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Thank you Patrick for your post today: and I also thank Philip Andrews-Speed and Andrew Tatham for their responses — especially their clarification of the 1994 guarantee/assurance. It is a real consolation (for us as powerless but concerned observers) to have a commentary such as yours, informed by lived experience and long reflexion, to help those of us on the outside to gain some purchase on these extraordinary and horrifying events — which seem to be accelerating with all the unpredictability and danger of a runaway train. Times thousands.

There was an excellent and chilling documentary programme on the evolution of Putin on the Arte TV channel here in France last night, in the wake of which I find that your summary of ‘inferiority complex, paranoia, and megalomania’ gets all the toxic essentials.

Well, Patrick, your post this morning has provoked some thoughts:

1. Violence begets violence begets violence ad infinitum. And that applies to threat of violence too. Assuming that there will be rational reactions to threats and that that will keep everything in check flies in the face of a long history of human irrationality, and you just need one nutter to ruin it for everyone. There has got to be a better way than constantly threatening and punishing people. Do families or schools that are governed by threats and punishment lead to happy balanced adults?

2. Likewise human irrationality means killing heads of state can provide a rallying point for some people however evil the ‘martyr’ has been proved to be. It certainly doesn’t seem to have provided a deterrent to Putin (though I’ve seen reports that he has repeatedly watched Gaddafi’s end – with one outcome being that he ends up doing terrible things when backed into a corner).

3. It’s difficult for the West to take the moral high ground when:

(a) countries in the West have illegally invaded and destroyed sovereign countries (I still find it amazing that there are many in this country and the US who count the Iraq wars in terms of the number of UK & US soldiers killed rather than the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) – and that is before you go back into history and see all the wars of acquisition that had nothing to do with who originally had claim to the land.

(b) the West’s major motivating factor for anything is just MONEY without consideration of the full picture of good and evil. Accepting money from all sources with no questions asked has enabled Putin to spread his tentacles around the whole world and believe that he can do what he likes (see ‘Moneyland’ by Oliver Bullough – and also this letter in today’s Financial Times from a retired UK Defence Attaché in Moscow https://www.ft.com/content/857d2ccd-2853-43ba-b6b9-88e04b42ba93). It has also skewed our economies in favour of the super rich and away from doing what is right for this wondrous but troubled planet and the people on it.

4. Why should whoever owned anything at any particular point in history mean anything today? A load of the discussion towards the ‘peace’ treaty after the First World War was based on these sorts of arguments to redraw the borders, particularly in Eastern Europe. And that went well. (see ‘Prisoners of Geography’ by Tim Marshall for a discussion of this as well as how the characters of various nation states have been influenced by the physical realities of their geography).

5. The logical end point of looking for the original owners of any piece of land is to find that no-one owned any of it. And there is a school of thought that says Man only started making war when he started ‘owning’ things. (See ‘Utopia for Realists’ and ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History’ by Rutger Bregman for thoughts about this as well as other possibilities for the future of mankind).
The wrong lessons have been learnt from previous major wars. The victors assert their rights over lands and peoples which fester resentment. Bigger walls and stricter borders are put up which end up dividing people both in space and thought. Greater controls over state media lead to irrational beliefs about the people of other countries including fear of ‘the other’ and claims of racial superiority that ‘legitimise’ terrible atrocities against ‘subhumans’ (whether that’s Jews in the Holocaust or whites in Japanese concentration camps).

Most of the people of the world want an easy life in the face of the strange mysteries and difficulties that affect us all. There has got to be a way of enabling everyone to see that we all share that and that we are all individual human beings rather than faceless representatives of a country or a government or a doctrine.

This all may seem a bit lacking in realism but ‘realism’ seems to lead to us being stuck in this infinite loop. A far greater mind than mine said, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. What can each of us do differently? How can we connect to other human beings in other places and lead to a different outcome?

Each of us possesses a power beyond the limits of our flesh and bone. Look at the history of the world and look at the individuals who have changed it for the better in the face of impossible odds. Once the shooting starts it generally means it’s too late to do anything but fight, but in the in-between times, we’ve got to look further into the future and I would ask anyone reading this, ‘What are you going to do today to make your bit of difference?’

The trouble is, the Budapest Memorandum is just that: a ‘memorandum’, it is not a UN Treaty. Also, it offers ‘assurances’ not ‘guarantees’. So it allows for a lot of wiggle room on both sides; offensive and defensive. Also, times have changed from a period of embryonic trust to one of deep distrust (or worse). Even a formal treaty might not withstand such a dramatic change of circumstance.

I agree with the Sudetenland analogy for the Russian enclaves, but the German invasion was more overt.

Ha! Write on, Patrick. Write on!

I’m sure I’m missing a lot of literary and/or other connotations but even so I read and enjoyed this post all the way through.

Patrick: as the honoured dedicatee of your latest story, I can only repeat my admiration of the way you have provided, without laying a square inch of concrete or tarmac, a bypass round (or through) the heavily-congested area of paralytic, hyperlinguistic para-commentary. To localize the metaphor: it’s a bit like driving down the M6 Toll road, having avoided the worst stretches of the M6 itself round Wolverhampton.

One mystery however remains. How, ever, did the verbigerating Professor Żuk come up with the clever title for his lecture? I suspect that you yourself must have helped him to ‘Blake on White’, incidentally projecting your reader — proleptically — to the relief of the last paragraph.

Patrick: much enjoyed your nightmarish examiners’ board (right in there with the ‘dark, diluvial owls’), on a rainy Sunday morning in Lille. Any retired academic probably has similar visitations. My more modest nightmares, originating in Manchester (where there were no gowns and no Latin in our English department – and no owls that I can remember, though the owl features in the university’s heraldic crest) had more to do with not having marked a pile of papers by the due date, or having scrambled the marks to such an extent that they could not be communicated. General sense of Not Having Done a Good Job.

I often feel, in fact, that the emotional energy we expend on these retirement nightmares (which include not having looked at our post for weeks, losing a pile of old-style UCCA forms, and, of course, failing to find the loo) are the real justification for the receipt of our pensions. I’m sure there must be a good Freudian argument for keeping these index-linked.

Mike attempted to teach me Russian at Ulster University from 1968 to 1972! I was never very good at it, but he did instil in me a lasting love for the language and for Russian literature. I hope I kindled in him a lasting interest in birds and ornithology. I would love to meet him again after so many years.

I type these words on Fourteenth Night,
’Twas good to read your diary,
With Chekhov news and flowers bright –
Permit me one enquiry:
Why speak you of a weight loss urge?
You seem to need no belt,
Your photo tells of no great splurge,
In fact you look quite svelte!
Re Cambridge Tales and ‘The White Bow’,
It seems we’re both in tune;
But when talk turns to the Black Crow
We’ve all had etiuq ghoune!
With Santa gone and all the rest,
One thing remains to do:
I wish you Mileses Alles Best’
For twenty twenty-two.

Dear Damian, humblest thanks… I will fight on
Until I see thee ‘Makar’ crowned at Scone!

A Happy New Year to you, the ninth;
Good Patrick, you deserve a plinth!
In the spirit of Calderon
Blog resolutely, and blog on;
What took him to the Dardanelles
(One of the Great War’s hottest hells)
Will drive you — generosity
Of spirit, and the energy
To make this current — to keep up
The dinner table where we sup
On conversation. You provide
The main course, and then step aside
For others to try out a dish
(Apéritif, or dessert-ish)
Contributed with the intent
To earn from you a kind comment,
Written with scholarship and wit:
The two don’t aye together fit.
Blog on, Macbeth said to Macduff;
None here will tell you, ‘Hold, enough’;
Till Birnam comes to Dunsinane,
Your readers want more of the same!

Mike Pursglove was my tutor & lecturer at the University of Exeter from 1991 – 1995. I am pleased to read he is still going strong.

Dear Jim: thanks for your ‘Dong!’. Not one of those
That Edward Lear met, with a Luminous Nose;
But Dong indeed — reminding one who goes
In search of novelty, he always knows

That nothing changes. Whatever comes along
Eventually turns out to be a Dong
Of some description; rather like a song
We know the tune to, but get the words wrong.

Coeli non animi mutantur qui
Trans mare currunt: all which means that we
Take ourselves with us everywhere; to be
Or not, perhaps; but never differently.

Really terrific to read of a nonJapanese who felt so quickly and deeply at home and who was obviously not only accepted by the Japanese people around him but also truly welcomed. Ringing in the new year is a good way to join in a popular ritual that makes one feel a part of Japanese culture. Brilliant, Jim … and I hope that your tie with Japan will never end….and Kalbi (or ‘Rib’ in Korean) is a great name for a yakinikuya!

Kate Pursglove’s review of the Yesenin translations can be found in East-West Review 20.1.56 Spring/Summer 2021 pp. 27-28

Well, Patrick: the last detail certainly does help. Since the butterfly has long been associated with metamorphosis, transformation and the soul, one understands why a metal vending machine cannot pretend to own one: or to make one commercially available. Does the same condition apply to the members of the restocking army? Or may they keep their souls in the stocking they may hang, hopefully, on the bedpost?

Damian, your Comment is both ludic and carnivalian (thank you), but like all such artistic prose it has a serious centre… I have been unable to find out how many million people are employed in restocking the machines, but they are certainly an army that toils day and night. It’s a full-time job and according to Easley each ‘vending machine worker’ (suggesting that they are actually special bees or ants) restocks/services about 40 machines, including clearing away litter and graffiti. Chicken they can do, but the line is drawn at selling live butterflies, apparently. I hope that helps? Patrick

Patrick: fascinating stuff on Japanese vending machines, today (what, I reflect, will your universal curiosity not get you to write about?). I have always been suspicious of these things since losing sixpence in one when I was small. (It wasn’t an Irish sixpence, either). But one aspect of Tim Easley’s enthusiastic account leaves me unsatisfied. He reports, ‘they were always fully stocked’. But one needs to know how, by whom, and when? It is the unhappy experience of anyone using such machines in the UK that just when you want one, it is undergoing the equivalent of open heart surgery.

Can it be that in Japan, there are some oblique descendants of the Samurai — a cut above Deliveroo — who are bred to this vocation, venturing out in the very waste and middle of the night to replenish the machines? Or is there a super-machine, of a robotic development unknown to us, and a solicitude rarely encountered, which serves these sub-machines with the same regularity, though with the reverse function, as the milking of a cow? Or is the simple solution that they are actually replenished by aliens?

With my own curiosity now fully engaged, I also wonder about the optimum, or maximum, size of articles to be vended (or vented) by the machine. One can get a chicken sandwich, but can one get a chicken? Can one get a LIVE chicken? Bottles we count on (normally small, 25/30 cl); but can one get a real 75cl? A magnum? A jeroboam? It seems to me, from a safe distance, that the technology of the vending machine still has a long way to go.

Great post, Mum! Full of lots of interesting details that I don’t usually think about when I’m reminiscing about Japan and I learned a lot 🙂

Thanks for the pointer to this, Patrick – sounds fascinating and a reminder that there are all different sorts of normal in this world. I’ve added it to my reading list – and here’s one for you, though given your wide reading and interest in biography, my guess is that you’ve already read it: ‘The Quest for Corvo – An Experiment in Biography’ by AJA Symons. It made me think of your Quest for Calderon, the difference being that Corvo was a much spikier and more socially awkward character than Calderon. An important part of the book is that it includes the story of the search for evidence of Corvo’s existence and personality, and that gives a sort of multi-dimensional picture of the nature of human contacts in great variety.

We lived in Far End in the 1980’s. It was a wonderful house and we were very sad to leave. Heartbreaking it is no longer there.

I really enjoyed the haiku – thankyou. May your chrysanthemums flourish.

I have been getting record daily hits for this and Damian Grant’s post, perhaps because of this recent article in ‘The Guardian’: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/30/the-female-gaze-on-dh-lawrence . Unfortunately none of the visitors seems stimulated to Comment!

Patrick: I am grateful for the generous response — from yourself and others — to my Post.

But you can’t expect someone even with dual nationality like me to put Racine in the scale against Shakespeare; and clearly, Lawrence himself would not have done so. Whatever Clifford may think, from Clifford’s author’s point of view Racine suffers from a triple disadvantage. Not only was he not English, but nor was he German or Italian — both languages and literatures that Lawrence knew better and much preferred to French. Significantly, Lawrence does not refer to Racine once in his voluminous correspondence; which shows a low level of engagement. (And none of Lawrence’s own plays is written in classic rhymed hexameters!)

In fact France and French come off rather badly in general in the letters. Lawrence writes from Bandol in December 1928: ‘It bores me so to have to speak French.I don’t know why but the French don’t really interest me, and I never want to speak to them.’ (Though he agrees they are ‘nice.’ ) And thinking particularly of Clifford’s praise for Racine — which you quote, on ’emotions that are ordered and given shape’ — it is even amusing to contrast the terms of another letter written just a week later, where Lawrence weighs in heavily against la belle France itself: ‘…what a mess the French make of their places — perfect slums of villadom, appallingly without order, or form, or place.’ Later on, we find him writing off ‘the whole of France’ (which he hardly knew!) as ‘a ghastly slummy nowhereness’, reserving a particular detestation for dirty and pretentious Paris: ‘The Lord made Adam out of printer’s ink, in Paris.’ But he was keen enough to work for a translation of Lady C there…

But to the main point: the two writers, and what they stand for. When Polixenes defends the artificiality of some flowers against Perdita’s rejection of them because, in her words, ‘there is an art that in their piedness shares / With great creating Nature’, he cleverly (and famously) turns this argument inside out:

Say there be,
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean. So over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes.

I’m not conversant with 17c French dramatic criticism, but I can’t imagine that Racinians would endorse such a radical aesthetic. Whereas it would certainly have appealed to Lawrence.

Thank you deeply, Damian, for what followers have described to me in emails as a ‘beautiful’ and ‘illuminating’ post. I’m honoured to have been able to publish it on Calderonia so many years after you first delivered it viva voce to the D.H. Lawrence Society. In my view, it says important things about the novel and more generally about the ‘paradox’, as you call it (and I agree), ‘underlying much of Lawrence’s work’.

About forty pages after the reference to A Winter’s Tale, Lawrence has Clifford Chatterley read aloud Racine and conclude ‘in a declamatory voice’ that ‘one gets all one wants out of Racine. Emotions that are ordered and given shape are more important than disorderly emotions. […] The modern world has only vulgarised emotion by letting it loose. What we need is classic control’. Do you think Lawrence expected us to take this contrast between (English) Shakespeare and (French) Racine seriously?

Thank you for the extra little asides here. It does show no matter how long a thread is on, it eventually does continue to be seen. I hesitated before adding the little I had here after so long, but it seems it was worthwhile, and that’s always good. Thanks again for the other details. I just ordered two books by Mr Pym from Abebooks, one is coming from Norway and only printed in an edition of 100: A Tour Round my Bookshelves, 1891, so I’ll enjoy reading that when it arrives.

Michael Barlow expands with some telling details on a guest post I wrote five years ago. The post concerned a story, jotted down as a child of eight, by my great-uncle Julian, an invalid naturalist, and later embellished and published by his ‘beloved friend’ the humourist Anstey Guthrie. The artist whose monogram Mr Barlow mentions was Molly B. Evans, a friend of Horace Pym, Julian’s father, and an occasional guest at his home. As well as designing Julian’s bookplate, reproduced in my original post with its lively array of reptiles and amphibians, Molly Evans painted an oil portrait of Julian’s sister Carol and one of Julian himself, aged seventeen. Julian died in 1898, one month after his twenty-first birthday.

I have a presentation copy of Happy Thoughts by Francis Burnand the onetime editor of Punch, the book was presented to Julian Tindale Pym by his father “From his fondly loving old dad” August 6th 1891. There is also a letter from the author of the book Burnand dated 1894 sent from the Royal Bath and Cliff Hotel, Bournemouth, addressed to “Dear Pym” which mentions the boy: “…as the air taken must mean that your boy is better…” He then mentions Guthrie as someone who is “chock full of anecdotes” and they will be coming down — “expect the cavalry” — and signed F. C. Burnand. There is also an ex-libris bookplate similar to the one above with the artist’s monogram in the bottom right of Julian’s. I may find out who this is as it looks professional enough to be able to trace the artist. (I’ll try to come back to it.) I believe Julian died aged 20 in 1898, which I don’t think was mentioned above?

Happy Thoughts is a gem of a funny book and well worth buying a copy, it beats the heck by a mile out of Three Men in a Boat and other late Victorian humorous works.

I thank you, Catherine, for providing a bit more substance to my suspicion that Lawrence preferred not to look some writers, whom he found were too close to him, straight in the eyes. And I thank you, Patrick, for forwarding John Worthen’s observation about how little of Blake’s work we can be certain Lawrence read. No doubt (to pursue the same argument) it is possible to ‘look away’ self-protectively even before reading, if you fear that your toes might get trodden on.

The other way is to do as Lawrence did in the case of Hardy: read all (the novels), praise to the skies for some things, but with a bracing counterweight of adverse criticism. And Lawrence was always pretty good at that.

And yes Patrick to your distinguishing between the place of Christ in their different systems. Lawrence I think loved his Christ as a somewhat unruly disciple; whereas for Blake, Jesus is treated with less respect, made to fall in line with the Blakeian menagerie…sometimes appearing more like one of those Hindu gods of infinite metamorphosis.

Thank you, Patrick, on behalf of stroke sufferers everywhere, for publishing Edna’s Diary. I ordered my copy on Amazon and it arrived very promptly and was a pleasure to read. But what I had not expected from the description on Calderonia was just quite how ‘cute’ this book is to handle. It is a little gem, the perfect non-threatening size to be read by or out loud to anyone, and Edna comes across as a lovely person, observant, empathetic, determined…and blessedly ordinary. She must have been a wonderful next-door neighbour. The NHS should be investing in a copy of her diary for everyone in stroke recovery!

‘It has even occurred to me, in a weak moment, to suspect that Lawrence deliberately avoided such references, because he didn’t want to be caught up in Blake’s wake, in the slipstream; the similarities being too close for his intellectual comfort.’ I’ve certainly had very much the same feeling — in what I don’t think was a weak moment — about the fact that L’s comments on Anna Karenina are exclusively about Anna and her plot, and not at all about Levin and his, despite — perhaps because of — the similarities between Lawrence and Levin, as therefore also between Lawrence and Tolstoy. Certainly, he explicitly attacked writers that he felt a bit too close to, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky included. But it seems a reasonable (if not provable) hypothesis that when he didn’t do that, he instead chose silence.

Patrick: as a dilatory footnote to the link between Lawrence and Blake touched on in the pieces on Women in Love, back in April, may I express my perplexity with the fact that despite the evident overlap between not only their ideas but in the very structuring of their ideas — the dynamic oppositions — there is so little reference to Blake in Lawrence’s writings; or, from what I can remember of the biographies I’ve read, in his recorded conversation. I have not trawled the novels in search; but there is no essay on Blake, and there are only a dozen references in the eight volumes of letters. Most of these refer to Blake’s paintings, in the context of the seizure of Lawrence’s own in 1928; only once does Lawrence refer to Blake’s written work, writing (to the Brewsters, in December 1925) ‘I am never very fond of abstract poetry, not even Blake’ (V, 356). This at least implies he’d read Blake, but doesn’t give much away. And Lawrence goes on to say here, about Brewster’s own poems, that what is strange and mysterious ‘can’t be put…in a brief, rhyming poem’; a judgement surely contradicted by Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ and indeed the Songs of Innocence and Experience.

I would be delighted to be better informed on this subject by one of your more erudite readers; or indeed, to have another viewpoint on the overlap itself. It has even occurred to me, in a weak moment, to suspect that Lawrence deliberately avoided such references, because he didn’t want to be caught up in Blake’s wake, in the slipstream; the similarities being too close for his intellectual comfort. But I don’t really believe this kind of critical plot-theory. Is there a simpler solution: that the omnivorous Lawrence had not read as much Blake as one assumes he must have done? Though ‘The Lemon Gardens’ chapter from Twilight in Italy seems struck from the same flint as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell…

Wow, thanks for these extremely detailed articles about your journey in typesetting a book!

If we use Amazon’s template doc with sample content and just replace that, is that cheating (:

Tex seems really powerful (and I’ve heard about it before), but I think for my uses maybe I will not need too much custom formatting. I’ve also heard “don’t use Word for formatting books!” but guess what tool I am experimenting using…

I don’t remember if I ever wrote about this, but for my first two e-books I used Sigil to manually edit the content. It was fun, but also tedious ):

A rather more youthful book on the recovery from stroke was written by a school contemporary of mine, Robert McCrum, My Year Off: Recovering Life After a Stroke, published in 1998.

Wonderful to hear from you again, Jenny. Thank you so much!

I’m certainly going to buy & read Edna’s Diary! Thanks for writing the blog.

Fascinating. The Breadalby discussion of translation is indeed a spoof, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not at all a spoof of English translations of Russian literature, but solely of the ‘quite intellectual and artificial’ kind of talk that went on at Garsington etc. — elsewhere described as ‘The talk went on like a rattle of small artillery, always slightly sententious, with a sententiousness that was only emphasised by the continual crackling of a witticism, the continual spatter of verbal jest, designed to give a tone of flippancy to a stream of conversation that was all critical and general, a canal of conversation rather than a stream. The attitude was mental and very wearying. Only the elderly sociologist [based on Bertrand Russell], whose mental fibre was so tough as to be insentient, seemed to be thoroughly happy’. Ursula is therefore not elevated, on the novel’s terms, by her contribution to the discussion; she is just — unusually for her — swept along by it.

There are two particular reasons for thinking this:

a) Lawrence cared very little about translation. He scarcely ever comments on whose translation of anything he reads, and — despite practising translation himself — has remarkably little to say about it. The conversation illustrates his distance from, rather than proximity to, its subject.

b) Lawrence was highly irritated by the Russian Craze, and Women in Love was written during its height. Therefore a discussion of translations of Russian literature was an obvious target for his satire (which is however, by his standards, extremely mild here).

Thanks for the further Hampstead details!

Mike, many many thanks for picking this up! Yes, I think you are right, the so-called quotation in ‘Breadalby’ could be an echo mischievously mangled by Lawrence from the very first page of the novel. There, in your translation, for the benefit of non-Russian readers, the sentence you have quoted reads: ‘The servant, in whom everything, from the turquoise ring in his ear, to the pomaded, dyed hair and deferential body language, marked him out as a member of the newest, most advanced generation, cast a supercilious look along the road and replied: “Nothing at all, sir. Not a sign.”‘ I remember there is a reference to ‘Bazarof’ in Lawrence’s The Trespasser (1912); presumably he had read Fathers and Children in Constance Garnett’s translation of 1895. Does anyone out there have more details about his reading of Turgenev?

I wonder if this is some mangled version of the words which conclude this paragraph on the first page of the novel: I can’t find Bazarov throwing/casting eyes/looks or anything else!
Слуга, в котором все: и бирюзовая сережка в ухе, и напомаженные разноцветные волосы, и учтивые телодвижения, словом, все изобличало человека новейшего, усовершенствованного поколения, посмотрел снисходительно вдоль дороги и ответствовал: «Никак нет-с, не видать».

Thank you Patrick for your intriguing reflections on Calderon and Lawrence as both Edwardians – of a rather different colour. Or stripe. I guess there would be material here for an Imaginary Conversation between the two of them; though this might well become truculent, on both sides. I don’t have the resources to do it, but who knows; someone better informed may pick up on the idea.

Meanwhile, a tiny grammatical point about the conversation you quote from Women in Love, on translations from Turgenev. My wife Madeleine points out (what I, along with the Cambridge editors, hadn’t noticed) that Hermione’s brother Alexander makes a blundering error in his reconstruction of a French intermediary between Russian and English: ‘Bazarov ouvra la porte…’ This should of course be ‘ouvrit la porte’. We may have to wait for the Pléiade Lawrence for the lapse to be properly recorded.

Thank you both for shedding so much light on Lawrence and religion. Damian appositely collocates Blake with Lawrence in his Comment, and this irritates the only question I have remaining about the topic: how do Lawrence’s and Blake’s placings of Jesus differ? As Catherine has said, ‘Christ is a reference point in all of Lawrence’s religious exploration’; indeed after reading her article I almost feel Lawrence was morbidly obsessed with Christ. But if Christ was a/the cynosure for Lawrence, Blake seems thoroughly confused in his placing of him: at the end of ‘The Gates of Paradise’, for instance, we are told that Satan is ‘Worship’d by the names of Jesus and Jehovah’. I have never understood this.

Patrick, and Catherine: I’ve now re-read your Post, Catherine’s Comment (and her Chapter), and your sub-Comment; so am ready to append my own sub-sub-Comment. Especially as it is now Easter Sunday morning, and last night I watched/listened to a complete performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion on French TV (from Versailles). For a moment, this made me feel like the faithful altar-boy I once was.

What kind of religious writer was Lawrence? I have to agree with Patrick that he was a ‘secular’ one in the sense that he was a maverick or freebooter in the field. As a short cut into the subject, I looked up the entries under Religion in my Index to Phoenix, and was impressed by the consistency of Lawrence’s position in these essays. The base-line is always the idea that true religious feeling lies too deep to be appropriated; it cannot be codified (least of all moralized) but only lived. (Didn’t Yeats write somewhere that we can never know the truth, only live it?) Any attempt to construct religion ends up with just scaffolding (I think of Notre Dame!); we are on the way to where ‘Priests in black gowns / Are doing their rounds, / Binding with briars / My joys and desires.’ Just as the ‘wave-tip of life,’ on which Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’ hinges and balances precariously, cannot be arrested — not even by Hokusai! — when the word, which is always moving in Lawrence, pulsating, contributing to and surrendering to a larger rhythm, becomes the Word, to be graven and inscribed; ‘He that takes joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sunrise; / He that would the bird decoy / Doth the winged life destroy.’

Incidentally, it is very dishonest of Eliot to suggest — in the passage Catherine quotes — that Lawrence was seeking to engage with the ‘lowest’ (rather than the ‘deepest’) level of consciousness; with that one treacherous word shovelling on a whole alien value-system. Eliot struggled with Lawrence as Lawrence struggled with Christ — or Satan. At the same time, he was honest enough to be disturbed by, afraid of what Lawrence represented, and so to lash out on occasion in a kind of desperate reflex.

I was happy to be reminded by Catherine that Lawrence saw The Rainbow as ‘a kind of Bible for the English people’. (A very Unauthorized Version!) And Patrick reminds us that The Rainbow is an Old Testament novel, thickly sown with references, just as Women in Love (with Birkin/Christ) has more of a New Testament atmosphere — although one of the titles Lawrence entertained, Dies Irae, also points towards the Apocalypse, and the ‘end-of-the-world feeling’ that Lawrence also attributed to the novel.

But what, meanwhile, of Christ? I understand ‘The Man Who Died’ as a kind of settling of accounts with Christ: the Christ by whom Lawrence was haunted all his life (I profit from Catherine’s many pertinent citations). In the end, Lawrence had to incorporate this Christ, include him in his own imaginative universe. While the other, suffering and sacrificial Christ is (gently but firmly) rejected: as Yeats rejected von Hugel (‘So get you gone, von Hugel, though with blessings on your head’). And as for immortality: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ The true Lawrentian immortality is that conferred and guaranteed by love, as sublimely invoked by Cleopatra: ‘I have immortal longings in me.’

This Comment is long enough, though I would like to have added some reaction to reading Catherine’s chapter, referred to at the end of her Comment, which is indeed rich in reference and wholly relevant to the theme you have introduced. I liked Baldick’s idea of Leavis as St Paul to Lawrence’s Christ; and was much taken with the ‘BD’ Lawrence, armed with sabre and pistol against the modern world. Obviously, a lot has been happening in Lawrence criticism since I gave up on it twenty years ago — though I must admit that the idea of a vegan Lawrence ‘tempts my risibility’. I should be better informed, and chastened.

Thank you indeed for sharing this extract with us, Catherine, and I do appreciate why you ask your question. I had never seen this writing of Eliot’s before. It is interesting, but strangely depressing, as Eliot in ‘clerical cut’ usually is.

I agree with you that he seems to call Lawrence ‘secular’ because Lawrence is not Christian in Eliot’s sense of the term. But I feel he also applies the adjective because of what he sees as Lawrence’s interest in observing religions quasi-anthropologically.

I myself used ‘secular’ in a far more basic sense, I’m afraid. I remember that I first wrote ‘Lawrence as a religious writer’, but then feared readers would take that to mean ‘writing from within a religion’, especially an established one. I agree with you that Lawrence was a religious writer tout court — he wrote about the human need for religion as such — but I still think there is a case for stressing that he was writing about Christianity (the particular focus of my post) from outside any established form. Thus, for instance, Pavel Florensky (a Russian Orthodox priest), or John Robinson (an Anglican bishop) are what one might call ‘religious religious’ writers, but Bakhtin or Kierkegaard are ‘secular’ religious writers as neither of them regarded himself as a member of his national church. I’d go so far as to say a ‘secular’ religious writer explores other people’s belief whereas the ‘religious religious’ writer has a ‘religion’.

I will say this for Eliot’s essay: it sent me back to Mornings in Mexico after sixty years, and the chapter ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ really is as fine Eliot says. But the answers on this subject, as far as I can see, are all embedded in your magnificent article, which I strongly recommend Calderonians to read by following the link at the bottom of Catherine’s Comment.

An extremely beautiful post Patrick; thank you.

Just one quibble: your description of Lawrence as a ‘(secular) religious writer’. What is the first adjective doing here?

T.S. Eliot, near the end of the 1937 essay extracted below, also describes him as a ‘secular’ religious writer (asterisks around important bits my additions):

‘before making my concluding observations, I shall consider one man who cannot be omitted, an Englishman who cannot be duplicated or replaced by a specimen from any other country, whose position is unique, and whose peculiar attitude towards Christianity does not seem to me to have been quite correctly estimated. That is D. H. Lawrence.

… With these two odd handicaps — the will against Christianity that was a residue of childhood and adolescence, and the temperament of uneducation — Lawrence started out on a lifelong search for a religion.

Whatever his disadvantages, a man of the ability of Lawrence, and with such an addiction, can be of very great value indeed; and *it is as an investigator of the religious life — as a kind of contemplative rather than a theologian — that he seems to me to take a high place with most right*. People have deplored the spoiling of the remarkable novelist of Sons and Lovers for the making of a medicine man; but much as I admire that rather sickly and morally unintelligible book, I find the medicine man much more important than the novelist. …

I think of Lawrence neither as an artist, nor as a man who failed to be an artist; I think of him, as I have suggested, as *a researcher into religious emotion*. And unless we see him as this, we are apt to attach too much importance to his views on sex and on society, to his psychological extravaganzas, and to personal peculiarities which may account for his aberrations.

… Lawrence had a really extraordinary capacity for being exacerbated by the modern world of enlightenment and progress, whether in a Midland mining village or in metropolitan intellectual society. This world was his nightmare; he wanted a world in which religion would be real, not a world of church congresses and religious newspapers, not even a world in which a religion could be believed, but *a world in which religion would be something deeper than belief, in which life would be a kind of religious behaviourism*. Hence the prancing Indians, who, in Mornings in Mexico, inspired some of his finest and most brilliant writing. He wished to go as low as possible in the scale of human consciousness, in order to find something that he could assure himself was real.

…The attempt is fundamentally chimerical. We do not feel that Lawrence really got inside the skin of his Hopis, nor would we wish him to do so, because he was a civilized and sensitively conscious man, and his Indians, one feels, are pretty stupid. He merely gave a marvellous record of how the Indians affected Lawrence. Yet his mistaken attempt was the result of an awareness of something very important. He was aware that religion is not, and can never survive as, simply a code of morals. It has not even much meaning to say that religion is ‘good’. Other things are good or bad in relation to one’s religion. If (I think he would have said) you find you can only accept an ‘evil’ religion, then for God’s sake do, for that is far nearer the truth than not having any. For what the evil religion has in common with the good is more important than the differences; and it is more important really to feel terror than to sing comminatory psalms. So he set himself, by an immense effort of will — the same effort that the Christian has to make towards a different end — to believe in nature spirits, and to try to worship stocks and stones. And with the same perseverance he set himself to an attitude of scepticism towards science, for he saw that science only provides a relative truth, and as we cannot know the relations, we do better — the contemporary mind being what it is — to deny it altogether than to accept it as an absolute which it is not.

The religion of Lawrence can be a useful criterion for us in testing the reality of our own faith: it can serve as a constant reminder that Christianity is frightening, frightful and scandalous to that secular mind which we are all compelled to some extent to share. But *for itself, it remains on the level of secularism, because it remains a religion of power and magic*. Or rather, the religion which Lawrence would have liked to achieve is a religion of power and magic, of control rather than propitiation. What he, being a civilized man, actually arrived at, was, of course, only a religion of autotherapy. It was like the restless search of the hypochondriac for a climate in which he can be cured, or in which at least he can bear his ailments more easily. Perhaps there is this motive in all of us, but if so, at least we can hope that our being aware of it helps to keep it in its place. We can cry, Thou son of David, have mercy on me, but we can be healed only if our faith is stronger even than our desire to be healed.’

For Eliot, Lawrence is ‘secular’ because he is not Christian in Eliot’s sense of the term. But Christ is a reference point in all of Lawrence’s religious explorations. And for these explorations the adjective ‘secular’, to me, jars. Nothing was secular to Lawrence.

Finally, here’s a little more on Lawrence and Christ, in case of interest to anyone: https://catherinebrown.org/d-h-lawrence-icon/

Utopia did, I believe, have children who were adorned with jewels relinquished upon maturity. Thanks as ever for stirring my mind.
x Jill

Dear Damian, thank you so much for taking all this trouble to attend to my entirely speculative passing point about Lawrence and children. Your Comment brilliantly addresses it. Of course, I am never happy attributing something in one historical period to a cause in a later historical period (‘having children in the war years’). But I can well imagine that Lawrence enjoyed the company of children. It occurs to me also that his TB might have affected his fertility. I agree with you, the relationship between Tom Brangwen and Anna as a child is ‘on another plane’. I would never deny it: Lawrence is a great writer. Thanks again for all your Comments, Patrick

Patrick: a point about Lawrence and children. It’s true that Birkin inveighs (somewhere in the novel: I haven’t looked for it) against people having children; but this is part of his general pessimism, and especially in the war years — having children is simply deathly. This is part of the ‘bitterness…to be understood’, I think.

Lawrence himself, in his own life, was unambiguous. He wrote to Frieda on 15 May 1912: ‘I want you to have children to me’, and explicitly rejected the idea of ‘interfering there’ (Marie Stopes style) when people were in love — and preferably married? There never were children between them; but Lawrence grew to have a good (if tempestuous) relationship with Frieda’s children, and by all accounts was very good value with children generally.

There is surely nothing more movingly depicted than the relationship between Tom Brangwen and Lydia’s child Anna in The Rainbow. And it’s important to remember that at the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie is pregnant by Mellors. This is Lawrence’s last fictional word on the subject!

Laurence Brockliss’s latest post has certainly addressed the two questions about marriage that I asked in my introductory one to this series on Women in Love. It’s addressed them so effectively that I now find those questions rather half-baked!

Taking the second one first — ‘Were there no happy Edwardian marriages?’ — I appreciate Brockliss’s explanation that there just isn’t the intimate documentation to quantify happiness in Victorian/Edwardian marriages. I should have thought of this, since it is broadly confirmed by my own experience of personal archives from the Edwardian period. Moreover, no-one did then what could presumably be done today, namely commission a mass poll with the question ‘Do you consider your marriage happy?’.

On the other hand, Brockliss concludes from his data-crunching that ‘most couples chose sensibly’ and ‘mésalliances were uncommon’. I assume, from his next sentence and his stance as a social historian, that by mésalliances he means ‘socially and financially unsuitable combinations’, although he will be well aware that to most people the word will mean ‘unhappy or temperamentally unworkable combinations’. Even given the fact that ‘divorce was a possibility only for the rich’, Brockliss’s conclusion about mésalliances would suggest that a majority of Victorian/Edwardian marriages were happy, or at least successful in terms of duration and children.

This in turn suggests that the institution of marriage itself was successful, which casts a searching light on my first question, which was ‘Is there any substance to Birkin’s critique of contemporary marriage, or is it guff?’.

The searching light quickly led me to realise that Birkin doesn’t criticise the institution of marriage itself at all. On the contrary, he seems sufficiently impressed by it to make ‘sex-marriage’ — a sexually complete partnership with one woman for life — his ideal. Neither he nor Ursula can wait to get married ‘by law’ as well. His belief in marriage, I gather, is something that feminists hold against Lawrence.

Nevertheless, I find the view of other people’s marriages presented in Women in Love both warped and bleak. I agree, of course, with Damian Grant in his last Comment that The Rainbow actually celebrates two ‘conventional’ marriages. But in Women in Love the marriages of Will and Anna Brangwen and Thomas and Christiana Crich are seen through their children’s eyes as having petered out in procreation, the nine to five, material wealth and falling asleep by the fire. It is this, and not the institution of marriage, that Birkin inveighs against at the beginning of chapter 16: ‘The thought of love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive. He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were’ (etcetera).

And whereas Laurence Brockliss showed in his previous guest post that some Late Victorians and Edwardians were consciously choosing not to have children, procreation is a strong thread and gauge of happiness/success in his present one. The Rainbow is full of children, but I think I am right in saying that no-one of Ursula’s generation in Women in Love aspires to having any. Lawrence may, I assume, have meant to suggest that after her terrible miscarriage in The Rainbow Ursula could not conceive again. But there is no indication that Birkin wants children. I do not know the real reasons that Lawrence and Frieda remained childless (a fact that worried Leavis), but I don’t think one can deny that both Birkin and Lawrence were utopians. There is no place in a utopia for children. Utopia is by definition perfect; children want to change things. As Sylvia Plath wrote, ‘Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children’.

Like Patrick, I must thank Professor Brockliss for his very meaty post. One could make many a good meal out of it, but I will confine myself to a few salient points.

How did Tolstoy know (he asks), about happy and unhappy families? He knew by intuition, which is another kind of knowledge to that which historians and social scientists represent — and naturally defend, as somehow of superior validity. But remember Blake’s relevant observation: ‘What is now proved was once imagined.’ Who is to say that intuition is inferior to demonstration? Not I, anyway, for what it’s worth. As Freud remarked, Sophocles and Shakespeare ‘intuited’ the Oedipus complex long before his own case studies. And Freud held the poetic imagination in great respect.

Brockliss himself remarks, giving the unusual details of the Symonds household, that ‘what [Symonds’ wife] thought of their relationship remains a closed book’. Precisely; and what the novelist tries to do is to write that closed book for us. (As does Pat Barker, in her rewriting of Homer in The Silence of the Girls.)

Our author also claims to have ‘a deeper understanding of our 5,000 marriages’ thanks to the social situations which have been studied. This depends on what is being understood. (Personally, I would trust Tolstoy.) A diet of data may simply not be nourishing; as Mr Gradgrind’s educational programme based only on ‘facts’ risks constipation in the children.

A second point I would take up is where Professor Brockliss says that the novel deals typically with courtship rather than marriage. Typically, yes; but there are enough marriages studied in fiction to question this as a generality. (As early as Henry Fielding’s Amelia, for example.) And surely no-one can accuse Lawrence himself of neglecting the subject, when The Rainbow studies two marriages closely; those of Tom and Lydia, and Will and Anna. Of Tom Brangwen this is Lawrence’s summary (I quote from memory): ‘This was what his life amounted to: the long marital embrace with his wife.’ And we get snapshots from later on in the marriage of Will and Anna, in Women in Love itself, especially the conflict between the two grown daughters and their parents. The very intimate study of marriage-in-action that we find in Lawrence’s plays is another matter; but should be allowed to feed back into the argument.

If the social scientist finds more sustenance in Bennett, Gissing, and Galsworthy than in what Lawrence offers, then that is hard luck on the social scientist (and on social science). The Old Wives’ Tale, as I remember, ends with a dog’s dinner; and that’s about as much sustenance as it provides.

Unusually, I am going to make two separate Comments on this erudite and entertaining post; this is the first.

As with Professor Brockliss’s previous guest posts, he has radically revised a conventional wisdom about our Victorian/Edwardian ancestors, and he has done it using objective, statistical data. How many times have I heard people say that our forebears had very limited opportunities to meet members of the other sex, and therefore predominantly married the girl next door, the lad in the next field, or a cousin? It makes a huge difference to learn that ‘in fact these provincial worlds were remarkably open’, and to read about examples, even if their matrimonial life is still inscrutable.

Brockliss’s revision certainly applies to my own maternal and paternal ancestors, who were not professionals but lower down the ladder. The Victorian patriarchs in my family were policemen in Kent or farm labourers in Hampshire, and their families had been there since the late eighteenth century if not earlier. But at least half of their children married and settled hundreds of miles away (particularly in London), whilst the other half stayed put.

Again as Laurence Brockliss says, how my Victorian patriarchs’ children who moved and married far away met their spouses, we don’t usually know. However, my private theory is that it was a function of the different nature of travel in those days. A neighbour rang me yesterday evening after spending a day on business in Leeds; he had driven there from Cambridge and back in a day. People in the nineteenth century — it always comes as a surprise — travelled equally long distances on business, or in search of work, but of course they did not return the same day. I have the impression they often stayed just long enough to fall in love… That was certainly the case with a great-grandfather of mine who was an ‘excavator’ born in Cornwall and wed in Lambeth.