Lewis's Tarr and Lawrence's Women in Love

Chapter 3: Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

ILet’s make no mistake, Wyndham Lewis’ Tarr

is a difficult novel. Difficult to read, difficult to understand, difficult to appreciate. It is the first of our fully blown modernist works (the other is Woolf’s To the Lighthouse). If Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is weak in all those ways that one expects realist novels to behave, Lewis’ Tarr is even more so. If Joyce begins to re-directour attention to the medium of language in A Portrait, Lewis envelopes us, fairly smothers us, in words (as does Joyce himself later in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake). If A Portrait plays withpainterly metaphors, Tarr is the work of an aggressive, thoroughly committed modern painter. If the music of A Portrait

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66 Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr

recalls, say, the delicate impressionism of Debussy, Tarr jars us like Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. If Joyce’s A Portrait is finally about art as the new heaven of those who have lost their religion, Tarr is art’s hell.

Wyndham Lewis was a painter of some standing before he took up writing as a full-time occupation. Of course, he never stopped painting and by the end of his life had achieved, as a painter, an important place inthe evolution of the visual arts in Great Britain and Europe. As a writer, early notoriety was followed, gradually, by increasing obscurity and, finally, self-exilein Canada during the Second World War. Only since the late 1970s, when the important American literary critic and theorist FredricJameson published Fables of Aggression, a monographon Lewis, has Lewis’s place in the making of modernist literature come to be better appreciated.The years when his work was not being noticedand read were, more or less, his own fault, rather than a case of unrecognized genius. Everyone knew he was talented, indeed considered by some to be the most imposing talent of his generation, but Lewis was so personally insufferable, so ferociously satirical in his attacks on his contemporaries, that he managed to alienate just about every arts community in Britain and, therefore, lost that vital support system of friends and colleagues that most artists need to sustain themselves. It’s not for nothing that his second book of memoirs is called Rude Assignment (1950) and his first, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). Certainly one of the rudest men alive, and the editor of a truculent arts journal called BLAST in 1914 –15, Lewis always managed to live up to the

Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr

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acidulous remark of fellow painter Augustus John, “Sarcasm with daring touches of scurrility was his strong card.”

It is easy to dismiss Lewis’s behaviour as merely the expression of a particularly prickly temperament. Certainly Lewis was a spiky man and a confirmed individualist. But to personalize in this way obscures a more interesting way of looking at what Lewis was all about. Lewis was living through a period when the artist was becoming more isolated from society at large. Stephen Dedalus is a case in point. His sense of isolation from family, church, and national community, and his need to seek out the companionship of like-minded devotees of art, casts light on amore general condition. But whereas Stephen, and Joyce too, saw this as a necessary development in the achievement of complete creative freedom beyond the margins of the established social and moral order, Lewis felt that this isolation, which seemed necessary from a certain point of view, also had its dangers. The issue was about creativefreedom; the question was about the best way to achieve it.

For many, the pursuit of serious art was anactivity that could only occur outside the boundaries of societies increasingly


penetrated by commerce and the profit motive.Take Richard Aldington in 1915:

The conditions of modern popular art areso degrading that no man of determined ordistinguished mind can possibly adoptthem. ‘What the public wants’ are thestale ideas of twenty, or fifty, or evenseventy years ago, ideas which any man oftalent [Note: not a word about the manywomen of talent] rejects at once asbanal. It is only the cliché, only thestale, the flat, and the profitable inart which finds ready acceptance andeager purchasers; while the exploiters atthird hand of original ideas are the onlyinnovators to secure applause …. The artsare now divided between popularcharlatans and men of talent, who, ofnecessity, write, think and paint onlyfor each other, since there is no oneelse to understand them. (“SomeReflections on Ernest Dowson,” Egoist, 1March 1915.)

The evolution of society along commercial lines may have made inevitable the division Aldington notes. It certainly made it possible for a great deal of serious and controversial art to get done. Piccaso and Braque’s innovations in painting are associated forever with the freer air of Montmartre. But this encapsulation of theart-world also made it possible for a particular kind of arty charlatan to make hisor her way into artistic circles on little more than talk, the proper costume, and money. Hobson, with his fashionably long hairand Plainsman’s hat, in the first chapter of Tarr is such a character, “disguised to look like the thing it is [his] function to betray” (23/25). Lewis tended to see the art-colonies of bohemia increasingly peopled by the traitors of art, people who mistook the more intense and vivid personal life of these


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precincts as art itself.For the serious artist, on the other hand, life within these bohemias tended to become aspecies of self-strangulation.

The close and intimate life of the bohemian enclaves — Bloomsbury and the Chelsea art scene in London, Greenwich Village in Manhattan, Montmartre and le rive gauche in Paris — into which artists where migrating in the early twentieth century, came to bother Lewis more and more. And the effect this was beginning to have on the behaviour of artists and on the practice of art, even the most serious, set him in permanent opposition.

In London, during and immediately after theFirst World War, he was particularly conscious of the Bloomsbury Group as just such an intimate oasis of friends, supportingeach other psychologically, creatively, and economically in a sahara of Philistines. Thismay be a good thing for an embattled and oppressed minority, but a microsystem of intimate relations functioning as principle mechanism of life-support came at a high cost. It sanctioned, Lewis felt, the creationof a group mystique, a kind of in-group/out-group dynamic, in which works of art were consciously double-coded, a


The Arrival (C. R. W. Nevinson, c. 1914)


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meaning for those in the know, for the cognoscenti as it were, and a meaning for the others. Lewis believed this dimension of coyness crippled a work by undermining its integrity. This was his principle objection to the work of Lytton Strachey. It certainly undercut the moral seriousness of Strachey’s irony and would, given enough time, practically extinguish the ironic vision as a form of moral critique, such as one finds in a writer like Joseph Conrad. The group mystique also tended to psychologize all experience, to lead to a kind of exquisite subjectivity and, hence, a flaccid passiveness which would in time decline again into something like the suffocating decadenceof the 1890s. These are points made about Hobson in the opening chapter of Tarr. VirginiaWoolf,E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and others were all roundly condemned in these terms. Now, these are arguable views and Lewis never stopped arguing them. His problem was that his critiques were usually open attacks, sometimes painfully personal and occasionallyperversely vicious.

As an artist within the artistic communities of Paris and London in the periodbefore and after World War One, Lewis found himself as a participant, albeit an unwilling one, in these strategic withdrawals of the avant-garde. He was certainly not happy there.He responded negatively and violently to whatseemed to him the claustrophobic and messy intimacies of bohemia. Tarr was written by a man whose values still reflected the traditional, patriarchal culture; he believedin a public world that mattered, long afterE. M. Forster had withdrawn into the sort of

72 Wyndham Lewis’s Tarrpersonal relationships which would lead him to say in a famous essay that he would ratherbetray King and Country, than betray a friend.The new social situation of the artist in modernity was an event from which Lewis neverfully recovered. Of course, Lewis himself did not help matters very much.

It is now rather easy to say that Lewis wasone of the most obnoxious men of his time. Only Bertolt Brecht and Evelyn Waugh are in the same league when it comes to nastiness. In his sexual life, he was a predator. He treated women abominably: got them pregnant and then cleared off — he was in a kind of sexual rivalry with the painter Augustus Johnfor a time, even to the point of taking pridein the number of times he was infected with venereal disease by casual conquests. In financial dealings, he was a sponger and he always ended up quarreling with those who helped him. A little bit like Otto Kreisler, I suspect.

Furthermore, Lewis was trenchantly heterosexual in a bohemian community of intense intimacy in which the women had already come out from under Victorian patriarchy, and in which gay men and women had already, within the confines of the enclave at least,


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simply come out. Lewis always joked about this, but there remained an everpresent note of nastiness in his humour. Lewis’s personal relations with women, for example, were appalling, especially in a period when feminism was finally acquiring a political focus. It is interesting actually to think ofa number of male writers in early modernism who shared something of Lewis’s anger towards women and homosexuals: T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and perhaps T. S. Eliot come immediately to mind.

The general male attitude towards women wasdifficult in this period in any case because of the suffrage movement, the most visible ofmany symptoms of women’s desire for greater independence and autonomy in the early years of the century.Women’s suffrage was perceived by settled society as particularly provocative. The factthat many women had begun to acquire money and, therefore, power, and to participate in the economy as producers and consumers, put agood deal of traditional male culture in a lather. The paradoxes of recognition, resignation, and rage are very plainly playedout in the popular, and male- dominated, press of the time. The ambivalent and contradictory portrayals of the “new” or the “modern women” in the daily newspapers, for example, are very revealing in the 1920s. Thestrident anti-feminist tone up front on the leader or editorial pages clashed with the flattering courtship of women consumers with money power in the advertising pages at the back. Needless to say the editorial intelligences that operated the popular pressseemed blind to the contradiction.

The women’s movement, because it was politically radical, was regarded initially as part of the modernist vanguard, an ally of

74 Wyndham Lewis’s Tarrmodernist artists, writers, and intellectuals,in the re-making of society. In fact, the first publication of Tarr occurred in a periodical called the The Egoist in 1916–17 (The Egoist had serialized Joyce’s A Portrait the year before). It had only recently changed its name from The New Freewoman and many of its suffragist editors were still connected with it. Lewis and other male modernists, althoughlending support when the women were simply talking, grew ambivalent or even hostile whenthe women took the struggle to the streets, zealously challenging male attitudes and behaviour.

In general though, it was the face-to-face re-negotiation of all personal relationships in bohemia that tested and frightened WyndhamLewis. Where the members of the Bloomsbury group were able to find in the open mutuality of friendship the basis of a new communal bond, Lewis felt only that a modern aesthetic of concentration, maximum intensity, objectivity was being softened and feminized by being enveloped in the sweet mush of privacy. When he came in contact with, say, the slack delicacy of a Lytton


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Strachey, he was disgusted. When he ran acrosswhat he thought were the capricious posturings of the Sitwell clan, especially Edith, a fragile doll-like character in white-face in the 1920s, he was nauseated. The cult of subjectivity, inwardness, and psychology in the literary London of the 1920s offended him and he took out his aggression in a number of ways. In Tarr, his animus towards Bloomsbury does not take long to surface when Tarr analyzes Hobson’s “position” as a member of the “Cambridge set”in the first chapter of Part I.

Lewis, then, was a thorough-going scoundrelin his relations with those he didn’t like, and that meant that with time he had more or less alienated everyone he knew. His dismissive attitudes towards the artistic bohemias of London were scathingly vented in a roman à clef called The Apes of God which made him the most hated man of his generation. He was also bothered by the fact that the reduced economic prospects of genuine artists within these bohemian enclaves meant that well-heeled dabblers in art were able to passthemselves off as cultural figures when they were little more than self-deluded art-phonies. These attitudes, in the end, came toreflect his estimate of all humanity. His ostracism from cosmopolitan artistic circles was more or less complete by the time he cameto write a scandalous book in praise of Adolf Hitler in 1931 (a position he changed in another book in 1939). D. H. Lawrence, not unfairly, said that Lewis’s final verdict on his fellow human beings could be summed up intwo words: “they stink.”

Lewis came to believe that what stood in the way of the genuine artist, one interested in producing something of significance, was the very intimacy of the

76 Wyndham Lewis’s Tarrbohemian enclave itself and this constitutes one of the most important themes of Tarr. For Lewis, relations of intimacy inevitably ran on towards sex; sex became the still point ofthe intimate world. And we cannot deny that sexual liberation, in all its varieties, was one of the central themes running through thelife experiences of these early artistic communities. This should not be surprising. What the London bohemia represented, even as early as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the nineteenth century and, later, on the more sexually adventurous terrain of the 1890s, was liberation from the massive repressions of Victorian society. Men and women were free to re-organize their intimatelives and a good deal of time and effort was expended in thinking about it, and doing it. The free expression of sexuality in the more open relationships of bohemia came to signifyemancipation and freedom, as it perhaps stilldoes. Of course, Lewis could not agree.

An attack on sexuality pervades his work ingeneral, and is customarily explained by charging Lewis with misogyny. Misogynist


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he may have been, but what his work seems to express is simply a pessimism about the liberating possibilities of sexual impulses in a massively repressed world. Michel Foucault, an important French theorist of sexuality, has expressed a similar skepticism:“We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.” Lewis would have gone on to remark that by saying yes to sex, one says no to art. Sexuality, he believed, endorses and perpetuates the way things are. It is a vote of confidence in the completeness of intimate life. The emphasis on relations of intimacy simply diverts intellectual and emotional energy into maintaining the status quo all the way down the line. And the painstaking cultivation of sexual intimacy takes on a kind of aestheticized aspect. Sex, according to Tarr, is as close to art as the average person can get. In bohemia, sexuality becomes a kind of substitute for art and art a way of trying toget in touch with the intimacies of life, using art as a way to get into sex. This is Kreisler’s problem in the novel as expounded by Tarr to his mistress Anastasya. We are meant to notice that it is also Tarr’s problemat the end of the novel. And, as Lewis was towrite in the later 1920s, this was D. H. Lawrence’s problem as well.

Tarr, towards the end of the novel tries todefine art for his sexual partner, Anastasya Vasek, in a way that sees it as occupying a maximum distance from what he calls “life” by which he means life in the close context of proximity and intimacy. “Life” is, as it were, right in your face. “Soft, quivering andquick flesh is as far from art as an object can be,” Tarr tells Anastasya. “Art is merely the dead, then?” she answers.


“No, but deadness is the first conditionof art .... [T]he second is absence ofsoul, in the human and sentimental sense.With the statue its lines and masses areits soul, no restless inflammable ego isimagined for its interior; it has noinside: good art must have no inside:that is capital.” (312)

Art is separate from life, more durable, more fixed, and more permanent. “Consider thecontent of what we call art,” Tarr says. “A statue is art. It is a dead thing, a lump of stone or wood. Its lines and proportions are its soul. Anything living, quick and changing is bad art always, naked men and women are the worst of all, because there arefewer semi-dead things about them. The shell of a tortoise, the plumage of a bird, makes these animals approach nearer to art” (312).

1.


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IITarr’s startling discussion with Anastasya

about the necessary conditions of art provides an opportunity to explore in detail a second current of modernism, a current thattook its leave of the affirmative interioritywe see Joyce explore in his development of Stephen as a character. In Ulysses, this tendency would emerge as the style of interior monologue called ‘stream-of-consciousness’. Lewis’s modernism takes a different route, although, paradoxically, it is implicit in Stephen’s comments on aesthetics to Lynch in the closing pages of A Portrait. In Stephen’s theory, the artwork is treated as if it is an artifact having its own objective existence separate from the artist’s consciousness and separate from all other things. In other words, one of the necessary conditions of art is the process ofabstracting the object from its natural context. Imbued with integritas, consonantia, and claritas, the work is a thing-initself, whole,harmonious, complete in its own being. Noticethat in his preliminary remarks to Lynch, Stephen specifically rejects the kinetic element; and in his lecture not a word about temporality.Time is not a factor in the existential

constitution of the artwork.For Lewis, this sort of affirmation becomes

the starting point for a radical emphasis on the external and the objective. Works of art possess their own ontological integrity; they resist incorporation into the human world, a reality dominated by consciousness of time. Time pervades subjectivity; objects exist in space and have no interior. They aresurfaces, planes and angles; they possess volume, visible topographies, and they are

80 Wyndham Lewis’s Tarrimmobile. In a word, dead.

Lewis was not the only figure constructing anti-temporal and anti-vital aesthetics around the time of World War One. Cubism, theimagist movement in London, Vorticism, and others, all tended in the same direction. This tendency was given a theoretical grounding by the German art historian WilhelmWorringer in his influential study, Abstraction and Empathy, published in 1908. Worringer explained the history of art as the conflict between two diametrically opposed “urges,” the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction. The urge to empathy is the urge behind realistic art which delights in the actual forms of life. It is profoundly vitalist, imitating nature in order to embodyand identify with the spirit of


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The Mud Bath (David Bomberg, 1914) life within. Opposed to this is the urge to

abstraction, which is not necessarily the urge to produce abstract art (although that is one of its primary directions), but to abstract objects from the world of nature andturn them into art. The aim is to:

wrest the object of the external worldout of its natural context, out of theunending flux of being, to purify it ofall its dependence upon life, i.e., ofeverything about it that was arbitrary,to render it necessary and irrefragible,to approximate it to its absolute value.

Worringer calls this process “de-organicization” and views it as the basis of artistic style itself. A good example of thede-organicizing spirit in the history of art occurs in Byzantine culture, continuing in the resistance to lifelikeness in the iconic art of eastern Orthodox churches. The ‘organic’ in art and literature is to be


found most vividly presented as theory and practice in Romanticism. The urgeto empathy, or identification, struggles against style, or stylization, because it wants to show things as they are. The urge to abstraction, or detachment, stylizes and deforms. It is this process which transforms life into art. One seeks immersion in time, inthe developmental; the other aspires to reach the timeless. One eschews the protocols of artifice; the other embraces, what the poet W. B. Yeats called in “Sailing toByzantium,” “the


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artifice of eternity.” “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing,” Yeats writes (lines 25– 6).

Time is the primary dimension of inwardness; space the dimension of the outward and the visible. These kinds of aesthetic opinions might seem natural to a painter for whom surface and line, visible pattern and shapeliness are paramount creativeconcerns. But how does a painter transpose this procedural regime to words on a page andto narrative? How is narrative, a supremely temporal art, made to aspire to the conditionof painting? Narrative is on-going, continuous; it tells a story in time, and eventhe experience of reading it is temporal through and through. Yet, Tarr is surprisingly successful in coming to terms with this paradox. Certainly time passes in the Tarr narrative, but it does not seem to be very important in the experience, nor is it of vital thematic interest. By way of contrast, think of Joyce’s use of the developmental dynamic of the Bildungsroman and then imagine itwith the time-element subtracted from it. In fact, as discussed in the previous chapter, Joyce attempts something like a de-temporalization of the work by choosing the pictoral — the portrait — as the operative metaphor for the form. We can see then that A Portrait’s form is a kind of compromise between abstraction and empathy. Lewis would eventually turn against so-called modernists, like Joyce and Woolf, who did not adhere morestrictly to the abstracting spirit. Lewis railed against the ‘fault’ of time-consciousness in a book he published in 1927 called Time and Western Man. This polemic is onemore turn of the anti-historical screw of modernism, an assault on history as the master discipline of the nineteenth century,

84 Wyndham Lewis’s Tarran assault that began with Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantages ofHistory for Life” (1874).

Lewis’s suppression of temporality in Tarr is more radical and far more uncompromising than we find in Joyce’s A Portrait.Things happen, but it is their geometry whichis at issue, not their velocity. To some extent, Conrad’s method of deceleration in the murder chapter of The Secret Agent reaches a state of almost complete stasis in Tarr. Moreover, none of the characters seem to develop in any way which makes sense of the realist conventions of character portrayal infiction. The same might be said for the characters in The Secret Agent. Can any of them be said to ‘develop’? Perhaps only Winnie Verloc. And her ‘development’ comes in one, explosive burst, from loyal and silent spouse, “who always refrained from looking deep into things,” to savage instrument of retribution. Indeed she erupts from a watchful torpor into what can only be called a state of paralytic astonishment, a kind ofparoxysm of dismay frozen in time. This is clearly deliberate in Conrad’s design. So, too, for Lewis. The static nature of Tarr’s narrative design has its origins in Lewis thepainter. As a


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proponent of the abstracting style of painting called Vorticism, in which the painter’s aim is to find that point in the composition which is decisively at rest, wrested from the flux of time and fixed in its essential, but visible, form, Lewis is searching for a verbal equivalent in the novel.

In this search, the modernist preoccupationwith the “image” as the fundamental building block of the poetic text is crucial. A literary movement to this effect had made its appearance in London in and about 1911–12 among the avant-garde poets. It was followed in 1914 by Vorticism. Imagism began with the ideas of T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound. When Hulme attacked the Romantic notion “that … theindividual is an infinite reservoir of possibilities,” and predicted that a renewal of poetry must come in the form of “dry, hardclassical verse,” he was in effect attacking the view of the poet as motivated by sentiment, by wooly humanist morality, and by an aptitude for autobiography. His rejection of the personal in composition, in the sense of a rejection of ‘personality’ as the source of an artist’s creative vision, was profoundlyinfluential, especially on T. S. Eliot whose own notable theories of “impersonality,” mentioned in Chapter One, owed a great deal toHulme.

Both Hulme and Pound emphasized the artfulness of art; the main task of the artist was a due attendance, in the strictestsense, to


Ezra Pound (Wyndham Lewis, 1939)


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the technique of composition, to the process which culminates in the production of the artifact and which provides an escape from the romantic yearning for spiritual autobiography and becoming.Pound’s most important definition — An “Image”is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time— stated the ideal of aesthetic objectivity and stasis which modernists promoted each in their various ways. It corresponded to Joyce’s notion of the detachment of an essentially objective creator, and to Lewis’snotion of ‘deadness’ as the first condition of art, or Eliot’s less sanguine definitions of the “undissociated sensibility” and the “impersonality” of the author. The need for this new objectivity had become so great thatPound could even say: “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works” (Homage to Gaudier–Brzeska 88).

Harnessing the power of the isolated image was not new to the Imagists. It has always been part of the repertoire of the great writers. In the early decades of the twentiethcentury it was given a theoretical grounding.Conrad was no Imagist, but we don’t have to look very far into his work to see how well heunderstood the peculiar power of, to adapt a phrase, l’image juste. Take this scene from The Secret Agent when Ossipon approaches the dead Verloc on the sofa in Chapter Twelve.

[T]he true sense of the scene he wasbeholding came to Ossipon through thecontemplation of the hat. It seemed anextraordinary thing, an ominous object, asign. Black, and rim upward, it lay onthe floor before the couch as ifprepared to receive the contribution ofpence of people who would come presentlyto behold Mr. Verloc in the fullness of


his domestic ease reposing on a sofa.(230/250 –51)

This is the same bowler hat which had “rocked slightly on its crown” in the last sentence of Chapter Eleven in the turbulence of Winnie’s flight from Verloc’s blood. It becomes, in its re-appearance some pages later, an odd image of great force, indeed, the narrator tells us it is not merely a pictoral image, but “an ominous object, a sign.” What exactly it’s a sign of is not easyto deduce, although the strange juxtaposition of the black bowler and the dead man inevitably comes across in the context not only as somewhat macabre, but as weirdly comical as well, a suggestion fortified by the further identification of the upturned hatwith the busker’s trade, or perhaps the beggar. This incongruous intervention of the comic has the effect of breaking the narrativespell, of suddenly detaching the reader from the dramatic action in order to gain more fully the ironic significance of these events.Incongruous as it is, the black hat is a powerful image of dissociation, that allows us, with a funny little laugh, to draw away from the intricate and involving drama of


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Verloc’s murder, and for a moment to see it whole and complete. It is the still point in the turmoil of action, the essential, but visible, image wrested from the flux.

Tarr is constructed from many such arrestingimages. But where in Conrad they draw together and bring to a focus disparate meanings in the narrative, enhancing the text’s coherence, Lewis achieves exactly the opposite effect. In Tarr they function disjunctively. Striking images seem to snag the weave of the narrative and deform it. It is as if the object of writing is not narrative or logical coherence at all, but surprising feats of perception, yielding images that constantly interrupt and deflect the narrative flow. Whereas in a traditional narrative all the resources of the art are devoted to the creation of an effect of seamlessness, in Tarr the effect is of torn fabric, a zigzag of stitches, snags, and tears. You can wear it, but the fit will be off and it will leave embarrassing parts of the body exposed.

The aim of these shock tactics is de-temporalization, or, to use Worringer’s term,de-organicization. The subject matter of Tarr is the ‘life’ of a bohemian community in Paris before the Great War, but it will not be rendered in the mode of imitation and empathy, that is in the mode of identification. It is rendered externally as a strategy of abstraction in Worringer’s senseof extracting objects from the world of nature and turning them into art. Here the whole life of these characters is abstracted from the psychological and spiritual context to which an essentially empathic art would direct us and rendered entirely from the

90 Wyndham Lewis’s Tarroutside. The play of images drives this process along and produces a species of narrative which is a series of abstract tableaux with mechanical figures in the place of rounded ‘characters’. Look at how one of the two main characters is introduced in the first chapter of Part II. “From a window in the neighbouring Boulevard, the eye of Otto Kreisler was fixed blankly upon a spot thirtyfeet above the scene of the Hobson-Tarr dialogue” (75). The sentences that follow keep Kreisler’s disembodied eye as the topical focus; it is all that we are given of the man, “one eye fixed upon Paris.” The image of the eye is built up carefully into a visual image, and all the psychological tissue rendered visually in terms of the dreary city outside Kreisler’s window. The narrator’s observing eye, coldly pans Kreisler’s room: it resembles “a funeral chamber”; his bed, “an overturned cupboard”; his shaved face emerges “from greenish soap, garish where the razor had scraped it.” Green and a livid red are the colours of the face before us. If we know something of the history of modern art we catch sight of the visual style of the Germanexpressionists. Or of Lewis’s own portraits of himself and others.


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Lewis does not avoid giving us a sense of Kreisler’s subjectivity; we are conscious of the character’s interior — his inner conflicts, depressions, frustrations, and so forth — but we cannot confidently say that what Kreisler feels or thinks are his own possessions. His emotions and ideas all seem to be psychic analogues of learned behaviour experienced by him as affective visitations, or collisions, from elsewhere. It is as if internal life is an alien invasion from the outside world, a progam imposed on the subject from the routines of social life without. One has feelings, it seems, because they are the typical internal data of one’s class, or age, or gender. Even movements are culture-bound as, for example, when “the little Briton” at Frau Liepmann’s reception gives “the britannic equivalent of a jump” when addressed by Kreisler (156). Or, at the same party, when Kreisler notices a young woman whose features are “set in a spasm of duty” (152). Or, again from the same episode, the narrator’s description of a “a flapper,” where even her “inexperience” becomes a fashion accessory, like her “bristling bronzecurls” (153).

This is a style of writing which holds up ‘life’ at arm’s length to cold and dispassionate inspection. None of it is prettyand the satiric edge slices through sentimentlike a sword. The images — “The clock struck eight: like eight metallic glittering waves dashing discordantly together in a cavern, itsstrokes rushed up and down in Bertha’s head” (190) — block the reader’s desire for sympathetic identification. Instead we are given the vivid, relentless play of dissociated images that disperse the emotionalunity of the text.They leave us with a series of stark

92 Wyndham Lewis’s Tarrjuxtapositions that resist the effect of identification, that is, the typical reader’sdesire to identify with the characters and plot of an ongoing narrative. As a result we are more aware of an abstracted point of view, much like Conrad’s irony, but taken to a new extreme and divested of its moral purpose. Consider the following description of Anastasya, one of the most remarkable in the book.

When she laughed, this commotion wastransmitted to her body as though sharpsonorous blows had been struck upon hermouth. Her lips were long hard bubblesrisen in the blond heavy pool of herface, ready to break, pitifully andgaily: grown forward with ape-likeintensity, they refused no emotion noisyegress if it got so far. Her eyes werelarge stubborn and reflective, browncoming out of blondness: her head was anelegant bone-white egg in a tobacco-coloured nest. Personality was given offby her with alarming intensity; it was anostentation similar to diamonds andfrocks mailed with sequins; Kreislerfelt himself caught in the midst of acascade, a hot cascade. (98–9)

Where a physical description in a conventionally realist text would inevitably lay the foundation for a psychological or moral


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assessment of the character, Lewis concentrates on the exterior surface, in all its scintillating detail, without any of it suggesting that Anastasya has any interior atall, or is in any way an individual. The normally implicit humanist discourse of inwardness (implying the existence of some inner spirit) is not only dispensed with, it is actively debunked. Indeed the very quintessence of humanist wisdom — the Socratic injunction to “Know thyself!’ — is comically turned on its head in the sentence following the description.

Recognizing herself, it would seem, to besome sort of travelling circus, equippedwith tricks and wonders, beauty showsand monstrosities, quite used to beinglooked at, she possessed the geniality ofpublic characters and gossiped easilywith Kreisler as though he were a strangeloafer.... (99)

The narrator’s “it would seem” conveys hissardonic distance and the cold aloofness thatpitilessly puts Anastasya’s ‘recognition’ of herself in a comic light. Most social comedy works with the similar technical procedures, but rarely with this degree of icy ferocity. Lewis’s characters always seem to resemble garish puppets — glittering grotesques — rather than ‘real’ human beings. Perhaps it is not surprising that the overall effect of this procedure is comic through and through, but a comedy calculated to disturb, rather than divert.

This style of writing was not easy to develop and Lewis’s revisions of Tarr suggest its difficulty. The original Egoist version, and the first book publication in1918 presented a more radically disjointed and brusque text than the revised text of 1928 weare reading. Lewis’s prefatory remarks to the

94 Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr1928 edition, suggest that the novel was re-written to erase the defects of haste in its original composition during the first year ofwar. Some critics argue that the earlier version corresponds more with Lewis’s aesthetic intentions and that the revision was his attempt to make the novel more acceptable, in the matter of style at least, to a wider reading public. Others think the 1928 a more sophisticated and polished piece of writing. We do have Lewis’s own words, however, for guidance.The 1918 Tarr he calls “rough” work (its very roughness is what excites some critics); the revision, he says, gives the “narrative everywhere a greater precision.” His word is “precision,” not smoothness or ease of consumption for uninitiated readers. In otherwords, he seems to be saying that the 1928 more precisely agrees with his intentions. Unfortunately, this sort of issue often threatens to become rather more a matter of personal taste, than of critical principle. As it is, my decision about which version to read has been made by the publisher of the only edition widely available and still in print. Penguin Books chose to reprint the 1928, rather


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than the 1918, on the grounds that it was thefruit of Lewis’s own second thoughts. However, readers interested in examining the differences between the two, and making up their own minds, should consult a reprint of the 1918 Tarr, published, mainly for scholars,by the Black Sparrow Press in 1990.

1.III

Lewis’s art, like Oscar Wilde’s, is an art of surface. As such it finds its clearest modal pattern in comedy. Lewis, however, willturn the mode on its head by avoiding, with adevilish grin, the usual happy ending of love and marriage. Instead he will close witha dingy suicide and with some contemptuous remarks about Tarr’s loveless marriages and his squalid resort to a series of mistresses.As most commentator’s note, the power of Lewis’s fiction issues from his theory of comedy: “The root of the Comic,” he wrote inThe Wild Body, “is to be sought in the sensations resulting from the observation of a thing behaving like a person. But from that point of view all men are necessarily comic; for they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons.” Conrad’s treatment of character, for example a lumpen-character like Adolf Verloc, is one of the literary sources of these ideas. So is the Aristophanic ‘Old Comedy’ of the Greeks that often involved the satirical mockery of the manners and mores of representative characters from the social classes of ancient Athens. Both Ben Jonson and Moliére were early modernexponents of this sort of satire. Not to mention that most un-Romantic of Romantic poets, Lord Byron. And Lewis himself has pointed to an important Renaissance source in


the making of both his style of writing and the style of his relationship to theworld at large. I am referring to thegreat French skeptic and ironist, the impeccably sardonicMichel de Montaigne, who provides the two quotations Lewis uses as epigraphs to the novel.


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With his emphasis on the visible manners ofthe “bourgeois- bohemians” in Paris, Lewis can also be thought to have written in the tradition of the comedy of manners. This is akind of comedy that represents the complex and sophisticated code of conduct current in fashionable circles, where appearances count for more than true moral character. Plots usually deal with intrigues of lust and greed, the self-interested cynicism of the characters being masked by decorous pretence.In Tarr, most of the “bourgeois- bohemians” are motivated by lust and greed in an atmosphere of cynicism, but with this difference, they don’t seem to know they are pretending, except, perhaps, for Tarr himself.

All people, Lewis writes, are necessarily comic,and he never relaxed the rigour of this assertion. In writing, the only thing that interests him is the behavioural shell, the actions and appearances of people, not their subjectivity as privately constituted beings. If they have interiors, they are empty spacesfilled with the emotional and cultural debris(or manners if you like) circulating in society at any one time. If they have an emotion, it most likely originates in their reading of novels or of current fashions of feeling, not in some innermost well-spring ofauthentic being. Their so-called unique inwardness, the structure of subjective intentions, is the unguided missile of their pathetic little wills and, therefore, the source of never-ending hilarity to the comedian. Lewis’s tendency to see people as things behaving like persons gives to his characters an oddly fractured or dissociated quality in which the incongruities of their behaviour never resolve into an understanding of character, seeing that there is no

98 Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr‘character’, in the sense of a privileged inwardness, to understand. Instead we see themas social actors performing for each other; the aggregate of all these performances make up the civil society of the bohemian enclave.

Tarr, Kreisler, Bertha, and the others do not seem to cohere around fixed centres of personality, but are cubist constructions of planes and angled surfaces, mere effects of costumes, learned responses, and clichés: “Ever since you’ve worn that pullover you’ve employed that jargon” (37), Tarr tells Guy Butcher, the “sham tough guy in excelsis.” And Kreisler when he first meets Anastasya executes “one or two of his stock displays” in order to make an impression, while presenting his “best de profundis mask of suety insistence, almost clammy with its intensity.” She laughs with “ostentatious satisfaction” in her turn (99, 100). And so on. We are watching the bulky antics of cunningly contrived automatons.Something like the gaudy characters from the old Italian commedia dell’arte transposed to the twentieth century ‘waste land.’ I suppose it is rather sobering to realize that these lurching pinocchios are what at the time Lewisseemed to think being human was all about.Certainly not a very comforting view of the humanist pieties.


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The bulk of his published writing attacks virtually every manifestation of literature and philosophy presenting life as if from theinside, as in the case of ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing. It was Lewis’s project to discredit “the shapeless warm organic durée of the inner monologue and of a psychology-oriented subjectivism” (Jameson 52). The ‘inside’, he argued, is just as lousy with lust, greed, and cynicism as the external world, only it’s wrapped more tightly in warm, self-congratulatory illusions. This is what his seemingly diverseattacks upon Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Henri Bergson, Virginia Woolf, and Jean-Paul Sartre come to: his unwavering contempt for any of the arts of inwardness. And he is especially contemptuous of the philosophies of Time, like Bergson’s for example, that allow us to distinguish between mechanical time, mere chronos, and some deeper, private time made available to intuition, memory, and chance. He attacks the conception of the self seeing it as composed of a papier maché subjectivity. Theseso-called inward states are the imaginary institution produced by the ego to hide it’s own hideous machinery from itself.

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Torso in metal from ‘The Rock Drill’ (Sir Jacob Epstein, 1913–14)


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It’s the machinery that Lewis wants to expose: indeed the machine is a central metaphoric motif in the novel. And it is the source of a good deal of the comic writing inthe novel. When we first meet Tarr we are told that “he had no social machinery at all at his disposal and was compelled to get along as well as he could with the cumbrous one of the intellect. With this he danced about it is true: but it was full of sinisterpiston-rods, organ-like shapes, heavy drills”(13). The intellect as pneumatic rock drill? Or when Guy Butcher arrives in Chapter 2, he pulls up “with the air of an Iron-Age mechanic, born among beds of embryonic machinery” (29). And after the rape, when Kreisler appears at Bertha’s door, she refersto him as ‘The Machine’ (199). These uncomfortable ideas make up a good deal of what Lewis’s eerie schizophrenic rush of mad laughter, terror, and nihilism are all about.

Most amusing of all are the comings and goings of the inhabitants of bohemian Paris in the years before the Great War. And why are they so funny? Lewis seems to say, because they think they are free from the moral and social restraints of conventional society. They may be free from something, butit is not convention. The conventions are simply different in the subculture they inhabit, but they are just as oppressive. Tarr is the character who ishalf-sensible to this contradictory situationand he spends a good deal of time lecturing his companions on its finer points. One of the best comic touches of the novel is Tarr’s dramatic monologues when he is in full flight, as in his long speech to Butcher about the “University of Humour … that prevails everywhere in England for the formation of youth,” and which provides a

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Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr“first-rate means of evading reality’ (35). His conversations with Anastasya in Part VII also contain many fine comic turns, includinga lecture on art that parallels Stephen Dedalus on the same subject in A Portrait. But Tarr is perhaps too much of a theoretical construct to work properly in a novel, too much a mere point of view with legs. In the end, Tarr seems to fail to carry the significance Lewis would like, and this seemsa flaw in the novel as a whole.

Kreisler is a different story. Kreisler is the character who most fully lives out the contradiction and in an entirely unreflectiveway. The early reviews of the novel suggestedthat Kreisler is a Dostoyevskian figure, but that is going too far. Kreisler does not convey otherworldly and metaphysical dimensions that are so much a part of Dostoyevsky’s greatest creations. In the novel, he is the more vigorously deployed of the two main male characters. In his second set of memoirs, Rude Assignment in 1951, Lewis acknowledged the greater force of Kreisler’s presentation and took to heart some of the early criticism of the novel that saw Tarr astoo patently a mouthpiece for the author’s own opinions about art and


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life. Kreisler is the more fully realized character, but he is not ‘rounded’ in the wayE. M. Forster proposed as the suitable treatment for principal characters. In his memoir, Lewis thought the novel should have had the German’s name for a title instead of the talkative Englishman.

The events of Tarr may be bizarre, but they are relatively simple to follow, and provide sufficient action to allow Lewis full rein in the making of his comedy of manners: Tarr,an Englishman and an artist, finds that his life is in need of order, life being a messier problem than art. He asks the advice of three fellow artists— Hobson, Butcher, and Lowndes — and then proceeds to abuse them. Later he visits his fiancée, Bertha Lunken, in order to break offtheir engagement. Unable to resolve this difficult emotional entanglement, he beats a retreat, supposedly leaving for England. The next three sections of the novel direct attention to Kreisler and his even messier life, his financial dependence on his father back in Germany and various other embarrassments, his obsession with the newly arrived Anastasya Vasek, his strange behaviourat Frau Liepmann’s reception, and his meetingwith the unhappy Bertha that ends in her rape.

Tarr then re-appears, not having gone to England after all, and begins to harass Kreisler. Before the German can revenge himself on Tarr, he is ‘insulted’ by a Pole, named Soltyk, who has attached himself to Anastasya, much to Kreisler’s annoyance. With a rival in his place beside Anastasya and a letter from his father telling him he will nolonger finance his Parisian adventures, Kreisler snaps. He fights a duel with Soltyk and kills him. He escapes and is on the run,

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Wyndham Lewis’s Tarruntil he gives himself up to the police near the Franco-German frontier. In custody, he hangs himself. His father, when notified, pays for the anonymous disposal of his son’s body. The novel concludes in a farcical way, with Bertha pregnant by Kreisler and the ‘gallant’ Tarr ready to marry her while maintaining a sexual relationship with Anastasya. In the final paragraphs, we hear about some of Tarr’s future liaisons with wives and mistresses. The plot peters out in a comic vision of Tarr’s life continuing its messy course in more or less the same way as we’ve seen in the novel, bouncing back and forth between the bovine and hard tinsel, between Bertha, replaced later in the lumpen department by the “cheerless and stodgy absurdity of Rose Fawcett,” and the flashy Anastasya Vasek, succeeded by another “lovely contraption” (309/309), the “painted, fine andenquiring face of Prism Dirkes” (334/334). None of this strikes a note of realism, but the names are works of genius worthy of Dickens.

Different readers will have different reactions to the comic situations and satireswhich make up the eccentric weave of the


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novel. But the situations, strange characters, and plot twists do not account adequately for the comic element. In fact, many might not find in these events and characters anything witty at all. However, what all readers agree is that Lewis’s comic language is a consummate tour de force. A critichas called his style in Tarr ‘reckless’ and this, it seems to me, is true. It is recklessand it is prolix, it is alliterative to a fault, it is a carnival of language, in the manner of parts of Joyce’s Ulysses. Samuel Beckett also comes to mind as a verbal stylist who is as creatively reckless as the two early modernists. Among Lewis’s precursors, we ought to include Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, and,of course, Dickens.

In any case, Lewis’s prose is a loud, brashinstrument which he plays fortissimo for most ofhis effects. His description of the restaurant in which Kreisler first meets Anastasya is a superb example of this comic copiousness.

The Restaurant Vallet, like many of itsneighbours, had been originally a cleantranquil little creamery, consisting of asmall shop a few feet either way. Then,one after another its customers had losttheir reserve: they had asked, inaddition to their daily glass of milk,for côtes de pré salé and similarmassive nourishment, which the decentlittle business at first supplied withtimid protest. But perpetual scenes ofunbridled voracity, semesters ofcompliance with the most brutal appetitesof man, gradually brought about a changein its character; it became frankly aplace where the most full- blooded palatemight be satisfied. As trade grew thesmall business had burrowed backwardsinto the ramshackle house: bursting

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through the walls and partitions,flinging down doors, it discovered manydingy rooms in the interior that ithurriedly packed with serried cohorts ofeaters. It had driven out terrifiedfamilies, had hemmed the apoplecticconcierge in her ‘loge’, it had brokenout on to the court at the back in shed-like structures: and in the musty bowelsof the house it had established abroiling luridly lighted roaring den,inhabited by a fierce band of slatternlysavages. (95– 6/95– 6)

We start with a mere “creamery” and end up with a den of savages. There is nothing conventionally realistic in this rush of language, no care in the deployment of verisimilitude, but a great deal of heed paidto image and rhythm. The Rabelaisian growth of the restaurant takes on a life of its own,very much like the passage itself that, in the hot cascade of words, becomes the verbal equivalent of a “broiling luridly lighted roaring den.” Decidedly fortissimo.

1.


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IVLewis, more clearly than any other of the

early modernists, formulates explicitly (often implicit in other modernists) one surprising characteristic of modernism, namely its essentialanti-humanism. Regarded from within the precinct of private life, the mass of humanity seems little more than the anonymous, moving streams of the metropolis —the automated sheep-world as represented by Charlie Chaplin in his comic film Modern Times,or Lewis’s description of a town’s people going home at night as having “all its legs moving slowly, like a spent insect” (289).Conrad’s mad professor, with his vision of humanity as insects, is perhaps a convenient point of reference here. The notion that these automatons represent the final triumph of “Man,” of humanism, as it has been celebrated in the Italian city states in the Quattrocento right through to the liberalism of John Stuart Mill is, Lewis would say, hysterical, laughable. The utilitarian quantification of pleasure and pain (the aim of life is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain), only theoretically achieved in the nineteenth century, had already seen to the practical obliteration of the concept of “Man” as the exalted topic of humanist discourse and as the sacred subject of the historical process. The humanist rhetoric lived on as a kind of lovable, old, official babble that no one quite knew how to stop spouting. That is until recently. Instead thenew master science of the twentieth century, economics, had already begun to reconstruct “Man” as a rational, and self-absorbed, calculator of utilities, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.

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In bohemia, the micropolitics of intimacy and authenticity had managed to keep alive some comforting notion of human significance and value. But this had been achieved by drawing the boundary around the communal ethos more tightly than ever before. The Bloomsbury Group was not only a circle of creative companions bound by the things of the spirit, but the new paradigm for surviving the quantification agendas of modern mass society.This would be the social life form of the future in which human presence would persist as flesh and blood, as concrete, particular


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being, rather than as demographic artifact. And it would lead, during the new century, tothe extraordinary advance of ‘private life’ and of a fortified ‘privacy’ as the last frontier of freedoms that matter, as opposed to the new definition of freedom in consumer society, the freedom to choose among time-sensitive, shelf items, including the freedomto choose who we are. The swarming masses of ‘utility maximizers’ out there in the ruins of the public world would be simply kept out of sight (and, I suppose, out of mind) from within the privileged enclaves of art. Lewis’s work represents the reaction against this state of affairs. And not only a reaction, but a withering critique.

Lewis did not believe that the “bourgeois-bohemian” redoubt could resist the processes that were transforming the external world. Inhis opinion, the freedom of the art-enclave was as illusory as the famous freedoms of consumer society, namely the freedom to choose between white cheese, orange cheese, and white cheese with orange swirls, all of them tasteless. In fact, Tarr is his bitter demonstration of that truth. Perhaps the mostperceptive remark about Bertha which Tarr utters occurs when he refers to her as a “spoiled peasant.” Spoiled because the peasant has been ripped from a living landscape and transported to an urban waste land, where two Boulevards “cross with their electric trams” (11). The traditional peasant’s landscape positions the individual in social, cultural, and moral terms, definesthe person according to known communal ties, not by a synthetic lather of self-fashioning.Spoiled because she mistakes the specialized and counterfeit rocketings of powerful feeling as her ‘nature’, rather than as the outflows of life in the Paris hothouse, and

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Wyndham Lewis’s Tarrin the bell jar of her own head.

The accumulating delirium of her perceptions in this sealed off world is beautifully conveyed in the opening paragraphs of Chapter Seven in the part called “A Jest too Deep for Laughter” (IV). The imagery of her flat as a redoubt raised against bandits and house- breakers (not to mention rapists) is right to the point. The fact that the “enemy,” Kreisler, seems to be able to see through the walls “at her face, magnified and exposed” (184) perfectly captures the paranoid psychology of the self as gated community. Even when common sense dawns a little, it is quickly extinguished bypanic.

Why should these little obstacles tostrangeness — which gate to enter, whichbell to ring — be taken away from thisparticular individual? He should remain‘stranger’ for her, where he came from:she did not want him any nearer to her.But he had burrowed his way through, wasat the bell already, and would soon be atherself: he would be at her! He would bebreaking into her: she did not wish himinside, he was well enough where he was.She found here, in her room, was verydifferent from she found outside, inrestaurant or street: the


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clothing of this décor [in her flat] was nakedness: she revolted immobile and alarmed. (184)

In the peasant world, security is achieved bycommunal solidarity, the psychic support provided by living customs, and an intimate knowledge of the lie of the land, not by the thickness of the surrounding walls. For the spoiled peasant, the world is nightmarishly dangerous, electric, and directionless (185).

Although Tarr concentrates its fire on the world of the

art-bohemia, there is a larger target in thesubtext. This is the legacy of humanism whichblossomed during the Renaissance, first inItaly, and subsequently spreading across thewhole of Christian Europe.The doctrine of “Man” as the measure of all things, of knowledge as an accumulating data-base of experience, rather than knowledge as a gift of authority and tradition, of secularism, of liberal democracy, of the notion of the self and the body as the moral and juridical possession of the individual, of the self-regulating

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The Armada(Wyndham Lewis, 1937)


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marketplace as the creator of wealth, of the legal doctrine of human rights, and of art asthe unique expression of uniquely constituted, creative individuals, all this faith in the ultimate perfectibility, throughself-development, of the individual, seemed less a sure thing in 1914 than it had in the past. By 1918 it was even less so. The veterans of the First World War, of which Lewis was one, did not want to hear any more orations on the dignity of “Man” after the blasting and bombadiering had subsided on theSomme or at Vimy Ridge. Tarr expresses in a deflected form some of the bitterness of a generation that had seen through everything, but especially the programmatic humanism of the established order, the establishment thathad condemned so many millions to death, while all the while holding forth on the sanctity and holiness of life. That bitterness is also expressed by T. S. Eliot’sThe Waste Land, and his later conversion to an orthodox Christianity with its antediluvian emphasis on the primacy of Original Sin. So does Richard Aldington’s sardonic and bleak war novel, The Death of a Hero.And so do those Cantos of Ezra Pound that deal with the immediate postwar era: “a stench, stuck in the nostrils’ (Canto XV) and his Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

What all these writers lament is the decline of a firmly rooted communal order in which being a free human being did not mean being a self-made object of tinsel and paste with a humanist ideology to support it. It isthe fracturing of a public world into a series of private horror pits pervaded by overheated intimacies, the sex motive, and the pretentious pursuit of authenticity. Thisis the face of the disaster. All of them feltthat this situation was the legacy of liberal

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Wyndham Lewis’s Tarrhumanism and that only a new “Call to Order” could put things right again. This latent authoritarianism led two of them into suspectprofessions: Lewis’s early admiration for Hitler, Pound’s attachment to Italian fascismand the figure of Benito Mussolini. Eliot’s judicious decision for a strict Christian orthodoxy was more palatable in the long run,but not any the less firm.D. H. Lawrence, too, was appalled by the general decline of traditional communities and the psychic resources they husbanded and made available. Although he, too, flirted withauthoritarian ideas, his reaction to this state of affairs was rather different than Lewis’s, although his assessment of the art-bohemias of Tarr was no less trenchant and, most would argue, a good deal more sensible.

For Lewis the question was principally one of freedom in a new kind of world. What was to be its fate? How could one preserve it? In1934, Lewis addressed this very point in a prose work called Men Without Art,

Freedom is certainly our human goal, in the sense that all effort is directed to that end: and it is a dictate of nature that we


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should laugh, and laugh loudly, at those who have fallen into slavery, and still more, those who batten on it. (116)

In his early work, his chosen method of disapproval was laughter, the toothy grin of the devilishly clever satirist castigating a world fallen on evil times. And his most sardonic sallies were launched at the expenseof the art-crowd from whom he expected much, and from whom, in his estimate at least, got so very little.His place in literary history underlines the importance of the satiric spirit in the evolution of the modern movement in literature.

Ayers, David. Wyndham Lewis and Western Man. London: Macmillan, 1992.

* Foshay, Toby Avard. Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde: The Politics of the Intellect. Montreal:McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.

Harrison, John R. The Reactionaries: A Study in the Anti–Democratic Intelligentsia. New York: Schocken, 1967.

Jameson, Fredric. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

Kenner, Hugh. Wyndham Lewis. Norfolk, Conn.:New Directions, 1954.

Kush, Thomas. Wyndham Lewis’s Pictorial Integer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1981.

Materer, Timothy. Wyndham Lewis the Novelist. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976.

Meyers, Jeffrey. The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis.

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London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

* Pritchard, William H. Wyndham Lewis.New York: Twayne, 1968.


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Chapter 4: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love

ILawrence’s

Women in Love is one of the great novels of the twentieth century.It is a work that can stand beside any of the great classics of nineteenth centuryrealism. It is also a work that cannot be narrowlypigeonholed into any particular mode of modern fiction. It is notrealism in the oldsense, although itdelves more deeplythan most realist texts of the previous century into the social and psychological realities of particular characters who areboth unique beingsand representativefigures drawn fromEnglish society inthe teens and twenties of this century. It is nota modernist work in the sense of Joyce and Lewis, nor anything like

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D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

the modernism of Woolf in the 1920s. But it is nevertheless a modern work through and through, and although some critics have spilled a lot of ink trying to disqualify Women in Love from the modernist canon, they would have probably been more profitably engaged in showing how Lawrence took the givens of his literary situation and made them his own, both the heritage of realism and the modernist current.

In fact, should we expect anything else from great writers?

Inheriting the past, they transform the legacy into something uniquely their own and,thus, enlarge the tradition. Rather than submitting to the dead hand of the past, or even worse, to the dead hand of contemporary fashion, they take what is suitable and bringit to new life. They are opportunists in the best sense of the word. Works which are written by rote to this or that ‘-ism’ generally moulder in the rubbish bin of literary history.

There is one way in which Lawrence was verymuch like his Victorian forebears. He was notonly a creative artist, he was also a


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I. K. Brunel, 19th-century industrial

engineer andshipbuilder

(Robert Howlett,1857)

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trenchant social and cultural critic. It is one of the curiosities of literary history that most of the great modernist writers — Eliot, Woolf, Lewis, Pound, and Lawrence (Joyce was the one exception)— also wrote voluminously on matters of general culture, social affairs, education, politics, and, even, economics. In this respect, they attempt to continue a traditionof committed public- mindedness that had had its heyday in the Victorian period. The figure of the ‘Victorian sage’, to borrow a phrase made famous by the critic John Holloway, was an important and necessary partof the Victorian cultural landscape. John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Tennyson, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Morris, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot and others were men and women whose authority to speak out onmatters of great public interest cannot be gainsaid. Thousands, perhaps even millions, paid attention to what they had to say and, in a very important sense, they helped shape the moral and cultural awareness of the Victorian public, especially the educated middle classes. This was probably the last time serious literary figures enjoyed so muchpublic attention. Raised in a time when the example of the Victorian sage was still a living memory, the great modernists seemed tobelieve that the public world remained intact.

However, early twentieth-century mass culture could not approach the cultural unityof the Victorian public sphere. In the twentieth century, the cacophony of voices, in all the registers of human speech and communication, broadcast from the mass media drown out and, sometimes, disparage the voiceof the sage. In the general howl, no single voice can speak for all people, or to them.


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No single point of view can embrace the existing diversity. As a result, the multiplication of points of view, each asserting its own primacy against all others,begins to make society resemble a cubist painting, with no single perspective, no vanishing point of final assent, no equilibrium of interests, just strongly contrasting points of views brusquely juxtaposed in two dimensions. In addition, the increasing isolation of the artist as discussed in the previous chapter led to a kind of marginalization of those who in another time might have more effectively occupied the office of public sage.

As it was, only T. S. Eliot could be thought to have acquired something of the sameauthority as his Victorian forebears. But hissocial criticism never approached, even remotely, the same degree of public notice asthat of a Ruskin or an Arnold. The other modernists also raised their voices on the great public issues of the day and to even less regard. The maddening frustration for someone like Ezra Pound is palpable in his writing and in his behaviour in his later years. Lewis grew more truculent and rudely disparaging of a good deal of what passed formodern life as he sank further into

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obscurity. Woolf wrote eloquently about peaceand war, and issues important to the status of women, but resigned herself to setting down a record of her thoughts without any expectations that her voice would be heard inthe media din that even by her time had become the norm in mass society. So, too, D. H. Lawrence.

Lawrence as a latter day ‘sage’ seems cut from the same cloth as Thomas Carlyle, in thesame way that T. S. Eliot might be thought to resemble Matthew Arnold. Carlyle, along with Ruskin, is the great Victorian critic ofindustrialism and the effect this transformation of the means of production washaving on the English landscape and on the English moral character. It was the rural nature of England, especially the values of country life, that the factory system had changed. Lawrence makes his own the old criticism of the industrial system, but he does it in the admonitory and prophetic tone of Carlyle. Carlyle’s fury becomes Lawrence’spassionate, jibing, argumentative, often bitter voice. His points are indeed familiar ones.

Industrialism forces all human energy into “a competition of mere acquisition” (Selected Essays 120). The aim of life is reduced, as a result, to “sheer mechanical materialism” (Selected Essays 94). All of life becomes a species of disintegrated amorphousness that effects individuals and the whole social order by opening the flood gates of conformism and regimentation. As a condition of mind, the industrial machine acclimatizes its casualties to an emphatic ugliness.

The real tragedy of England, as I seeit, is the tragedy of ugliness. Thecountry is so lovely: the man-madeEngland is so vile .... It was uglinesswhich betrayed the spirit of man in the


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nineteenth century. The great crime whichthe moneyed classes and promoters ofindustry committed in the palmy Victoriandays was the condemning of the workers tougliness, ugliness, ugliness: meannessand formless and ugly surroundings, uglyideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, uglylove, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, uglyhouses, ugly relationship between workersand employers. The human soul needsactual beauty even more than bread.

(Nottingham and the MiningCountry 119)

He returns to this theme again and again. Here is a famous passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover:

The blackened brick dwellings, the blackslate roofs glistening their sharp edges,the mud black with coal-dust, thepavements wet and black. It was as ifdismalness had soaked through and througheverything. The utter negation of naturalbeauty, the utter negation of thegladness of life, the utter absence ofthe instinct for shapely beauty whichevery bird and beast has, the utterdeath of the human intuitive faculty wasappalling. (173– 4)

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Coming out of School. (L. S. Lowry, 1927)

In these admonitory passages, and there are many, many more

in his work, Lawrence takes up the mantle of Carlyle. The difference is that Lawrence was reviled rather than acclaimed in his time, forced into years of self-exile rather than honoured as the voice of conscience in a respectful land.

On the face of it, he seems not have had much influence on an England that was set on ahistorical course, no one, let alone an itinerant novelist, might change. But when we look at the situation a little more closely wefind that perhaps he did have an influence, not powerful enough to change English society from its fated course, but sufficient to transform certain portions of the collective mentality.For one thing, the mention of Lady Chatterley’s


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Lover above, reminds us of the landmark obscenity trial in the 1960s which allowed thenovel to be published in Britain for the firsttime and put an end to the role of the political state as censor of public morals.Lawrence’s uninhibited celebration of sexuality, of the human body as our continuing access to nature and to a shameless physical happiness, helped revise public morality and many other attitudes. Indeed, the issue of sexuality is only part of a wider transformation in which Lawrence has played a very crucial role, namely, there-evaluation of the constitution of the person, human intimacy, and

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the new importance of personal relationships in modernity. But it is not his explicit non-fictional polemics that have had the greatesteffect. That has been achieved by his novels.He was always very conscious of the power inherent in fiction to “inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead” (Chapter 9, Lady Chatterley’s Lover). Certainly Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a signal event in the ‘sexualrevolution’ of the 1960s, but a novel like Women in Love was equally important in what might be called the ‘relationship revolution’of the 1920s. And the one would have been impossible without the other. In this respect, Lawrence, virtually ignored by his contemporaries, vilified by hypocrites and blue stockings, exercised some of that hiddenpower that Shelley triumphantly ascribed to poets, when he called them, the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Women in Love is a rich and absorbing novel. Its focus on the central characters and on thecontrasting nature of the personal relationships should not obscure the novel’s largeness of vision. It is the whole of English society, perhaps even the whole of modern Western society, which Lawrence has in view. This was always the case with his fiction. It is just that each of the novels looks at the whole from the perspective of oneof its principal constituent dimensions. In Women in Love, the dimension is character and relationship.

Lawrence wrote the novel as a sequel to A Rainbow. Although there is some continuity of character, theme, and place, Women in Love can stand on its own without reference to the earlier novel. This independence was not Lawrence’s initial intention. He wanted to


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link the two novels more closely; indeed, thetwo were part of a single work he was going to call The Sisters. But circumstances preventedhim. The Rainbow published in 1915 was soon suppressed by the censors; Lawrence’s candor in his treatment of human relationships beganearly in his career. As a result, Women in Love had to be written to stand on its own as the reading public would not have had access to The Rainbow. Lawrence continued to have difficulties with the censors after Women in Love was completed in 1917. It was therefore not published until 1920 and, then, privatelyin New York. It was finally published in a trade edition in London in 1921 at about the same time as Eliot’s The Waste Land.

It would be useful to read the earlier one.Although the two do not depend on each other in any final sense, the background to the Brangwen family, especially to Ursula’s early youth, will give the reader greater sense of social context and personal history. In form,

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the two novels are very different. The Rainbow is a family saga, partly Old Testament dynastic chronicle, partly epic saga in the Norse tradition, and partly a social history of nineteenth-century rural England. Women in Love has a more dramatic focus, a more limitedtime span, a limited set of social scenes, a smaller number of principal characters whose intense personal relationships are explored in detail, and whose contrasting fates resultin an absorbing psychic drama, and, in the case of Gerald, possibly a form of tragedy. In The Rainbow, individual fates are seen against the background of an historical evolution of family and society; in Women in Love individual fates, although still in history, are seen more fully as the product of self-knowledge and of relations of intenseintimacy. In Women in Love, it is perhaps safe to say that character is not only a product of fate, but that it is fate itself.

Lawrence’s sense of the nature of the humanperson and of character began to change as hewas nearing the end of The Rainbow. He felt he was beginning to move beyond the traditional account of ‘character’ as he had inherited it from the great Victorian realists, primarily Thomas Hardy. Character was not immersed and, therefore, ‘determined’ by the social environment of family, social class, region, access to knowledge. Lawrence felt he was looking more deeply into the very constitutionof selves, not simply to the costumes society forced them to wear. In this respect, he was very much a modernist explorer of the unknown regions of the self, especially what, at the time, the new psychology of Sigmund Freud and others was calling the unconscious dimension of being. In a famous letter of 5 June 1914, Lawrence explained to Edward Garnett the new


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direction he was taking in the matter of portraying character.

You mustn’t look in my novel for the oldstable ego — of the character. There isanother ego, according to whose actionthe individual is unrecognizable, andpasses through, as it were, allotropicstates which it needs a deeper sense thanany we’ve been used to exercise, todiscover are states of the same singleradically unchanged element. (Like asdiamond and coal are the same pure singleelement of carbon.) … You must not say mynovel is shaky — it is not perfect,because I am not expert in what I want todo. But it is the real thing, say whatyou like. And I shall get my reception,if not now, then before long. Again Isay, don’t look for the development ofthe novel to follow the lines of certaincharacters: the characters fall into theform of some other rhythmic form, aswhen one draws a fiddle-bow across a finetray delicately sanded, the sand takeslines unknown.

(Moore, ed. Collected Letters,Vol I 282)

Although written about characterization in TheRainbow, his comments are even more appropriate to Women in Love.

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Not only character, but the nature of personal relationships was also undergoing a profound change in this period and Women in Love had much to say under that head. For one thing, as mentioned in Chapter Three, the movement for women’s suffrage had brought gender politics to the fore for the first timein British history. And it had created waves.An essentially patriarchal society was feelingthe strain, particularly the relations betweenmen and women, and especially in the vexed area of marriage. It is not surprising, then,that the curtain rises in Women in Love on two young women discussing marriage. But the stresses and strains on the old institutions for the regulation of intimacy were slowly being dismantled and new forms were taking their places, forms that have slowly become the norm in modernized societies.

The more socially advanced elements of the population were beginning to live a new kind of life. Lawrence understood this explicitly and commented on it, through Birkin’s description of the kind of people he associates with London:

‘Art — music — London Bohemia — the mostpettifogging calculating Bohemia thatever reckoned its pennies. But there area few decent people, decent in somerespects. They are really very thoroughrejecters of the world — perhaps theylive only in the gesture of rejection andnegation — but negatively something, atany rate.’

…

‘Painters, musicians, writers — hangers-on, models, advanced young people,anybody who is openly at outs with theconventions, and belongs to nowhereparticularly. They are often youngfellows down from the University, andgirls who are living their own lives, as


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they say.’(Chapter V, 65– 6/60)

Birkin’s remarks make for an interesting comparison with Lewis’s more sanguine opinions about life in bohemia. But the general point that this passage raises is a capital one. The bonds of custom and tradition, that held people in particular social and psychological positions, had begunto weaken, as they have all through the century. Lawrence was very alert to the quickening changes at the level of personal life.

In The Rainbow he had portrayed a traditionalrural society (and had used the appropriate literary form of the dynastic saga). The farmand the church anchor the two cycles of the year, the agricultural and the Christian, providing a kind of permanence through cyclical repetition. Marriage means home and children; the family is the social form through which all experience is filtered. In Women in Love, however, the family ethos has been replaced by individual figures in a landscape, figures increasingly isolated from

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each other and from the surrounding social context. The chief actors of Women in Love are professionally emancipated and spiritually uprooted, so that a correspondingly greater strain is thrown on their private relations. What Lawrence dramatizes in the novel has become, paradoxically in thoroughly conventionalized forms, the sociological reality of personal life in the twentieth century. This is not to say that Lawrence hassomehow caused this change to happen. He didn’t. But he was one of the first intellectuals of Europe to notice it and to imaginatively explore and assess the consequences for individual persons. Wyndham Lewis, coming to quite a different set of conclusions, was another. The changes themselves became clear as the century progressed and soon became conventionalized in their turn.

In contrast to personal ties in the traditional society of the past, or societiesorganized around custom and precedence, the new form of relationship is only loosely anchored in the determining conditions of settled contexts. A marriage is no longer a contractual alliance between families, but a matter of intrinsic feeling between the partners alone. So that for the true couple, ‘marriage’, as a form of public acknowledgement of the bond, is often unnecessary. The relationship is sought only for what it brings to the partners concerned,and ‘what it brings’ is usually put in the form of emotional satisfactions and securities, that is, the intimate bonds of love far outweigh all other considerations. The new type of relationship is also reflexively organized, in an open fashion, and on a continuous basis. This means that ‘the relationship’ itself becomes the object


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of intense scrutiny and constant monitoring. The more a relationship depends only upon itself, the more it is the subject of persistent examination and questioning. Increasingly the partners define their own sense of well being from the state of the relationship. Any points of tension or conflict always potentially have the power todestroy it as a result of the weakening of external pressures, from family or church, tomaintain it at all costs. With its focus on intimacy and the face-to-face assessment of the bond as a constant element, the issue of commitment and mutual trust takes on enormousimportance. Finally, the bonds of intimacy require a space of their own to develop and grow, and, as a result, the new emphasis on privacy in modernity makes the raising of psychological boundaries around the social space of the relationship something of a virtue and a necessity.

It is perhaps easy to recognize the physiognomy of the modern relationship in theabove description and to recognize how much it has become the norm in advanced modern societies achieving degrees of banality unimaginable in Lawrence’s time. In the earlier part of the century, such forms of personal relationship were

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exceptional rather than normal and, therefore, carried a rather more explosive psychic charge. The emotionally explosive relationship between Catherine and Heathcliffin Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a prototype of the relationships of the future.Initially, they were often limited to those outside the social mainstream, like artists for example, or those who could afford to experiment with new ways of living. At one point, Birkin tells Gerald “only artists produce for each other the world that is fit to live in” (233/208).This is a theme we have touched on before, namely the increasing social isolation of theartist in modernity, but here we also see that from the position of outsider, the creative or exceptional person often experimented with new lifestyles that subsequently, with a tamer, more formulaic character, came to provide new models for living in mainstream society itself.

Moreover, this dis-embedding of the individual from older defining contexts required a decisive shift in the personal politics of self-definition, in the way persons defined themselves for themselves andfor others. Increasing scrutiny of intimate relations was paralleled by increased monitoring of the self as a personal possession, no longer entirely dependent on social positioning. The now familiar idea that we are free to make our own lives as we see fit was something of an alien notion a hundred years ago. But changes in the nature of personal relations could not have been possible without the corresponding shifts in the making and

re-making of selves.The period of the First World War, and the

1920s which followed it, is one of the


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watershed moments in the evolution of intimate life. Lawrence in his own personal relations with others, primarily his wife Frieda, and in a novel like Women in Love, illuminated the new landscapes of the self and of the self in relationship with other selves. This was an explicit aim: to take people, two couples, and develop their relationships. The affairs of one couple go wrong and those of the other go right; new definitions of what’s right and wrong in the making of these bonds is the work’s explicit theme. “What I feel strongly about is the relation between men and women,” Lawrence wrote to a correspondent in 1913.

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IILawrence still felt strongly about the

dynamics of intimacy in 1921, at the time of the first publication of Women in Love. But to explore the nature of intimate relations requires a clear conception of character. Andcharacter is one of the ways that Lawrence moves beyond the realism of his predecessors.He works to create more essential characters,not concerned with the social ego that interests the traditional realist, but with the primal forces that are prior to the ego, the inner forces that flow like underground rivers below the surface of the social production of personality. These forces are often expressed in terms of myth by referenceto the mythopoeic traditions of various cultures.

In relationships, inherently dynamic and unstable, character shows itself, not necessarily to itself, but to the world at large. It is the task of the novelist to showin the behaviour of the characters in relations with others the fundamental disposition of those primal forces, forces that can create and destroy, bring peace or end in war, make life possible, or bring death, either literally or as death-in-life. In effect, the visible actions and words of the character must also convey the mythic content as well.

The basic narrative device for getting at relationships in the novel is comparison and contrast. The two couples, Birkin and Ursula,Gerald and Gudrun, together with Hermione, Birkin’s former mistress, not only provide the main interest of the novel but are linked and contrasted in a variety of ways. In addition, Lawrence explores the rather different intimacies between the two males


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and between the two sisters. The concentration on relationship goes hand in hand with the new agendas of the self. To re-define the bond that leads to marriage, for example, means to

re-define one’s self.Birkin in the novel is the character most

conscious of the seismic shifts which are required. In one of the first important, and most famous, confrontations in the novel, angry words pass between Birkin and Hermione, lovers at the end of their relationship, about the nature and expectations of love in both its physical and psychological dimensions. Ursula who is listening attentively, and who is at the beginning of a new relationship with Birkin herself, intervenes when she hears Birkin praising unrestricted sensuality.

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‘But do you really want sensuality?’ she

asked puzzled. Birkin looked at her, and

became intent in his explanation.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that and nothing else,at this point. It is a fulfillment — thegreat dark knowledge you can’t have inyour head — the dark involuntary being.It is death to one’s self — but it is thecoming into being of another.’

‘But how? How can you have knowledge notin your head?’ she asked, quite unable tointerpret his phrases.

‘In the blood,’ he answered; ‘when themind and the known world is drowned indarkness — everything must go — theremust be a deluge. Then you find yourselfin a palpable body of darkness, a demon—’

‘But why should I be a demon —?’ she asked.

‘“Woman wailing for her demon lover”’ — he quoted— ‘why, I don’t know.’

(Chapter III, 46–7/43)

This is a key exchange between Birkin and Ursula. Birkin’s desire to get beyond the daily conscious self and to find in the sensual union of bodies and souls some new, more powerful sense of being, is a defining moment for both of them. The exchange links the discovery of a new self with the forging of the man-woman relationship; each finds hisor her self within the boundaries of the relationship.

In the “Mino” chapter the relationship between a man and a woman begins to take on the scope of a mutually defining cosmos. Indeed the metaphor Birkin uses in the conversation with Ursula is “two single equalstars balanced in conjunction.” The stars arenot the common selves of everyday life, but beyond the self, “a final me,” Birkin says,


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“which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility.” These final selves take eachaccording “to the primal desire” (161–63/146).

It isn’t until the “Excurse” chapter that what is initially experienced on an abstract and intellectual plane is finally won at the deepest level of feeling. This is the chapterof the final quarrel, “this memorable battlefield” (350/311), between Birkin and Ursula when they come closest to breaking away from each other. Birkin accuses her of being obsessed with the benevolent ideal of love, which is really an expression of her female conceit, and Ursula accuses him of egoism and male conceit. After Ursula flings his rings at him, scattering them in the mud,Birkin, suddenly alone, experiences a releasefrom sterile consciousness into another mode of being, finally experienced existentially rather than in the mode of abstract thought. And this makes all the difference.

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There was a darkness over his mind. Theterrible knot of consciousness that hadpersisted there like an obsession wasbroken, gone, his life was dissolved indarkness over his limbs and his body. Butthere was a point of anxiety in his heartnow. He wanted her to come back. Hebreathed lightly and regularly like aninfant, that breathes innocently, beyondthe touch of responsibility.

She was coming back .… (349/309 –10)

The quarrel has the effect of clearing away the accumulated psychic debris left overfrom immersion in the dying world around them. That Birkin is compared to “an infant” suggests new birth, and Ursula’s gift of a single flower, sign of vital life and beauty,communicates her own re-birth beyond the scenes of callous degradation and rage which precede the reconciliation.

Although it is difficult at times to know what Lawrence is driving at when he writes ofthe pure relationship, so much of his sense of it deals in paradoxes and obscure turns ofthought, we are given many vivid accounts andenactments of Birkin’s thought processes as he struggles towards re-defining his own lifeand his life with others. The “Moony” chapteris a particularly evocative episode. It openswith the scene when Ursula, unobserved, watches Birkin in the wood throwing stones angrily at the reflection of the moon in the smooth surface of the pond at Willey. The stones shatter the moon’s reflection into agitated fragments. They “fly asunder in flakes of white and dangerous fire.”

Rapidly, like white birds, the fires allbroken rose across the pond, fleeing inclamorous confusion, battling with theflock of dark waves that were forcingtheir way in. The furthest waves oflight, fleeing out, seemed to be


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clamoring against the shore for escape,the waves of darkness came in heavily,running under towards the centre.(278/247)

But no matter how violently Birkin hurls his stones and his taunts at the moon, the imperturbable face of “Cybele” or the accursed “Syria Dea” remains, always reforming when the stones stop. No matter howhard he tries to drive away the ‘white goddess’, she always comes back.

But at the centre, the heart of all, wasstill a vivid, incandescent quivering ofa white moon not quite destroyed, a whitebody of fire writhing and striving andnot even now broken open, not yetviolated. It seemed to be drawing itselftogether with strange, violent pangs, inblind effort. It was getting stronger, itwas reasserting itself, the inviolablemoon. And the rays were hastening in inthin lines of light, to return to thestrengthened moon, that shook upon thewater in triumphant reassumption.(278/247)

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The whole passage, of which this is only a small part, is extraordinarily vivid and brilliantly conveys the state of psychological tension in Birkin, while the reader sees the whole isolated little drama through Ursula’s astonished eyes. The scene concentrates the emotional or psychic statesof the couple. The image of the moon exploding as the stones hit the water and then re-forming, enacts in colours of black and white, the struggle tobreak away the givens of existence into a newreality, a place where one does not have to keep on asserting “the truth,” because there are no lies against which one must steadily struggle (277–78/246– 47). But the destruction of the white goddess of lies, of the reified states of false consciousness andof the body of sensuality that its destruction reveals, is well-nigh impossible;she bursts apart, but reforms even more powerful than before. This malign re-telling of the Antaeus myth (see Graves), brilliantlytransposed to water from the strength-giving earth, neatly conveys certain psychological truths. It is as if the task of ridding oneself of one’s old ego in order to venture beyond it towards some non-mentalist vitalityof physical being, is as impossible as obliterating the reflection of the moon with stones. Indeed the ego complex seems to re-form with greater strength after each attemptto surpass it.

The day after this episode Birkin recalls the fetish sculpture from West Africa that he has seen at a friend’s flat in London. Itis a female figure, which he suddenly realizes is the active expression of a purely mindless, purely sensual existence:

She knew what he himself did not know.She had thousands of years of purely


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sensual, purely unspiritual knowledgebehind her. It must have been thousandsof years since her race had died,mystically: that is, since the relationbetween the senses and the outspoken mindhad broken, leaving the experience all inone sort, mystically sensual. (285/253)

It is precisely this kind of experience that Birkin seems to have most desired in that early portion of the novel when he was tryingto free himself of Hermione’s abstracted sense of the sensual, an experience of the body always mediated through the intellect. To free himself from this icebound intimacy, he posited the dark, unknowing body of pure sensuality. Suddenly confronted with that very thing in the form of the figure with “such protuberant buttocks, so weighty and unexpected below her slim long loins,” he realizes that this is not what he wants either.

He thinks of how this “African process of purely sensual understanding” would play out in the colder lands of the north. He thinks of Gerald, representative of the northern races, caught in that same process, but without the tropical inflections of equatorial Africa. Instead Birkin imagines him as “one of these strange white

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wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled inthe destructive frost mystery” (287/254). WasGerald a messenger, an omen of the coming of the new ice age, in which the spirit dies to a sensuality made from frost and ice, rather than from the hot marsh and forests of sweating mahogany? This, too, Birkin rejects.

There was another way, the way offreedom. There was the Paradisal entryinto pure, single being, the individualsoul taking precedence over love anddesire for union, stronger than any pangsof emotion, a lovely state of free proudsingleness, which accepted the obligationof the permanent connexion with others,and with the other, submits to the yokeand leash of love, but never forfeits itsown proud individual singleness, evenwhile it loves and yields. (287/254)

It is this third, paradoxical, way to relationship which Birkin and Ursula discoverin those moments of heated argument and verbal violence in “Mino.”

Lawrence has been criticized in recent years for indulging himself in gender and racial stereotypes. The African sculpture operates as an effective symbol in the novel,but Birkin’s analysis of it is probably not very reliable anthropology, in fact it bristles with long exploded stereotypes of African culture. In this respect, Lawrence and the other modernists, Pound, Joyce, Eliotto name only three, are not to be relied on as explorers of what they would have assumed were ‘primitive’ cultures. Their interest in the ‘primitive’ was conditioned by their critique of the over-refined, over-intellectualized world of European culture. The so-called ‘primitive’ was their polemicalriposte to the artificial refinements of contemporary Europe so catastrophically annulled by the carnage and destruction of


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the First World War. As a result, they needed tointerpret ‘primitive’ cultures as the exact antithesis of all those things European that were life-denying and ‘unhealthy’. Contemporary anthropology has taught us to be wary of our assumptions about the cultural levels achieved by so-called ‘primitive’ peoples. It has taught us to be wary of the implicit, and often unexamined, values which words like ‘primitive’ or ‘inferior’ carried in the colonial period. Lawrence’s use of the African sculpture cannot be dismissed as ‘racist’, because the image means something within the context of the novel. It is its place in the economy of the novel itself that is of primary concern. But there is no use denying that Lawrence, in so many ways a greatand liberated intelligence, unconsciously absorbed some of his society’s prejudices.

You should also be wary when considering Lawrence’s account of gender relations, at least as wary as one ought to be when

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considering the figure of women and of the feminine in Joyce and Lewis. For one thing itis important to remember that Lawrence was one of the very first novelists to breach the wall of silence which most of early twentiethcentury society erected around the more intimate, and physical, relations between people of whatever sex. It was not for nothing that Lawrence suffered all his life atthe hands of censors, both official and busybody. But again he carried into this new literary territory certain assumptions in terms of gender that put unconscious limits on his understanding, for example a programmatic ‘essentialism’ which feminist literary criticism has come to question in recent decades. However, it is important to realize that we know what we know because we have come to


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D. H. Lawrence. (P. Juley and Son)

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understand what a writer like Lawrence knew and was courageous enough to put down in black and white. Because he didn’t get it exactly right, according to our reckoning, does not mitigate the fact that it was writers and intellectuals like Lawrence who opened the door of the house in which we now all live. He got us into the house and we’ve found the particular rooms we were looking for. Lawrence found his.

1.III

Ursula and Birkin are the couple whose relationship goes right.

Gudrun and Gerald are the counterexample, theother pole in the contrast. They fail to achieve the pure relationship, and failing inthat, they fail in everything. Rather than a union of increasing psychic sympathy, mutual acceptance and gentleness, Gerald and Gudrun run on towards a tragic fate. Gerald cannot break away from the demands of social conformity sufficiently to bring a true unioninto being. The conventionally successful man, he is essentially two people. There is alife below the social surface that is sensualand secret and disconnected from the glossy social self. And it becomes increasingly evident that the two are irreconcilable. Gudrun, in her part, is too assertive and self-conscious, too happy in her role of non-conformist outsider, and too thoroughly and watchfully ironic to ever be able to toleratethe necessary self-abandonment for the sort of marriage towards which Birkin and Ursula are moving.


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Although Geraldis ready to marry,it will be a marriage with a woman only in a formal sense. Marriage for Gerald, the doubleman, has a different meaning and it involves living a double existence.

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Marriage was like a doom to him. He waswilling to condemn himself in marriage,to become like a convict condemned tothe mines of the underworld, living nolife in the sun, but having a dreadfulsubterranean activity. He was willing toaccept this. And marriage was the seal ofhis condemnation. He was willing to besealed thus in the underworld, like asoul damned but living for ever indamnation. But he would not make anypure relationship with any other soul. Hecould not. Marriage was not thecommitting of himself into a relationshipwith Gudrun. It was a committing ofhimself in acceptance of the establishedorder, in which he did not livinglybelieve, and then he would retreat tothe underworld for his life. This hewould do. (398/353)

It is interesting how the literary use of marriage has come full circle. In the traditional romantic comedy of Menander, Plautus, Terence, Lope de Vega, and, above all, Shakespeare, the marriage or marriages with which comedies usually end meant precisely what Gerald seems to mean by marriage, an affirmation of solidarity with and acceptance of the established order of things. But what a different moral effect andmeaning these affirmations have. Gerald, running against the spirit of the comic tradition, simply accepts the form but not the substance of the marriage bond, and Lawrence is wittily ironic in showing us thatit is Gerald’s kind of malign affirmation in the ancient mode of comedy, with its wider social implications, which, instead, leads toa specifically modern form of tragedy. The union of Birkin and Ursula deliberately dissociates itself from this view of marriage, “marriage in the old sense” (397) rooted in the social world. Their union now


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represents the true comic resolution. The happiness of the lovers now expresses the newpower of the pure relationship, the power of their own inner resources, rather than the appropriation of their avowals by the social order for the purpose of its own perpetuation.

We should note also that it is Gerald’s “underworld” existence that Birkin identifieswith the sensuality of the African sculpture,a sensuality which is not the solution to thefalse consciousness of an artificial society,but one of its characterizing symptoms. Gerald’s doubleness is the inevitable result. Gudrun intuits this doubleness in Gerald because it is part of her nature as well. This irreconcilable doubleness is effectivelyconveyed when Gudrun and Gerald visit the Pompadour Café in London before their trip tothe continent.

Gudrun hated the Café, yet she alwayswent back to it, as did most of theartists of her acquaintance. She loathedits atmosphere of petty vice and pettyjealousy and petty art. Yet she alwayscalled in again, when she was in town. Itwas as if she had to return to thissmall, slow central whirlpool ofdisintegration and dissolution: …(429/380)

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Their potential for union occurs at the level of the sensual bond, but this is only apartial relationship, intrinsically unstable and, therefore, doomed. The born mistress andthe hidden sensualist conjoin, but only partially, and, as a result, the dynamics of the union go into reverse. The resulting conflict destroys them, Gerald’s literal deathand Gudrun’s metaphorical death in her new relationship with the corrupted and corrupting Austrian designer Loerke.

The last three chapters of the novel, perhaps the most powerfully dramatic writing in Lawrence’s œuvre, superbly enact the whole icy process of disintegration with the frigidly crystalline Alps as background. As the life of Ursula and Birkin roots more deeply in the soil of their true beings, theyblossom inwardly and radiate a powerful harmony, which serves to make a stark contrast with the ever louder dissonances of Gudrun and Gerald. The introduction of Loerke, a kind of demonic figure, accomplishes two things. Firstly, he epitomizes the divided consciousnesses of thetwo principal characters. He is also important at the level of form because he re-enacts, in the relationship of Gudrun and Gerald, the intrusive and antithetical role of Hermione in the relationship of Ursula andBirkin. But where Hermione’s influence gradually diminishes, Gudrun’s conflict with Gerald is aided and abetted by Loerke. The psychological violence and cruelty with whichthe novel ends in describing the events leading to Gerald’s death convey Lawrence’s sense of the gravity of the forces unleashed by the divisions that run through the consciousnesses of the actors.They are self-destructive through and through. It is a theme that has been running


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like an underground stream from beginning to end.Only by a process of healing these rifts in being, such as we’ve seen in the story of Ursula and Birkin, can these forces be allayed.

1.

IVIf Lawrence’s approach to character

represents one of the ways in which the novelbreaks company with realism, the second occurs at the level of structure. For one thing the book has no strongly formulated plot; it has a narrative, but it is not organized around an objective and rationalized framework of action, eliciting particular kinds of plot-related interest, such as suspense for example. By

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contrast the first two novels we have read, which are closer to the realist tradition, have more or less conventional stories to tell.Conrad’s Secret Agent may be a simple tale, but it is a tale nonetheless. Indeed, on one level at least we can see the familiar outlines of the detective story. Although it relies for its primary effects more weakly onplot as a chain of causally related events, Joyce’s A Portrait does organize its narrative onthe basis of a clear, progressive movement. It is different from the traditional realist plot, but the growth to maturity of Stephen gives the narrative at least the semblance ofa plot.

With Lewis and Lawrence, and later with Woolf, we will have strongly organized narratives, but looser plots. It goes withoutsaying that this is not a flaw in these novels. They are the deliberate choice of the writers. In the case of Lawrence, he didn’t want to simply tell a story as much as he wanted to dramatize the interplay of psyches,create a tapestry of relationships that, in their totality, reveal something of the worldin which they are found. He was far more interested in a structure that captured the drama of primal compulsions, a psychic drama with its own kind of coherence and logic. This is a sort of narrative in which unconscious dimensions of being play as much of a role in determining a character’s fate, or the development of a theme, as actions linked by the conventional realist logic of cause and effect. The painterly analogue of this narrative form is in a type of abstract art where juxtaposed elements on a flat planeconstitute the meaning and theme of the painting more immediately and, so the theory goes, more powerfully, than in a canvas in


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which all the elements are ‘logically’ arranged and rationalized in a three dimensional space according to the conventions of perspective.

The structure of Women in Love is highly organized in its own way and it might be useful to keep the painterly analogy in mind.It is the pattern of the relationships, the shifting meanings which the relationships andthe characters begin to assume that composes the narrative texture. Because the pattern develops in time, the novel also has a particular rhythm all its own. On this point,Lawrence parts company somewhat, but not entirely, with a modernist like Lewis, for whom time and immersion in time-consciousnessis the enemy. Although Lawrence is interestedin temporal effects, rhythm for example, or the dance and music, he still shares the anti- historical inclinations of the modernists. Time, as a living dimension of being in the world, is not the enemy; history is.History stands over and against life; it is the accretion of dead forms, produced by the human will, and abandoned by the flow of lifein the form of institutions, monuments, archives, and dead habits of thought and feeling. History, therefore, is the public remains of all that is diseased and corruptedin human nature, all that is against life as existential experience.

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Swan Upping at Cookham (Sir Stanley Spencer, 1914–19).The novel’s structure does not imitate a

historical narrative in the way realist novels often do, explaining events later in time by their evolution from earlier actions.In Women in Love the primal essentials of character determine fate; fate is not the product of past actions more or less under the control of human wills. Knowledge arrivesby sudden illumination, rather than through the slow accumulation of worldly experience that leads to knowledge.


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Birkin understands the essence of Gerald’s sensual nature through the moment of revelation with the African sculpture.

The novel reflects this alteration in the nature of knowing, what one might call the epistemological revolution of modernism, at

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every turn. For example, even the most sensational episode of the novel, the death by water of Diana, in “Water-Party,” loses its salience as a powerful plot device and gives way to revelation that transfigures theevent; we come to expect that moments of vision are always near at hand. As Gudrun rows back and forth on the pond after Gerald has gone into the water to find the girl, we are told that the “terrible, massive, cold, boundless surface of the water terrified her beyond words.” Not death, but the elemental water terrify her. “She felt she must jump into the water too, to know the horror also” (202/181). One does not come to know things by abstract study, but by immersion in their element, even to the point of self-destruction. The focus on knowledge as revelation comes in the very next paragraph, where Gerald’s body as he climbs back into a boat is seen by Gudrun in a perspective whichsuddenly joins an aesthetic experience with avisionary one.

Then he clambered into the boat. Oh, andthe beauty of the subjection of hisloins, white and dimly luminous as heclimbed over the side of the boat, madeher want to die, to die. The beauty ofhis dim and luminous loins as he climbedinto the boat, his back rounded and soft— ah, this was too much for her, toofinal a vision. She knew it was fatal.The terrible hopelessness of fate, and ofbeauty, such beauty!

He was not like a man to her, he was anincarnation, a great phase of life.(203/181)

The rhythmical repetition, the expletives, the key words — luminous, beauty, die, vision, knew, fate, incarnation, life — all ofthem deflect attention away from the action asaction leading to some new phase of the plot,


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and focus it on the event as the tip of a psychic iceberg in which the primal forces of character suddenly stir from their usual dormancy and are made visible by the disturbance of routine existence. Even when human voices wake Gudrun from her reverie to the fact that she is witness to a human event,Lawrence tells us, of her ecstatic state of mind, that she “could scarcely believe there was a world of man.” Lawrence is much more interested in listening to the music of Gudrun’s nervous excitement as an antiphonal element in the matrix of individual fates, than in the mere shocking fact of the deaths of Diana and her fiancé. Later in the novel, we see that their deaths, the two locked in a death-embrace, dimly foreshadow the relationship of Gerald and Gudrun to come andof Gerald’s own final end in the Alpine snows, but the fact of death in “Water-Party” is a curiously negligible event in the light of Gudrun’s gorgeous delirium.

The overall structure of the novel is primarily, to use a musical analogy, a species of free counterpoint that works well with the novel’s open-ended method of comparison and contrast. First we have Birkinand Ursula elaborated as the first subject; Gudrun and

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Gerald as the second. First Birkin and Ursula take precedence and establish a set of themes; then we hear the counterpoint of Gerald and Gudrun as they gives us those themes in their malignant form in the second part of the novel. The minor relationships, Birkin and Hermione, Gudrun and Loerke, Birkin and Gerald, and Ursula and Gudrun, arevariations on the principal subjects, each adding new levels of complication and textureto the primary themes. To these structural elements woven around the dynamics of character, we must add also the use of recurring motifs as noted in earlier chapters.The use of natural imagery — animals and flowers — to convey the persistence of the life-force is a well-known Laurentian effect, as is his use of water imagery in the novel. The river, the pond, and even the ice-fields on which Gerald dies make for highly expressive symbols of life and death. The deeps of the earth, primarily in the collieryworld of the miners, also provide a striking contrast with water and the Alpine setting atthe end of the novel. When taking all of these elements into account, the resulting narrative structure is far too complex in detail to describe at length, but it is firmlyforged for the task at hand.

As a consequence of this dense patterning and of the rhythmic freedom, Lawrence’s structural sense merges from the start with his sense of language and verbal style. In a writer like Lawrence, as in all the modernists, the old distinction between a work’s structure and its style loses much of its critical usefulness. Appeals to, what he called in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, our “sympatheticconsciousness” must be absolutely direct — direct as music or colour, and that means a style of writing that reverberates in the


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nervous system as much, more so some would say, as in the mind. Incantation through repetition and rhythm, the steady production of vividly realized images, the constant pressure one feels in the writing that Lawrence is always struggling to find the right words, the high use of colour, and, what E.M. Forster called, the effectiveness of “the flitting scenes,” by which he meant Lawrence’s ability to capture in a few vivid strokes fleeting impressions and the look of things, all of these stylistic traits contribute to the making of the style as the best possible vehicle for conveying Lawrence’s ideas and for his explorations of deeper life, the radiant life that beats always in and around, beneath and above, the surface calm of public moralities and public manners.

This sense of everyday life as tedious and mechanical occasionally transfigured by moments of vision is a modernist commonplace which not only effects the typical forms of modernist art, with its reliance on the Image, and on the magically transformative powers of language, but effects also modernist notions of living in social time, of living in concrete history.

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Gudrun’s reverie about marriage to Gerald andof life at Shortlands, when they are comingunglued in the Alps, exactly captures thefelt ennui of everyday life.

The thought of the mechanical successionof day following day, day following day,ad infinitum, was one of the things thatmade her heart palpitate with a realapproach of madness. The terrible bondageof this tick-tack of time, this twitchingof the hand of the clock, this eternalrepetition of hours and days — oh God, itwas too awful to contemplate. (522/464)

Against this mechanical round, moments of rapture in the crystalline Alps:

‘Oh, but this — !’ she cried involuntarily, almost in pain.

In front was a valley shut in under thesky, the last huge slopes of snow andblack rock, and at the end, like thenavel of the earth, a white-folded wall,and two peaks glimmering in the latelight. Straight in front ran the cradleof silent snow, between the great slopesthat were fringed with a little roughnessof pine trees, like hair, round the base.But the cradle of snow ran on to theeternal closing-in, where the walls ofsnow and rock rose impenetrable, and themountain peaks above were in heavenimmediate. This was the centre, theknot, the navel of the world, where theearth belonged to the skies, pure,unapproachable, impassable. (450/401)

The visions of omphalos, the mythical navel ofthe world of the ancient Greeks, and of the phallus are not only rapturous as visionary experience, but the prose also grows increasingly rapt as it proceeds, even achieving, near the end, Miltonic swerves of syntax, as “in heaven immediate.” Gudrun is filled “with a strange rapture.” The rapture defeats, and some modernists would argue,


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redeems the mechanical tick-tack of time.Modernist accounts of experience with

their profoundly anti-historical, anti-realist biases begin with precisely this evaluation of routine life as a kind of sordid tedium periodicallyrent by bolts of otherworldly light. T. S. Eliot in “Dry Salvages” summarized it in the following words, re-defining history, real history, as the intersections of what is timeless with time.

For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in ashaft of sunlight,The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeplyThat it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts … (Part V)

And the German theorist Walter Benjamin, from a thoroughly historicist tradition, the Marxist, arrived at an even more radical

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conception of history, in which political revolutions erupt as the visionary moments ofcollective consciousness. History from this perspective is not so much a sequence in time, but a kind of gap in time, a fulfillment, a revelation in the present instant.

History is the subject of a structurewhose site is not homogenous, empty time,but time filled by the presence of thenow.

(Illuminations 263)

Benjamin’s German word for “now” is Jetztzeit,not the more prosaic Geganwart, meaning thesimple present, but “now” in the sense ofmystical presence, or illumination, what isreferred to in European mystical traditionsas the nunc stans.

When narrative structures are written from within this set of ideas, they cannot possiblyfollow mechanically progressive lines of development, because, like the Pauline revelation on the road to Damascus, we cannot predict when the explosions of consciousness will come. Conrad’s bomb metaphor in The Secret Agent is relevant here, as is Stephen’s visionary moment on the beach in Joyce’s A Portrait. In Women in Love we have a narrative written from the point of view of a narrator who is always mortally aware that in every moment there is the potential for the bomb of consciousness to go off. The peculiar pitch ofthe novel, its hysteria some critics have argued, comes from the tense consciousness of the earthquakes rumbling ominously beneath ourfeet, even as we walk calmly along.

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VEarlier I

mentioned in passing that the British edition ofWomen in Love was first published in1921, about the time of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. Let’s look for a moment at the waysin which Women in Love is Lawrence’s Waste Land. Eliot’s poem is perhaps the most famous literary work of the immediate postwar period in England and, perhaps, all of Europe. It expresses the dismay of a younger generationat the physical and moral disintegration of Europe in a ferocious war, a war, unprecedented in scale (up to that time) and unprecedented in its destructive fury. The war destroyed the old Victorian order and the old Victorian certainties.

Eliot, in later

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years, personalized the poem by saying that it only expressed his own grouse against life. That may be so, but the poem still had an enormous effect in shaping the sensibilityof the younger generation trying to recover from the traumas of 1914 –18.

Women in Love was written during the conflict itself, and written under duress when Lawrence was himself suspected of pro-German sympathies (his wife Frieda was a German national). Although the novel does not deal with the war explicitly (seeChapter 15 in his later novel Kangaroo for that), it can be read as a diagnostic document of the time, that is to say, a text which reveals the inner, psychic roots of thesocial and psychological ethos which led to the war. For a novel about intimate relationships, it gives a most astonishing impression of violence and fury, especially in the closing chapters. For Lawrence the waritself was only a symptom of the divided state of the European soul, symbolized in The Rainbow by the image of the rainbow that closes the novel and that which the rainbow opposes, the death-dealing industrial world. The industrial juggernaut is always a figure of death in Lawrence, and associated with theunderworld of the German Nibelunglied (see the opening of the “Diver” Chapter 51, for example). These lieder are mythological storiesthat the composer Richard Wagner had turned into the greatest artistic achievement of thenineteenth century, the four operas that constitute Der Ring das Nibelungen, a work much admired by Lawrence. The war was an inevitable consequence of lives lived in conditions of the reigning madness.The regeneration of society, if it was to

come at all, was intimately connected to personal regeneration; the coal-pits and the


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squalid houses are only the outward expression of the “hard-scaled separateness” that Lawrence’s characters are trying to escape in their personal lives.

The squalor of the miners inevitably seepsinto and undermines the righteousness of the mine owners. We learn a great deal about Gerald by the way he compartmentalizes his life as a mine owner and his personal life. He is not only willing to accept the social horror that the pits represent, but to do worse. For the pits, hideous as they are, have at least generated a kind of tradition, a way of life of their own, and he is willingto sacrifice even this small step towards human solidarity in community, by the desire to achieve greater efficiencies and production. It is as if he can do nothing else, nothing that can allay the life-destroying impulses that course murderously through the industrial system, which in 1914 will find its apotheosis in the first great mechanized war of the industrial era. The terrible violence to come is foreshadowed when Gerald’s father is dying in the chapter called “The Industrial Magnate.”

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Hillside in Wales (L. S. Lowry, c. 1962)

[Gerald] did not inherit an establishedorder and a living idea. The wholeunifying idea of mankind seemed to bedying with his father, the centralizingforce that had held the whole togetherseemed to collapse with his father, theparts were ready to go asunder interrible disintegration. Gerald was as ifleft on board a ship that was goingasunder beneath his feet, he was incharge of a vessel whose timbers were allcoming apart. (248/221)

Gerald represents not only a destructive force in the personal sphere, but a malign social system that is no longer directed to human ends. After the death of his father, Gerald comes to conceive “the pure instrumentality of mankind.” Human beings


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“were mere conditions, like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual” (250 –51/223). The Waste Land, too, posits disintegration of the human idea as a theme and as an organizing (or is it disorganizing?) principle. Gerald represents one way forward from the dead world of the Victorians into the thoroughly inhuman world of modernized society. This is one of the paths that lead to the

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special viciousness of the Great War; the other is the violence that inheres in the self that is divided from its own vital beingby the stiffly alienating self-assertiveness of the will (expressed explicitly in the unreality for Ursula of the formula Der Wille zurMacht, the Nietzschean ‘will to power’ [“Mino” 167/150]). These, then, are the ways in which Women in Love is a war book.

Women in Love and Eliot’s Waste Land also share a common interest in myth and the relationship of myth to conscious life. For both, ancient myths provide a substructure of human experience that persists in the human psyche for millennia. This is very important for Lawrence whose sense of the importance of unconscious life and the hidden flow of primalforces is a crucial aspect of his critique of contemporary life. We may think we are different from the ancient origins of our culture, we may think we have progressed, but because our theory of history only records superficial changes that effect our conscious minds, we lose sight of the fact that our unconscious minds carry with them the whole inner modality of being that we share with ancient peoples. Myths are our access to the fundamental ground of this primordial experience, the visible embodiments of the deep structure of the collective unconscious.Stephen Dedalus is named after an ancient mythological figure because Stephen re-enacts an ancient impulse, the impulse of art. The vegetation and fertility myths Eliot uses in the Waste Land help to unify, or so the argumentgoes, the disintegration and chaos of contemporary history.

The relation between the contemporary chaosand mythological structure is not pursued withthe same tenacity as Joyce does in Ulysses, butthe many references in Women in Love to ancient


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mythological traditions, especially of Germany, nevertheless function in a very similar way. The identification of the miners with the toiling mass of nibelungen in the tales of that name is an important identification. And Gerald, the mineowner, is their master. But Lawrence significantly develops Gerald as a double-sided character. In the first place, he is thedark, misshapen Alberich, the lord of Nibelheim, the kingdom of the nibelungen; he determines the fate of his minions in the underworld. He also affects the fate of the gods in Valhalla. Gerald’s other side makes him one of those latter sky gods; the blonde,blue-eyed, physically beautiful incarnation ofa Siegfried whose power as a modern industrialist to condemn the miners to a glimmering existence underground and to pillage England is also alive with the mythic force of a different order. His death in the Valhalla-like setting of the Alps evokes this other side of his persona. Dark and light, underworld and Valhalla co-exist in a single breast and link the self-destructive impulses in Gerald’s character to these mythological figures.

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Loerke, who is so much a part of Gerald’s death struggle, becomes a projection of the Alberich persona. It is almost as if Alberich, or, more precisely, the son of Alberich, Hagan, the final destroyer of Siegfried, is split from Gerald and assumes the form of Loerke, the dark, bitter character who lurks (Loerke?) in the dark places of the soul and brings down, in an atmosphere of cynicism and betrayal, the beautiful and ingenuous god. The spear thrustinto the back of Siegfried by the Loerke-likeHagan in Wagner’s Die Götterdämmerung not only provides Lawrence with a starting point for his own re-telling of the tale, but in the 1920s and ’30s provided the Nazis in Germany with a potent political symbol of the fate ofGermany at the hands of its enemies, especially the so-called internal enemy, tragically identified with the Jews.

Lawrence shared an interest in the music dramas of Wagner with many of his contemporaries. Forster, Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce were all well acquainted with the work of the German composer and often alluded and referred to his operas in their works. Eliot’s use of material from Tristan und Isolde andParsifal is very well known. Virginia Woolf madeallusions to Wagner in order to establish character or social scene or to create mythical reverberations. Joyce incorporated awealth of allusions to Wagner in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake for the purposes of parody and wordplay. Indeed Lawrence had indicated his interest in Wagner very early on. In his early novel The Trespasser, he includes many allusions to Wagner in telling the story of an adulterous love affair between a violinistand her teacher, It was originally called The Saga of Siegmund. In the Ring, Siegmund is Siegfried’s father. The critic John DiGaetani


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has surveyed the pervasiveness of Wagner in the British novel in his Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel and this is a book well worthconsulting if you are interested in these connections.

1.

VIFinally, we should consider briefly some of

Lawrence’s aesthetic ideas as conveyed by thecharacters in the novel. We should also note that this is the third novel of the ones we’ve been reading in which characters converse on matters of artistic theory. It isas if the possibility of revolutionizing waysof living in society

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required a re-consideration of the arts that might express them. In Lawrence the conversation about art and its relationship tolife surfaces again and again throughout the novel. It is a recurring point of discussion for Gudrun, who is an artist, and Ursula, who is endowed with a natural taste. When the scene shifts to the Alpine chalet, Loerke, the industrial artist, joins the conversation.It is significant that he is an artist who has applied himself to the decoration of factories with caricatures of human beings dominated by machines. This parody of the modern spirit in art underlines Lawrence’s doubts about certain aspects of modernity. Heunderstands that some of what passes for modern art is merely the gilding applied to the mechanical hells of modern industrial society. Loerke not only celebrates the industrial ethos in practice, he also theorizes it as a higher form of art, and indeed the art of the future.

Ironically, Gerald, the industrial magnate,who might be thought to be most in tune with Loerke’s appreciation of industrial art, is indeed the one character who thoroughly despises him. The fact that Gerald is instinctively repelled suggests the finer potentiality that fails to be realized in himand that makes his life a tragedy. His capacity for violence at the end, when he nearly succeeds in strangling Gudrun, one of the most powerful scenes in the novel, reminds us of how tragic heroes come to live in extremis. Gerald is no Hamlet or Lear, but hehas the makings of a golden haired Othello, driven mad by sexual jealousy, though potentially a man of dignity and honour.

We are in no doubt about where Lawrence stands on the question of the relationship ofart to life though. And Ursula, with her gift


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of sensibility, is more or less Lawrence’s spokesperson on these questions. Though bullied by the sarcastic Loerke, she will have nothing to do with the notion, put forward by him, of a work of art as an end initself. Art is necessarily instinct with life, not separate from it, and not a substitute for living. Lawrence is clearly onthe side of Ursula, when she claims that the “world of art is only the truth about the real world.” She makes this declaration against the decadent artist, for whom a work of art is a “picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing,” having “nothing to do with anything but itself … no relation with the everyday world” (484–85/430). In the conversation with Gudrun and Ursula, Loerke’sideas sound very much like Tarr’s. Art and Life, he declares, occupy:

“… two different and distinct planes ofexistence, and to translate one into theother is worse than foolish, it is adarkening of all counsel, a makingconfusion everywhere. Do you see, youmust not confuse the relative work ofaction with the absolute world of art.That you must not do” (484/430–31).

But that is precisely what Lawrence does do. He is a modern, but without that hard-edged sense of the separation of art and life

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that we find so brusquely advanced in Lewis’sTarr and more suavely formulated by Stephen Dedalus. Lawrence takes from his great realist predecessors, like Hardy, their capacity for communicating the lived actuality of experience, the very look and feel of the real. Lawrence writes, therefore,with a vivid, bristling immediacy that captures the freshness of sense impressions as they register upon the mind; an honesty and a faithfulness to the actual quality of human experience. He has the capacity to understand those implicit forces of life thatgovern the development of human beings with or without their conscious awareness. But he is also a writer with general ideas to communicate. He is a writer with a message and one which he felt had the potential to heal the psychic wounds of a disintegrating civilization. In the 1930s, after his death, many writers sought inspiration in his work and attempted to use literature for the purposes of changing society. It would be thelast time in the century that artists would seriously entertain the thought that art’s potency extended into the area of social affairs and politics.


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1.

Alldritt, Keith.The Visual Imagination of D. H. Lawrence.

London: Edward Arnold, 1971.

* Bedient, Calvin. Architects of the Self: George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and E. M. Forster. Berkeley, CA:University ofCalifornia Press, 1972.

D. H. Lawrence: New Studies. Ed. Christopher Heywood. London: Macmillan, 1987.

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Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity.The 1988 Raymond Fred West Memorial Lectures, Stanford University. Stanford:Stanford Univ. Press, 1990.

Kermode, Frank. Lawrence. Fontana Modern Masters. London: Fontana-Collins, 1979.

* Kiely, Robert. Beyond Egotism: The Fiction ofJames Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence.Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980.

Leavis, F. R. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964.

———. Thought, Words, Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976.

Pinion, F. B. A D. H. Lawrence Companion: Life, Thought, and Works. London: Macmillan, 1978.

Sagar, Keith. The Art of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966.

Spilka, Mark. The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence. Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1955.

Lewis's Tarr and Lawrence's Women in Love

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Transcript of Lewis's Tarr and Lawrence's Women in Love