Hello and thank you for coming to a very special guest lecture within a single or for course.
His lawyers in the Alps. I never expected the mountains, you never expected the mountains.
Probably, why not? They were always there, but I was never there before.
I never knew they were there. I didn't expect it like that.
Aaron, assistant to his host, having looked out from his garden in town at the Alps beyond,
I don't know if all of you have ever been in mountains such as those which cover the area on your map.
And I'll be referring to these places occasionally by date coded numbers and colours.
By the way, although feel free to ignore these references,
I will assume that you are all at least familiar with hills such as Surround Lawrence's native eastward.
But according to Mr. Noone, if you do not know the tale in spring, gentle reader, you don't.
And there's an end of it.
And I at least think that it's true that as Gilbert Noon, Goodwin, Brangwyn, Alexander Hepburn, Hannelore and Lao, all his characters,
D.H. Lawrence and numberless grand and not so grand tourists have discovered seeing mountains
for the first time as an adult perforce alters one's view of even larger structures.
The planet Earth, which is discovered to have such places in it,
of God whose existence or non-existence must now be correlated with the existence of these things and of humanity,
which finds itself on its smallest vertical scale as measured against them,
and has developed a variety of aesthetic and spiritual discourses to encompass them.
Romanticism buckled and was thrown towards its highest peaks by the Alps, and so it seems to me, was Lawrence's writing and thought.
Which isn't to imply that he couldn't write the plane if he'd made it to Russia, as he had in mind to do, but never did,
his prose would have stretched to its horizons, as it does to those of the plane of Lombardy in Arun's rod.
But there is a particular aspect in which Lawrence suits mountains,
it isn't just that he had a faculty receptive to their sublimity, though he had that.
He was also a writer of paradoks and self-contradiction. And I would argue that mountains are themselves governed by abundant paradoxes.
I hope you'll indulge me if I rehearse what I think are the most obvious of them.
They exist by virtue of relief and are nothing without Vali's.
They are places in their own right, the Urals, the Alps.
And there are also partitions between other places, Europe and Asia, north and South Europe.
Then again, they can unite countries as more blown unites France and Italy.
They are paradigmatic of stability, they, quote, never move, they are always there,
writes Lawrence in a letter of 1913, but they are the products of the Earth's convulsions.
It seems as though some dramatic upheaval must have taken place.
The mountains fall down into their own shadows. That's from his essay, The Return Journey of the Same Year.
Snow epitomises both their eternal city and their seasonality, respectively, on the peaks and in the annual falls,
melts and avalanches, their defining substances are black and white, rock and snow.
But they can also be multicoloured with the flowers in which Lawrence took
such delight or with the ice colours gleaming in blossom of reflecting snow.
That's from Mr. Moon. Rock is archetypal, substantial snow, insubstantial, and so soft that Gerald can go to sleep in it.
But in Birkins soul, when he contemplates Gerald's corpse, it produces the sharp, heavy bruise of ice.
Mountains come close to the sun than any other terrestrial thing, but the more they approach it, the colder they become.
They obstruct the sun's entry to valleys and they make the night darker, as Lawrence found in the villages above Lutsen,
which have great shadows wielded over them like a menace and gleams of brief sunshine like a window.
They are safe havens from the wars of the plains as, for example,
for the soldiers of the Franco Prussian wars who climbed their way to refuge in Switzerland.
But they pose dangers of their own. They give birth to rivers and cradle lakes and bring death through avalanches, rocks and falls.
They delight the soul and they can oppress it, which for Lawrence,
explains the emphasis on pain in the crucifixes which he found along the Imperial Road.
They bring people into peculiar companionship. The three friends of the prologue of women in love find that in the hall it was another world,
another life, till each found the presence of his companions like an essential flame.
But they do this because of their capacity to make humans feel isolated.
They can limit experience, as Lawrence found, of the alien women who, quote,
seemed rather deadend, as if the continuing silence acted on them like a deadening drug.
Or they can provide revivifying experience of the other.
As for Mr. Noone, who first becomes an English when contemplating the Alps, a long rank of them right in heaven from the valley,
they are places of peculiarly hard and pinched lives and of the leisure of bohemian writers with beards and tourists.
Their peaks are, quote, pure, unapproachable, impossible and topped by tourist hotels, as in Women in Love.
Tourists can scale them either by making an effort and taking a risk which might kill them or by avoiding effort and risk altogether.
That is, they can be like the clerk from Stratham whom Lawrence met in a guest house on Lake Lucerna, half dead from exhaustion.
Or they can ride by bus to the glacier above Caporn until, as Hepburn and Hannah do in the captain's dull.
From a distance, mountains consist of ridges and peaks up close,
they resolve themselves into more or less flat paths and the most dangerous surfaces are, in fact, the smoothest.
Hepburn knows he risked serious injury in mounting a melting glacier without a stick.
Mountains encourage unhealthy risk taking, but some people climb or live in them for the sake of their health,
as Lawrence did in July nineteen twenty eight, when he lived in a chalet at four thousand feet in Kessell Matter near Castaic.
And for anyone geographically interested, that's the Orange Point forty one.
They are places of sublimity, but also of much that is antithetical to sublimity.
That is the tamed sublimity of the wrapper round milk chocolate.
As Lawrence described the view from loud sound.
The cheery banality of the bag hile, which Captain Hepburn so loathes, the vigorous fun of the show, plotless.
So those of you women in love will know that the shoe plucker dance takes place at a significant moment.
The various pictures of this dance to be found. This is one and this is an interior shot, which is therefore closer to what we have in the novel.
So you have to imagine this is Oliver Reed dancing with the professor's daughter and is another.
Or of skiing. And tobogganing or the prosaic misery to continue the list of a. sublime mountain elements,
the present misery of being simply cold and wet as Frieda and Lawrence often were on their 1912 crossing,
nothing so awful as the Alps when it rains, he wrote to Catherine Carswell.
And finally, the rampant commercialism of the Swiss, which struck Lawrence as early as 1913.
Mountains are the realm of God who is all in all or if they are not that, and then they and perhaps everything else, all the realm of nothing at all.
As Shelly asks,
in the last of his one hundred and forty four lines addressed to Montbleau with which Lawrence was familiar and what were thou and Earth and stars,
and see if to the human mind's imagining silence and solitude were a vacancy question mark.
There are two ways of experiencing them from afar, as from the veil of Shamone for Shirley,
as in this contemporary picture or the Isaw Valley for the eloping Lawrence, alternatively, from their heights,
whence you can see the rest of the world from above, unless, of course, you have not yet reached above the tree line,
in which case you see nothing for trees as the woman who wanted to disappear discovers to her increasing discomfiture.
They can dominate your mood and change the colour of your soul,
or they can reflect whatever mood you happen to be in when Lawrence expresses happy love for Frida in the poem First Love written in back,
he claims that they he and she hold mountains proud and blithe on our love.
They stand upright on our love. We are the source.
This inverts normal gravity in which the source is above.
Yet when one of Frida's fictional avatars, Yohana, chooses to tell Gilbert Noone,
the Lowrance figure that their walking companion, Stanley, has, quote,
had her a couple of nights before and she chooses to tell this to him at a moment when they are almost lost at night and dangerously high up then,
quote, night, loneliness, danger, all merged.
That the same landscapes can affect different people in different situations differently is
apparent in the different differences between Captain Hepburn's distrust of Alpine sublimity.
Arun's nervous excitement, Buyat Gilbert's rejoicing in it, Ursula's suffocation by it at what is probably the same place.
If we accept the speculation that haunted houses and the fictional haunt housing is the same as the expulsion of Mr. Noone and the actual meyerhofer.
So if you want to know where the ending of of women in love takes place, our best bet is Meyerhofer, which is a yellow point three.
Which leads to the big romantic question and concern, are they or do we project and that in turn leads on to Shellie's.
Great question. Laurence himself strikes a tentative note when in his poem Sinner's, he states that the mountains rise above us, dreaming forever.
One might even think they love us. But only right and only think and do they even dream?
Given these rocky uncertainties and piled paradoxes, it's not surprising Lawrence shifts his metaphors.
A glacier is like some great, deep furred ice bear, reaching down terrible pores of ice into the valley.
A valley is described as the earth's cleavage with the sky from above, a sharp wedge forcing its way in.
And the eternal ferocious water like the steel edge of the wedge mountains themselves appear as sky slopes,
which would let one walk up into the sky as ghosts.
As great thighs, amongst which Gilbert calls about like a dwarf.
A queen. White found. Marvellous striped sky panthers circling round a great camp,
tigers prowling between the north and the south and my favourite, a row of angels with flaming swords.
I want to concentrate Lawrence's responses to the ambiguities of mountains in two areas.
First, his understanding of the Alps as delineating the north from the south, and second,
his understanding of the Alps as guarantors of eternal life and sources of death.
The first is one of the best known of the many binaries through which Lawrence thought.
The north and south, it's first developed in Twilight in Italy in 1912 in relation to Germany and Italy,
then it's extended in Women and Love via Gerrold and the fetish in Halliday's flat to the Arctic and the African.
On the other hand, it gets more complicated. The opening essay of studies in classic American literature, written in nineteen eighteen,
likens the German Italian polarity in Europe to the Gallic African polarity for
Rome and to the European American polarity which developed at the Renaissance.
In twilights in Italy, one thesis which emerges is that when northern Europe is crying out for the Dionysian ecstasy,
which is what he thought that it was doing,
southern Europe is breaking free from Dionysus, from the triumphal affirmation of life over death, immorality, sorry, immortality through procreation.
Because of this, Italy is in twilight, but so is the north,
as they both try with very limited success, to become more like each other within this binary.
Lawrence knows exactly where he is. He always represents himself as northern.
On reaching the south side of the Alps, he is reminded of the slummed voted on and on the land where the lemons bloom.
That is, his self consciously adopts the German romantic perspective on Italy, voiced in Gerta Vilhelm Maistre.
That lyric, which ends with the lines dargin dying it on the big or far to last on scene.
The river is where our path goes. Oh Father, let us move there.
Lawrence, as we know, did this on and off for the rest of his life.
But there were several confusions in Lawrences north south binary,
the Bavarians who live on the north side of the Alps are described as living in the heat of physical experience,
which is a crucifixion, whereas the Swiss who are to their south are characterised by utter soulless ordinariness, something intolerable.
Gerald Critch is characterised as Arctic and like the mountains, is likened repeatedly to a tiger,
but is the most sensual and least spiritually refined of the quintet of women in love.
His Arctic aspect is in part correlated to a commercial and mechanistic spirit which Lawrence identifies in the urban Suess,
but not in the Highlander's, who for him are the real mountain people, the Austrians he describes in ways which more fit the Italians as soft.
Vagg easygoing, not so fierce and hostile as the Bavarian Highlanders.
But in north Italy, Austrian territory is defined as Germanic.
The station at Trenta was still Austrian there, one was still on Germanic ground, self-consciousness is the is one of the qualities of the North,
but is found most of all in the vulgar or sensational crucifixes which he notices south,
not north of the Brenner Pass and which are far from the mindlessness of Halliday's fetish.
In addition, the very concept of the Alps as borderline is confused.
On the one hand, the Alps are supposed to demarcate north from south to Mr Noon.
They stand like angels with flaming swords, barring us from the paradise of the South.
But insofar as Alps are not a line but an area, they demonstrate that the change from north to south across their latitudinal expanse,
with the exceptions of the anomalies I've just mentioned.
All right, within the ALP's lines, such as the Brenner Pass mark a particular point of demarcation in the return journey,
describing Lawrence's journey over the Gotthard Pass,
which is Redpoint 13, we were crossing in silence from the northern world to the southern over the ridge of the world in Mr Noone.
What I'm pretty sure is the same.
Sorry, in Mr Noone, it's called the Games, which is actually the Phitsanulok, the narrator comments even geographically one Kompass.
So definite a turning point. So the actual turning point is different and different in different works.
But he is very concerned with the notion of a definite turning point, since both the North and the South are presented as possessing positive value,
and since both Arctic and African extremes in women and love are presented as disintegrated and ultimately destructive,
these turning points might be thought of as intrinsically desirable points of balance.
The middle and of the high two all, after all, contains the crucifix, which Lawrence considers one of the best.
But it hangs in a valley and the peak points of transition.
The experiences which Lawrence and his characters have there are orientated to perfection and to consummation to to the extreme,
not to equipoise or fusion, that is.
The Alps, yes, we want Andermatt now, the Alps, as well as representing division and transition between the north and the south,
also epitomise the north, which is their function in women in love,
or as is implied by the fact that southern Europeans who were trying to break free from
Dionysus include the young Italian migrants whom Lawrence finds working in Swiss factories.
So in coming to Switzerland, they have moved to the north, the Arctic plains, by which I mean exactly that.
The plains of the Arctic then are conflated with the alpine peaks and the pole
with what in another sense is the temperate zone or the other point of meeting.
Two factors help mediate this conflation of the alpine extreme with the Arctic extreme first volcano,
whose characters are in part taken from Norse mythology but are often seen acting in the Rhineland or the Bavarian hills.
So, for example, Gilbert Noone associate the Alpine with both the Northern and the Bulgarian.
When climbing between shifts and Meyerhoff, he finds himself almost transported happy in a God world of strange northern gods.
It was hard not to believe in the old white skinned, muscular gods whom Bogner travesty.
But surely Siegfried tramped through such spring meadows, breaking the gold, the gold blonde globe flowers against his fierce naked knees.
Second, there was the mediating concept of the desert, both the peaks and the plains,
if snow covered, are largely deserted of flora and fauna, human and animal.
Shelly's description of the top of Mount Bloor,
which in fact the paradox of seeing something that no ice sees would apply equally well to the North Pole.
The snows descend upon that mountain. None beholds them their.
No, when the flakes burn in the sinking sun or the star beams dart through them, wins,
contend silently there and keep the snow with breath rapid and strong, but silently.
I think the reason that the winds contend silently is that there is no idea that to
hear their contention as a tree which falls in a forest which contains no ears,
falls silently. In Women in Love and the Return Journey, respectively, the peaks are described as a terrible waste of whiteness and a desolate waste.
The woman who lives high up in an isolated farm in the sky over the hills is described as speaking in a high screaming voice like a desert bird.
And this desert is suspect of the Alps is one reason why I think that last year's
William Ivory slash Maranda Bohane television adaptation of Women in Love,
which was aired on BBC four, permissibly shifted very audaciously.
But in that sense, permissibly shifted the location of the ending from the Alps to the South African desert.
That move might alternatively be defended on the grounds that certain elements of Gerald's
character suggest the disintegrator essential more than they do no abstract annihilation.
But the desert has actually presented in the film is not African, but in its infinitude and austerity, both Alpine and Arctic.
Lawrence was not only attracted to the more moderate versions of the north and the South, represented by South Germany and Tuscany respectively,
and between which he oscillated through much of his life,
he often deliberately on this oscillation, included the high Alps in 1913, 21 and twenty seven.
He crossed the Alps in both directions in nineteen twenty eight, as you would have seen in both ways, twice overall in half of the years of his life.
After 1912, he visited the Alps, and that's most of those in which he was able to.
The following passage from the return journey concerning the stretch between
the Folker Pass and the Gotthard Pass explains some part of their attraction.
I was free in this heavy ice cold air, this upper world alone, London far away below, beyond England, Germany, France.
They were so unreal, false, non-existent inactivity out of the silence.
One look down on it and it seemed to have lost all importance.
Then the next moment, sorry, the next morning, standing looking round at the mountain tops, I was jumping in my soul with delight.
Should one ever go down to the lower world? Indeed, like the sorry, unlike the young man from Stratham whom he met exhausted.
He knows that he perhaps never needs to return either to England or to a job.
His work of the moment is to express precisely that sentiment in writing,
which will sell and it did his travel writing was enough to get him and his wife through these years.
Ursula, standing in a similar position, feels disconnected from her past.
She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this place with Birken,
not to have toiled up out of the muck of her childhood and her upbringing.
The contemplation of the world and its history from above should, however, Laurentian ring alarm bells.
You may remember that the narrator of Mr. Noon calls on Dear Draftee uplift to Ballarat
outskirts and trouser legs like Zeppelin balloons till we were up into the sky.
When we look down on our fellow men, it's a risky thing to do.
Of course, the metaphorical mountain to which, as I mentioned,
Lawrence repeatedly refers from Mr Noone to Fantasia of the unconscious to climbing down Pisgah.
The essay is, of course, Mt.
Pisgah, from which the promised lands of various conceptions of humanity are viewed and from which he wants to slow down on his rear.
Lawrence ever vigilant against idealism, perhaps not always including his own,
is aware at the end of women and love of the dangers of seeing the South as a promised land from the vantage point of the Alps.
When Birken is recalled from Verona back up into the hall by the death of Gerald and he stands contemplating the spot on which he died,
he muses that Gerald might have gone on down to Italy. He might.
And what then? Was it a way out? It was only a way in again.
He and Ursula and the novel, not in Italy, of course, let alone Verona, but in disputation back in what is in fact, eastward.
Of course, Pisgah is primarily for a metaphorical mountain, and he doesn't need to stand on an actual alpine peak,
nor even have the experience of an extreme version of the north, which that is in order to view Italy as a promised land.
But he doesn't choose a mountain as a metaphor for spiritual elevation and see real mountains as having spiritual significance without wanting.
At one point in his writings and as far as I know,
he only does it wants to try out a moment of scepticism of the mountains themselves in the captain's dull.
Anybody read that? An important Alpine fiction for Lawrence in the captain's dog handler and Hepburn visit Iglesia above Caporn in the hall.
Handler has a very strong response to the crystalline finality of the mountain,
which has strong resemblances to the reaction of Will Brangwyn, who was transported by the experience of Lincoln Cathedral.
And as you remember there in Lincoln Cathedral, it's his wife who points out to him the gargoyles, so that his ecstasy,
his understanding of the sublimity of the cathedral collapses, just as Anna does for Will Hepburn.
There's a gender reversal here. Hepburn spoils Handler's moment by questioning its basis.
So she says to him, I came to see the mountains,
which are wonderful and give me strength and I came to see the glacier, you can do nothing but find fault.
Even with God's mountains, a dark flame suddenly went over his face.
Yes, he said, I hate them. I hate them.
I hate their snow and their affectation. Affectation, she laughed.
Oh, even the mountains are affected for you, are they? Yes, he said.
They're loftiness and they're uplift. I hate their uplift.
I hate people prancing on mountaintops and feeling insulted.
I'd like to make them all stop up there on their mountaintops and to chew ice to fill their stomachs.
I wouldn't let them down again. I wouldn't. I hate it all.
I tell you, you must be a little mad, she said superbly, to talk like that about the mountains.
They are so much bigger than you know.
He said, no, they are not. What? She laughed aloud.
The mountains are not bigger than you, but you are extraordinary.
They are not bigger than me. He cried any more than you are bigger than me if you stand on a ladder.
They are less than me. There is an even an echo of Lawrence's conceit of the descent of Pisgah in the fact that Hepburn,
who after having said all this then does climb the glacier very dangerously,
has a moment of ecstasy on the top of it and then has to descend with exaggerated care.
He doesn't quite go on his bottom. He kind of does a zigzag, but it's not a dignified, a descent.
Back at the hotel of the glaciers foot Jews of the wrong sort, quote, are described as imparting a wholesome breath of sanity,
disillusion and sentimentality to the excited Nordic Burkill atmosphere.
Their dark side sardonic presence seemed to say to the maidenly necked mountain, youth don't sprout wings of the spirit too much, my dear.
The relationship to which Hannelore soon thereafter commits with Hepburn is not certainly hopeful,
but her mountain ecstasy is not allowed to stand as determinative in the onward stream of life.
Lawrence wrote the story once he had been able to return to the Alps after the seven year break from them enforced by the war,
during which during that period of break, he had presented the Alps at their most life enhancing and their most killing in Mr Noone and Women in Love,
respectively, written almost at the same time. But neither contains this sardonic, sceptical questioning of them,
such as it seems that Lawrence has returned to them after so many years of positive and negative speculation about them had suddenly inspired.
After all, Lurker is a Jew who is entirely unaffected by the sublimity of the mountains by which he is surrounded.
But he is of the wrong sort, not only in the snobbish sense in which the narrator of the captain's dull uses the phrase,
but he is of the wrong sort, according to the desiderata of the novel as a whole.
The deflationary critique is not that which the Tyrolean Mountains of Women in love received.
In fact, Ursula realises that this utterly silent,
frozen world of the mountaintops was not universal after she has had an argument with Laqueur and in leaving the mountains, she is leaving him.
The equivalent of the will Anna and Anna Hepburn dispute in this novel is between Goodwin and Gerald.
And as you will know, if you've read the novel, it's Goodwin who has the ecstasy and this her supposedly Arctic lover shatters.
So you remember that when they arrive in the guest house, they go into a room which she describes as being like in the inside of a nut,
and it's got a little window and she kneels down in front of it and she sees what is beyond to her.
It was so beautiful. It was a delirium. She wanted to gather the glowing eternal peaks to her breast and die.
He saw them, saw they were beautiful, but there were almost no clamour in his breast like Will in Lincoln Cathedral,
who is furious with Ana for destroying his ecstasy. She is furious with him for doing the same.
It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.
Don't try to come between it and me. But he had done it brutally and peevishly asking her, why do you grovel before it, not like Hepburn,
by doing the equivalent of pointing out the gargoyles undermining its perfection and women in love are much more complex.
Response to the Alps is going on, one which, like most of Lawrence's writing most, takes them entirely seriously.
And so in order to understand that, essentially in order to understand why Gerrold ends up frozen in the Alps,
I just want to return for the last part to Twilight in Italy. In those essays, the responses to the Alps, which Lawrence identifies,
divide into a sense of the mountains as sources of pain and death and a sense of them as eternal,
both of these identifications are made particularly by the Terralliance, who for Lawrence are the archetypal mountain people.
The fear of the possibility of violence, even unto death at the hands of Alpine nature is discussed, for example, in their extraordinary essay,
A Chapel Amongst the Mountains, on the basis of his observation of votive tokens given in thanks for the survival of physical accidents,
Lawrence conclude, concludes they.
That's the trillions lived under the mountains where always was fear of the unknown God who crushed life at any moment and threatened it always.
Mary, the Virgin Mary is the ostensible dedicatedly of these tokens.
But Lawrence feels that that which had neither known nor suffered the dread unnamed, which had aimed and missed by a little.
This must be acknowledged covertly. In other words, it's a different God that is in fact being worshipped in these votive tokens.
Hence, in the valley of Klumb, the sculptor of crucifixes whom Lawrence particularly admires,
is involved in propitiating death and is in fact obsessed with pain.
There is something crude and sinister about it, almost like depravity, a form of reverting,
turning back along the course of blood by which we have come, and almost Russian dark mysticism, a worship of cruelty and pain and torture and death.
This mention of Russia complicates Lawrence's psychogeography still further,
but it does suggest another allegiance between the wastes of peak and plain.
But it also suggests a connexion between the native alpine peoples and the Arctic GERROLD in a way which I think helps to explain what is otherwise,
I think, an enigmatic encounter between himself when he's stumbling his way towards death and a half buried crucifix,
a little Christ under a little sloping hood at the top of a pole he shared away.
Somebody was going to murder him. Yet why be afraid it was bound to happen to be murdered?
He looked round in terror at the snow, the rocking, pale, shadowy slopes of the upper world.
This was the moment when death was uplifted and there was no escape.
Lord Jesus, was it then bound to be Lord Jesus?
He could feel the blow descending. He knew he was murdered.
He has, of course, already been shown to have faithfully inherited his family's sense of ill fated ness,
but this has never been shown as having any connexion with Christ.
I don't, in fact, think that he is here making any connexion with Christ.
He is establishing contact with the darker mysticism of the of the of the dread unnamed, which in his case is not going to take aim and then miss.
A sense of a terrifying mountaintop being with the power over life and death is, of course,
also found in Lord of the Flies, although admittedly most of the variables are very different.
Both locations are isolette and within them, the source of death lies above.
In the return journey, Lawrence writes of the villages above Lutsen there,
it seemed in the glamorous snow was the source of death which fell down in great waves of shadow and rock rushing to the earth.
And all the people of the mountains on the slopes in the valleys seemed to live upon this great rushing wave of death.
But to Lawrence,
the mountains also are and guarantee the eternal and the rocks in Lawrence's description of the Alps are frequently described as living.
Watch out for that living rock. Very frequent conjunction.
This is not necessarily contradictory with the mountains is a source of deaths and sources of death like beasties, are themselves immortal.
Moreover, the mountains emphasise, by contrast, the mortality of the humans who live on them.
This, according to Lawrence, is felt by the Bavarian peasants.
The ice, the operations of snow is brilliant, with timeless immunity from the flux and warmth of life overhead.
They transcend all life and all the soft, moist fire of the blood so that a man must needs live in the radiance of his own negation.
But this is a very different kind of connexion between death and the mountains to that acknowledged in the Alpine chapel that was bloody.
This is crystalline. One senses that Lawrence attributes the first two others to Terralliance to the spiritual failure Jarold,
but that he himself has directly felt the second.
And it is also the more the more complex in the passage which I quoted before from the return journey in which the
sides of the mountains are like the collapsing walls of the grave and the source of death rushes to the level earth.
It's also the case that there is a flu upwards that flows from the needle point of snow to the unutterable cold and death,
the radiant cold which waits to receive back again all that which has passed for the moment into being.
He's expressed this before in the crucifix across the mountains.
He wrote this, Our life, this admixture of labour and warm experience in the flesh all the time,
it is streaming upwards into the timeless brilliance beyond.
This is a kind of crystalline nirvana, and therefore, for Lowrance,
ambiguous one reaches one's personal end and one's apotheosis as a temporary experience of the Alps.
It is felt as an ecstasy, as we've seen by various of his characters, sometimes to life enhancing effect, sometimes otherwise.
Mr Noone, I would say, has the former when he's crossing the Ganzeer in this description,
I would draw your attention to the way in which Lawrence Pyles, his terms, adjectives repeated with slight variations,
metaphors taken from architecture, the animal kingdom, geology and maths on top of each other, like the rocks which lie scattered on the peaks,
bearing a similar imperfect relationship to the crystalline as language to what he describes.
He wanted only one thing to look across at that marvellous God,
proud Aluf Pyramid of a peak flashing its snow stripes like some snow beast and blueing the clear beyond.
She it's now as she lifted her marvellous dark slope's clear, a marvellous prism of substance in the Aether raid with her snow,
as with lightning strikes beyond and crystal and almost mathematically pure.
And he was satisfied in a perfect aloneness. This is self negation and it is a consummation devoutly to be wished, and it's taken him by surprise.
I never expected the mountains. He was just crossing the Alps with his lover and this happened.
The case is slightly differently. It's slightly different for the orderly.
In the short story, the Prussian officer. This story was written and set in and near Yushan Horsin Redpoint nine, just south of Munich,
where Lawrence and Frieda lived from August to September 1913 in a villa which probably resembled this one.
That is unlike Women in Love and Mr Noone, it is written on location and in this at the same time as Twilight in Italy,
throughout the action of this famous short story, the Prussian officer's company is walking south directly towards the mountains.
Stunning, though, this photo is you can see how an approach to the mountains could be an approach to ecstatic consummation and death.
So this orderly through whose consciousness much of this story is vocalised is focussed on them as he marches on and on in silence,
staring at the mountains ahead that rose sheer out of the land.
And then later on, when he's marching with an extreme thirst, the mountains seem almost supernatural.
He murders his officer, the eponymous Prussian officer. After he's done this, the mountains, still gleaming in the sky, shone in their silence.
He stood and looked at them. His face illuminated. The next morning he is dying.
And again, the mountains ranged across the pale edge of the morning sky.
He wanted them, he wanted them alone. He wanted to leave himself and be identified with them.
He has a fit, is thrown to the ground on recovering consciousness.
He stared at the gleaming mountains. He stared till his eyes went black and the mountains as they stood in their beauty.
So clean and cool seemed to have it that which was lost in him.
That's the last he sees, that's the vision of the crucifix across the mountains of a man having gone into the cold radiance
which waits to receive back again all that which has passed for the moment into being unlike Gerald,
he actually has carried out a murder and is then consummated by is then consummated by the mountains.
Goodman also reaches her point of strange rapture in the navel of the world as she looks out of her window or down from a peak.
When she toboggans, she settled down like a crystal in the navel of snow and was gone.
But her consummation, like Mr. Noon's, is not final.
And unlike Mr. Noone, she is unable to make a successful descent from the mountains and re-entry to her re-entry to life.
Since I would say that her passage to Dresden and life with Larker does not count as that.
Moreover, her ecstasy is directly destructive of her relationship with Jarrold and therefore of him.
During her first ecstasy, he feels vap around his heart.
He saw the blind valley, the great cul de sac of snow, and there was no way out.
The tears of her strange religion set him at Nort.
He can neither share her ecstasy nor recover her from it once she has first experienced it,
I would say it is the mountains far more than the sardonic lurker that takes her from him.
Gerald's relationship with the mountains is less spiritual.
He toboggans with great physical intensity, and on the day in which he goes out for a long ski by himself, he becomes snow burned, snow estranged.
As I mentioned before,
he shares with the two religions a fear of the mountains and he can't envisage any dissent from them back into quotidien lowland life.
But when he actually turns into ice, this is a physical transformation. He doesn't have an Arctic apotheosis.
He's the victim of Goodwins Arctic apotheosis. So it's perhaps appropriate that unlike the Prussian officers orderly,
his body doesn't rest in the Alps, but is returned to Eastwood as a corpse, not a crystal.
Lawrence himself, though, did rest in the Alps. He died in those Orange Point forty five in the Alps of the French Riviera and remained there at
least until nineteen thirty five when his ashes were moved to New Mexico by Frida's third husband.
He had gone there not to become eternal or to disappear from his former self,
but in order to prolong warm physical life, he made over half his visits to the Alps during his last five years.
Yet perhaps because his reasons going there were antithetical to his understanding of Alpine threat and promise,
he wrote almost nothing about the Alps during this time.
The one exception is the woman who wanted to disappear, not to be confused with a short story.
The woman who rode away, which is a Mexican story,
the woman who wanted to disappear is an unfinished story of nineteen twenty nine the year before his death.
Here we're back in the psychological and geographic territory of 1912.
A stifled American housewife wants to disappear from her family for a year, and she takes us out to a place that sounds very much like irrationalism.
But from there she yearns somewhat like the Prussian officers, orderly towards the mountains.
In this case, not for positive consummation, though, just in order to escape her previous life and her previous self.
Given this, it's appropriate that she never reaches above the tree line.
Like the woman who rode away. She climbs into the mountain forests and meets a male native, unlike the woman who rode away.
She does not reach South Forgettin consummation as the sun shines through an icicle.
And she is she's sacrificed. She is highly unlikely even to have and she is highly unlikely to have even had this story been finished.
Rather, she gives every sign when the story breaks off that she is about to become an Alpine Lady Chatterley.
The story breaks off as she sits in the heart of an Alpine forester, and she's probably soon to make a return to warm, connected life.
In fact, warmer and more connected than before. Such life then sheltered from the eternal peaks and snow is possible in the mountains.
Mr. Noon's Yohana demonstrates it at the very time that Gilbert is having his alpine ecstasy.
Yohana, who hasn't gone on this walk with him rather than feeling easily abandoned as Hepburn is by Hannelore,
as Gerald is by Grugeon, is back at the heart having a fling with Stanley.
That too is possible. So it's appropriate that the landscape of Von's is not that of the high Alps.
These are mountains which acknowledge warm life or which at least offered the hope of prolonging it.
I don't think that Lawrence died as the Prussian officer's orderly did.
That story, written 17 years before, makes obvious the connexion of the physical and the spiritual,
which was the task of most of Lawrence's writing to guarantee,
and which surely at the end of mumbler dares to question whether Lawrence's death was merely physical.
It's beyond, obviously, my scope to decide.
I merely suggest that whatever we supposed to have been the case must have some correlation with our understanding of what mountains are.
Thank you.