And. Trial of Penguin Books for Public,
the publication of an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover Dame Rebecca West was one of the witnesses called for the defence.
Although she defended the novel from the charge of obscenity. She conceded that, quote, Lawrence has a great defect which impairs this book.
He has absolutely no sense of humour.
And a lot of the sentences in this book are, to my view, ludicrous.
She was and is not alone in either part of this opinion that Lawrence has no sense of humour and that because he has no sense of humour,
he unintentionally writes in a way which is ludicrous.
Malaz and Lady Chatterley, placing flowers in each other's pubic hair, has been found by many to be hilarious, though I confess that I cannot see why.
More generally, it is his tone and style that have been found fault with.
At his tone, at times, insistent, hyper confident, bullying, preaching and his style with its half invented vocabulary and its repetition,
Lawrence himself explained in his advertising leaflet for the American edition of Women and Love.
That in point of style, founders of Folt is often found with the continual, slightly modified repetition.
The only answer is that it is natural to the author and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion
or understanding comes from this pulsing frictional to and fro which works up to a culmination.
This commentary would itself be held up by the same kind of critic to the same kind of ridicule.
And there is no doubt that he is being serious here. But am I wrong to detect behind that the ghost of a grim, ghostly hands rubbing,
rubbing together to see what the honest readers of America make of that?
Over the last three decades, there's been increasing recognition that Lawrence did indeed have a sense of humour,
and this has helped to restore his reputation from the nadir it reached as a result of the 1970s feminist critique.
The Lawrence being presented today, both as in during this hour and in general nowadays, is perhaps harder both to ridicule and connect,
at least to object to than the sage who was presented in the nineteen fifties and sixties in 1996.
A book devoted to this subject came out Paul Eggerton, John Worden's Lawrence and comedy.
Comedy is used here in the narrow sense of humour, not the widest sense of involving a happy ending.
I think ultimately that Lawrence did have a view of life, though, which was comedic in the widest sense.
But that isn't the subject of this lecture today. Those who knew Lawrence found him fun.
Jesse Chambers, the Eastwood friend on whom Miriam in Sons and Lovers is based, recalls that when he was in the mood,
he could be very funny, particularly when mimicking the members of the Christian Endeavour class.
Frieda recalls him, mimicking Bertrand Russell and the other fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.
He acted for me how? After dinner, they walked around the room with their hands on their backs and discussed the Balkans in the professional way.
And really they knew nothing. Any of you who live within striking distance of Hampstead May, a couple of years ago,
have seen a play which was premiered there called On the Rocks by Amy Rosenthal.
This was about Lawrence and Frida's life together in rock strewn Cornwall during
the First World War and the failure of their experiment in communal living.
When the short story writer Katherine Mansfield and her novelist boyfriend John Middleton Murray came to join them.
The actor playing Lawrence was far too muscular and healthy.
Looking at this play and this production exaggerated the extent to which Lawrence was the life and soul of the party.
He would not, for example, as this place showed, grab a bottle of beer and lustily encourage others to do likewise.
He drank a little and disliked drunkenness, but I was glad that this play reminded people that Lawrence was indeed the kind
of person who would corral his friends into polygons like Shiraz and Brook.
No Nodine Birken in Women in Love resembles, as I said last week, Lawrence in several ways.
The Burkean played by Alan Bates in the nineteen sixty nine Ken Russell film of Women in Love, also raises laughter with him,
but less by being a party animal, as in that play and more by being a teasing enfant terrible.
Here he is taking tea at Bradley.
In fact, in the garden at Bradberry, he hardly gives any kind of speech except to rebuff Hamani irritably, there are no soliloquies.
But Bates's speech on figs is a verbatim quotation of sections of Lawrence's poem, Figgs,
which was published in his collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers within four years of finishing Women in Love.
And it's a testimony to the freeness of its verse that it resembles prose.
Or rather, perhaps it indicates that speech, if transcribed, more resembles free verse than it resembles prose.
In any case, it's an inexplicable deviation from the novel,
just as the one posthumous Lawrence of On the Rocks is a forgivable distortion of the man himself.
Lawrence would read out his poems to his friends, including at Garston, the country seat of Lady Autoline morale,
which lies just six miles from us on which Bradley was partially based.
The Oxford Voice, one of the poems in his nineteen twenty nine collection, Pansy's asks to be read out loud.
It ends. We wouldn't insist on it for a moment.
But we are. We are. You know, we are superior.
We are. Or in generally exasperated vein, there is the little wowza, another pansy,
there should certainly be red in Eastwood accent, which I'm going to have to make my best shot.
There is a little wowza John Thomas by name. And for every blooming mortal thing that little blighters to blame, it was Emmas.
Putin has made the first mistake of putting us in the world, forcing us out of the UN awake and making us come on cold.
And then when you get in nicely on and life seems to begin, that little bleeder comes bustin in with Hello boy, what about sin?
And then it leads to by the nose. After a lot of women and strips you starkers a monkey notes and leaves you never a tramon.
And then somebody has to marry to put him through its paces.
Then when John Thomas don't worry. It's your wife. Where is and Grace is.
I think of all the little brutes as ever was invented. That little cods the Holy Worst ACTUP.
Tim, I've repented. Lawrence was also able to laugh warmly and delightedly at others.
This kind of laughter combines an amused sense of the absurd, the unlearnt,
the clumsy and the preposterous with love of those who aroused this feeling in him.
We find it in the narration of Tom Brangwyn speech at Will and Anna's Wedding in the Rainbow.
This is a rustic scene. The step father of the bride and his two brothers are getting drunk and ribald.
They toast the virginal couple night and day in May.
They enjoy it hammer and tongs and may they enjoy it.
And then Tom, the stepfather of the bride, finds himself inspired by a theory about angels and decides to make a speech.
It seems to me, as a married couple makes one angel for an angel can't be less than a human being.
And if it was only the soul of a man minus the man, then it would be less than a human being.
His brother then raises the problem of women who never marry or who remarry, such as Tom's own wife.
One of the women in the audience then recalls that her angel sorry, her child once thought he saw angels.
And another woman recalls that when she was a child, she got an angel stuck up her nose.
We used to call them. They saw things, angels as well.
It's about the room then moves into a general discussion of things that children will get stuck up their noses.
Quote, Tom Brown's mood of inspiration began to pass away.
He forgot all about it and was soon shouting and roaring with the rest.
This is the mildest satire of a rustics version of Lawrence's own ideas.
Tom enjoyed his inspiration, as did we. And then we are happy to get on with the party.
We both share the spirit of this party and that of the newlywed couple who later that night pours
in their lovemaking to giggle at their drunken fathers who are singing at them through the window.
Often, though, Lawrence uses humour when he is out of humour as a weapon of attack.
In his 1927 essay on John Galsworthy, he described what he means by satire.
And I should explain in this quotation that his phrase social being denote the mode in which a soul exists in relation to society.
Satire exists for the very purpose of killing the social being,
showing him what an inferior he is, and with all his parade of social honesty, dishonest to life,
dishonest to the living universe on which he is parasitic as a louse, by ridiculing the social being,
the satirist helps the true individual, the real human being, to rise to his feet again and to go on with the battle.
Here, then we have humour as the demonstration of superiority, one of the four major theories of humour alongside incongruity, relief and play,
and in Lawrence's case, the demonstration of superiority has the aim of annihilation in how beastly the bourgeois is,
which is another poem from Pansy's. The sarcasm is wielded like a battle axe.
How beastly the Bajwa is, especially the male of the species, presentable, eminently presentable.
Shall I make you a present of him? Isn't he handsome?
Isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen?
Doesn't he look the fresh, clean Englishman outside?
Isn't he God's own image, tramping his thirty miles a day after partridges for a little rubber ball.
Wouldn't you like to be like that? Well, off and quite the thing.
The poem ends standing in the thousands. These appearances in damp England.
What a pity. They can't all be knocked over like sickening toadstools and left to melt back swiftly into the soil of England.
A very different resigned satire can be found in Lady Chatterley's Lover.
If you've read this, you'll remember that before Lady Chatterley meets Mallow's,
she has a brief affair with a guest of her husband's called Mikaela's.
Mickolus is an Irish playwright.
Ultimately, he is an unsympathetic character, but he embodies several characteristics of Lawrence himself in exaggerated form.
He is an outsider to the English upper classes, whom he satirises in his plays but whose hospitality he nonetheless accepts.
He is unhappy, lonely and without glee.
What is interesting is the closeness of his own gloomy sense of irony to that of the narrator who describes it.
For example, Mickolus was the last word in what was caddish and boundaries,
he was discovered to be and to English and to the class that made the discovery, this was worse than the dirtiest crime.
He was cut dead and his corpse thrown into the refuse can bear in mind that Lawrence was writing this novel in Italy about the country,
which had first published and then suppressed and burned his rainbo,
demanding changes to women in love because of threats of libel and which had suspected him of anti English activities during the war,
and in which the novel on which he was engaged at the time stood not a chance of publication.
He didn't feel he did indeed feel cut dead by England.
Mikaela's talks to Connie. Am I altogether a lonely bird?
He asked, with his queer grin of a smile that looked almost as if he had toothache.
It was so wry and his eyes were so perfectly unchanging.
Only melancholy or stoical or disillusioned or afraid.
The part of the novel which is concerned with RAGBRAI, Clifford and his Flamel trousered,
Cambridge Intransigents, was precisely such a queer, melancholy grin that looks like a spiritual toothache.
Koney then takes pity on Mickolus, stroking the nape of his neck when he lies his head in her lap, which then moves smoothly into their first sex.
Later in the novel itself along sorry later, the novel itself, along with Connie, finds a better satisfaction in Malaz.
That is when the not when the narrative itself loses its grimace and breaks into a smile of serious delight.
Much Laurentian satire, though, is not sad, but exuberant, and one of its primary uses is in the deflation of idealism,
two works which I mentioned last week, do this in particular fantasy of the unconscious and Mr Noone.
Mr Noone is a semiautobiographical novel which Lawrence wrote in nineteen twenty to twenty one, but abandoned unfinished.
The manuscript ends halfway through a sentence. Its narrator is the most rambunctious and controlling of any of Lawrence's works.
As Melvyn Bragg says in his introduction to the novel, he panders, flatters, scorns.
Tiss dismisses bullies and badgers.
The poor reader taking the scruff of his neck in one feetfirst and the seat of the pants in the other and frog marching him up and down the page.
Here is an example. An anonymous lady.
She may even be yourself. Gentle reader once wrote to me.
Thus you who can write so beautifully of stars and flowers.
Why will you grovel in the ditch? I might answer her or you, gentle reader.
Thus you who wear such nice suede shoes.
Why do you blow your nose? Often it is not the nose, but the bottom, which this Rabelaisian narrator uses to remind us of our grossness,
he reminds us that we have one, gives it a few robust kicks and from time to time pushes us down onto it.
There is no sadism in this. These are the acts of an amused parent dealing with a pretentious five year old.
Except since we are adults who instead can be sarcastic, dear draftee,
uplift bellow out our skirts and trouser legs like Zeppelin balloons till we roll up into the sky whence we can look down on our fellow men in love.
Of course, buttoned up uppermost. It's a risky thing to do.
Of course, if your trousers seat is worn a little thin, the balloon of the spiritual inflators might then burst and let you flop on that same
pathetic mankind which will not welcome you at all if you come down like a brickbat.
Another favourite metaphor for Lawrence for pretentiousness was Mt.
Pisgah. This is the mountain from which Moses saw the Promised Land for the first time.
Lawrence does not believe in the Promised Land, at least not one which can be discerned from what he would consider a spiritual elevation.
There is an essay called Climbing Down Pisgah, but in fact, the following quotation concerning Pisgah comes from fantasy of the unconscious.
The Promised Land, if it be anywhere, lies away beneath our feet.
Idealism and materialism amount to the same thing on top of Pisgah, and the space is very crowded.
We're all cornetta on our mountain top, climbing up one another and standing on one another's faces.
In our Scream of Excelsior, they say that that way lies the new Jerusalem of universal love.
And over there, the happy valley of indulgent pragmatism. And they're quite near is the chirpy land of the vital lists.
And in those dark groves, the home of successful analysis surnamed Psycho.
But Lord, I can't see anything. Help me heaven to a telescope for icy black.
Nothing. I'm not going to try anymore.
I'm going to sit down on my posterior and Slava's full speed down this Pisgah, even if it cost me my trouser seat.
Saho, away we go. The political ideal he wags his wagging finger at in particular, is the American ideal of liberty.
This mock heroic passage concerns the book fantasy of the unconscious itself.
And when I lay this little book at the foot of the Liberty Statue, that brawny lady is not going to look down her nose and bawl.
Do you see any green in my eye? Of course I don't, dear lady.
I only see the reflection of that torch. Or is it a carrot which you are holding up to light the way into New York Harbour?
Well, many an arse has strayed across the uneasy paddock of the Atlantic to nibble your carrot.
Dear lady, nevertheless, in spite of all this up trotz they a little arse and makes you a nice present of this little book,
you needn't sniff and and glance at your carrots.
Get Lady Liberty. You needn't throw down the thinnest carrot pairing.
You can pair off and then say, why should I pay for this tripe, this wordy mass of rather revolting nonsense.
You can't pay for it, darling, if I don't make you a present of it, you could never buy it.
So don't shake your carrot, Sapta, and feel supercilious. Here's a gift for you, Mrs.
You can look it in its mouth to mind. It doesn't bite you.
Now, you needn't bother to put your carrot behind your back. Nobody wants to snatch it.
The 1969 film of Women in Love shows Burkin also in a deflationary mode,
in a scene just after the one I've shown you, you may remember that at bread will be her.
Maione orchestrates Gudrun and Ursula in a little ballet in the style of the Russian ballet of Pavlova and Lewinsky.
As in the last extract, the film departs from the novel, which, like Lawrence himself, took the ballet seriously.
The women dance well, and Gudrun and Ursula during this ballet aroused their respective lovers to be.
But like the figure skating scene, the adaptation here is true to an aspect of Lawrence.
His desire to deflate spiritual pretension. Mocking is a word you often find in his writings and more often than not, approvingly used at the wedding.
At the beginning of Women in Love, Laura calls to her groom when he finally arrives at the church.
Tibs Tibs, she cried in her sudden mocking excitement, standing high on the path in the sunlight and waving her bouquet.
She then raises him into church. This is an example of the kind of spontaneous behaviour of which Lawrence approves elsewhere.
Mockery has a sexual charge in that Tyrolean Gusto's Burkean dances.
The shawl platen with Ursula quote, He seemed to have turned into something wicked and flickering, mocking, mocking, suggestive, quite impossible.
Ursula was frightened of him, clear before her eyes, as in a vision, she could see the sardonic, licentious mockery in his eyes.
When they then go to bed, his eyes, his lips dropped with a faint motion of satiric contempt, and she gave way.
He might do as he would. His licentiousness was repulsively attractive, but he was self responsible.
She would see what it was. What it almost certainly is is anal sex, the one instance of it in the novel.
The mockery and satire involved in it aren't far distant from Lawrence's mockery of Lady Liberty or of the Lady in the suede shoes.
This is the mockery of the satires of Pan, for whom lust is inextricably connected with amusement and whose face is above their erections,
where a perpetual grin Laurence liked plan and approved of his male characters at times resembling him.
For Lawrence, another major use of satire is as a means of self-defence, his friend Catherine Caswell,
in her memoir of him The Savage Pilgrimage, likened him to Joey in the Punch and Judy show.
He pops up from the grave and mocks those who would reduce him to a formula.
The simile is apt. His works do boppers on the head, and in particular, they bop his critics.
The Forward to Fantasia of the Unconscious is titled An Answer to some critics.
He methodically holds various criticisms which had been made of psych,
psychoanalysis and the unconscious up to ridicule by selectively quoting juxtaposing opposed criticisms.
For example, the accusation that he was obsessed by sex and that he was prejudicially prejudice against Freud by quips,
by refuting the criticisms and by mocking apostrophes.
Dear Mr. Weaver, since many of his critics had held extracts of his writing up to ridicule, he is meeting fire with fire.
One critic concludes, This is altogether a remarkable book, a book which will appeal to a limited few and which,
to the generality of readers, will seem only a worthy mass of rather revolting nonsense.
As for me, Laurence says, I feel the generality of readers as a wordless mass of rather revolting nonsense, he said.
He sarcastically neutralises criticism of his use of an arean idea.
Of course, my dear critic, the ancient Aryans were just doddering. The old buffer's babbling the babes.
But as for me, I have some respect for my ancestors and believe they had more up their sleeve than just the marvel of the unborn me.
The satire of his critics gets sourer in the chapter of Women in Love called Gudrun in the Pompadour.
The pompadour is based on Cafe Royal Society Cafe in Piccadilly in London, which has just been destroyed to make way for a block of flats.
Three Bohemian friends, Haliday Libidinal, Nikonov and the Puss.
Some are there. Gouta and Gerald come in but choose not to join them.
Quote, The holiday party was tipsy and malicious. They were talking out loudly about Birken ridiculing him on every point.
Oh, don't make me think of Birken. Haliday was squealing. He makes me perfectly sick.
He's as bad as Jesus Lord. What must I do to be saved?
He giggled to himself typically. Do you remember? Came the quick voice of the Russian.
The letters he used to send desire is holy.
Oh, yes! Cried Haliday. Oh, how perfectly splendid. Well, I have got one in my pocket.
I'm sure I have. And he finds that he does indeed have a letter from Birken on him.
This is one of the best. There is a phrase in every race he read in the singsongs slow,
distinct voice of a clergyman reading the Scriptures when the desire for destruction overcomes every other desire in the individual.
This desire is ultimately a desire for destruction in the cell I hope is going ahead with the destruction of himself,
said the quick voice of the Russian. There's not much to destroy in him, said the person.
He's so thin already there's only a [INAUDIBLE] end to start on.
Do let me go on a return along the flux of corruption to the original rudimentary conditions of being.
Oh, he was always going on about corruption, said the person. He must be corrupt himself to have it so much on his mind.
After a while, Gudrun, who is not being part of this group, goes to their table and asks to see the letter to see whether it is genuine or not.
May I see? Smiling foolishly, he handed it to her as if hypnotised.
Thank you, she said, and she turned and walked out of the cafe with the letter all down the brilliant room between the tables in her measured fashion.
It was some moments before anybody realised what was happening.
They call for her to be stopped, but she does walk out unhindered and outside, says to Gerald, I could have killed them dogs.
They are dogs. Why is Rupert such a fool as to write such letters to them?
Why does he give himself away to such? Can I? It is a thing that cannot be born.
This is not just Lawrence speaking. The episode is based on a very similar event which took place in the Cafe Royale on the 1st of September 1916.
Katherine Mansfield was there with two other friends of Lawrence, the translator, Eschaton Jansky, and the painter Mark Gertler.
They overheard two men and a woman on another table talking about talking about various authors.
Then a woman pulls out a copy of Amara's, the most recent of Lawrence's collections of poetry,
and the party starts dissecting it in perfect English, using long words.
Catherine goes to their table, asks to see the book and leaves the cafe with it,
Kottoor Jansky then told Laurence about this episode and he gave Catherine the honour of an extra chapter in his novel, Chapter 27.
The passage in the novel not only serves to attack Lawrence's critics, though it does do this,
it also serves to sweeten the pill of his and Birkins own doctrines by admitting that he knew he could be and was seen as a preacher,
according to the Wowza. As in the poem a little while,
the little Wowza is a puritanical enthusiast or fanatic or one who wants to compel everybody else
to do whatever he thinks right and abstain from everything he thinks wrong with this knowledge.
The poem is therefore not only of an obscene poem, it obtains something of the cast of a wry confession.
Lawrence knew that some people might smile at the locution and ideas in, for example, fantasy of the unconscious.
He knew that it might happen and he tried to forestall it. In that little book, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.
I tried rather wistfully to convince you, dear reader, that you had a solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion and a few other things.
I warned the generality of readers that this present book will seem to them here.
The phrase recurs. It clearly stuck with him, will seem to them only a rather more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than the last.
I would warn the generality of critics to throw this book away in a wastepaper basket without more ado.
As for the limited few, I may as well say straight off that I stick to the solar plexus.
That statement alone, I hope, will thin the numbers considerably.
One is reminded of the description of Tom Brangwyn when he starts to give his speech on angels, his eyes twinkling and yet quite profound.
But he was deeply serious and hugely amused at the same time.
In Mr Noone, he is often genially self parodic and now gentle reader, ha, I feel you shy at those two words.
Yes, I admit it. They are my dilly dilly dally. Come and be killed.
Yes, I am going to pacifies and oh moralise. And why shouldn't I.
If you don't want to read, turn on to page.
And here there's a break in the manuscript, given that the novel was abandoned, unfinished and not published until 1984,
the freedom with which he browbeats his readers would have been affected by his sense that they didn't exist.
It's significant that both of these works with Fantasia of the unconscious are from the early 20s,
his experience of the First World War, living with a German in England,
his interpretation of the war as the spiritual death throes of English society and his great
difficulties in getting his novels into print broke something in Lawrence as early as 1915,
he wrote in a letter to Bertrand Russell. I'm ashamed to write any real writing of passionate love to my fellow men.
Only satire is decent now.
Compare this with T.S. Eliot statement in the metaphysical poets of 1920, poets in our civilisation as it exists at present must be difficult.
These contrasting statements epitomise an important difference between Elliotts and Lawrence's writings in the 20s.
But in this respect, Lawrence was in tune with his age.
The 1920s saw probably the greatest flowering of satire in England since Swift died in 1745 with forced war.
And Aldous Huxley, who was Lawrence's closest male friend from 1926 onwards when Lawrence died in a guesthouse above Von's in nineteen thirty,
one of England's best surviving satirical novelists was at his side.
Indeed, two years earlier, he Huxley had caricatured Lawrence as the character Rampion in his own satirical novel Point Counterpoint.
So if you read point counterpoint, watch out for Rampion.
But a lot of twenties satire unlike, say, Swift's A Modest Proposal, does not blaze with righteous indignation.
It had an ironic detachment as though since the First World War had been launched, justified and advertised.
In the spirit of seriousness, your country needs you.
Seriousness itself was not quite decent. The opening line of the Second Draught of Lady Chatterley's Lover sums it up.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
The shattered Clifford Chatterley, who literally embodies the war, is described as follows.
Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him.
He remains strange and bright and cheerful, almost one might say chirpy.
There is something of this chirping us in a lot of the consumptive Lawrence's writing of the 20s, as he says himself of Aaron's rod.
It is funny. It amuses me terribly. Yet the direct syntax of those sentences contradict their meaning.
It is again, as if said, through gritted teeth. Here is one of his most political poems called Asain Revolution.
Bear in mind, Lawrence was living in fascist Italy, which, as Arun's world records, had been close to communist revolution.
And he experienced Neo was aware of numerous bomb attacks in public places.
If you make a revolution, make it for fun. Don't do it in ghastly seriousness.
Don't do it in deadly earnest. Do it for fun.
Don't do it because you hate people. Do it just to spit in there.
I don't do it for the working classes, do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own and kick our heels like Jolli escaped arses.
Don't do it anyhow for international labour. Labour is the one thing man has had too much of.
Let's abolish labour. Let's have done with labouring. Work can be fun and men can enjoy it.
Then it's not labour. Let's have it. So let's make a revolution for fun.
Instability itself is a quality which Lawrence embraces greatly Birken, as the film showed, joins in the dancing, which follows the ballet.
Roo's Birken, quote, did not yet know how to dance their convulsive ragtime sort of dancing.
But he knew how to begin Birken when he could get free from the weight of the people present whom he disliked,
danced rapidly and with a real gaiety and how her minie hated him for this irresponsible gaiety.
Now I see, cried the Contessa excitedly. Mr Burkin. He is a changer.
He is not a man. He is a chameleon, a creature of change.
He is not a man. He is treacherous. Not one of us said itself over in homogenise consciousness,
and her soul writhed in black subjection to him because of his power to escape to exist other than she did,
because he was not consistent, not a man less than a man.
Birkins ideas, as I mentioned last week, change abruptly and contradict each other over the novel.
What matters, though, is not this. But the author's attempt to interpret his soul to be spiritually alive is to be what the Contessa calls a changer.
Lawrence was well aware of the limitations of language. Tom Bronwyn's monologue on Angels is introduced.
Tom Brangwyn wanted to spread to make a speech. For the first time in his life.
He must spread himself wordly. Lawrence to felt the urge to spread himself wordly nearly all the time.
But he was well aware that word is spreading often entailed an element of the ridiculous and not just if one lacked a university education.
One way in which Lawrence demonstrates his impatience with and scepticism of language is by using certain words on different occasions,
not just in different ways but in flatly contradictory ways.
And it's good, as readers of Lawrence, to be aware of this consciousness, for example, can be a good thing.
It can also be a bad thing to forward to.
Women in love extols the struggle into conscious being.
But Homogenise A. per effort at consciousness leaves her spent and Ashan in her body conscious sometimes means unconscious.
Burkean describes the fetish as representing really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual.
Two senses of consciousness. Meet's when in exquisite Birken drove on in a strange new wakefulness.
The tension of his consciousness broken. He seemed to be conscious all over.
Many of Birkins words are found debased in other situations.
Birken wants an inhuman connexion, but machines are inhuman.
Words with the same root are played off against each other.
Organic, which is positive organisation, generally negative equality as in democracy, negative equilibrium as in that between a man and a woman.
Generally positive idir final, complete and absolute are all words which can go either way.
So let the reader beware. Lowrance allows Ursula to mock Birken when he spreads himself wordly.
This is their first Tea Party. But don't you think me good looking?
She persisted in a mocking voice. He looked at her to see if he felt that she was good looking.
I don't feel that you're good looking, he said. Not even attractive, she marked bitingly.
He knitted his brows in sudden exasperation. Don't you see, it's not a question of visual appreciation in the least.
I don't want to see you. I've seen plenty of women.
I'm sick and weary of seeing them. I want a woman I don't see. I'm sorry, I can't oblige you by being invisible, she laughed.
Yes, he said, you are invisible to me if you don't force me to be visually aware of you.
But I don't want to see or hear of you. What did you ask me for?
Then she marked. I think you were very silly.
I think you want to tell me you love me and you go all the way around to do it.
All right, he said, looking at with sudden exasperation. Now, go away then and leave me alone.
I don't want any more of your meretricious persiflage. Is it really persiflage?
She marked her face, really relaxing into laughter.
She interpreted it that he had made a deep confession of love to her, but he was so absurd in his words also.
But this argument between them and others like it in the novel does not just serve to qualify Burkin.
They also have the virtue of pitting the lovers in opposition.
Lawrence, as I say, the Crown, which he wrote between the Rainbow and Women in Love, argues that life itself is based on opposition.
The flux of corruption, which was mentioned in the letter to Haliday, is a necessary counterpart to the flux of creation.
To paraphrase this essay, The Bestial Lion forever fights the virginal unicorn, and between them they hold aloft the crown.
It would be wrong for the lion ever to lie down with the lamb. This would be the end of life for them.
Both Birken and Urszula, therefore, ought to argue in one of the most ending, most open endings in the whole history of the novel.
Birken ends women in love with the words. I do not believe that.
Lawrence and Freeda themselves fought spectacularly, their friend Enid Hopkin recalls visiting them in 1918.
I remember the group around the piano in the candlelight,
Frida singing with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth, and Frida would strike wrong notes.
After several of these, Lawrence would lose his temper and scream at her.
Frida would scream back. The whole scene was very dramatic as we stood in mid chorus.
Suddenly it was all over and freedom would settle down and go back to go back to playing,
and we would all start to sing again at such moments they resemble perhaps not so much Birken and Ursula, but Mr Noone and his German lover,
Yohana, and the narrator defies us, gentle readers,
to disapprove out of this very promising looking bag of a story which I have this moment shown to you tied up with a pretty blue ribbon of peace.
I am going to let out what the cat I am going to let the cat out of the bag or even to whirling fur, flying cats or claws and sparks.
Dear Gilbert, he had found his mate and his match. He had found one who would give him [INAUDIBLE] for tat and tittle tattle.
My dear, I mean you gentle reader.
All life and splendour is made out of the union of indomitable opposites, with its iridescent humour and seriousness,
self-parody and self-assertion, valorisation of argument and refusal to tolerate dissent.
This passage suggests a way of reading Lawrence without taking umbrage at his self-confidence,
despairing at his contradictions, or taking flight as some of his views.
At certain moments, he even endorses relativism, acknowledging that the truths which he feels are not necessarily truths for all of us in Fantasia,
he reassures us, Don't get alarmed if I say things,
just apply a little theory of relativity and realise that what I say is not what you hear,
but something uttered in the midst of my isolation and arriving strangely changed and
travel worn down the long curve of your own individual circumstances and atmosphere.
And this perception points towards the quite different kind of humour with which I want to end.
It's found in the poem Bear Fig Trees of the early twenties.
Let me sit down beneath the many branching and candelabrum that lives upon this rock and laugh at a
time and laugh at dull eternity and make a joke of stale infinity within the flash scent of this wicked
tree that has kept so many secrets up its sleeve and has been laughing through so many ages at man and
his uncomfortable nurses and his attempt to assure himself that what is so is not so up its sleeve.
This is divine laughter of the laughing Buddha in whom Lawrence had considerable interest or as the preacher of Ecclesiastes puts it,
vanity of vanities all is vanity. This is the wisdom next to which all human wisdom is but folly.
Admittedly, this is not Lawrence's usual position.
Truth for him is not normally to be found in Nirvana. He's down amongst us, fighting harder than most of us to work out what is really going on.
And he doesn't oblige us to follow his path. If I try to write down what I see, why not?
If a publisher likes to print the book or write and if anybody wants to read it, let him.
But why? Anybody should read one single word if he doesn't want to.
I don't see. Unless, of course, he is a critic who has to scribble a billion worth of words no matter how to say.
So go ye and scribble, thank you.