D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930)

This is a three-generation family saga, set in Nottinghamshire, starting in Victorian times and ending before fears of WW1 loomed. Except that it isn’t that: the brief Introduction summarises all the key characters, careers, couplings, births and deaths.

Events are mere tools and waypoints, not the purpose or destination, because this is not primarily a story: it’s an experience of passions, clothed in elliptically floral, fiery, watery imagery, stained deep with Biblical themes.

But show more these are not conventionally Christian people: they seek and submit to the forces of nature, their physical desires, free of guilt and shame. They marvel at creation, and worship it and each other through the medium of their mingling, tingling flesh. A deep, true sacrament. (Yet when this was banned shortly after publication, it was on the grounds of obscenity, rather than blasphemy: lesbianism alluded to, though nowadays, any outrage comes from the fact that one is the teacher of the other.)

This is a profoundly sensual, sexual book, but it’s not at all explicit: the most intimate encounters are described in terms of flowers and flames, rather than human anatomy. I’m not one for florid language or euphemisms, but I was first seduced, then bewitched, and finally intoxicated by the surreal erotic lyricism that is often more poem than prose.

Reading this was a total emotional immersion. I opened up to receive Lawrence's words: I burned in the fire, dusted the ashes from my lips, and drowned in the waters.

Reliving it now, I melt and burn and dissolve and yearn all over again. I quiver and shiver, even as I wave and drown, licked in the flames of Lawrence’s passion.

Lawrence’s Words

I am too much in the thrall of this book to write more words of my own:

• “Outside, the rain slanted by in fine, steely, mysterious haste, emerging out of the gulf of darkness.”

• “The pure love came in sunbeams between them, when she was like a flower in the sun to him… feeling the radiance from the Almighty beat through him like a pulse, as he stood in the upright flame of praise, transmitting the pulse of Creation.”

• “Then softly, oh softly, so softly… his lips touched her cheek, and she drifted through strands of heat and darkness.”

• “His limbs, his body, took fire and beat up in flames. She clung to him, she cleaved to his body. The flames swept him, he held her in sinews of fire. If she would kiss him! He bent his mouth down. And her mouth, soft and moist, received him. He felt his veins burst with anguish of thankfulness, his heart was made with gratefulness, he could pour himself out upon her forever.”

• Plum trees, “All glittering and snowy and delighted with the sunshine, in full bloom under a blue sky. They threw out their blossom, they flung it about under the blue heavens.”

• “But to him, she was a flame that consumed him… till he existed only as an unconscious, dark transit of flame, deriving from her.”

• "Now, ah now, she was swimming in the same water... The girl moved her limbs voluptuously, and swam by herself, deliciously, yet with a craving of unsatisfaction. She wanted to touch the other, to touch her, to feel her."

• “She would… feel her blood running, feel herself lying open like a flower unsheathed in the sun, insistent and potent with demand.”

• “She laid hold of him for her dreams.”

• “He was the warm colouring to her dreams, he was the hot blood beating within them.”

MORE quotes… I have saved many more quotes, grouped loosely by theme, HERE, along with a (very) few observations about the story, and the change of tone at the end.

But that is not the review; this one is.

Ursula's story (plus Gudrun's) is continued in Women in Love, which is remarkably different style - in some ways. See my review HERE.

Image: Georgia O’Keeffe “Blue Flower” 1918, http://whitney.org/image_columns/0026/3487/okeeffe_blue_flower_481_481.jpg show less

A paean to a kind of Nietzschean paganism, with the will-to-power being replaced with a will-to-collective-wholeness, Lawrence here seeks to reestablish the pre-Judaeo-Christian world’s connection with the cosmos, an acephalic rapturous correspondence from a man’s blood to the rays of the Sun and the salve of the Moon. It’s all rather beautiful really, with Lawrence’s venom toward John of Patmos being tempered by a congenial warmth. Lawrence utilises his dying pen strokes here to show more outline a program of contented living for modern man, one contradictory to the individualistic and envious vision portrayed in Revelations: a vision which has been handed down to us by the cruel side of Christianity’s Janus face (the Christian Love of Jesus versus the Christian Envy of John of Patmos, with such envy bringing about the desire to destroy Rome and then the entire universe just because John could not enjoy the delicacies of Babylon).

Of course it’s a shame that any mention of paganism these days makes people quite rightfully turn up their noses, it’s been somewhat co-opted by the dregs of the New-Age-hippy-cum-weird-sex-magick-stuff community (think of Kathy Bates in About Schmidt, wind chimes and a sour sopping pussy, balding chubby men with musty miserable-looking ponytails, you get the picture), even worse are the eye-rolling racist rants espoused by Scandinavian dolts who identify as pagans and think that by using the word ‘degeneracy’ enough times they’ll magically be able to regain some absurd connection with their Norse Gods by virtue of blood and soil alone (I see you Varg Vikernes and The Golden One, you sad bastards). I think there really is something to be said about the line of thought through the Romantic poets, Nietzsche and Lawrence, some kind of link between us and our environment that needs to be rekindled, and it’s always interesting to see someone try to put the words down to communicate such an idea. I think the question now is to try to steer away from the flat and dull materialism of scientism (and the dull orthodox interpretations of Marxism for that matter) whilst at the same time not indulging in some meatheaded irrationalism, aiming instead to give a voice to the capabilities of emotional intelligence, something wider than the individual (almost collective unconscious-y, but I’ve never been a card-carrying Jungian). Don’t tell anyone that I’ve been reading this during my virtual business meetings, I have to cling onto it just so as to remind myself that there is indeed something eternal out there, something worthy of praise outside of the slow suicide I am participating in each and every time I hop on a zoom call.

Lawrence has the virtue/terrible tendency to leave his best stuff on the last page, so I’ll leave you with this.

‘What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his 'soul'. Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.’

‘Shadow wizard money gang
We love casting spells’

‘Who says the sun cannot speak to me! The sun has a great blazing consciousness, and I have a little blazing consciousness. When I can strip myself of the trash of personal feelings and ideas, and get down to my naked sun-self, then the sun and I can commune by the hour, the blazing interchange, and he gives me life, sun-life, and I send him a little new brightness from the world of the bright blood. The great sun, like an angry dragon, hater of the nervous and personal consciousness in us. As all these modern sunbathers must realize, for they become disintegrated by the very sun that bronzes them. But the sun, like a lion, loves the bright red blood of life, and can give it an infinite enrichment if we know how to receive it. But we don't. We have lost the sun. And he only falls on us and destroys us, decomposing something in us: the dragon of destruction instead of the life-bringer. And we have lost the moon, the cool, bright, ever-varying moon. It is she who would caress our nerves, smooth them with the silky hand of her glowing, soothe them into serenity again with her cool presence. For the moon is the mistress and mother of our watery bodies, the pale body of our nervous consciousness and our moist flesh. Oh, the moon could soothe us and heal us like a cool great Artemis between her arms. But we have lost her, in our stupidity we ignore her, and angry she stares down on us and whips us with nervous whips. Oh, beware of the angry Artemis of the night heavens, beware of the spite of Cybele, beware of the vindictiveness of horned Astarte. For the lovers who shoot themselves in the night, in the horrible suicide of love, they are driven mad by the poisoned arrows of Artemis: the moon is against them: the moon is fiercely against them. And oh, if the moon is against you, oh, beware of the bitter night, especially the night of intoxication. Now this may sound nonsense, but that is merely because we are fools. There is an eternal vital correspondence between our blood and the sun: there is an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the moon. If we get out of contact and harmony with the sun and moon, then both turn into great dragons of destruction against us. The sun is a great source of blood-vitality, it streams strength to us. But once we resist the sun, and say: It is a mere ball of gas! - then the very streaming vitality of sunshine turns into subtle disintegrative force in us, and undoes us. The same with the moon, the planets, the great stars. They are either our makers or our unmakers. There is no escape. We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus?’ show less

You know a book is trouble when it's published privately in Italy in 1928 and again in France a year later. It wasn't published openly to the masses until 1960 when it was promptly banned across the world. The United States, Canada, Australia, India, and Japan all found fault with it. Finally, when it was at the center of a 1960 British obscenity trial, things came to a head.
Who doesn't know this story? Lady Chatterley is an attractive upper-class woman married to an equally handsome man show more who happens to be paralyzed from the waist down. Connie is young, spoiled, and has certain...needs. Her husband says he understands, but a man and wife's varying perceptions of the same marriage are striking. Clifford Chatterley doesn't really understand the resentments of his wife. A poignant scene is when Connie watches a mother hen protect her eggs and feels empty. She wants a child. She wants a lover. She finds solace in the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, who lives on the grounds. His cottage is a short distance from the estate...It is the classic tale of class differences. Lawrence goes a bit further by exploring themes of industrialism (Clifford wants to modernize mining with new technology) and mind-body psychology (the struggle between the heart and mind when it involves sexuality, especially when it is illicit in nature). The ending is ambiguous, as typical of Lawrence's work, but it ends with hope. show less

I often come away from D.H. Lawrence thinking, "What an odd book." This is no exception. The love story/romance is full of nothing happening and the rapidly shifting feelings of one person for another, bouncing back and forth between affection, attraction, frustration, and disdain. At first, I found this jarring. Then, I began to wonder if it is closer to how humans actually feel if examined in that minute by minute manner. Though the affair was presumably the main story, I found the pieces show more with Siegmund's family (their painful rejection, his overpowering guilt) the most gripping. show less