1 00:00:10,330 --> 00:00:16,480 It's describing people who have lived for generations on Marsh Farm. 2 00:00:16,480 --> 00:00:23,350 They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, 3 00:00:23,350 --> 00:00:30,190 feeling the pulse and body of the soil that opened to their furrow for the grain and became smooth 4 00:00:30,190 --> 00:00:37,530 and supple after their ploughing and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire. 5 00:00:37,530 --> 00:00:44,730 They took the order of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, 6 00:00:44,730 --> 00:00:52,180 the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. 7 00:00:52,180 --> 00:01:06,940 But the women looked out from the heated blind intercourse of farm life to the spoken world beyond this male female classification fits some, 8 00:01:06,940 --> 00:01:20,320 if not all, of the novel. The chapter, called The Widening Circle, is concerned with Ursula, a female's development integrator consciousness. 9 00:01:20,320 --> 00:01:25,780 This male female classification also fits Lawrence's parents. 10 00:01:25,780 --> 00:01:36,820 Author Lawrence was the son of a cloth trader who went down the mines when he was aged seven and spent his working life in the mines. 11 00:01:36,820 --> 00:01:42,730 Lydia Bedsore, Lawrence's mother, was the granddaughter of a Methodist composer. 12 00:01:42,730 --> 00:01:47,920 She was not quite middle class, despite the impression she tried to give to her husband. 13 00:01:47,920 --> 00:01:56,710 But she did value education and successfully determined that none of her children should go down the mine. 14 00:01:56,710 --> 00:02:02,890 And yet, in his nonfictional works, including Fantasia of the unconscious, 15 00:02:02,890 --> 00:02:10,000 Lawrence made the reverse classification that it was women who represented the unconscious, 16 00:02:10,000 --> 00:02:23,290 the sensuous, the soil, the blood, the centre and men who represented the mentor, the word exploration, the circumference, the widening circle. 17 00:02:23,290 --> 00:02:31,330 This better fits the relationship of Birken and Ursula, perhaps of Lawrence and Frida Lawrence. 18 00:02:31,330 --> 00:02:37,360 Certainly all his life struggles, strove to widen his circle aesthetically, 19 00:02:37,360 --> 00:02:43,060 intellectually and importantly for the purposes of this lecture culturally. 20 00:02:43,060 --> 00:02:50,470 When he was a child, his family's prised possession was a 20 volume international library of Famous Literature, 21 00:02:50,470 --> 00:02:57,160 which contained excerpts from works of many places. And in this he read greedily. 22 00:02:57,160 --> 00:03:04,000 It offered him his first contact with many writers who were to influence him and his first contact, 23 00:03:04,000 --> 00:03:10,450 albeit virtual, with other countries at Nottingham University or University College Nottingham. 24 00:03:10,450 --> 00:03:18,290 He studied alongside botany, modern languages. There is something of him in his creation. 25 00:03:18,290 --> 00:03:26,240 Tom Brangwyn, who yearns for something beyond farm life, he finds it in Lydia Leonski, 26 00:03:26,240 --> 00:03:35,450 a Polish widow who has come to his village as the vicar's housekeeper when he first sees her on a street, even without knowing who she is. 27 00:03:35,450 --> 00:03:50,030 He says to himself, that's her. As it happens, Lydia Lawrence's younger sister, ADA, married APOEL Fritz Kirienko, this aunt ADA had a sister in law, 28 00:03:50,030 --> 00:03:59,390 Yohana, who in January 1912 invited Lawrence to come and stay with her and her husband at their home northeast of Bonn. 29 00:03:59,390 --> 00:04:06,320 Finally, Lawrence had a means to travel. Before he undertook that journey, though, he met Frieda. 30 00:04:06,320 --> 00:04:12,000 She wanted to go to Metz to see her father because he was about to celebrate 50 years of military service. 31 00:04:12,000 --> 00:04:22,440 And so they set out together on their separate visits to Germany and thus began their life of restless movement. 32 00:04:22,440 --> 00:04:27,870 Amongst his fictional works, it's Mr. Noone, from which I've quoted plenty already. 33 00:04:27,870 --> 00:04:35,190 It's a novel of nineteen twenty to twenty two that we get a sense of what it was like for him for the first time. 34 00:04:35,190 --> 00:04:44,760 Seeing Germany, the first half of the novel is a parody and an infantilization of Lawrence's own early life. 35 00:04:44,760 --> 00:04:48,270 It ends with the provincial schoolteacher Gilbert Noone, 36 00:04:48,270 --> 00:04:55,860 extracting himself after he's been caught in flagrante with a certain Emmy by her father in his greenhouse. 37 00:04:55,860 --> 00:05:02,400 Thankfully, she gets herself engaged to someone boring or to use Lawrences language of no account. 38 00:05:02,400 --> 00:05:06,900 And he's in the clear. As the second half of the novel opens. 39 00:05:06,900 --> 00:05:12,460 Suddenly we find ourselves in what the chapter title calls Hi Germany. 40 00:05:12,460 --> 00:05:22,870 A fine apartment in Munich, he's working as a research assistant to a professor and we see him going for a walk in the Bavarian hills. 41 00:05:22,870 --> 00:05:30,370 It was a lovely ringing morning bright world for the Englishman, vast and glamorous. 42 00:05:30,370 --> 00:05:34,510 The sense of space was an intoxication for him. 43 00:05:34,510 --> 00:05:43,420 He felt he could walk without stopping onto the far northeastern magic of Russia or south to Italy. 44 00:05:43,420 --> 00:05:54,910 For the first time, he saw England from the outside, tiny, she seemed, and tight and so partial, just a little bit amongst the rest. 45 00:05:54,910 --> 00:06:00,940 Her marvellous truths and standards and ideals were just local, not universal. 46 00:06:00,940 --> 00:06:07,900 They were just a piece of a local pattern in what was really a vast, complicated, far reaching design. 47 00:06:07,900 --> 00:06:16,080 He saw the white road, which seemed to him to lead to Russia, and he became an English. 48 00:06:16,080 --> 00:06:26,640 Indeed, Lawrence did from 1912 onwards, he and Frida moved from England to Germany to Italy, Germany, Switzerland, 49 00:06:26,640 --> 00:06:36,300 Italy, England, Germany, Italy, England for the war to Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Germany, Sicily, Ceylon, Australia, 50 00:06:36,300 --> 00:06:45,150 New Zealand, Tahiti, the United States, Mexico, the states, Mexico, England, the States, England, Italy, Germany, 51 00:06:45,150 --> 00:06:53,370 England, Italy, Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, Switzerland, France, Italy, Germany, England, France. 52 00:06:53,370 --> 00:06:59,340 And even this list doesn't reflect the number of times that they moved home within each country. 53 00:06:59,340 --> 00:07:06,960 Even after dying, he roamed five years after Frida's lover, Antonio, rather likely later to become her third husband, 54 00:07:06,960 --> 00:07:15,660 Doug Laurence up, cremated him and brought his ashes to be buried at the ranch in New Mexico, where Lawrence and Frida had lived. 55 00:07:15,660 --> 00:07:26,400 Various factors favoured their travelling Freeda wanted to visit her mother every so often people with tuberculosis seek places in the sun. 56 00:07:26,400 --> 00:07:30,510 Lawrence had a gift for languages until 1920. 57 00:07:30,510 --> 00:07:34,950 He was poor and living in Italy was cheap. 58 00:07:34,950 --> 00:07:46,440 After Lance entered literary circles around 1912, he made friends who lived in many countries and who would put him and Frida up temporarily for free. 59 00:07:46,440 --> 00:07:51,450 But Lawrence also had a restlessness see in Sardinia. 60 00:07:51,450 --> 00:08:02,830 Lawrence's account of their stay in Sardinia in nineteen twenty one opens with the line, comes over one, an absolute necessity to move. 61 00:08:02,830 --> 00:08:06,820 Lawrence has a gift and a taste for this, a syntactic structure. 62 00:08:06,820 --> 00:08:16,990 The phrase comes over, one comes out of nowhere and compels us towards that subject, an absolute necessity to move. 63 00:08:16,990 --> 00:08:25,180 Every lecture in this series has stressed the value placed on change, change of attitude towards every subject he thought of. 64 00:08:25,180 --> 00:08:35,170 And it also turns out change of place when in Women in Love, Birken and Ursula go to a market to buy furniture to set up a home together. 65 00:08:35,170 --> 00:08:41,410 Working suddenly realises. The truth is we don't want things at all. 66 00:08:41,410 --> 00:08:45,940 The thought of a house and furniture of my own is hateful to me. 67 00:08:45,940 --> 00:08:54,660 This startled her for a moment. Then she replied. So it is to me, but we must live somewhere. 68 00:08:54,660 --> 00:09:01,410 Not somewhere, anywhere, he said one should just live anywhere, not have a definite place. 69 00:09:01,410 --> 00:09:08,220 I don't want a definite place. As soon as you get a room and it is complete, you want to run from it. 70 00:09:08,220 --> 00:09:14,050 Now, my room's at the mill are quite complete. I want them at the bottom of the sea. 71 00:09:14,050 --> 00:09:18,280 And we are never to have a complete place of our own, never a home. 72 00:09:18,280 --> 00:09:25,450 She said, pray God in this world. No, he answered, but there's only this world. 73 00:09:25,450 --> 00:09:31,600 She objected. He spread out his hands with a gesture of indifference on the one hand. 74 00:09:31,600 --> 00:09:36,940 Then there is his dislike of fixity and completion, which is the stick and the other. 75 00:09:36,940 --> 00:09:40,870 There is the character of the place that he wants to move towards. 76 00:09:40,870 --> 00:09:48,370 The quotation from the opening of C in Sardinia goes on and what is more to move in some particular direction, 77 00:09:48,370 --> 00:09:53,690 a double necessity than to get on the move and to know whether. 78 00:09:53,690 --> 00:10:03,290 At the end of Women in Love, Ursula knows where to go when she wants to escape the Alps, which is to Italy and specifically to Verona, 79 00:10:03,290 --> 00:10:08,660 this directed movement contrasts with her sister's feelings soon after this conversation. 80 00:10:08,660 --> 00:10:16,010 So this is when her relationship with Gerald is completely broken down. And look asks her, you were going away tomorrow. 81 00:10:16,010 --> 00:10:23,760 Yes. Fukin. That was the question for HINH, whether. 82 00:10:23,760 --> 00:10:34,360 For him, what a lovely word, she never wanted it answered, let it shine forever, I don't know, she said, smiling at him. 83 00:10:34,360 --> 00:10:39,450 He caught the smile from her one never does, he said. One never does, she repeated. 84 00:10:39,450 --> 00:10:43,740 But he laughed. Where will you take a ticket to? Oh, heaven, she cried. 85 00:10:43,740 --> 00:10:52,200 Well, must take a ticket. Here was a blow. She saw herself at the Wicked at the railway station, then relieving thought came to her. 86 00:10:52,200 --> 00:10:57,630 She breathed freely. But one needn't go. She cried. Certainly not, he said. 87 00:10:57,630 --> 00:11:06,690 I mean one needn't go where one's ticket says. That struck him one might take a ticket so as not to travel to the destination, 88 00:11:06,690 --> 00:11:12,630 it indicated one might break off and avoid the destination, then take a ticket to London. 89 00:11:12,630 --> 00:11:24,570 He said one must never go there. Right. She answered Goodwins anywhere and definitely not London ends up as being Dresden with lurker. 90 00:11:24,570 --> 00:11:33,180 This is what comes of not knowing Vautin. For Gerrold, it's worse once he's tried to murder Gouldian and walk away into the snow. 91 00:11:33,180 --> 00:11:39,030 He was not really conscious. He only wanted to go on, to go on whilst he could to move to keep going. 92 00:11:39,030 --> 00:11:45,720 That was all to keep going until it was finished. He had lost all sense of place after his death. 93 00:11:45,720 --> 00:11:51,420 Birken goes and finds the place where he went to sleep in the snow and sees a rope. 94 00:11:51,420 --> 00:11:57,330 Quote, Gerald might have found this rope. He might have hauled himself up to the crest. 95 00:11:57,330 --> 00:12:04,950 He might have heard the dogs in the Marion Hotel and found shelter. He might have gone on down the steep, steep fall of the south side, 96 00:12:04,950 --> 00:12:12,150 down into the dark valley with its pines onto the great imperial road leading south to Italy. 97 00:12:12,150 --> 00:12:16,800 Lawrence was once disturbed by being caught out on the question of Fortuyn. 98 00:12:16,800 --> 00:12:27,270 He was expanding his project of Romanian, which is his utopian idea for a colony of about 20 souls who could live together in harmony. 99 00:12:27,270 --> 00:12:34,650 In winter 1914, he was trying to encourage John Middleton, Mary Katherine Mansfield and Scott Wolanski, 100 00:12:34,650 --> 00:12:41,040 his Ukrainian friend, to move with him and Frieda to an unpopulated island. 101 00:12:41,040 --> 00:12:48,040 Catherine gathered up a pile of maps and asked him to indicate precisely where this island was. 102 00:12:48,040 --> 00:12:53,710 He said very little after that and ran in and did not materialise, 103 00:12:53,710 --> 00:12:58,780 the pattern of his travelling was there on arrival in a place he would have a difficult period because the 104 00:12:58,780 --> 00:13:04,210 journey would have strained him physically and finding accommodation and settling in and in some cases, 105 00:13:04,210 --> 00:13:16,310 learning a language was all strenuous. Then he and Frieda might have a good period, then would come over her or him an absolute necessity to move. 106 00:13:16,310 --> 00:13:21,520 One result of this is a biography which it is fun to research expensive financially. 107 00:13:21,520 --> 00:13:27,640 And in terms of carbon footprint, some people have tried to visit all the places that Lawrence knew. 108 00:13:27,640 --> 00:13:31,270 One is the comedian and journalist Geoff Dyer. 109 00:13:31,270 --> 00:13:41,380 You may know his 1997 book Out of Sheer Rage, which which is the autobiographical account of his failure to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence. 110 00:13:41,380 --> 00:13:48,820 After much stressful to do under the Sicilian Sun, he finally locates the Villa Fantana Versailles in Tahmeena, 111 00:13:48,820 --> 00:13:59,320 where he is rewarded for his persistence by finding a plaque which says D.H. Lawrence, English author, lived here. 112 00:13:59,320 --> 00:14:06,070 Nineteen twenty nineteen twenty three, Dyas says, We had found it. 113 00:14:06,070 --> 00:14:13,630 He's with his girlfriend. We stood silently. I knew this moment well from previous literary pilgrimages. 114 00:14:13,630 --> 00:14:22,900 Perhaps you also do you look and look and try to summon up feelings which don't exist. 115 00:14:22,900 --> 00:14:33,670 You try saying a mantra to yourself, D.H. Lawrence lived here, you say, I am standing in the place he stood seeing the things he saw. 116 00:14:33,670 --> 00:14:45,270 But nothing changes, everything remains exactly the same a road, a house with sky above it and the sea glittering in the distance. 117 00:14:45,270 --> 00:14:50,010 Well, maybe you haven't had such problems, Lawrence had no such difficulties, 118 00:14:50,010 --> 00:14:56,520 places were instantly meaningful for him and he was able to write down those meanings immediately. 119 00:14:56,520 --> 00:15:07,050 And in contrast to die at speed, he had read much travel literature before starting to write, but his own differed from all his models. 120 00:15:07,050 --> 00:15:14,910 Several points are worth noting about his travel writing, by which I principally mean the collection's entitled Twilight in Italy. 121 00:15:14,910 --> 00:15:20,460 Nineteen sixteen CE in Sardinia, 1921, Mourning's in Mexico. 122 00:15:20,460 --> 00:15:27,690 Twenty seven sketches of Etruscan places, twenty eight and many uncollected essays. 123 00:15:27,690 --> 00:15:35,640 He had two strong tendencies in his mode of composition. Some things he wrote rewrote in their entirety. 124 00:15:35,640 --> 00:15:46,140 And then again, and perhaps again. Sons and lovers, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover of this kind of the things he wrote at speed, 125 00:15:46,140 --> 00:15:52,260 then sent to be published after hardly reading, let alone rewriting them. 126 00:15:52,260 --> 00:15:59,400 Most of his travel writings are of this kind. In particular, before the war, there was a financial reason for this. 127 00:15:59,400 --> 00:16:04,590 When he eloped, he had given up his teaching job and was supporting Frida as well as himself. 128 00:16:04,590 --> 00:16:12,060 He financed their travels through Germany and Italy by sending essays to Pinker, his agent in London. 129 00:16:12,060 --> 00:16:17,040 In the early twenties, a friend of his visited him in an Italian city. 130 00:16:17,040 --> 00:16:23,520 Lawrence had arrived there for the first time in his life on an earlier train on the same day. 131 00:16:23,520 --> 00:16:30,990 By the by the time that this friend reached Lawrence's hotel, he found him sitting at a desk in his room, 132 00:16:30,990 --> 00:16:39,790 writing an article about the city in which he had just arrived, diagnosing its spiritual vices and virtues. 133 00:16:39,790 --> 00:16:47,650 To an extent, then, Lawrence would use a place as an allegory or vocabulary with which to express whichever spiritual thoughts had been 134 00:16:47,650 --> 00:16:55,660 planted in him by his initial experiences of it when he was towards the end of his life researching the Etruscans, 135 00:16:55,660 --> 00:17:00,680 the predecessor, predecessors of the Romans in central Italy, he wrote to a friend, 136 00:17:00,680 --> 00:17:06,070 I should just have to start in and go ahead and be damned to all authorities. 137 00:17:06,070 --> 00:17:15,910 There really is next to nothing to be said scientifically about the Etruscans must take the imaginative line. 138 00:17:15,910 --> 00:17:23,950 His fiction, too, was influenced by his travel, Arun's world is partly set in Italy, Kangaroo Set in Australia, 139 00:17:23,950 --> 00:17:29,530 the plumed serpent in Mexico, not to mention many short stories set in each of these. 140 00:17:29,530 --> 00:17:34,570 He began kangaroos soon after he and Frieda arrived in Sydney and finished it. 141 00:17:34,570 --> 00:17:38,830 But for the last chapter within five weeks, 142 00:17:38,830 --> 00:17:47,200 one thing which will strike modern readers in all of these writings is his attitude towards the divisions of humanity into type's, 143 00:17:47,200 --> 00:17:51,880 which we might now call nations, races or ethnicity. 144 00:17:51,880 --> 00:17:56,350 The noun, which in anthropological parlance correlates with the adjective ethnic. 145 00:17:56,350 --> 00:18:02,800 It's a useful noun to have he delighted in the variety of mankind. 146 00:18:02,800 --> 00:18:09,460 Mr Noon, when he's looking out across the hills of Bavaria, thinks many magical lands, 147 00:18:09,460 --> 00:18:17,470 many magical peoples, all magnetic and strange, uniting to form the very patchwork of Europe. 148 00:18:17,470 --> 00:18:22,480 This seemed to break his soul like a chrysalis into a new life. 149 00:18:22,480 --> 00:18:27,550 There were so many, many lands and peoples besides himself and his own land. 150 00:18:27,550 --> 00:18:34,240 It was so nice to be one amongst many so far so tolerant, multicultural. 151 00:18:34,240 --> 00:18:41,590 Mr Noone is rejoicing that a thousand flowers of national defence do bloom on the face of the Earth. 152 00:18:41,590 --> 00:18:51,640 Correspondingly, Aaron, quote, had no eye for the horrible sameness that was spreading like a disease over Italy from England and the north. 153 00:18:51,640 --> 00:18:57,550 This is a repeated theme, Florence, the homogenisation of Europe starting from the North. 154 00:18:57,550 --> 00:19:02,830 But how had these differences between peoples arisen in the first place? 155 00:19:02,830 --> 00:19:07,900 The eleventh chapter of the Book of Genesis, as you know, explained it by the story of the Babylonians, 156 00:19:07,900 --> 00:19:12,520 who tried in their hubris to build a tower which would reach heaven. 157 00:19:12,520 --> 00:19:17,860 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is won and they have all one language. 158 00:19:17,860 --> 00:19:24,820 And this they begin to do. And now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do, 159 00:19:24,820 --> 00:19:31,780 go to let us go down and there confound their language that they may not understand one another speech. 160 00:19:31,780 --> 00:19:40,520 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the Earth, and they left off to build the city. 161 00:19:40,520 --> 00:19:47,810 In the last lecture, I mentioned that Lawrence reinvented the Bible in his own way in Fantasia of the unconscious, 162 00:19:47,810 --> 00:19:55,940 he gives his own version of this story, which has much geological and esoteric reading behind it. 163 00:19:55,940 --> 00:20:01,130 He also claims that mankind was originally one quote, 164 00:20:01,130 --> 00:20:05,750 just as mathematics and mechanics and physics are defined and expounded in the 165 00:20:05,750 --> 00:20:11,840 same way in the universities of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow today. 166 00:20:11,840 --> 00:20:15,050 So it seems to me in the great world previous to ours, 167 00:20:15,050 --> 00:20:28,460 a great science and cosmology were taught esoterically in all the countries of the globe Asia, Polynesia, America, Atlantis and Europe. 168 00:20:28,460 --> 00:20:32,840 The seabeds of today must have been comparatively dry. 169 00:20:32,840 --> 00:20:40,190 The Easter Island in the Marquesas and the rest Rose Lufti from the marvellous, great continent of the Pacific. 170 00:20:40,190 --> 00:20:48,650 In that world, men lived and taught and knew and were won in complete correspondence all over the Earth, 171 00:20:48,650 --> 00:20:52,970 men wandered back and forth from Atlantis to the Polynesian continent. 172 00:20:52,970 --> 00:21:06,970 As men now sail from Europe to America, the interchange was complete and knowledge science was universal over the Earth, cosmopolitan as it is today. 173 00:21:06,970 --> 00:21:12,310 Then came the melting of the glaciers and the world flood, 174 00:21:12,310 --> 00:21:20,800 the refugees from the drowned continents fled to the high places of America, Europe, Asia and the Pacific islands, 175 00:21:20,800 --> 00:21:28,090 and some degenerated naturally into cavemen, Neolithic and Palaeolithic creatures, 176 00:21:28,090 --> 00:21:36,040 and some retained their marvellous innate beauty and life perfection like the South Sea Islanders. 177 00:21:36,040 --> 00:21:42,820 And some wandered savage in Africa and some like Druids or Etruscans or child 178 00:21:42,820 --> 00:21:51,450 Deion's or Amerindians or Chinese refused to forget but taught the old wisdom. 179 00:21:51,450 --> 00:21:59,610 More or less forgotten as knowledge, remembered as ritual, gesture and myth, story, 180 00:21:59,610 --> 00:22:08,250 floods and fire and convulsions and ice arrest intervene between the great glamorous civilisations of mankind. 181 00:22:08,250 --> 00:22:19,120 But nothing will ever quench humanity and the human potentiality to evolve something magnificent out of a renewed chaos. 182 00:22:19,120 --> 00:22:26,290 As much of the Old Testament indicates, the idea of nationalism is as old as the ancient Jews. 183 00:22:26,290 --> 00:22:30,910 I'm using nationalism not in the colloquial sense of a strong version of patriotism, 184 00:22:30,910 --> 00:22:42,430 but in the academic sense of a belief that mankind is or should be and or should be divided into two distinct political and cultural groups. 185 00:22:42,430 --> 00:22:51,640 Lawrence stands on the far side of a long history of developing European theories on nationalism, particularly from the Renaissance onwards. 186 00:22:51,640 --> 00:22:52,720 In the 19th century, 187 00:22:52,720 --> 00:23:02,470 German romantics such as Howard and Fisht theorised the nation in essentialist terms and developed the idea of the national character. 188 00:23:02,470 --> 00:23:07,210 In the 20th century, more political and pluralist theories of the nation have developed, 189 00:23:07,210 --> 00:23:13,330 and some people now argue that with the help of such transnational units as the EU and the UN, 190 00:23:13,330 --> 00:23:19,120 the 500 year age of so-called nationalism is coming to an end. 191 00:23:19,120 --> 00:23:27,730 Others point to the Balkanisation of the Balkans in the 1990s and say that ethnic nationalism is alive and kicking. 192 00:23:27,730 --> 00:23:32,620 So how to locate Lawrence's ideas in this spectrum for a start? 193 00:23:32,620 --> 00:23:41,290 As usual, he has no coherent theory or vocabulary. He uses the term people, nation and race in a range of ways. 194 00:23:41,290 --> 00:23:49,930 But he normally uses a particular noun such as the Etruscans, in preference to any one of those abstract nouns. 195 00:23:49,930 --> 00:23:52,570 He is not a civic nationalist. 196 00:23:52,570 --> 00:24:02,530 That is to say, someone who believes that a nation is made up by citizens who are conscious of and consent to being part of a nation. 197 00:24:02,530 --> 00:24:10,660 Lawrence was not interested in political structures or the issue of statehood, and his sense of history is inconsistent. 198 00:24:10,660 --> 00:24:15,940 He describes the Japanese as an old nation, which makes some sense. 199 00:24:15,940 --> 00:24:27,250 But he describes the Germans and not the Italians as a young nation, despite the fact that they were unified as modern states at about the same time. 200 00:24:27,250 --> 00:24:36,130 One of the most important theorists of the nation when Lawrence was growing up was the Frenchman and Eleanor in 1882, 201 00:24:36,130 --> 00:24:43,450 after the secession of Alsace Lorraine to Germany, and this included Frida's hometown of Mezze. 202 00:24:43,450 --> 00:24:48,400 He wrote the book. Keskin asks, What is a nation? 203 00:24:48,400 --> 00:24:57,370 He answered that the nation is a form of morality and solidarity sustained by a distinctive historical consciousness. 204 00:24:57,370 --> 00:25:02,020 The existence of a nation, as he put it, is a daily plebiscite. 205 00:25:02,020 --> 00:25:07,780 Lawrence, on the other hand, thought that Italians were Italians, whether they liked it or not, 206 00:25:07,780 --> 00:25:15,760 nor would he have liked her nose sentiment that common suffering is greater than separate happiness in women in life. 207 00:25:15,760 --> 00:25:23,590 One of the arguments between her Maione and Birken concerns Italian unification, which happened in the late 60s. 208 00:25:23,590 --> 00:25:30,970 Amaney says. I'm interested in it in Italy. In her coming to national consciousness. 209 00:25:30,970 --> 00:25:35,320 I wish she'd come to something different from national consciousness then, said Birkin, 210 00:25:35,320 --> 00:25:39,400 especially as it only means a sort of commercial industrial consciousness. 211 00:25:39,400 --> 00:25:43,590 I hate Italy international randt. 212 00:25:43,590 --> 00:25:52,230 Lawrence also has little interest in the kind of nationalism alternatively theorised by the German romantics how to sort that sense, 213 00:25:52,230 --> 00:26:01,120 one's experience of life was filtered by language. One's essence was determined by the particular language that one spoke. 214 00:26:01,120 --> 00:26:10,960 And that the essence of a nation is located in its language, philology was therefore brought to the service of group psychology. 215 00:26:10,960 --> 00:26:19,330 How does contemporary Fisht politicised this view and argued that linguistic nations should have their own states? 216 00:26:19,330 --> 00:26:28,840 Of course, these ideas cannot account for multi multilingual nations such as the Swiss or multi-state languages such as Arabic and English. 217 00:26:28,840 --> 00:26:35,830 Lawrence was a good linguist and by the end of his life had a reasonable knowledge of German, Italian, Spanish and French. 218 00:26:35,830 --> 00:26:43,810 He scattered their terms across his writings with varying degrees of consideration for readers who don't know those languages. 219 00:26:43,810 --> 00:26:49,140 But he showed very little interest, interestingly, in language per say. 220 00:26:49,140 --> 00:26:57,310 Occasionally, he notes difficulties he has in communication. For example, in his 1913 essay, The Spiner and the Monks, 221 00:26:57,310 --> 00:27:04,090 in which an elderly Italian woman speaks to him at length, he doesn't understand and eventually he runs away. 222 00:27:04,090 --> 00:27:10,990 This is presented as comic, but not as profoundly interesting in his version of the Bible story. 223 00:27:10,990 --> 00:27:16,420 He doesn't mention language only cultural difference. 224 00:27:16,420 --> 00:27:25,240 When he read literature in translation, he, frustratingly for his researches, didn't make a note of whose translation he read. 225 00:27:25,240 --> 00:27:31,720 He himself wrote translations from the Italian and helped Cottam Jansky with his translations from the Russian. 226 00:27:31,720 --> 00:27:42,220 But he didn't reflect on the process. He made spiritual extrapolations from many aspects of the culture, but not from its language. 227 00:27:42,220 --> 00:27:52,700 He was, however, interested in what would nowadays be called psychogeography, the effect of a place upon soul. 228 00:27:52,700 --> 00:28:02,690 Having lived for half a year in Sicily, he decided to leave for Sardinia because he found the proximity of the volcano Atnah oppressive, 229 00:28:02,690 --> 00:28:06,770 this timeless atnah in her lower heaven loveliness. 230 00:28:06,770 --> 00:28:11,680 So lovely, so lovely. What a torturer. 231 00:28:11,680 --> 00:28:17,800 Not many men can really stand her without losing their souls. 232 00:28:17,800 --> 00:28:24,700 She's like Soucy. How many men, how many races has Etna put to flight? 233 00:28:24,700 --> 00:28:32,920 It was she who broke the quick of the Greeks. So and after the Greeks, she gave the Romans, the Normans, the Arabs, the Spaniards, 234 00:28:32,920 --> 00:28:38,200 the French, the Italians, even the English, she gave them all their inspired our. 235 00:28:38,200 --> 00:28:47,950 And broke their souls. As a result, the Sicilians who were the one people who have remained in her proximity, according to Lawrence, 236 00:28:47,950 --> 00:28:57,270 are intelligent demons and humanly, according to us, the most stupid people on Earth. 237 00:28:57,270 --> 00:29:05,160 For him, the influence of space can override the direct transmission of culture across generations. 238 00:29:05,160 --> 00:29:10,350 So, for example, he finds on reading American literature that in the great writers, 239 00:29:10,350 --> 00:29:17,250 the voice, the voice, the voices of Native Americans are suppressed, but audible. 240 00:29:17,250 --> 00:29:24,880 So it would seem that immigrants to America absorb this native voice just by being their. 241 00:29:24,880 --> 00:29:33,910 He sees the modern Italians as the spiritual, if not necessarily the genetic descendants of the forerunners of the Romans in central Italy, 242 00:29:33,910 --> 00:29:40,390 the Etruscans, not of the Romans themselves after visiting an Etruscan tomb. 243 00:29:40,390 --> 00:29:48,130 He notes that, quote, in the full, dark, handsome, jovial faces of his fellow tourists on the bus. 244 00:29:48,130 --> 00:29:54,010 Surely you see the lustre still of the life loving Etruscans. 245 00:29:54,010 --> 00:29:56,620 So this is, of course, a problem for the fascists, 246 00:29:56,620 --> 00:30:05,050 the fascists considering themselves in all things Roman Roman of the Caesar's heirs of the Empire and world power 247 00:30:05,050 --> 00:30:10,760 have to confront the fact that Italy today is far more Etruscan in its polls than Roman and will always be. 248 00:30:10,760 --> 00:30:16,540 So why try to revert to the Latin Roman mechanism and suppression? 249 00:30:16,540 --> 00:30:25,580 And I suppose that's one way of interpreting the Italian fascists failure to be as enthusiastic and efficient as as the Nazis. 250 00:30:25,580 --> 00:30:30,740 In his 1969 essay, The Crucifix Across the Mountains, to which I return next week, 251 00:30:30,740 --> 00:30:39,230 he speculates maybe a certain Gersen van that's megalomania is inherent in the German nature. 252 00:30:39,230 --> 00:30:44,510 If only nations would realise that they have certain natural characteristics, 253 00:30:44,510 --> 00:30:48,710 if only they would understand and agree to each other's particular nature. 254 00:30:48,710 --> 00:30:59,530 How much simpler it would all be. And yet, Lawrence is not what contemporary sociologists or anthropologists would call a primordia list, 255 00:30:59,530 --> 00:31:05,410 that is someone who believes that national Essence's are fixed across time. 256 00:31:05,410 --> 00:31:11,500 He is, if anything, a perennial list. He believes that nation's pop up and dissolve. 257 00:31:11,500 --> 00:31:21,430 They are cultural, not natural categories. They rely not on genes, not on language, and certainly not on politics or consent. 258 00:31:21,430 --> 00:31:27,030 They are mutable spiritual phenomena that have a certain relationship to place. 259 00:31:27,030 --> 00:31:33,430 And in this, he partly resembles his contemporary, the German philosopher Osvald Spangler. 260 00:31:33,430 --> 00:31:42,640 His most famous work is that one took on this ardent Londis, The Decline of the West, published in the same year as Arun's Road. 261 00:31:42,640 --> 00:31:48,250 This argues that all cultures pass through a life cycle of growth and decay. 262 00:31:48,250 --> 00:31:53,800 Western Europe is currently entering the final stage of its existence. 263 00:31:53,800 --> 00:31:59,800 This was a hugely influential work with which Lawrence had considerable sympathy. 264 00:31:59,800 --> 00:32:07,120 Women in Love represents an exhausted European civilisation tearing itself apart in war. 265 00:32:07,120 --> 00:32:15,580 One of the alternative titles was Love amongst the Ruins. It won't surprise you to hear that the Nazis also embraced Spangler, 266 00:32:15,580 --> 00:32:25,760 but then rejected him in 1933 for refusing to accept their racial theory and for being pessimistic about the future of Germany. 267 00:32:25,760 --> 00:32:28,520 But there is a further feature of Lawrence's national thinking, 268 00:32:28,520 --> 00:32:37,250 which is peculiarly his it's his thinking in terms of binaries of polar opposites amongst peoples. 269 00:32:37,250 --> 00:32:48,650 We see this in studies in classic American literature. Nineteen nineteen, he says that the Romans thought in terms of the Gallic African opposition. 270 00:32:48,650 --> 00:32:56,150 Modern Europe, he says, is divided by the German Italian polarity at the Renaissance. 271 00:32:56,150 --> 00:33:01,400 Europe and America became polar opposites to each other within America, 272 00:33:01,400 --> 00:33:12,810 the poles of the European Puritans who lost physically to control the spirit and the Native Americans who were the other way around. 273 00:33:12,810 --> 00:33:21,270 He wrote the essay, The English and the Germans in 1912, soon after coming into contact with the Germans for the first time in this, 274 00:33:21,270 --> 00:33:34,320 he characterises the Germans as not as old a nation as we as less couth than the English, less and less civilised and less cynical. 275 00:33:34,320 --> 00:33:40,320 The English ask implicitly to be destroyed by a more brutal nation. 276 00:33:40,320 --> 00:33:52,920 And that, he says, is why there is a German scare. In Fantasia, the unconscious, he describes the tuto Roman polarity as follows. 277 00:33:52,920 --> 00:33:58,380 When the legions crossed the Rhine, they met the faceless silence of the Black Forest, 278 00:33:58,380 --> 00:34:04,920 the enormous power of these collective trees stronger in their sombre life even than Rome. 279 00:34:04,920 --> 00:34:08,130 No wonder the soldiers were terrified. 280 00:34:08,130 --> 00:34:15,720 No wonder they thrilled with horror when deep in the woods, they found the skulls and trophies of their dead comrades on the trees. 281 00:34:15,720 --> 00:34:20,250 The two German has something of the sap of trees in his veins. 282 00:34:20,250 --> 00:34:27,600 Even now he is a tree. God and his gods are not human. 283 00:34:27,600 --> 00:34:34,720 But after bone dry Italy and after the jibbering of myriad people all rattling their personalities, 284 00:34:34,720 --> 00:34:41,640 I am glad to be free with the profound indifference of faceless trees. 285 00:34:41,640 --> 00:34:53,070 Correspondingly, when in the countryside near Trento, Mr Noone says the Romans doesn't want to feel the Romans, one does, said Yohana grimly. 286 00:34:53,070 --> 00:34:58,200 Bear in mind she's German to her fresh northern forest leaved. 287 00:34:58,200 --> 00:35:10,150 So it was indescribably hideous. The dry vineyards on their terraced hills, the the treeless slopes. 288 00:35:10,150 --> 00:35:17,980 Women in love itself, however, is orientated around a larger scale spiritual binary to which I return next week, 289 00:35:17,980 --> 00:35:28,430 the African and the Arctic, the African is represented by the fetish in Halliday's flat, a sculpture of a woman in childbirth. 290 00:35:28,430 --> 00:35:35,390 Birken asserts about it, There are centuries and hundreds of centuries of development behind that carving, 291 00:35:35,390 --> 00:35:47,430 it is an awful picture pitch of culture, pure culture and sensation, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. 292 00:35:47,430 --> 00:35:55,770 The Arctic is represented by Jarold, which may be why he shudders when he sees the sculpture, when Gudrun first sees him, 293 00:35:55,770 --> 00:36:05,070 she perceives that in his clear northern flesh and his father was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. 294 00:36:05,070 --> 00:36:11,190 And he looked so new and pure as an Arctic thing. 295 00:36:11,190 --> 00:36:21,960 Birken sees these as alternative modes of death, the white race is having the Arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow. 296 00:36:21,960 --> 00:36:30,960 This is psychogeography, again, would fulfil a mystery of ice, destructive knowledge, snow, abstract annihilation, 297 00:36:30,960 --> 00:36:41,000 whereas the West Africans controlled by the burning death abstraction of the Sahara had been fulfilled in sun destruction. 298 00:36:41,000 --> 00:36:45,980 Burkean thinks of Jarold as one of those strange, white, wonderful demons from the north. 299 00:36:45,980 --> 00:36:54,110 Was he fated away to pass in to pass away in this knowledge, death by perfect cold? 300 00:36:54,110 --> 00:37:05,060 As it turns out, of course, he is these polls, the Arctic and the African are not the lion and the unicorn on which the crown of life is balanced, 301 00:37:05,060 --> 00:37:14,470 to borrow the image from his essay, The Crown. They are not eternal opposites which guarantee each other's existence through their very strife. 302 00:37:14,470 --> 00:37:21,640 There were Scylla and assuredness, both to be avoided as most people living either in the Arctic or the Sahak, 303 00:37:21,640 --> 00:37:27,730 so as people generally avoid living either in the Arctic or the Sahara, he reflects, 304 00:37:27,730 --> 00:37:32,530 there was the other way, the remaining way, and he must run to follow it. 305 00:37:32,530 --> 00:37:39,430 He thought of Ursula. They must marry and go and live in a temperate zone in Italy. 306 00:37:39,430 --> 00:37:45,370 Lawrence is thinking about race, therefore differs from his thought about individuals of individuals, 307 00:37:45,370 --> 00:37:49,480 be they are dandelion or a rabbit or a horse or a man. 308 00:37:49,480 --> 00:37:55,150 He demands that they be themselves, that they fulfil perfectly whatever they are. 309 00:37:55,150 --> 00:38:00,310 But as an African or as an eiseman, and perhaps also as an Englishman, 310 00:38:00,310 --> 00:38:11,200 one should not embody one's race to perfection because that is to end up spiritually burned or frozen or desiccated. 311 00:38:11,200 --> 00:38:16,240 So far, I've tried to describe the nature of Lawrence's thoughts towards people's, 312 00:38:16,240 --> 00:38:21,460 but in the last part of this lecture, I want to turn more to the contents of those feelings. 313 00:38:21,460 --> 00:38:26,260 The obvious place to start with this is Germany, because that's where Lauren started. 314 00:38:26,260 --> 00:38:33,040 His feelings towards it were mixed. On the one hand, he loved and admired not only his wife, but her family. 315 00:38:33,040 --> 00:38:42,100 It turns out the freedom was not a one off her sisters. Two were strong, liberated, unconventional and intelligent. 316 00:38:42,100 --> 00:38:47,920 He chose German names for his heroines was a good one. 317 00:38:47,920 --> 00:38:57,550 Initially, he wanted the dedication of the rainbow to Elsa, his sister in law, to be printed in German for Elsa and in Gothic script. 318 00:38:57,550 --> 00:39:01,690 His publishers refused. This was nineteen sixteen. 319 00:39:01,690 --> 00:39:08,110 Lawrence's staunch refusal to be anti German during the First World War undermined support for the novel in 320 00:39:08,110 --> 00:39:16,120 some who might otherwise have more strenuously protested against its suppression on grounds of obscenity. 321 00:39:16,120 --> 00:39:22,090 Lawrence was also more strongly drawn to the philosophy of Germany than to that of any other country. 322 00:39:22,090 --> 00:39:26,900 Schopenhauer needs to Heidegger Spangler. 323 00:39:26,900 --> 00:39:36,170 On the other hand, he detested Prussian militarism, as I've mentioned, Frida's hometown of Mezze had until recently been French. 324 00:39:36,170 --> 00:39:44,450 Her father, the Baron FleetBoston, which too often was garrison administrative officer of the occupying Prussian army, 325 00:39:44,450 --> 00:39:50,000 Lawrence and Freeda, once nearly arrested for accidentally straying into a military zone. 326 00:39:50,000 --> 00:39:57,590 And Episode two accounts in how a Spy is arrested, ironically, in 1912. 327 00:39:57,590 --> 00:40:04,280 This story was rejected for publication in England as being too anti German. 328 00:40:04,280 --> 00:40:14,180 His 1914 essay, With the Guns, which is a chilling description of witnessing German shooting training, was published in Germany. 329 00:40:14,180 --> 00:40:24,620 Then was Lawrence's intellectual home perhaps more than any other country, but it was in Italy that he was more spiritually and physically at home. 330 00:40:24,620 --> 00:40:27,170 He lived for longer there than in any other country. 331 00:40:27,170 --> 00:40:34,040 After England, after he'd given up on Old and New Mexico, it was to Italy that he returned to him. 332 00:40:34,040 --> 00:40:44,720 The Italians, and especially the Etruscans, were non-intellectual, non-spiritual and a blessed relief in sketches of Etruscan places. 333 00:40:44,720 --> 00:40:51,200 Nineteen twenty eight. One of his last works, he writes, One must love Italy if one has lived there. 334 00:40:51,200 --> 00:40:59,060 It is so non-moral, it leaves the soul to be free over these countries, Germany and England. 335 00:40:59,060 --> 00:41:08,760 Like the grey skies, lies the gloom of a dark moral condemnation and judgement and reservation of the people Italy does not judge. 336 00:41:08,760 --> 00:41:19,170 Why is England so shabby, the Italians here sing and the women walk straight and look calm and the men adore children. 337 00:41:19,170 --> 00:41:24,680 I think they haven't many ideas, but they look well and they have strong blood. 338 00:41:24,680 --> 00:41:33,490 When he goes to the theatre, he finds that Italian actors make a nonsense of Ibsen and a hash of Hamlet just because they are too full of life. 339 00:41:33,490 --> 00:41:43,030 Quote, Every Italian I've seen lives by the human ties which connect him to his neighbour, but Hamlet had no neighbour. 340 00:41:43,030 --> 00:41:47,830 When a living creature begins to question whether he ought to live or ought not to live. 341 00:41:47,830 --> 00:41:56,110 He is like a rotten fungus. And it turns out that Italians are not good at acting the part of rotten fungi. 342 00:41:56,110 --> 00:42:03,730 Lady Chatterley's Lover, which is his book of advice to the English on How to Live, was partly written in Italy. 343 00:42:03,730 --> 00:42:12,380 One unfortunate feature of the latest French Lady Chatterley film is that it is filmed in France under a perpetual sun. 344 00:42:12,380 --> 00:42:16,940 There is no doubt that Italy gave Florence what Aaron Sison finds there, quote, 345 00:42:16,940 --> 00:42:23,870 a feeling of bravado and an almost swaggering carelessness, which is Italy's best gift to an Englishman. 346 00:42:23,870 --> 00:42:32,720 Like his contemporary E.M. Forster, Italy represented a liberated natural foil to English civilisation. 347 00:42:32,720 --> 00:42:37,280 This was how he felt on first discovering Italy and again by the end of his life. 348 00:42:37,280 --> 00:42:45,480 But during the First World War, he had come to believe that, quote, Our European way of living is superseded. 349 00:42:45,480 --> 00:42:49,550 In response, he looked in opposite directions, east and west. 350 00:42:49,550 --> 00:42:58,120 And with startling precedents, he decided that the future lies with the United States of America and Russia. 351 00:42:58,120 --> 00:43:00,340 He could see their similarities, 352 00:43:00,340 --> 00:43:11,350 they slowly expanded at precisely the same time over the two preceding centuries in opposite directions to cover a whole continent. 353 00:43:11,350 --> 00:43:20,200 They had tiny cultural elites who were conscious of and sought to reduce their reliance on European culture. 354 00:43:20,200 --> 00:43:28,510 And their literature was on the rise at the time when Lawrence wrote a book entitled Studies in Classic American Literature, 355 00:43:28,510 --> 00:43:38,860 Classic and American literature were contradictions in terms America was the most favourable outlet for his work in the world, 356 00:43:38,860 --> 00:43:44,980 and much of his income across his career came from there. He planned to visit both countries. 357 00:43:44,980 --> 00:43:52,440 But once Russia had descended into civil war, only his visits to America materialised. 358 00:43:52,440 --> 00:43:58,140 But he was sorely disappointed he found the United States, according to his writing, 359 00:43:58,140 --> 00:44:04,800 a place of mechanisation egoistic wilfulness and self-conscious posturing. 360 00:44:04,800 --> 00:44:11,730 He immediately wanted to get away from the cities and into the open spaces for a while on his ranch in New Mexico, 361 00:44:11,730 --> 00:44:15,870 which was given by a friend in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. 362 00:44:15,870 --> 00:44:27,580 He found peace. It was then in Mexico that he diagnosed vitality, the plumed serpent concerns a contemporary Aztec revival cult, 363 00:44:27,580 --> 00:44:32,710 which involved the submission of women to men and of all to a strong leader. 364 00:44:32,710 --> 00:44:39,730 It is one of his so-called leadership novels. And we will touch on this in the class on fascism in eighth week. 365 00:44:39,730 --> 00:44:49,750 Whatever one makes of its politics, one must remember that it locates the spiritual future of humanity in a non-white people and that 366 00:44:49,750 --> 00:44:56,650 this was sharply at variance with much imperial and racist thinking of his time and country. 367 00:44:56,650 --> 00:45:02,290 But Lance himself did not become a member of an Aztec revivalist cult, 368 00:45:02,290 --> 00:45:12,220 he never attempted to deliberately on English himself to this extent, and he returned to Europe for good in nineteen twenty five. 369 00:45:12,220 --> 00:45:20,050 Worth noting that he always dressed as an Englishman, wherever he was, he knew by now that the pattern of his life was fullfillment, 370 00:45:20,050 --> 00:45:26,650 followed by disappointment, and that these two opposite states were made meaningful by each other. 371 00:45:26,650 --> 00:45:30,504 Travel expressed this and travel caused him to know.