English 272D
Wollaeger, Fall 1998David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930)
Long manuscript, The Sisters, 1913 -> The Rainbow (1916) and Women in Love; working title at one stage: "Dies Irae," or "The Day of Wrath"
Other important dates: 1913, Sons and Lovers; 1924, Receives ranch in Taos, New Mexico and hopes to start a utopian community there named Rananim (a longstanding desire); 1928, Lady Chatterly's Lover, put on trial for obsenity
E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), chap. 33:
      "Why has not England a great mythology? Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our country-side have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here. It has stopped with the witches and fairies. It cannot vivify one fraction of a summer field, or give names to half a dozen stars. England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk."
DHL to J. B. Pinker, 16 Dec. 1915, re. Lawrence's new work, The Rainbow:
      "Tell Arnold Bennett that all rules of construction hold good only for novels which are copies of other novels. A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction, and what he calls faults, he being an old imitator, I call characteristics. I shall repeat till I am grey – when they have as good a work to show, they may make their pronouncements ex cathedra. Till then, let them learn decent respect."
To Edward Garnett, 5 June 1914:
      "You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond – but I say, "Diamond, what! This is carbon." And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.)"
Filippo Marinetti on the aim of futurist art, Futurist Manifesto (1909):Â
      ". . . to break with the past and its academic culture and to celebrate technology, dynamism, and power."To Catherine Carswell, 7 November 1916:
      "I also think that America, being so much worse, falser, further gone than England, is nearer to feedom. England has a long and awful process of corruption and death to go through. America has almost dry-rotted to the point where the final seed of the new is almost left ready to sprout."
Some Lawrentian "Doctrine"
To Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, 8 Dec. 1915:
      I have been reading Frazer's Golden Bough and Totemism and Exogamy. Now I am convinced of what I believed when I was about twenty–that there is another seat of consciousness than the brain and the nerve system: there is a blood-consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary mental-consciousness, which depends on the eye as its source or connector. There is the blood-consciousness, with the sexual connection holding the same relation as the eye, in seeing, holds to the mental-consciousness. One lives, knows, and has one's being in the blood, without any reference to nerves and brain. This is one half of our life, belonging to the darkness. And the tragedy of this our life, and of your life, is that the mental and nerve-consciousness exerts a tyranny about the blood-consciousness, and is engaged in the destruction of your blood-being or blood-consciousness, the final liberating of the one, which is only death in result. Plato was the same. Now it is necessary for us to realise that there is this other great half of our life active in the darkness, the blood-relationship: that when I see, there is a connection between my mental-consciousness and an outside body, forming a percept; but at the same time there is a transmission through the darkness which is never absent from the light, into my blood-consciousness: but in seeing, the blood-percept is perhaps too strong. On the other hand, when I take a woman, then the blood-percept is supreme, my blood-knowing is overwhelming. There is a transmission, I don't know of what , between her blood & mine, in the act of connection. So that afterwards, even when she goes away, the blood-consciousness persists between us, when the mental-consciousness is suspended; and I am formed then by my blood-consciousness, not by my mind or nerves at all.       Similarly in the transmission from the blood of the mother to the embryo in the womb, there goes the whole blood-consciousness. And when they say a mental image is sometimes transmitted from the mother to the embryo, this is not the mental image, but the blood-image. All living things, even plants, have a blood being. If a lizard falls on the breasts of a pregnant woman, then the blood-being of the lizard passes with a shock into the blood-being of the woman, and is transferred to the fetus, probably without intervention either of nerve or brain-consciousness. And this is the origin of totem: and for this reason some tribes no doubt were kangaroos: they contained the blood-knowledge of the kangaroo.–And blood knowledge comes either through the mother or through the sex–so that dreams at puberty are as good an origin of the totem as the percept of a pregnant woman.       This is very important to our living, that we should realise that we have a blood-being, a blood-consciousness, a blood-soul, complete and apart from the mental and nerve-consciousness.
From DHL's essay "The Crown" (1915):
"And there is no rest, no cessation from the conflict [of life]. For we are two opposites which exist by virtue of our inter-opposition. Remove the opposition and there is a collapse, a sudden crumbling into universal darkness."A gloss on "Mooney"
From his essay "Poetry of the Present" (1915?):Â
"there is another kind of poetry; the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no round, consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the unfinished tide."