I looked over the remainder of the book and found some things of interest, but there are limitations to correspondences compared to fiction or memoirs. As Lawrence's literary career advanced, he additionally befriended Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley and Alfred Stieglitz, among others, and maintained a fairly large correspondence, which, however, frequently pertained to publishing matters or minor travel anecdotes. He was surprisingly energetic and alive for a man of wavering health, and it is difficult to keep track of his peregrinations in this book. During World War I he and Frieda stayed in England, living in Cornwall and Derbyshire. From 1919 to 1922 they lived in Sicily and traveled to Sardinia and Switzerland. From 1922 to 1924 they traveled to Ceylon and Australia and settled in Taos, New Mexico, and they then traveled to Mexico, New York, Los Angeles, England, France, Switzerland, Germany and Austria. In 1924-1925 he spent time in Mexico City but left when he became ill. They spent most of 1926 in Italy. In 1927-1928 they visited France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Germany, finally settling in the South of France in 1929, where he died the following year.
It isn't clear to me why he and Frieda traveled so much. Part of it had to do with their finances. Free housing provided by a wealthy patron seems to have been one of the motivating factors behind moving to Taos. There were also legal and other pressures which may have kept them unusually mobile. While living in England, Frieda was accused of being a German spy. Censors found passages in Lawrence's novels pornographic, particularly in Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Lawrence became one of the most controversial writers of the century. He also wrote poems and plays and painted, and some of his paintings were seized because they were considered obscene. However, Lawrence also seems to have liked travel for its own sake, and it constituted part of his philosophy of living to the fullest and experiencing the world.
I am always surprised by people like Lawrence who are prodigious yet are still able to produce excellent work. However, I think that in every case high productivity eventually leads to lower quality. Lawrence seems to be bound by his early experiences in England, and he will mainly be remembered for his English novels. I did not find Aaron's Rod, which is set in Florence, particularly well done, and it seems likely that most of the fiction derived from his travels is not as good as his major novels, all of which are set in England. If you realistically consider how good fiction is produced, it soon becomes apparent how limited any writer is likely to be: you can't simply travel around and churn out top-quality writing pertinent to each location, because, during a short period of time, no individual can absorb a deep enough understanding of an unfamiliar environment to capture its essence, regardless of his or her skill as a writer. As I mentioned earlier, George Eliot made the same mistake, but it was limited to just one novel, Romola, which was set in Renaissance Florence. I have no desire to read Lawrence's novels set in Australia or Mexico.
Like every intelligent writer I know, Lawrence's initial reaction to America, when he arrived in Taos, was negative. He wrote to Else Jaffe, his sister-in-law, in 1922:
...I think America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it. So much for them – cowards! You can have the Land of the Free – as much as I know of it. – In the spring I want to come back to Europe.
Later, in 1925, he wrote to Kyle Crichton, an American journalist:
I have been thinking of what you say about not having had the courage to be a creative writer. It seems to me that may be true – America, of all countries, kills that courage, simply because it sees no value in the really creative effort, whereas it esteems, more highly than any other country, the journalistic effort: it loves the thrill of a sensation, but loathes to be in any way moved, inwardly affected so that a new vital adjustment is necessary. Americans are enormously adaptible: perhaps because inwardly they are not adjusted at all to their environment. They are never as American as a chipmunk is, or as an Indian is: only as a Ford car or as the Woolworth building.
That's why it seems to me impossible almost, to be purely a creative writer in America: everybody compromises with journalism and commerce. Hawthorne and Melville and Whitman reached a point of imaginative or visionary adjustment to America, which, it seemed to me, is again entirely lost, abandoned: because you can't adjust yourself vitally, inwardly, to a rather scaring world, and at the same time, get ahead.
Obviously I was delighted to read the above lines.
Still, Lawrence embodied some aspects of the culture of his period that no longer interest me. He was writing at a time when Freud, Jung and psychoanalysis were trendy, and artsy people were interested in Eastern religions and native cultures, prefiguring the 1960's – all of which I think led nowhere. I have been trying to determine what, if anything, was so great about Frieda, and I can't come up with anything. The impression I have is that she was sexually uninhibited with Lawrence, which offered him something that he had not found with British women. She was socially skilled and reasonably well-read, but both of them were opinionated, headstrong and argumentative, and they often had loud fights that disturbed their friends and acquaintances. Rather than poring over biographies or letters, the answers may have been available if Lawrence had lived to write memoirs. As it is, I am inclined to see Frieda as a hedonistic woman who abandoned a conventional life and her children in order to have a good time. Lawrence seems to have had no interest in children, and this offered her an assurance that she wouldn't be weighed down again. In her case, however, I don't see an artist as much as reveler, and she left behind nothing of note. Sometimes it is easy to feel nostalgic about the now nonexistent artistic and literary colonies of the past, but I sense that, had I been there, many weaknesses would have been in full view.
This experiment in literary correspondences was not a complete failure, but I don't think that, in general, they are likely to be reliable enough to become a fixture of my reading habits.
Thursday, August 31, 2017
Thursday, August 24, 2017
The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence II
This book is probably more appropriate for academic research than for a casual reading, but I am finding it informative in several respects. Because it consists of Lawrence's actual letters, one gets a more visceral sense of the progress of his life than one would elsewhere. It also provides a fine-grained picture of how his literary career developed and the individual interactions that accompanied it. One sees how the tone and style of his letters changed according to the recipient. The letters to his old friends read more spontaneously than those to literary insiders and aristocratic acquaintances, and he is probably adjusting his presentation according to the requirements of each relationship.
Lawrence's output of high quality writing is impressive compared to that of more recent writers. He began to produce fiction under his own name in 1908, and his first novel was published in 1911, followed by a second novel in 1912. Sons and Lovers, the third, was published in 1913, a short story collection in 1914 and The Rainbow appeared in 1915. What is striking to me is how intimate the artistic circles were in England at the time. When an author received some attention, virtually everyone in the literary community became familiar with them and they were soon socializing. A brief chronology: he was an unknown writer who left his teaching position in 1912 due to poor health; by 1913 he was corresponding with Lady Cynthia Asquith; by 1914 he was corresponding with Amy Lowell (an American poet); in 1915 he was friends with E.M. Forster and corresponding with Lady Ottoline Morrell and Bertrand Russell.
Besides the relative frankness about sexuality in his novels, Lawrence probably appealed to the literary elite in England because of his relationship with Frieda, who came from an aristocratic German family. She divorced her husband in Nottingham and gave up her three children in order to marry Lawrence, and, especially by English standards, they lived a bohemian lifestyle. They never had much money to spare and moved often to cheaper parts of Europe in order to extend his small income.
In his better letters, as in his better novels, Lawrence comes across less as a thinker than as an artist who is committed to his somewhat utopian vision of the world. He expresses some of this in a letter to E.M. Forster in 1915:
In my Island, I wanted people to come without class or money, sacrificing nothing, but each coming with all his desires, yet knowing that his life is but a tiny section of a Whole: so that he shall fulfil his life in relation to the Whole. I wanted a real community, not built out of abstinence or equality, but of many fulfilled individualities seeking greater fulfilment.
But, I can't find anybody. Each man is so bent on his own private fulfilment – either he wants love of a woman, and can't get it complete, or he wants to influence his fellow men (for their good, of course), or he wants to satisfy his own soul with regard to his position in eternity. And they make me tired, these friends of mine. They seem so childish and greedy, always the immediate desire, always the particular outlook, no conception of the whole horizon wheeling round....
I do feel every man must have the devil of a struggle before he can have stuffed himself full enough to satisfy all his immediate needs, and can give up, cease, and withdraw himself, yield himself up to his metamorphosis, his crucifixion, and so come to his new issuing, his wings, his resurrection, his whole flesh shining like a mote in sunshine, fulfilled and now taking part in the fulfilment of the Whole.
So I feel frightfully like weeping in a corner – not over myself – but perhaps my own resurrection is too new, one must feel if the scars are not there, and wince – and one must see the other people all writhing and struggling and unable to give up.
This tortured reasoning pervades Lawrence's early works, and I had similar thoughts when I was that age – 29 – though by then my expectations of others were already becoming quite low. There is something of the visionary in him, which adds to his appeal. Lawrence's struggle is of a type that one rarely encounters in the U.S., or perhaps anywhere.
I am going to attempt to move more quickly through this book, because I have a couple more lined up and don't want to dwell on this one forever.
Lawrence's output of high quality writing is impressive compared to that of more recent writers. He began to produce fiction under his own name in 1908, and his first novel was published in 1911, followed by a second novel in 1912. Sons and Lovers, the third, was published in 1913, a short story collection in 1914 and The Rainbow appeared in 1915. What is striking to me is how intimate the artistic circles were in England at the time. When an author received some attention, virtually everyone in the literary community became familiar with them and they were soon socializing. A brief chronology: he was an unknown writer who left his teaching position in 1912 due to poor health; by 1913 he was corresponding with Lady Cynthia Asquith; by 1914 he was corresponding with Amy Lowell (an American poet); in 1915 he was friends with E.M. Forster and corresponding with Lady Ottoline Morrell and Bertrand Russell.
Besides the relative frankness about sexuality in his novels, Lawrence probably appealed to the literary elite in England because of his relationship with Frieda, who came from an aristocratic German family. She divorced her husband in Nottingham and gave up her three children in order to marry Lawrence, and, especially by English standards, they lived a bohemian lifestyle. They never had much money to spare and moved often to cheaper parts of Europe in order to extend his small income.
In his better letters, as in his better novels, Lawrence comes across less as a thinker than as an artist who is committed to his somewhat utopian vision of the world. He expresses some of this in a letter to E.M. Forster in 1915:
In my Island, I wanted people to come without class or money, sacrificing nothing, but each coming with all his desires, yet knowing that his life is but a tiny section of a Whole: so that he shall fulfil his life in relation to the Whole. I wanted a real community, not built out of abstinence or equality, but of many fulfilled individualities seeking greater fulfilment.
But, I can't find anybody. Each man is so bent on his own private fulfilment – either he wants love of a woman, and can't get it complete, or he wants to influence his fellow men (for their good, of course), or he wants to satisfy his own soul with regard to his position in eternity. And they make me tired, these friends of mine. They seem so childish and greedy, always the immediate desire, always the particular outlook, no conception of the whole horizon wheeling round....
I do feel every man must have the devil of a struggle before he can have stuffed himself full enough to satisfy all his immediate needs, and can give up, cease, and withdraw himself, yield himself up to his metamorphosis, his crucifixion, and so come to his new issuing, his wings, his resurrection, his whole flesh shining like a mote in sunshine, fulfilled and now taking part in the fulfilment of the Whole.
So I feel frightfully like weeping in a corner – not over myself – but perhaps my own resurrection is too new, one must feel if the scars are not there, and wince – and one must see the other people all writhing and struggling and unable to give up.
This tortured reasoning pervades Lawrence's early works, and I had similar thoughts when I was that age – 29 – though by then my expectations of others were already becoming quite low. There is something of the visionary in him, which adds to his appeal. Lawrence's struggle is of a type that one rarely encounters in the U.S., or perhaps anywhere.
I am going to attempt to move more quickly through this book, because I have a couple more lined up and don't want to dwell on this one forever.
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Diary
There has been a lapse in my posts because I haven't had much to write about and have been preoccupied with other things. I recently purchased some new software and hardware for my Dobsonian telescope, which I can now operate with my Android smartphone and find millions of objects automatically. Of course, actual viewing conditions don't permit that, and there has been about one good viewing night all summer, which allowed me to get my best view so far of Saturn. I prefer fainter objects such as galaxies, which require optimal viewing conditions. Because of all the trees in the yard, there is just one spot, with a V-shaped opening between the trees, where I can see objects near the southern horizon, and those objects are only visible in it for a few weeks before moving out of range. Jupiter is gone and Saturn soon will be. I had wanted to see if I could split the companion star of Antares, but I didn't get a chance. One of the things that is interesting about astronomical observation is that after a while you get the sense that you are living inside a giant mechanical clock. I'm also spending time selling online some old equipment that is no longer needed.
Another occupation, which I don't do much anymore, has been finding an old friend. Even though I don't expect much to come from it, I enjoy the hunt. He is a high school friend named Evans, which makes him hard to look up. The last time I saw him was in about 1973, and I haven't heard anything from him since. I invited him to my wedding in 1974 and he didn't show up. Since I couldn't find him directly, I began to look into his family. His father was the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, and he had two sisters. Although his parents died long ago, both of his sisters married husbands with less-common surnames, and their weddings were announced in The New York Times. One sister is now the chief curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. I sent her an e-mail at work, but she didn't respond. The other sister, I just found, lives in Massachusetts. She owns a vacation house in Vermont that is advertised on VRBO, and I was able to contact her through that website. It turns out that her brother is alive and living in Miami. I will be e-mailing him soon.
In other news, I noticed a footprint in the mud in the woods behind the garage that did not belong to us. Out of curiosity, I purchased a game camera and positioned it to point at the back of the garage in order to capture potential intruders. So far, the main star of the ten-second videos recorded has been William, who can be seen coming and going from the woods at night, occasionally stopping to sniff the camera, and once carrying out prey. There have been raccoons and a fox, but no bears or deer – or people, other than us. I think the footprint was probably left by our neighbor, Fred, who is not a likely burglar.
I was recently contacted by an anonymous reader of this blog who expressed his/her appreciation. That encourages me to continue writing it, but is not necessarily enough to go on forever. I refuse to write solely on the basis of wanting to write, and believe that I must at least write something that might be useful, without being repetitive. Many of my general ideas have already been expressed, and new readings, though they may always provide a source for additional subject matter, are not necessarily easy to find. Very little fiction appeals to me, and finding good nonfiction is haphazard in my case. There isn't much to say about current events, since, for example, the fact that Donald Trump would turn out to be an incompetent president was already likely before his inauguration. The main story about Trump's legacy may be how long he was permitted to remain in office, and here we are, still pulling teeth. If you have any suggestions regarding the future direction of this blog, I am always open to ideas.
I will continue on the topic of D.H. Lawrence when I have more to say.
Another occupation, which I don't do much anymore, has been finding an old friend. Even though I don't expect much to come from it, I enjoy the hunt. He is a high school friend named Evans, which makes him hard to look up. The last time I saw him was in about 1973, and I haven't heard anything from him since. I invited him to my wedding in 1974 and he didn't show up. Since I couldn't find him directly, I began to look into his family. His father was the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, and he had two sisters. Although his parents died long ago, both of his sisters married husbands with less-common surnames, and their weddings were announced in The New York Times. One sister is now the chief curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. I sent her an e-mail at work, but she didn't respond. The other sister, I just found, lives in Massachusetts. She owns a vacation house in Vermont that is advertised on VRBO, and I was able to contact her through that website. It turns out that her brother is alive and living in Miami. I will be e-mailing him soon.
In other news, I noticed a footprint in the mud in the woods behind the garage that did not belong to us. Out of curiosity, I purchased a game camera and positioned it to point at the back of the garage in order to capture potential intruders. So far, the main star of the ten-second videos recorded has been William, who can be seen coming and going from the woods at night, occasionally stopping to sniff the camera, and once carrying out prey. There have been raccoons and a fox, but no bears or deer – or people, other than us. I think the footprint was probably left by our neighbor, Fred, who is not a likely burglar.
I was recently contacted by an anonymous reader of this blog who expressed his/her appreciation. That encourages me to continue writing it, but is not necessarily enough to go on forever. I refuse to write solely on the basis of wanting to write, and believe that I must at least write something that might be useful, without being repetitive. Many of my general ideas have already been expressed, and new readings, though they may always provide a source for additional subject matter, are not necessarily easy to find. Very little fiction appeals to me, and finding good nonfiction is haphazard in my case. There isn't much to say about current events, since, for example, the fact that Donald Trump would turn out to be an incompetent president was already likely before his inauguration. The main story about Trump's legacy may be how long he was permitted to remain in office, and here we are, still pulling teeth. If you have any suggestions regarding the future direction of this blog, I am always open to ideas.
I will continue on the topic of D.H. Lawrence when I have more to say.
Friday, August 4, 2017
The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence I
I am enjoying this book, edited by James T. Boulton, but am reading it at a very slow pace. A more convincing picture of Lawrence emerges than you are likely to find in a biography, as you witness him reacting in real time to events in his life. However, the narrative is highly fragmented, as many letters are not included, and the full context of each letter is not always apparent. So far, most of the letters have been to his female friends, and I've just reached the point when, at age 26, he falls head-over-heels in love with Frieda Weekley, the wife of one of his professors at University College Nottingham.
He writes touchingly and eloquently on many occasions, as in a letter to Blanche Jennings in 1908:
I am very sorry you have been dipped so deeply in the blues. Let me drowse you out a little sermon, will you? I will labour it out like the church clock slowly lets fall the long hour. It has just struck twelve. I wonder if I can keep awake. I think, you know, hedonism won't wear. I think life is only a joke when you are sure it's most serious and right; when you know the great procession is marching, on the whole, in the right direction, then, to be sure, the creatures in the menagerie are comical, and their capers are too funny. But before you can see the fun you must be earnestly certain of the wonder of this eternal progression – The little lozenge lights are sliding round my pencil quaintly; but the sun they come from is keeping on its grand course. (If I write a bit canting, it is because I am almost dreaming.) My poor little philosophy is like that. I think there is a great purpose which keeps the menagerie moving onward to better places, while the animals snap and rattle by the way. So I laugh when I see their grimaces, if these do not hinder the march. I am sure I can help the march if I like. It is a valuable assurance.
That same year he moved to Croydon, near London, for a teaching position, and he describes the difference from rural Eastwood, his hometown, in a letter to May Holbrook:
Townspeople are indeed glib and noisy, but there is not much at the bottom of them. They are less individual, less self-opinionated and conceited than country people, but less, far less serious. It is with them work, and after work, conscious striving after relaxation. In Eastwood, people work, and then drift into their small pleasures; here they pursue a shallow pleasure, and it leaves no room for a prolific idleness, a fruitful leisure. Do not lament a town so much.
During this period he is writing fiction in pursuit of a literary livelihood and befriends Edward Garnett, the influential critic, essayist and dramatist (and husband of translator Constance Garnett). Garnett recognized his talent and boosted his early career. Unfortunately, Lawrence's health is already wavering, and he is showing signs of the tuberculosis that kills him at age 44.
I find Lawrence's writing fresh, vivid and honest, and I hardly think his more-famous contemporaries, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, are worth reading (I gave up on To the Lighthouse a few months ago). Although I am not by nature as sensuous as he is and do not revel in physical descriptions the way he does, he manages to combine that with substantive thoughts and feelings, creating an uncommonly powerful effect. Unlike most modern writers, he emphasizes expression, which is the real purpose of language, more than style, and I think that he is probably one of the best English writers ever. As I proceed through this book, I'll update you as seems fitting.
He writes touchingly and eloquently on many occasions, as in a letter to Blanche Jennings in 1908:
I am very sorry you have been dipped so deeply in the blues. Let me drowse you out a little sermon, will you? I will labour it out like the church clock slowly lets fall the long hour. It has just struck twelve. I wonder if I can keep awake. I think, you know, hedonism won't wear. I think life is only a joke when you are sure it's most serious and right; when you know the great procession is marching, on the whole, in the right direction, then, to be sure, the creatures in the menagerie are comical, and their capers are too funny. But before you can see the fun you must be earnestly certain of the wonder of this eternal progression – The little lozenge lights are sliding round my pencil quaintly; but the sun they come from is keeping on its grand course. (If I write a bit canting, it is because I am almost dreaming.) My poor little philosophy is like that. I think there is a great purpose which keeps the menagerie moving onward to better places, while the animals snap and rattle by the way. So I laugh when I see their grimaces, if these do not hinder the march. I am sure I can help the march if I like. It is a valuable assurance.
That same year he moved to Croydon, near London, for a teaching position, and he describes the difference from rural Eastwood, his hometown, in a letter to May Holbrook:
Townspeople are indeed glib and noisy, but there is not much at the bottom of them. They are less individual, less self-opinionated and conceited than country people, but less, far less serious. It is with them work, and after work, conscious striving after relaxation. In Eastwood, people work, and then drift into their small pleasures; here they pursue a shallow pleasure, and it leaves no room for a prolific idleness, a fruitful leisure. Do not lament a town so much.
During this period he is writing fiction in pursuit of a literary livelihood and befriends Edward Garnett, the influential critic, essayist and dramatist (and husband of translator Constance Garnett). Garnett recognized his talent and boosted his early career. Unfortunately, Lawrence's health is already wavering, and he is showing signs of the tuberculosis that kills him at age 44.
I find Lawrence's writing fresh, vivid and honest, and I hardly think his more-famous contemporaries, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, are worth reading (I gave up on To the Lighthouse a few months ago). Although I am not by nature as sensuous as he is and do not revel in physical descriptions the way he does, he manages to combine that with substantive thoughts and feelings, creating an uncommonly powerful effect. Unlike most modern writers, he emphasizes expression, which is the real purpose of language, more than style, and I think that he is probably one of the best English writers ever. As I proceed through this book, I'll update you as seems fitting.
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