
wait and watch till the day of David at last
shall he finished, and wisdom no more he gox-
faced, and the hlood gets hack its flame.
Michal, of course, is subordinate to this larger
theme. : But Saul is in conflict also with his womenfol^.
When David advises him to pluck out this problem, as if it
were a thorn, Saul answers: "But is it easy to pluck out
7
a rancorous woman from the heart?" At times Saul laughs
at Michal's impertinence, hut when David finds her voice
r
Ibid..
P. 259.
J
Ibid., p. 306.
6
Ibid.. p. 312.
7
Ibid..
p. 215.
342
8
sweet, he says that "at times it is snarling and "bad."
Michal,I.of' course, forsakes father for husband and the new
order. She, like David, is clever and outwits Saul. In
her relations with David, she is the Lawrencean woman who
finds love all-sufficient, unable to conceive of a higher
activity. When she asks David if he will not seek her for
herself, and he replies that he will for himself "and for
the Lord's own self in me, 1 1 she comments: "Ever thou
9
puttest the Lord between me and thee."
In the David story, Lawrence's theme of the split
between blood and intellect producing the modern era, found
new incident and symbol. Setting and atmosphere stemmed
both from the Bible and from New Mexico and Mexico. The
courtyard of Saul's house is a "sort of compound with an
adobe house beyond." In Bethlehem the scene is "an open
place in the village. An old man on a roof calling aloud
and kindling a signal fire." In some of the singing and
dancing there seem to be hints of Indian ceremony and
pageantry. The king's room at G-ilgal is a "bare adobe
room, mats on the floor," with a "little open hearth."
That part of the setting not plainly New Mexican is con
sistently pastoral. There may be an echo, of Mexico in the
"round, pyramid-like hill, with a stair-like way to the
8
Ibid.
9 Ibid.. pp. 273-274.
3^3
top, where is a rude rock altar.1 1 The chanting of the
prophets may he linked to the Indian ceremonies. That
Lawrence intended to use still more Southwestern atmos
phere is indicated by a note on the manuscript of an
early version of the play: "Must be kept simple.— plain—
naive— villagers" and "tune the church-bell tune of the
Indians."10 For the latter Lawrence made his own musical
notation. The play was produced in England in 1927 without
much success.
The six essays which date from this last stay at the
ranch are all essentially the re-embodiment of old themes.
The continuity and unity of Lawrence's thought is indicated
by the fact that these essays were published with "The
Crown," written in 1915 during the war. In a prefatory
note, Lawrence said: "I alter The Crown only a very little.
It says what I still believe. 1,11
12 _
In "The Novel" Lawrence applies his belief In the
"passional" truth of the blood-consciousness. "The novel
Is the highest form of human expression so far attained"
because "it is so incapable of the absolute." Any attempt
at the absolute in the novel is didacticism, and the
10
Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H.
Lawrence Manuscripts, p . 124.
11
Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine
and Other Essays.
12 Ibid.. pp. 103-123.
3kk
didactic parts of a novel do not constitute its essence,
which is the relativeness of everything. Most great
novelists— such as Tolstoi, Hardy, and F-lauhert— have a
purpose or a philosophy (didacticism); hut this purpose
must not he "at outs with the passional inspiration. " ■ He
illustrates this conflict hy attaching what he considers
the overwhelming of the passional hy the purposeful in
Tolstdi's Anna Karenina. The attack demonstrates further
how little Lawrence's essential ideas and convictions
changed over the years, since an identical attack occurs
13
in the essay on Thomas Hardy written during the War.
Lawrence1s hete nolr. society, is the cause of Anna and
Vronsky's failure— an opinion shared hy Thomas Mann, with
the difference that Mann credits Tolstoi with an attack on
society— that, and the lovers' cowardice. "The monster
was social, not phallic at all." Inevitably one thinks
of the similarity of the elopment with Mrs. Lawrence to
the situation in Anna, although the sequel was quite dif
ferent.
Protection for the reader does lie in the fact that
the novel, unlike other forms, shows up the false imposi
tion of purpose; hut the writer should follow his "passional
inspiration." In full iconoclastic swing, Lawrence applies
his paradox to such names as Socrates, Jesus, and the
13
Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence.
P. 398.
345
writers of the Gospels—-as for the latter, his preference
is for the Old Testament, in which the "purpose was so big,
it didn't quarrel with . . . passional inspiration." The
tone is playful and satirical, the effect that of improvisa
tion. Even Dante and Petrarch come in for a share of the
satire; Beatrice and ^aura are spiritual concubines, not
wives.
Toward the end Lawrence returns to his own defini
tion of the novel.
. . . If you put a theosophist1in a novel, he or
she may cry avauntJ 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. . . . ^
The essay ends with a critical principle often used by
latter-day critics:
Oh, give me the novel I Let me hear what the
novel says. n-
As for the novelist, he is usually a dribbling liar.
Lawrence's attack on the didactic poses a problem . C
for his critics. In The Plumed Serpent. for example, it is
apparent to one who has read much Lawrence, that his charac
teristic problems and themes dominate the book. But to
Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine
and Other Essays. pp. 120-121. This avowal is made game of
by W. X. Tindall in D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow, p. 148,
who feels that Lawrence does not adequately acknoxtfledge his
own theosophical sources. Tindall, in his penchant for
theatrical satire, does not really attack the problem posed
by Lawrence's statement.
15 IkM- > P- 123.
346
what extent do they, springing from a surprisingly fertile
and tenacious intellect, gather about themselves the passion
that should, according to his theory, go to the characters
in all their relativity? There is a kind of relativity
in Kate's intellectual uncertainty, and in her emotional ap
proach to and withdrawal from the other characters, who
themselves, at times, partake of this individual, relative
quality. In a sense, this is the working out of the artist's
own uncertainty in imaginative experience. Yet undoubtedly
Lawrence's ideas are the criteria for events and symbols,
and they even intrude themselves in exposition, sometimes
lengthy exposition. In that way, no writer is more didactic
than Lawrence. Superficially the difference between his
method and one more acceptable esthetically lies in the
difference between the implicit and the explicit, which
intrudes into the imaginative experience and is a mixing
of two forms. Certainly every creative mind must have some
criteria by which to interpret experience. Lawrence's cri
teria, one feels, have become highly systematized, even
dogmatic, though retaining the power to evoke passionate in
tensity.
In "Him With His Tail in His Mouth"^ Lawrence took
. 17
as his point of departure the serpent symbol for eternity.
Ibid.. pp. 127-141.
17
For this as a theosophic symbol, see W. Y. Tindall,
D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow, p. 135*
3^7
From Moses and Plato to Bergson, thinkers have sought to
put the tail of the serpent of creation into its mouth;
that is, they have evolved monistic systems. Modern science,
in its finding of a basic unity in atom or electron, attempts
the same thing. To Lawrence, this is “bunk." "How do you
know? How does anyone know, what always was or wasn't?
Bunk of geology, and strata, and all that, biology or evo-
18
lution." But there is such a thing as "life, or life
energy," which men want inside them. "... That which is
good, and moral, is that which brings into us a stronger,
deeper flow of life and life-energy: evil is that which
impairs the life-flow." This flow cannot be had by turning
to seek it, but by going ahead, the difficulty being that
we do not know which way is ahead. However, we are sure
that in our present direction the life-flow becomes weaker.
Plato's "perfect!Idea" has become deathly. "All goals be
come graves." To Lawrence, the difficulty is that "there is
too much automatic consciousness and self-consciousness in
the world." The characteristic Lawrencean view is now
apparent.
Susan, the cow, and other ranch creatures are used
as illustrations as Lawrence begins to explore his theory
of individuation and the equilibrium resulting from recogni
tion of individuation. Individual identity lies in a
18
Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine
and Other Essays. p. 129.
348
19
fourth, dimension of creation in which difference, not
unity, is the rule. The Greeks, who were “sane,1 * x^ere
“pantheists and pluralists.1 1 "So,“ says Lawrence, “am I."
Susan and the Rhode Island Red hen are in this dimension
goddesses, not to be comprehended anthropomorphically.
The Greek idea of "equilibrium1 ' is "just a bit
mechanical," and it became, as the Greeks attempted to
equilibrate themselves with animals, anthropomorphic. This
idea leads him, in ending the essay, to art, including the
early Greek, which kept alive "the spark between . . .
stranger and stranger." This spark may be found in
Egyptian art, and in the.bison drawn by the cavemen of
Altamira. Lawrence's concluding paragraph returns to the
old animosity - toward the ideal:
As for ideal relationships, and pure love,
you might as well start to wa,ter tin pansies with
carbolic acid (which is pure enough, in the anti
septic sense) in order to get the Garden of
Paradise.20
Again Lawrence's philosophy appears in new symbols
and form. The struggle for equilibrium in difference, the
strong repugnance to the threat to individuality of the
ideal and absolute, reveal themselves. Again one remembers
the man who at times rushed headlong into intimate friend
ship, only to suffer strong revulsion. One also remembers
19
A term linked by Tindall with theosophy.
20 Ibid.. p. 141.
3^-9
that this feeling and conception must he responsible for the
unique insight of much of Lawrence's best work, the sensu
ous, powerful rendering of individuation, which appears at
times even amidst the declamation of the essays.
Like Shaw, Lawrence could not resist the mischievous
21
paradox. In "Blessed are the Powerful," the Beatitude is
reversed as Lawrence expounds his belief that the age of
democracy and love is waning, and that an era of power must
succeed it. It is the theme, not new in Lawrence even in
1925, which received fullest expression some years later in
his Apocalypse.
Although Lawrence contemplates a "twilight" period
of transition between eras, he avoids nihilism. The nature
of power must be looked into-, to avoid anarchy and blunder
ing. He rejects the Nietzschean, Germanic "will-to-power"
and. the Hebraic "ethical will of God." Will is only an
attribute of the ego. True power, on the other hand, comes
"to us, we knottf not how, from beyond." It is "life rushing
into us, . . ; the exercise of power is the setting of life
in motion." Lenin, Mussolini, Hindenburg, Lloyd George,
Hivera, are failures, from whom we cannot get power ("to
be able to"), might ("to bring about that which may-be"),
glory, honor, or wisdom. These must be qualities of the
people before they can be expressed in politics.
Ibid., pp. 1^5-158•
350
The remainder of the essay is an expatiation on
the nature of power. "Courage, discipline, inward isola
tion. . . are the conditions upon which power will abide
in us." It is not only "power to do" but "the power to de
stroy." The fascination of the latter for Lawrence may be
seen in the statement:
. . . Between those who, with a single impulse,
set out passionately to destroy what must be
destroyed, joy flies like electric sparks,
within the communion of power.
The "power" theory is also linked to his opposition to
democracy, for men possess power in different degrees.
". . . The communion of power will always be a communion-in
inequality." Faced with the problem of integrating his
conception of love with that of power, he takes "the act
of love" as itself "an act of power." (For an expression
of this in Lawrence's fiction, see "The Captain's Doll,"
written years earlier.) Thus the idea that love rules is
false, since it stems from power.
The mystery of power has become the power of money,
of human greed and envy, of materialism. Conversely, past
ages must have been better; living in terror under Peter
the Great must have been superior to being "a member of the
proletariat under Comrade Lenin."
When Lawrence enumerates examples of power, the
22
Ibid., p. 153*
351
breadth of the list is rather astonishing.
There is physical strength, like Samson’s. There
is racial power, like David's or Mahomet's. There
is mental power, like that of Socrates, and ethical
power, like that of Moses, and spiritual power,
like Jesus' or li£e Buddha's, and mechanical power,
like that of Stephenson, or military power, like
Napoleon's, or political p o w e r , like Pitt's. These
are all true manifestations of power, coming out
of the unknot'irn.23
Nevertheless, at the end of the essay Lawrence is drawn to
the power that is destructive. At least one-half of what he
felt to be his own mission was to wield such power.
Even Attile., the Scourge of G-od, who helped to
scourge the Roman world out of existence, was
great with power. He was the scourge of G-od:
not the scourge of, the League of Nations, hired
and paid in cash. ^
25
In ". . . Love Was Once a Little Boy" Lawrence
turned to the problem which, seen through the life and work,
seems most central and personal to him. The need of iso
lateness to avoid loss of integrity, and simultaneously
the need of relationship, with woman, society, and the
universe, are implicit everywhere in him. The conflict be
tween these two needs is the focal point of the essay. 11. .
Love, as a desire, is balanced against the opposite desire,
2 6
to maintain the integrity of the individual self."
23 Ibid'., p. 15?.
o h
Ibid.
25 Ibid., pp. 161-189.
ofi
Ibid., p. 162.
352
Modern man, living in an age of individuality, yet calling
himself the servant of love, enacts "a perpetual paradox."
Struggle between egos is inevitable.
Alluding to the Greek idea of equilibrium, as he had
done in "Blessed are the Powerful," he finds balance neces
sary. The balancing of such abstractions as "citizen against
a citizeness, Christian against a Christian" is easy, but
not the balancing of the living man and woman. At this
point he turns, in illustration, to his "equilibration"
with Susan, the ranch cow, sketching vividly her recalci
trance, always an annyoing actuality. She is an example
of individuality versus equilibrium. Yet a relationship
without absolute equilibrium is possible.
She knows my touch and she goes very still and
peaceful, being milked. I, too, I know her smell
and her warmth and her feel. And I share some
of her cowy silence, when I milk her. There is
a sort of relation between, us. And this relation
is part of the mystery of love: the individuality
on each side, $ine and Susan's,, suspended in the
relationship.2'
To illustrate a false relationship between man and the
non-human, he turns to satire and burlesque of Wordsworth's
anthropomorphic identification of himself with the prim
rose, which "ousts the primrose from its own individuality."
Men and women in love are also individuals who will
assert themselves despite the lies -of romantic love, and
Ibid.. pp. 167-168.
353
oppose both the dominance of one ego and the dominance of
abstract equality. He illustrates this with the c.ock and
the hen who, as "loyal subjects" of the ranch, are theoreti
cally equal but who in themselves demonstrate the individuality
and the relationship, a "peculiar togetherness,1 1 that cannot
be called love. A discussion of the quality of femaleness
in the hen brings him to his conception of the central role
of sex:
It is her sex, no doubt: but so subtle as to have
nothing to do with function. It is a mystery, like
a delicate flame. It would be false to call it
love, because love complicates the ego. . . . But
in the frail, subtle desirousness of the true male,
towards everything female, and the equally frail,
indescribable desirability of every female for
every male, lies the real clue to the equating,
or the relating,. of things which otherwise .are.in
commensurable.
In a conception of "streams of desire," Lawrence
finds his solution to the conflict. The streams .meet while
the individuals remain apart* Hence the absurdity of the
idea of Perfect Love. He sees in modern times a failure of
desire because of the failure to recognize the difference
between desire and love. The result Is a "stagnant unity"
called "democracy, and the reign of love." He inveighs
against modern woman's Insistence on equality, her thinking
like man and her attempt to beat him at his own game.
"Every woman he has ever met" has made this mistake.
Actually the streams of desire do not often meet.
Ibid., p. 176.
354
The modern rush into relationship is "a sort of prostitu
tion." He returns to his duality— the defence hy every
thing of its individuality, and its reaching forth in de
sire. As if aware that the paradox he has sought to
resolve, still remains, he attacks individualism based on
the ego, for example, such a shout of independence as that
in Henley's "Invictus." Plainly, if true individuality is
not egoistici it must come from "the unseen."
The powers that enter me fluctuate and ebb.
And the desire that goes forth from me waxes and
wanes. Sometimes it is weak,' and I am almost
isolated. Sometimes it is strong, and I am
almost carried atiray.2°
30
"Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine" uses
as its frame of reference an incident at the ranch that
31
summer. Lawrence had already encountered, and disliked,
porcupines. Now the pain of a dog from whose nose he must
remove quills aroused him so much that, when a porcupine
was found nearby, he, who had never "shot at any live thing,"
found himself able to kill. In creating this part of the
essay, Lawrence is at his descriptive, narrative best.
The remainder of the essay develops from the realiza
tion that one "must be able to shoot and kill." There is
irony in remembering that this comes from the man who had
^ Ibid., p. 186.
30
Ibid.. pp. 193-219.
Brett, Lawrence and Brett. p. 244-.
vicariously recognized and created the necessity of
killing in The Plumed Serpent and other stories. “One
suddenly realizes again how all creatures devour, and must
devour the lower forms of life.1 1 Examples of this are now
apparent all about him at the ranch, and he creates them,
in the essay, in his most vivid manner, ending with Timsy,
the ce„t, and 1 1 the dilation of the strange, vacant arrogance
of power": in her eyes.
This conception of power leads him to his view of
life as moving “in circles of power," each circle maintain
ing “its orbit upon the subjection of some lower circle,"
which must be mastered before there can be a higher one.
There is .no use lamenting over, or trying to reform this,
as does the Buddhist. "The only thing to do is to realise
what is higher, and what Is lower. ..."
For Lawrence, the higher is the “more vividly alive,
the final test being, “Gan thy neighbour finally overcome
thee?" It is “the truth behind the survival of the fittest.
Fitness for mere survival means survival “only to supply
food or contribute in some way to the existence of a higher
form of life, which is able to do more than survive, which
can really vive, live." Thus Lawrence attempts to reconcile
his metaphysical world with material “fact," the key dis
tinction lying here between-“survival" and "living."
He seems to be diverted, at this point, by another
circumvention of the unpleasant. The devouring of one
species by another is in terms only of "species, of types,
of races, of nations, not of single individuals, nor of
beings." Each individual, in the fourth dimension,, that of
being, is "incomparable and unique." He now proceeds to
enumerate the parts of "the inexorable law of life": 1.
the perfection and uniqueness of the individual in. the
fourth dimension; 2. in the time-space dimension the pos
sibility of destruction of every species (not to the detri
ment, he implies, of the individual being of 1), by "a more
vital cycle of existence"; 3* the vitality "which is the
determining factor in the struggle for existence" is also de
rived from the fourth dimension, "the ultimate source of
all vitality"; in existence the primary source of vi
tality is "living creatures lower than ourselves"; the
ways of obtaining it are many, for example, food, love, and
best, "a pure relationship. . . , which allows the transfer
to take place in a living flow, enhancing the life in both
beings"; 5* "no creature is fully itself till it is, like
the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to
32
the sun, the entire living cosmos."-^
Lawrence then acknowledges "the tangle of existence
and being," only to be gotten out of by sacrificing one
to the other, which is useless. Being is not ideal (Plato)
32 Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine.
pp. 210-211.
357
"but is "a transcendent form of existence, and as much
material as existence is.1 * The dualism that began with a
dislike for killing and yet recognition of the necessity
of killing here becomes the mind-body, spirit-flesh, ex
istence-being dualism, and Lawrence resolves the conflict
by denying the dualism. Integration is reached at the
expense of romantic and religious sensibility, yet with a
£ey conception of being as transcendent and governing survi
val which is non-materialistic. Involved are a stoic hard
ness, and even ruthlessness, qualities to be found in
Lawrence 1s fiction.
The essay concludes in sermonic style with the
finding of.inspiration and glory in the acknowledgment of
the necessity of growth, cycle, conquest. “In heaven, in
the perfected relation, there is peace: in the fourth di
mension. But there is getting there. And that, for ever,
is the process of conquest. Things are perfect and in
comparable there; but “every man, in the struggle of conquest
towards his own consummation, must master the inferior
cycles of life, and never relinquish his mastery.*1 Even
individual perfection “will but serve a perfection which
still lies ahead, unrevealed and unconceived." One is
reminded of the struggle for mastery by Ramon in The Plumed
Serpent.
33 Ibid., p. 217.
358
Having attacked "democracy," Lawrence was forced
to explain his adherence to such an archaic term as
'zh.
"aristocracy." In the essay of this title, his defini
tion is formed amid many ideas found in the other essays
of this New Mexico summer. Thus he begins with the rela
tiveness and relatedness of all living things, and with his
concept of the cycles of creation. "Among men, the differ
ence in being is infinite."
Decline from the recognition of nobleness among men
began with the Christian era. Christ's equating of purity
and poverty was the idea of "a noble manhood," but it left
"the scramble for money and power to the impure." Lawrence's
remoteness from the materialistic basis of modern reform
is evident in his dislike of the objection, "Not much King
dom of Heaven for a hungry man." When the pure said this,
“the Soul began to die out of men."
Lawrence attempts to define a "natural aristocracy"
(one thinks of Jefferson's "natural aristoi"). He rejects
an aristocracy of birth, though it is better than one of
money. Natural aristocracy tests not only what a man is,
but what he can do, the question being "what kind of thing
can a man do?" The function of the true aristocrat is the
bringing of more life and the release of "the fountains of
vitality."
Ibid.. pp. 223-2^0.
359
Using this test, he finds Caesar and Cioero early
aristocrats. Stephenson, the inventor, did not accomplish
this-^while Galileo and Newton did. With them Lawrence
names suGh diverse figures as Peter the Great, Frederick the
Great, Napoleon, Voltaire,, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, and
Rousseau.
He satirizes what he considers the modern over
emphasis on the importance of man to man, and to woman,
the result of making “man the measure of the universe."
In "the great ages" man had "vital relation" with all of
his world and universe. Now a "stuffy little human fool
sitting in a chair and wearing lambs-wool underwear" thinks
that "Amon, Mithras, Mistletoe, and the whole Tree of Life
were just invented to contribute" to his "complacency."
The Englishman has lost his mystic relationship to the
oak, turning instead to "golden boughs."
As in others of these essays, Lawrence turns for
illustration of relationship to Susan, his cow, the ranch
fowls, and the mountain pine. Only a machine can be
neuter. All else is actively related. At this point he
becomes almost preoccupied with the sun and the night,
relationship to which is "the greatest and final relation."
The supreme moment of "active life" is the relation to the
sun, that of "quiescent life" to the night. Something of
35
In "Blessed are the Powerful," however, Stephenson
is listed as a true manifestation of power.
360
this conception had occurred in his fiction as early as
The Rainbow, in which the man moves outward in day life
from the "night" of love and sex. Here, in the essay,
The sun makes a man a lord: an aristocrat: almost
a deity. But in his consummation with night and
the moon, man knows for ever his own passing away.
But no man is man in all his splendour till
he passes further than every relationship: further
than mankind and womankind, in the last leap to
the sun, to the night.-55
At the end of the essay aristocracy becomes "the
aristocracy of the sun," a term and symbol now to appear
many times in his work, particularly in the sardonic Pansies
several years later. His last paragraph is a call to arise,
a manifesto. The evangelistic spirit was not lost from
Lawrence after The Plumed Serpent. or ever lost.
Lawrence's illness wrought no great transformation ,
in the work. The writer who rose from his sick-bed hurled
the same challenges, manipulated much the same symbols, and
found in the life about him at the ranch and in his civili
zation the same conflicts as before. The answers he found,
and the advice he gave, were much the same. The Christian
era began a decline, not an advance. With David, a fox
like shrewdness replaced the ancient manhood, conqueror by
strength and ruler of its women. Strength and the blood
and its flame must wait in "the flames of death" until
the cycle begun by David is ended.
36
Ibid.. pp. 237-238.
361
The; novel, Lawrence still insists, despite evidence
that his own practice did not entirely follow his theory,
should express the ‘ 'passional inspiration" of the author
and not have a "didactic purpose*" Indeed, the former may
contradict the latter. Thus not the novelist, hut the
novel, is to he trusted.
In life, the important thing is not "factual"
knowledge ("hunk of geology, and strata, and all that")
hut a "stronger, deeper flow of life and 1ife-energy,"
which depends upon an animistic, not a mechanical, view
of the universe. Power works reciprocally with the floxv
of life. Christian meekness and the rule of love have
resulted in the corruption of modern democracy. Life
exhibits circles of power, each mastering that 3ust hene&th
it, the highest heing that most vividly alive. There is
inspiration in the struggle toward a "perfected relation,£
a "fourth dimension," which will hring peace; hut the
process of getting there is "the process of conquest.."
What is wanted is a "natural aristo.cracy," which can re
lease "the fountains of vitality." Christian meekness
leaves power to the impure; modern materialism walls out
the transcendent universe.
The change in the man, noted hy Mrs. Lawrence's
nephew that summer, seems to he the result of an accumula
tion of strains dating from the War rather than a sudden
362
irritableness and withdrawal. Jeffrey remembered a Lawrence
in love during the days of elopement and often full of the
sensibility and joyousness that seems to have become the
more infrequent of the two moods Lawrence's friends remarked
in him: this, and a grim, sardonic, destructive one.
The role of America during this period had been to
furnish, at first with the infuriating impersonality and
37
inconsiderateness of immigration laws, a temporary refuge
in which to convalesce,, and, at the ranch, symbols and
examples to illustrate the essays and provide setting and
atmosphere for the play.
37 The visa was for only six months. Richard AdTdington,
H* Lawrence. Portrait of a G-enlus But. . . (Hew York, 1950) »
P- 357.
PART VII
CHAPTER I
AFTERMATH IN EUROPE
Lawrence's friends, and above all the New Mexico
ranch, often beckoned him back to America. But the in
creasing problem of maintaining his health, his distaste
for the legal difficulties of entry, the restlessness and
dynamic philosophy which forbade returns and prompted him
to move in new directions,1 and other factors in the complex
that were the man and the career, kept him in Europe. He
found England and the ghost of his past there unbearable,
and sought almost at once the warmth of Southern Italy.
Most of the few years remaining to him were spent along
the Mediterranean, except for several visits to England
and Germany. America appeared in his work only in retro
spect, or in bits of "property" in story and essay.
In April, 1926, Willard Johnson published a D. H.
Lawrence Number of his little New Mexico magazine, The
Laughing Horse (on this occasion issued from Mrs. Luhan's
Finney Farm in the East) to which Lawrence contributed a
poem, "Mediterranean in January1 ," and three short essays,
"Paris Letter," "A Little Moonshine with Lemon," and
He wanted to visit Russia, and studied the language.
3 6k
"Europe versus America." All reveal aspects of Lawrence's
transition from America to Europe.
2
"Mediterranean in January" reveals in the verse
form approaching humorous and careless doggerel that was
to characterize much of his next poetry, Lawrence's sense
of nervousness and loss among the Americans of the West
contrasted with the perennial flowering of an anemone on
the Mediterranean and the sense of continuity of days there,
a renewal from an ancient past.
"Paris Letter"^ is one of those brilliant bits of
combined travelogue and doctrine that Lawrence could make
seem so easy, as if struck off conversationally without
conscious effort. He begins by stressing the monumental,
man-made beauty of Paris, beside which the Seine and the
trees of the city are poor and insignificant. His wife
longs for grandeur; but the grandeur is faded, and "de
mocracy has collapsed into more and more democracy," the
men collapsing with it into "rather nice and helplessly
commonplace little fellows." In the galleries of the
Tuileries, dominated by nude-Statues, there is no wicked
court, but only the admiration of the statues by a. fat
bourgeois whose wife knows he will not ;really stray from
-
Also in Collected Poems.
3
Also in Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H.
Lawrence. pp. 119-122.
365
her. The French seem worn out “with the pink .nudities
of women" and another mistress, the dinner table. To this
point, Lawrence has sketched swiftly, using descriptive
detail and anecdote. The remainder is an explicit state
ment. He no longer believes in democracy or in the old
aristocracy, but rather in "the old Homeric aristocracy,
when the grandeur was inside the man, and he lived in a
simple wooden house." Such monuments as those of Paris
make a museum both for dead life and the living.
The natural aristocrat has got to fortify himself
inside his own will, according to his own strength.
The moment he builds himself external evidences,
like palaces,,he builds himself in, and commits
his own doom.
Lawrence's anti-democratic theme had frequently aroused the
opposition of his American friends, for example, both Willard
Johnson and Witter Bynner in Mexico during The Plumed
Serpent period. The D. H. Lawrence Number of The Laughing
Horse contained critiques by Frederic Leighton and Idella
Purnell which opposed Lawrence's stand, in a good-natured,
appreciative way.
"A Little Moonshine, i^ith Lemon," which eventually ap
peared as the last essay of the book, Mornings in Mexico.
is a beautiful creation of nostalgia bridging two worlds,
and is hardly doctrinaire at all. Beginning with the
moon-lit night of the feast of St. Catherine on the
b
Ibid., p. 121.
366
Mediterranean and the drinking of wine, Lawrence wonders
what is going on at the New Mexico ranch. The moon there
balances the Italian moon, and re-creates the winter scene
at the ranch. Interrupted by an Italian voice, he turns
to the Mediterranean night, reiterating the theme of
"Mediterranean in January."
The Mediterranean, so eternally young, the very
symbol of youth! And Italy, so reputedly old, yet
forever so child-like and naive i Never, never for
a moment able to comprehend the wonderful, hoary^
age of America, the continent of the afterwards.
He turns once more to the ranch, where, instead of a choice
of wine there would be moonshine with hot water, lemon,
sugar, and cinnamon before bed. Again Italian voices in
terrupt, and he gives up the imaginative return— to choose
vermouth. In all this there is a deft, delicate creation
of nostalgic atmosphere, and perfect unity of movement and
symbol. The paradox of America as the older continent, in
tellectual, conscious, haunted by ghosts, unlike the naive,
child-like Mediterranean, is an idea he had used long be
fore in his study of American literature.
Lawrence really came to grips with his latest change
of place in "Europe versus America."^ He begins with
disgust at a young American1s saying he should like to
see Europe^"and have done with it." Europe is better and
5
Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico. p. 186.
f\
Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence.
pp. 117-118.
3 67
more important than something one can be "through with,"
to use an American trick of speech. Lawrence now believes
that the things one is sick of in Europe are really in one
self. European civilization is "more tense" in Americans
than in Europeans.
The Europeans still have a vague idea that the uni
verse is greater than they are, and isn't going to
change very radically. . . . But the Americans are
tense, somewhere inside themselves, as if they felt
that once they slackened, the world would really
collapse. '
The consequence is that Europe is younger than America in
spirit.
In the people here there is still, at the bottom,
the old, young insouciance. It isn't that the
young don't care: it is merely that, at the bot
tom of them there isn1t care. It isn't till we
.grow old that we grip the very sources of our
life with care, and strangle them.
This grip of care in the American distinguishes him from
the ~European. Lawrence now acknowledges that he, like the
young American, was a fool in assuming that he could be
through with Europe. Europe is "squeezing the life out
of herself, with her mental education and fixed ideas"
but is not nearly so far gone as America. He feels it "a
relief to-be by the Mediterranean, and gradually let the
tight coils inside oneself come slack." The antithesis
to "care" is "insouciance," a term to appear often in his
7 Ibid., p. 117.
8
Ibid., p. 118.
368
remaining work.
That some such relaxation was actually taking place
in Lawrence is indicated by the tone of his correspondence
and by the direction his work took almost immediately after
his arrival in Italy. 'In "Sun" he worked with the strong
sensuousness that in his earlier work had antagonized the
prudish and the prudent. The same note appears in "The
Virgin and the G-lpsy," in which old restraints are vio
lently broken. He began that series of Iconoclastic nude
paintings which were later to arouse the Epglish censor
ship. Even in more conventional stories, the themes of
husband-wife antagonism, bullying, and the loss of true
feeling or its re-dlscovery, achieve a new liveliness and
softness, compared with the American stories.
Lawrence's resolve not to risk the strain of another
long work, led to an occasional review in the next few
years. Among these Was a review of William Carlos Williams'
9
In the American Grain, and one of Nigger Heaven by Carl
Van Vechten, Flight by Walter White, Manhattan Transfer by
John Dos Passos, and In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway.'1 '0
Williams' distinction, via. Poe, between the national
and the local is compatible with Lawrence's own "spirit of
place." (The distinction bears on the question of why
9 Ibid.. PP- 33^-336.
10 XLId.. pp. 361-366.
369
Lawrence could not settle down dfter Sons and Lovers to
exploit the color of the miner's life in England, or in
Taos to exploit Indian and landscape.) The local is
"the very opposite of the parochial, the parish-pump
stuff." But "all creative art must rise out of a specific
soil and flicker with a spirit of place." There is more
Lawrence than Williams in
To bring a few American citizens into American
consciousness— the consciousness at present being
all bastardized European--is to form the nucleus
of the new race. To have the nucleus of a new
race is to have a future: and a true aristocracy.
It is to have the germ of an aristocracy in sensi
tive tenderness and diamond-like re si stance.
Lawrence's dualism--one almost says dual personality-
appears in the qualities needed on a continent that is like
"a woman with exquisite, super-subtle tenderness and re
coiling cruelty" (Williams* conception, Lawrence notes).
Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, Lawrence thought to be
"a false book" written by an author who wanted to "make
a sensation— and, of course, money." With White's Flight.
he finds a theme for his review. In White's book, and
others on the Negro, the Negro is "an absolute white man,
save for the colour of his skin,"
One likes to cherish illusions about the race
soul, the eternal Negroid soul, black and
glistening and touched with awfulness and with
mystery. One is not allowed. . . . His soul is
11 Ibid., P. 335.
370
. . . what the white man's soul is, just tha same,
a gramophone grinding over the old records.-^
The heroine, having passed the color line, tires of her
white husband and reverts to Harlem, but she will, says
Lawrence, tire of "Nigger Heaven" and move again. All
of the books he is reviewing involve flight, from no
where to nowhere. Manhattan Transfer involves many such
flights, but Dos Passos, a "far better writer," knows
this and "gets a kind of tragic significance into the
fact." Lawrence understands Dos Passos1 technique, and
finds the confusion
. . . genuine, not affected; it is life, not a
pose. . . . What makes the rush so swift. . . ,
is the wild, strange frenzy for success: ego
istic, individualistic success.
The war brings collapse, and the book ends with a final-
bit of flight, to nowhere. 1^ Hemingway, Lawrence finds
flight without illusions "about landing anywhere." Nick
is in the contemporary world the "remains of the lone
trapper and cowboy," to be met in the wilder sections,
who is in "a state of conscious, accepted indifference
to everything except freedom from work and the moment1s
Interest." It is clear that Lawrence found in Hemingway
attitudes and an honesty compatible with his own rejections
and hatred of sentimentality.
12
Ibid., p. 362.
13 IMd,. p. 364.
371
. . . Krebs, in that devastating Oklahoma sketch. . . ,
doesn't love anybody, and it nauseates him to have
to pretend he does. He doesn't even want to love
anybody. . . . He wants just to lounge around and
maintain a healthy state of nothingness inside him
self, 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 doean1t care, then why should he care? Any
how, he doesn't.1^
In Lawrence's own fiction, the American experience
made Itself felt from time to time. In "Mother and
15
Daughter" . a lost lover, who has married an American,
figures in the battle of the daughter against her mother'a
dominance and scorn of love. In "The Lovely Lady,"1^
that devastating portrait of the dominating mother who
preserves a strange youthfulness into her seventies as long
as she can hold her son and render him incapable of love
of another woman, mother and son pore over old Mexican
legal documents that contain an account of the seduction
17
of a nun. "The Blue Moccasins" takes its title from
the chief bit of property and symbolism. The heroine,
possessor of a loveless marriage to a younger man, refuses
the "shoes" to.her rival-when they are needed for a play,
and at that psychological juncture loses him. Again in
.p-
Ibid., p. 366.
15
Lawrence, The Lovely Lady.
16
Ibid.
17 Ibid.
372
Lawrence deadness and negation of will are replaced by
passional affirmation. In "Things"!^ two uew England
idealists, strongly reminiscent of Lawrence’s American
friends, Earl and Achsah Brewster, though he denied this
in a letter to them, pursue fad after fad, ideal after
ideal, in dilettante fashion, as long as their money holds
out, and then return home, where at last "the job," long
held out against, closes in on the man. He is finally
"inside the cage." The tone is that of the sardonic
Lawrence. Most American of all is "None of That,"19 in
which Lawrence in almost Hemingwayesque fashion portrays
the modern "bitch." He may well have had certain aspects
of Mrs. Luhan in mind— or so Mrs. Lawrence thinks. This
woman who seduces men and then scorns the sexual act (she
will have "none of that") meets her defeat, and subsequent
death, at the hands of a bullfighter in Mexico, where
Lawrence had felt the presence of death so strongly. One
recalls Hemingway’s later Death in the Afternoon and its
fascination with the elaborate ritual of danger, courage,
and death. Lawrence's inimical woman, who must always be
converted or conquered, is conquered indeed. His narrator
is Mexican. Setting and incident are consummately done,
18 Ibid.
19
Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other
Stories (Leipzig: Tanchnitz), pp. 265-2(37 •
373
and Lawrence refrains from comment, a technique rare in
his immediately preceding work.
In his own life, Lawrence was not given to complete
breaks. He continued to correspond with Mrs. Luhan, and
when she sent him the first sections of Intimate Memories,
gave her advice about publication. When, late in 1928,
only about a year before his death, she asked him to write
an article on Hew Mexico,he responded with what he con
sidered "quite a beautiful" one. Doing it, he wrote to
her, gave him
. . . a real longing to be back— and I should like
to come in spring (sicl even If only to stay the
six months allowed oy the passport. Brett sug
gests creeping in unnoticed, but if I feel I have
to do that I shall be spitting in everybody's eye.
I'm not given to creeping in, and USA isn't para
dise anyhow.21
The obtuse, vulgar reactions of two American girls
to the art of Florence prompted Lawrence to an outburst of
anger.
They've negated and negated and negated till
there's nothing— and they themselves are empty
vessels. . . . And it's largely the result of an
affectation of "freedom" from old standards,
become a fixed habit and a loathesome disease. . . .
I feel I'd rather go and live in a hyena house
than go to live in America.22
But correspondence with Mrs. Luhan about a return
20 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, pp. 338-339*
21 Jbid-, P* 339*
22
Aldington, D. H. Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius
But. . . pp, 378-379*
374
continued through 1929. Lawrence was afraid of the old
difficulties (". . . Won't somebody or other begin doing
one dirt?1 1 ) His concern for the ranch and the manuscripts
there, tended by Brett, who had returned to New Mexico
in 1926 after seeing Lawrence in Italy, is that of a man
unconsciously writing his will. He was ill, and apparently
badly shaken by the censorship of Lady Chatterley1s Lover,
the paintings, and the poems Pansies. For a time, he
considered selling the ranch, "a bit remote and strenu-
23
ous when one is not well." Then he decided, Mrs.
Lawrence reported, that he did not want "to lose the con-
2 i f . ■
nection" in America. He himself wrote with a note of
resignation repeated in such a late poem as "The Ship of
Death,"
. . . The cycle of the greater year still goes round,
and as it turns, it will probably bring us back.
One has to wait for the auspicious day. I find one
has to lean a great deal on destiny, when one's own will
has been so thoroughly curbed by Illness and things,
and one^finds one can't do anything, hardly, as one
likes. *
In January, 1930, only about a month before his death, he
was writing hopefully of two months of "absolute care,"
after which he "ought to be well enough to come to New
23
Ibid., p. 341.
2 k
Ibid., p. 347.
25
Ibid.. pp. 349-350.
375
26
Mexico and there get quite strong."
27
The essay, "New Mexico," published posthumously,
was Lawrence's last real comment on the American experi
ence. New Mexico was “the greatest experience from the
outside world" that he had ever had, and it changed him
"for ever." The Buddhism of Ceylon "had not touched the
great psyche of materialism and idealism" that dominated
him. Years "among the old Gree£ paganism" of Sicily
"had not shattered the essential Christianity on which"
his "character was established." Australia was "a sort
of dream or trance. . ., the self remaining unchanged."
Tahiti and California had repelled him. But "in the
magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico. . . , a new part
of the soul woke up suddenly and the old world gave way
to a new." The sun and the landscape "had a splendid
silent terror, and a vast far-and-wide magnificence. . .
beyond mere aesthetic appreciation." Paradoxically the
greatest modern political democracy gave one "the greatest
sense of overweening, terrible proudness and merciless
ness. " These qualities had- been stressed in the New
Mexico stories and poems.
In New Mexico "the human being is left stark,
26 Ibid., p. 351.
27
Survey Graphic, May, 1931* Phoenix: the Posthu
mous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, pp. Ikl -Uvf.
376
heartless, hut undauntedly religious." The latter quality
was a revelation to the Lawrence who had I'looked over all
the world for something" that to him would he religious.
He had felt it fleetingly in a native dance in Ceylon, hut
he had no "permanent feeling of^religion" till he encountered
New Mexico and "the old human race-experience there." He
recapitulates the experience reported long before in the
Indian essays, with something of the same sensuous detail,
eschewing naivete and sentimentality,, as before, by acknow
ledging the existence of the bad Indian, disintegrated from
the tribe and its religion. But where the tribe has re
tained its religion
. . . there is a tribal integrity and a living
tradition going back far beyond the birth of Christ,
beyond the pyramids, beyond Moses. A vast old
religion which once swayed the earth lingers in
unbroken practice there in New Mexico, older, per
haps, than anything in the world. . . .
What Lawrence had found in New Mexico was the most
significant evidence of a golden age, belief in which he
had expounded in 1921 in the Foreword of Fantasia of the
Unconscious. The disinherited pilgrim through the waste
land had found a tradition outside Western Europe for his
intuited belief. The contemporary heretic had circled far
back and become the preacher of a greater orthodoxy which,
in the cyclical yet upward movement of human destiny, must
—
Ibid.. pp. 1A4-1^5»
377
prevail again in heightened form. There is no harshness
in "New Mexico," but in the concluding paragraph Lawrence
repeated once more his belief in the cycle.
The sky-scraper will scatter on the winds
like thistledown, and the genuine America, the
America of New Mexico, will stajjt on its course
again. This is an interregnum.
29
Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence,
p.. 14-7. ! “
CHAPTER II
CONCLUSION
To the very young Lawrence, America was a conven
tional symbol o‘ f escape and new beginnings. Some of his
earliest work involved that theme. In his youthful read
ing, American transcendentalism delighted him with its
eclectic freedom, confidence in life, and intuitions of
an indwelling spirit in nature; and pragmatism appealed
to him with its empirical approach to an evolving life
for the individual. He wrote Whitmanesque verses explor
ing the forbidden'subtleties of sex and love, and in them
and in more realistic prose struggled toward individua
tion and integration.. G-radually he outlined a gospel of
intuition expressing his own unique vision off the world,
a theory of knowing through the blood, with all that that
implies of irrationality, darkness, and even death, as
well as intellectual synthesis, struggle toward the light,
and life.
He found in Frieda the chance of freedom from the
painful tie to his mother and from the puritanical scruple
and obscene repressions of his boyhood. Significantly
she was of the upper classes. He called upon her to
recognize the superiority of his genius, and took her
from a middle-class marriage as if he were indeed "the fox
379
of the story of that name. With her he set about achieving
an equilibrated life and recording the contest for it in
his work.
But society intervened with the problems of divorce,
ties between her and the children of the first marriage,
equality of the sexes, public taste and censorship of too
unconventional work, and then, elimacticalljj war with its
total disregard of individual struggle for delicate, poetic
spiritual and physical equilibrium. To the Lawrence who
had already moved out to the periphery of Western culture,
his world came to an end. The only thing left to do was
to hasten the death and to struggle for a new, difficult
beginning.
Lawrence became the archetype of the modern artist
alienated from his culture. Joyce rejected home, church,
and country for the creative, freedom of his art. The ’ ’lost
generation" gathered in Paris. Hemingway, turning his
back upon his native land, gave up the old abstract words
with their unrealized ideals and explored in concrete
terms nothingness of soul and the sharp actualities of
violence, death, and stoic suffering. Dos Passos' three
soldiers were crushed by a world they never made, and
his U. S. A. became a deadly pandemonium. Fitzgerald
celebrated "the brave young men" and a G-atsby whose dream
was a fantastic bubble amid froth. T. S. Eliot sang the
swansong of the genteel, dilettante Prufrock, contrasted
a sterile modern wasteland with a spiritually fruitful
past, and presented his thirst at the fountainhead of
.Christianity in a conservative spirit. They, and many
others, were akin to Lawrence. But in his negations he
encompassed them all; and in his affinflations he was the
most daring, versatile, and revolutionary in a sense
involving the inner life.and apart from Marxism, which he
rejected along with all materialism save that curious
psychological connection he felt throughtthe blood. Eliot’
heretic, he rejected not only the1 church but the whole
Christian era and G-reek philosophy just preceding it,
turfiing for any acceptable tradition at all to evidences
of a superior pre-historic world.
The developing young writer had established closer
ties with America through Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, “Imagism,
and Harriet Monroe and her Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.
America, indeed, had turned out to be a better market for
his work than England. There was a long precedent for the
flight of Europeans in that direction. In the midst of
the war Lawrence, having given up trust in the mass of
society, turned to hope in superior individuals and grasped
at the idea of a remote haven in America where natural and
communal life for such individuals might proceed in harmony
and vivid life as a nucleus for a new society. There a
381
resurrection might follow the death of all his English
past within him.
Frustration after frustration of this plan followed,
driving Lawrence farther towards nihilism and revenge. The
idea of essays on American transcendentalism originated as
a means of entree. As he studied the abstractions made by
American writers from Franklin to Whitman, it occurred
to him that these men were not young and new but ultimate
extensions of European intellectualism and decadence.
America became for him the ultimate destruction of feeling,
of the spontaneous life of the blood. Evidence for this
lay in the massive industrialism, the signs of neuroticism,
and the ancient sacrificial death urge of the Mexican
Indian. Inevitably sharing in the modern realistic spirit,
Lawrence found the primitivism of Rousseau and Chateaubriand
naive, failing before the naturalistic forces and the
decadence that must be realized. But for the alien seek
ing a tradition and a home, the Indian loomed larger and
larger as a link with a pre-historic past from which the
Christian era was a decline.
After the war, as he formulated his philosophy in
Fantasia of the Unconscious and announced his theory of a
pre-historic era which had contained his integration, he
received the invitation to New Mexico. He voyaged first
to the East, seeking traces there of the ancient religion,
382
thence to the utter newness and rawness of Australia,
where he made further rejections of the present and was
tempted to forgetfulness, through the decadent remnants
of the past in the South Seas, and finally to New Mexico
and his feeling of an authentic link there.
In New Mexico three worlds were juxtaposed: modern
culture with its aimlessness, frivolity, and concealed
destructiveness; the Indian world in powerful contrast,
decaying, but a thread from a past to which one could
not return but from which one might learn the way to the
future; and in the country Itself a primitive, naturalis
tic world of powerful forces pulling down man and his
aspirations. This was not enough to move Lawrence to a
major expression. To the south lay the fertile warmth
of Mexico, where the Christian churches stood like ghosts
in a land which retained the legend of the return of
Quetzalcoatl, where under a thin modern overlay lurked the
fierce, unformed nature of the Indian, brutal but fascina
tingly powerful, crying out to be molded and saved, where
the catchwords of democracy, socialism, and fascism spoke
hypocritically of materialistic brotherhood for the masses,
where ferment and revolution were in the air. Lawrence^
desire to change his world, to be a prophet, even a god,
to it, was brought to fever heat amid debate with ideal
istic Americans and with the wife, the eternal woman,
383
realistic, doubting, limited, who must he persuaded of
her husband's leadership and wisdom. The amalgam was The
Plumed Serpent, which pulled Into its texture all the
themes, images, and symbols of the American experience
which had appeared in minor works, and ended in the triumph
of a hero-god, a Promethean savior.
The rest of Lawrence's career was in a sense anti
climax and epilogue. Slowly and tentatively, but only
tentatively, the miner's son gave ;up his godly throne,
retreating into the more human warmth and tenderness of
the Mediterranean, into the gypsy-gamekeeper seer of the
later fiction, still aiming his "silent bullets" through
essay, poem, and story, with a climax in Lady Chatterley1s
Lover, but never again making the full assumption. His
real apotheosis was in America.
It has been the tendency of many who write on
Lawrence to discount the. philosophy, as Aldington does
in his recent biography, to accentuate his apparent in
consistencies without explaining their sources, and to
treat him as the source of a florlleglum of fine passages,
of penetrating bits of psychological.insight, of poetic
phrasing. The philosophy is in many respects unpalatable.
To the anthropologist the Atlantis, golden-age legend is
no more than a legend, an intellectual position without
adequate evidence. The physiology and psychology of the
blood-consciousness theory at times seem personal, vn
381;
unscientific combinations of the wildest sort. Prom the
pen of a man who was not an artist, much of the structure
would justifiably be dismissed as on the level of theo-
sophical, irrational drivel, as Tindall sees it. The
approach to America with its negation of the achievements
of modern technology, of humanitarianism, and of demo
cratic processes, seems on one side monstrous, except to
the hard-bitten student of social realities. But even
the student of the social sciences relies upon more ration
ality, more intellectuality, to ameliorate a bad situation.
Although some see the atomic age as an ultimate deathly
extension of technology, there are others who hope yet
for wise, rational control of the new forces. Almost
none would be interested in trying to practise Lawrence's
religion. Nevertheless, without the philosophy there
would be no Lawrence.
Despite his own disregard for art as art, it is as
the artist with unique insights and world of imaginative
form and significance that Lawrence is of value. The
philosophy is in one sense an efflorescence of his artis
tic vision, an attempt to explain that vision both to
himself and to the world. In another sense, so far as it
adequately expresses his unconscious, the philosophy must
be equated with his artistic vision. It governs his
-selection Of character, incident, image, symbol; it is
385
the key to the multiplicity and conflict of both his
art and his life.
In this study, we have seen Lawrence1s Imaginative
world take shape in sensitive response to", the pressures
of the real world. It so happened that America was a
major pressure and condition, so that a climactic synthe
sis was reached in The Plumed Serpent. Thus we have
traced a rising line of development. Yet there is reason
for supposing that a similar development would have taken
place in an altered context. Lawrence's philosophy runs
in a straight line through his work, bringing his environ
ment into adjustment with it. The filings around the
magnet arrange themselves into different patterns, but
always in relationship to the same force. The vision of
the man is an absolute In a relative world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. BOOKS
Aldington, Richard, D. H. Lawrence. Portrait of -a. Genius
But. . . . New York: Buell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950*
Brett, Dorothy, Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship. Philadel
phia: Lippincott, 1933.
Carswell, Catherine, The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of
H* Lawrence♦ New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932.
Damon, S. F., Amy Lowell. A Chronicle. Boston: Houghton.
Mifflin Company, 1935.
Ford, Ford Madox, Portraits from Life. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1937-
Hughes, Glenn, Imagism and the Imaglsta. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1931*
Keynes, John Maynard, Two Memoirs. New York: Augustus M.
Kelley, 19^9-
Lawrence, D. H., Assorted Articles. New York: Alfred A,
Knopf, 193^»
_______________ , Birds. Beasts and Flowers. London: Seeker,
1923.
_______________ , The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence.
New York: J. Cape and H. Smith, 1929- 2 vols.
_______________ , Fantasia of the Unconscious. New York:
Boni, 1930.
_______________ , Kangaroo. New York: Seltzer, 1923.
_______________ , The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. edited by
Aldous Huxley. New York: The Viking Press, 1932. 3**d
printing, 1936.
_______________ , The Lovely Lady. London: Seeker, 1932.
_______________ , Mornings in Mexico. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1927.
388
Lawrence, D. H., Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of
D. H. Lawrence. edited by Edward C. McDonald, New York:
The Viking Press, 1936.
________________ , The Plays of D. H. Lawrence. London:
Seeker, 1933*
_______________ , The Plumed Serpent. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1926.
________________ , The Prussian Officer and Other Stories..
London: Duckworth, 191L.
________________ _ Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine
and Other Essays. Philadelphia: The Centaur Press,
1925.
________________ , St. Mawr. Together with The Princess.
London: Seeker, 1930*
________________ , Studies in Classic American Literature.
New York: Boni, 1930.
The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories.
Leipzig: T&uchnitz, n.d.
______, Women in Love. New York: The Modern Library,
n.d.
Lawrence, Frieda, “Not I, But the Wind. . . ." Santa Fe:
The Rydal Press, 1 9 3 % .
Luhan, Mabel Dodge, Lorenzo in Taos. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1932.
McDonald, Edward A., A Bibliography of the Writings of D,
H. Lawrence. Philadelphia: The Centaur Book Shop,
1925.
Merrild, Knud, A Poet and Two Painters. New Yor3$:: The
Viking Press, 1939.
Moore, Harry T., D, H. Lawrence1s Letters to Bertrand
Russell. New York: Gotham Book Mart, 19^8.
Murry, J. M., Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence. New York:
Holt, 1933.
_____________ , Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence.
New York: J, Cape and H. Smith, 1931*
389
Pattee, Fred Lewis, “A Call for a literary Historian,1 *
The Reinterpretation of American Literature, edited by
Norman Foerster. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928.
Powell, Lawrence Clark, The Manuscripts of D. H. Lawrence:
A Descriptive Catalogue. Los Angeles: The Public Library,
1937.
Russell, Bertrand, Mysticism and Logic. New York: Norton,
1929.
T.E., (Jessie Chambers) D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record.
. New York: Knight Publications, 1936.
Tedlock, E. W., Jr., The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D.
H. Lawrence Manuscripts. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1948.
Tindall, W. Y., D. H. Lawrence and Susan Eis Cow. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1939-
______________ , "Transcendentalism in Contemporary Literature,"
The Asian Legacy and American Life, edited by Arthur E.
Christy. New York: John Day, 1945.
Tylor, Edward B-., Primitive. Culture. Boston: Estes and
Lauriat, 1874. 2 vols.
B. PERIODICAL ARTICLES
Aldington, Richard, "D. H. Lawrence as Poet." The Saturday
Review of Literature. 2:7^9-750, May 1, 1926.
Anonymous, "Censorship Beaten in New York Court," Publisher1s
Weekly. 801-804, September 16, 1922.
. "Important Censorship Case," Publisher* s Weekly.
463-464, August 5, 1922.
__________, "More Censorship," Publisher's Weekly. 118,
July 15, 1922.
__________, "Notes," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 3*151,
January, 1914.
Auden, W. H., "Some Notes on D. H. Lawrence," The Nation.
164: 482, April 26, 1947*
390
Gregory, Alyse, review of Studies in Classic American
Literature. The Dial. 70-71, January, 1924.
Hueffer, Ford Madox, "Impressionism— Some Speculations,"
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 2:220-221, September, 1913.
Lawrence, D. H., "Gertain Americans and an Englishman," New
York Times Magazine, 3, 9, December 24, 1922.
_______________ , "0 I Americans !" New Mexico Quarterly Review.
8:75-81, May, 1938. ;
_______________ , "Studies in Classic American Literature"—
(vii) "Nathaniel Hawthorne," English Review. May 1919.
Leighton, Frederic W.,"The Bite of Mr. Lawrence," Laughing
Horse. D. H. Lawrence Number:16-18, April, 1926.
Lesemann, Maurice, "D. H. Lawrence in Mexico," The Bookman.
59:30, March, 1924.
Pound, Ezra, review of Love Poems and Others. Poetry: A
Magazine of Verse. 2:149-151, July, 1913*
Tietjens, Eunice, review of Amores. Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse. 9:264-266, February, 1917.
Troy, William, "The Lawrence Myth,." Partisan Review. 4:
3-13, January, 1938.
Villiers, Bud (Willard Johnson), “D. H. Lawrence in Mexico,"
The Southwest Review. 15:425-433, Summer, 193°.
Weaver, Raymond M., review of Studies in Classic American
Literature. The Bookman. 58:327-328, November, 1923.
Weston, Edward, "Lawrence in Mexico," The Carmelite. 3:
ix-xi, March 19, 1930.
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