Professor David Peimer
D.H. Lawrence
Professor David Peimer - D.H. Lawrence
- I’m going to dive into this remarkable, strange, mysterious, passionate, little bit crazy, fantastic individual called David Herbert Lawrence, and some of his books, and look at a couple of clips of the Ken Russell film, Women in Love, and look a little bit at his life. And then I’m going to also talk about, show some of his actual writing with, which is read by Ian McKellen from different parts of his work. And then later, a couple of clips specifically from the superb Ken Russell film with Glenda Jackson, Oliver Reed, Alan Bates, etc., Women in Love. I’m going to talk more about Women in Love than any other of his works, because obviously I’d rather do less is more and go into more depth with Lawrence, and that book and that film in particular, and less about the others. So, and what I think… And look at this question of, does Lawrence still endure? Does he fascinate today? Is he already…? Is it nostalgic looking back? Does he belong to that end of Victorian First World War era specifically? Is he bound by that, that particular period in history and literature? Or does he transcend it and does he speak to us today? And if so, what can we connect with this guy and his writing? It’s beyond, well, I’m sure, we all studied, or many of us studied at university or wherever else about him. And there were two articles in particular that have really helped. The one is by the wonderful English poet, Blake Morrison, the contemporary poet, which I’ve adapted a little bit from a couple of ideas. And the other is from the fantastic the Jewish English writer, Howard Jacobson, who has a superb essay also on Lawrence, and of course, there are some others as well.
So I want to acknowledge those honestly upfront and share with you. So as we dive in, I think if there’s one word, as I was thinking about this for today, there’s one word that really captures D.H. Lawrence, umm, 100 years later from his early beginning certainly. It would be the word “desire” in contemporary terms. Obviously, passion, primal forces, nature, sensuality, sexuality, everything, all of it, all of it comes in. But I think the word “desire” in so many ways is a broader word. And I think it really, it captures for me all of those, those other phrases and all the nuances, the mysteries, the strangeness, the non-rationality, the hunger, the fear, the apprehension. All these qualities around this word “desire” and trying to figure out how we position ourselves in our own personal lives, in our immediate personal lives, in our communities, in our countries, and in our period in history, or how does it play out in a more nuanced way. And I think that for me is what Lawrence really grapples with underneath everything. Obviously all those other qualities I mentioned, of passion and sexuality, sensuality, all of that, the gladiatorial combat between men and women, between men and men, women and women, all, between parent and child, and generations, classes. It all, that gladiatorial combat I think plays itself out as well, but inside it is for me this notion of desire. So what I want to do is just start a little bit, I’m sure many people know a lot about his life, so I’m going to deal with that fairly pretty briefly.
But we can’t underestimate, if we imagine going back 110 years ago, and imagine him in England growing up in Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner. This is at the height of British Empire, and it’s shortly before the First World War that is coming to crash down and the terrifying reality of it. And what he is actually doing in that context, he’s not from Oxbridge, he’s not from the elite universities, and so on. And his upbringing is so, is by its own definition, I suppose would be othered in his own time. It’s the censorship trials, the portrayals of sexuality, the accusations about obscenity and all these things, which we know only too well today, and how long it really lasted. And yet for this guy to carry on writing, keep going, not stopping. In fact it galvanised him I think more and more. This sort of primal energy that he tapped inside himself with all his own contradictions and maverick complexities in a way. The Rainbow, one of his early novels was published in Britain in 1915, and all copies of that novel were burnt in England. They were actually physically burnt, not just banned. And it was banned for 11 years afterwards. I mean, we have to go imagine living in that time, and that’s what’s happening. The end of Lady Chatterley ban was only in 1960. So decades it was banned, obviously for its so-called sexually explicit nature, and so on. So, and obscenity. Hmm, got a comment. So Lawrence is highly controversial in his own time, he’s controversial after that, people are for and against him. He becomes very popular in the 60s, and then a lot of academia goes on to him, scholars up and down all the time.
Only we can diminish this for a second because he doesn’t choose, he doesn’t certainly not born with a silver spoon, and he doesn’t choose in a way to aspire to the life of silver spoon, and live it. As he said himself, when he went into voluntary exile and left England for good and started travelling all over the world: Australia, Malta, France, Italy, America, Mexico, New Mexico, he said, and I’m quoting him. He described it as a savage enough pilgrimage for himself. He was scorned, absolutely scorned. When you read back newspaper reports and many others at the time, he was scorned as a tasteless pornographer who only had a fair amount of success for erotica. In one phrase that captures it for me of a lot of what the, I suppose contemporary popular response to him was. So his formative years were in a coal mining town in Nottinghamshire, just a little bit outside of Nottingham is where he grows up. Father’s a coal miner, alcoholic, mother working… His mother mainly looking after the home, he’s incredibly domestic… You can imagine the repression for his mother, the father having the sweat, physical work of coal miner, and the stigma attached to it. And of course, the complexity of being working class at the time, of that superior-inferior dichotomy inside him, how he’s treated and how he sees himself. He became a teacher after studying at University College Nottingham. At that time it was linked to the University of London. Then he meets Frieda, who is six-years-older than him, and she was married to his professor. He was a professor of modern languages, a guy called Weeks. And she had three young children, and they eloped, so she leaves the three young children and leaves her professor husband, and they leave England, they go to Frieda’s parents’ home in Germany.
And she, interestingly, as a little bit of trivial pursuit, she is related to the Red Baron, the Baron von Richthofen. As you all know, he was the Red Baron, he was the German fighter ace in the First World War of aeroplanes. And of course, he led the squadron of planes, which Hermann Goring was a junior pilot in, interestingly. Anyway, he was the German ace in the First World War. That context of the First World War, and him being with a German woman, all of this feeds into his life, that he is choosing and living. It’s Anthony Burgess, and I’m going to play a couple of extracts from the wonderful British novelist, Anthony Burgess, who has a fantastic documentary. And that’s the one that Ian McKellen does some readings in. He talks about that in the 19th century, for him writers like Lawrence and others would’ve seen 19th century Victorian England almost as a search for natural man, which would be… Sorry, it would’ve been liberal man, the enlightenment, education, knowledge, learning, development of technology, liberal man in a way. And then later as a reaction to that, Lawrence is on a search for natural man, if you like. And I think that feeds into a lot of William Blake, and there’s a whole trajectory in English poetry and writing that follows that, these phrases of Anthony Burgess who wrote A Clockwork Orange, we all know the great Kubrick film. And he’s going for instinct and nature, it’s a bit like Hemingway comes a little bit afterwards as well. He dies before Hitler, he’s only 44, and he dies of TB. And I think he begins to see not only this conflict between liberal and nature, between Victorian England, and what’s after the horror and the catastrophe and the industrialization of warfare of the First World War.
But I think he almost sees in a way I think the savagely imperfect or savagely grotesque man that is coming in the 20th century or that emerges from the First into the Second World War, and what to do about it. For me, the other great writer, of course, is Kafka, who sees the automaton, human beings becoming automatons, and the reaction. So, and also Lawrence combines the complexity between being highly provincial and yet highly educated, and incredibly well read, so… And very knowledgeable about European, Russian literature, all of these things, but coming from that background, again, I have to stress going back 110, 120 years that he is growing up. He wrote books in Freudian psychoanalysis, one was called Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, fascinating interesting books. Another one was called the Fantasia of the Unconscious. And then, of course, as I mentioned, 1960 was when Lady Chatterley’s Lover is unbanned in England. And it was regarded as obscene up until then under the, what became the Obscene Publications Act. And the chief prosecutor at the trial in 1960, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, he asked in the court, he said, “Is this the kind of book that you would wish your wife or servant to read?” That phrase of the prosecutor brilliantly I think sums up the attitude that he is reacting to, of class, of stuffiness, of the repression, of emotion. Not just sexuality, but emotion, intuition, all of these, these deeper qualities. E.M. Forster called him the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation. F.R. Leavis said that he’s part of the great Oxbridge scholar who wrote the book, The Great Tradition, which in a sense crystallises the great tradition of the English novel and poetry. There’s Wordsworth, there’s Keats, there’s Shelley, there’s Byron, there’s Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, basically put them all into the cannon in that book of his, F.R. Leavis, and he puts Lawrence straight in there.
And Lawrence wrote, and this for me is one of the most fascinating phrases, “The trend of our civilization is towards a greater abstraction from the physical towards a physical separateness between men and women, between individual and individual.” And this for me is where he finds what I’m calling the role of desire. The trend of our civilization is towards a greater abstraction from the physical towards physical separateness between men and women, between individual and individual, an abstraction from the physical. So he doesn’t just say, look, I’m going to write about sex, I’m going to write about passion, or even desire, or erotica, anything like that, it’s the abstraction from the physical. Is it just a clever turn of phrase, which would be good in a marketing PR today? Or is it something really deeper in that thought? I think something pretty deep in it. Just three lines from one of his lovely poems. “O the stale old dogs who pretend to guard the morals of the masses, how smelly they make the great back-yard.” He’s writing these poetries understanding his times while he’s delving into the abstraction from the physical. Okay, if we can look at the next slide, please. So this is Lawrence and Frieda, the lady that I mentioned that he went off with. And for over 20 years, he travelled the world, lived with her. We all know, I’m sure, in particular Mexico, New Mexico, Australia, and so on, all around. So this is the passionate love affair for both of them, of their lives. Can we look at the next slide, please?
This is the Penguin version of Sons and Lovers, one of the very early novels, which I think is one of the great novels of him. It’s really the son-mother relationship, that addible conflict. And I think, I’m sure he read Freud, ‘cause he wrote these books in psychoanalysis. When he read, we don’t know; what he understood, we don’t know, but he certainly was in touch with developing thought of his own times in the early 1900s. 1913 is Sons and Lovers, and it is such a searing book of parent-child, of mother-son relationship, and so powerful. And I’m going to look at a couple of ideas about it, okay? If we can go on to the next slide, please. And then, of course, he writes in 1920, and this is over 100 years ago. He writes Women in Love; and of course, the superb Ken Russell film of it, with Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, and Jennie Linden. Okay, I’m going to show a couple of clips from that as well. If we go on to the next slide, please. I chose this because for me this is one of the iconic images from the movie. And I think it really captures something quite strong about Women in Love. The two relationships, and how these actors brilliantly I think portrayed the characters that were written. We have to remember, these are not real life, obviously these are fiction, these are characters. And I think so many people miss the point 'cause they try and understand pigeonhole Lawrence as, well, he’s just pornography or he’s just erotic or it’s just passion or it’s just class or… But I think it’s all of that, but there’s something of human nature and the complexities, the contradictions, the paradoxes of human nature in these two fundamental male-female relationships here in the book and in the film.
And I think Russell captures it, I really do, and I think he’s just captured. And this for me, when you look carefully at each of their faces and eyes and who is looking at who, where, what the body is, everything, where their perception and their passion is located is so specific, and I think beautifully framed, almost like a picture or a painting. It’s that ability of Lawrence in his writing, and that’s why I disagree that one can’t pigeonhole him because he understands writing from character and mood. And I don’t think he’s so obsessed with plot, it’s more about character and mood, and irrational, unconscious decisions we all make, impulsively and more thoughtfully in life. And that’s the reaction to what he called the old stable ego of Victorian literature. And it’s that he is stabilising of the imagined stable ego, in his phrase, that I think gives rise to his gladiatorial combativeness against the abstraction from the physical and diving into the passionate, and the emotional and the sexual. And for me it’s captured here, this is such a… It’s so erotic and sexual obviously, but it’s also going way deeper at its nature behind, but it’s at tamed nature with a hint of the tree in the background, which is not tamed. So it’s all these qualities are quite fragile in the film, and I think in this image. I don’t want to go overboard in it, as some scholars might. Okay, if we can have the next slide, please. And obviously in 1928, the book we all know, Lady Chatterley’s so well.
I’m not going to talk about Lady Chatterley today, I’m going to talk much more about Women in Love, a little bit about Sons and Lovers, because I think it’s been spoken about so much, and it’s impossible to deal with all these things in real depth, and I wouldn’t like to. Okay? This is 1928 again, nearly 100 years ago when it’s all written. Okay, I’d like to start with going into a little bit about his life. And this is the first piece from the Anthony Burgess documentary where Ian McKellen is reading from very early writings by Lawrence about growing up in the coal mining town just near Nottingham and his childhood adolescence. Okay? If we can show it, please.
[Ian] Men. It was enough for them that the earth heaved and opened its furrow to them, that the wind blew to dry the wet wheat, and set the young ears of corn wheeling freshly round about. So much warmth and generating and pain and death did they know in their blood, earth and sky and beast and green plants, that they lived full and surcharged, their senses full fed, their faces always turned to the heat of the blood, staring into the sun, dazed with looking towards the source of generation, unable to turn round.
At this point we literally reached the-
Hmm, we can hold it there.
The investigation. Lawrence wrote in-
Okay, thanks Hannah. So this is Anthony Burgess in the documentary. Hmm, so it just, it’s the beauty of that language is how, for me often when I read Thomas Hardy and some of the other Victorian writers, the great writers, even George Eliot, nature is almost a backdrop to the human drama that has been played out in the novels amongst the characters. But I think for Lawrence, and that’s why he’s coming the early 20th century, it’s the inner unconscious drives of the characters that nature is part of in a way. He sees that inside nature, it’s not a backdrop, it’s inside the passions, the desires of human beings who play out their lives in the drama of his books. And that for me is a huge shift between a lot of Victorian writing, and I know I’m generalising big about a lot of Victorian and early 20th century novels in the English language and others for that matter, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. It’s all about the inner life of character as opposed to characters with a backdrop almost. And we see the same change happening in theatre, we see it I think in certain art and certain other developments because the human, because societies in Europe and America and elsewhere are changing in that way to value in a life of the individual much more. And of course, ultimately Freudian, Jungian psychology, and so on. But that’s where the passions are, and nature is almost harnessed to help describe those passions. And those passions are put into nature, and nature is symbolic in those passions. So it’s very different to a kind of a backdrop.
And I think it took off in film and many other art forms as well. Okay, if we can go on to the next slide. Sorry, the next clip is Ian McKellen… Sorry, this is Anthony Burgess and Ian McKellen talking about the mining town where he grew up. You can show that, please.
Worked underground as a sort of intimate community. They knew each other practically naked, and with a curious close intimacy, and the darkness and the underground remoteness of the pit 'stall’, and the continual presence of danger, made the physical, instinctive, and intuitional contact between men very highly developed, a contact almost as close as touch, very real and very powerful. That physical awareness and intimate togetherness was at its strongest down pit. When the men came up into the light, they blinked, they had in a measure to change their flow. Nevertheless, they brought with them above ground the curious dark intimacy of the mine, the naked sort of contact. And if I think of my childhood, it is always as if there was a lustrous sort of inner darkness, like the gloss of coal, in which we moved and had our real being.
It’s an extraordinary phrase. If we think of my childhood, it’s almost like the coal, again, he’s making something of nature, the coal taken out of it that he’s… That’s the image that he’s choosing to talk about the inner darkness, the inner unknown qualities that we can’t put our fingers on. If I remember, it was Freud’s definition of the unconscious like a house where you could go through different rooms and somewhat dimly lit, a bit of a dim understanding of this room, of that, and as we delve into it. And I think either influenced by Freud or just his own instinct that he’s following, Lawrence. He’s using all these qualities to try and understand the life of a coal miner, of his father. And growing up in a small little town in Nottinghamshire, so different from so many of the other writers that we explore, and that I think we know pretty well. He was highly influenced by Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, which is fascinating because Tolstoy tries for me to battle with nature, also inside human nature, again, not as a backdrop. And it’s the inner life of character, the irrational motives, choices, decisions that ordinary humans we all make, and the contradictions, the paradoxes that are so human, all too human. But, and he praised Tolstoy enormously. These are guys who’ve… This guy, and many other, they’ve all read these people, the Russians and, they’ve all read each other all over. But I think it’s actually Dostoevsky that he’s deeper in touch with. Although he had an aversion to Dostoevsky certainly in a public way and in letters, because I think with Dostoevsky is almost too close to Lawrence. There’s a sense of modernism, this inner unconscious drive, passion, desires of characters, that is the true motivating force in human nature.
The old question going way back to Homer 2,500 years ago and way before that, and all elsewhere, what really drives us as humans? What drives our stories, our narratives, our communities, our nations, our lives, our choices, and has these inner irrational motives? And I think, again, he’s trying to bring back the physical inside this, the passionate and the physical. Again, anything to get away from this abstractness, this separateness from the physical between individuals, man and woman, and families, classes, everything. He also wrote that, and he said in one of his letters, “You mustn’t look in my novels for the old stable ego of the character.” So he’s using the word “ego”, Freud and other people using the word of the times. “You mustn’t look in my novels for the old stable ego.” In other words, you can’t compartmentalise it easily that the rational and the irrational even, it’s all… It’s got a murky origin. Murky and glorious, it’s shining and it’s dark, which is all the impulses coming from our unconscious in a way. Okay? And this for me is captured in him may… Trying to understand growing up, and we can imagine 100 years ago how tough it was, but his father was an alcoholic, but still how tough it was for this generation to work in coal mines in England at the time. Okay, so the next clip, which I want to show is about him, what he said, “I want to escape the jackals who are running this war, the First World War.” And he wrote Sons and Lovers, we can never forget while the Battle of the Somme was going on. The first day of the Battle of the Somme in the First World War, over 20,000 English soldiers alone were killed in one day, the greatest number in that war, greatest number in one day, were slaughtered. So this is all going on while he is writing Sons and Lovers, and he knows it completely. So he wants to get away from it, the war and after the war, and that’s when he begins with Frieda the restless search, I think with some meaning in any, or trying to understand the shattered civilization, and what to write and how, going to Australia. Okay, if we can show it, please.
His voyage of discovery, he visited many countries, and to all of them he brought the gifts that had been nurtured when he was a boy and a young man in Nottinghamshire, searching spirit, capacity for empathy, for entering into the life of people, places and things, a miraculous eye for notating the surface of nature. His feeling, his reverence for beasts and birds and fish and even plants is unmatched in the whole of English literature, unmatched even by Blake or by Wordsworth. This feeling for things is something that makes Lawrence quite exceptional. Even in his domestic life, while Frieda Lawrence lay in bed lazily smoking cigarettes, Lawrence scrubbed floors, got water from the well, chopped wood, prepared the meals, washed her underwear, picked figs. When he made a fire, the fire would always go.
So this is Anthony Burgess who had a fairly working class upbringing as well. A Clockwork Orange, of course, his great novel, we all know. Interestingly, as a side interest, interesting thought, or historical fact rather, is that Anthony Burgess’s own wife was viciously raped in London by a bunch of thugs, and its thought, that experience is what led him to write Clockwork Orange much later. But he reevaluated so many things in his own writing, and I think that profound deep connection between him and Lawrence and others, of course, comes out. And it certainly comes out in Anthony Burgess’s, for me in incisive understanding of Lawrence’s work. Okay, then he goes to Australia, which I want to show, and we’re going to include a bit from the poem, Kangaroo. If we can show it please, thanks.
Northern hemisphere life seems to leap at the air, or skim under the wind like stags on rocky ground, or pawing horses, or springy scut-tailed rabbits. But the yellow antipodal Kangaroo, when she sits up, who can unseat her, like a liquid drop that is heavy, and just touches the earth. The downward drip, the down-urge, so much denser than cold-blooded frogs. Her sensitive, long, pure-bred face, her full antipodal eyes, so dark, so big and quiet and remote, having watched so many empty dawns in silent Australia.
Is this nostalgic, mere romantic? Is it the ability to find words that still echo today 100 years later in trying to capture a moment in nature of a kangaroo jumping? Is it too detached to part of its times 100 years ago? And is it actually romanticising nature in Australia? Or is it just a, not just a childlike fascination, but a sense of the mystery and reminding us. I think it was Galileo who said the mystery question of, how are we here? Why are we here? What are we doing? Just taking us way back to these very old, old questions which have been going on for millennia. ‘Cause he’s trying to I think in some way, not only get away from his class upbringing in small little coal mining town, Nottinghamshire, and the repression of Victorian England, but he is trying to get away from the horrific catastrophe of that war, that First World War, industrialised, mechanised slaughter on a scale unseen and unheard of, to try and find something, some meaning somewhere. That’s what Burgess says, it’s the rejection of the desire for the liberal, what Burgess calls the liberal man towards a natural man. Are those glib phrases? Are those nostalgic, romantic? For us all to decide.
But I think there is something, there’s a yearning inside it, which is just so deeply human. There’s a restlessness in the searching in D.H. Lawrence 'cause he doesn’t fit, he’s a classic outsider in the end, trying to find somewhere to belong and connect to. And we all know Norman Lebrecht’s wonderful book, Genius and Anxiety, about remarkable Jewish individuals, over the last 150 years or so. And yet, and the otherness in the sense of the outsider. And of course, he is one of them. He is not Jewish obviously, but he is an outsider in all these ways, trying to find where he can belong, and finally have a bit of peace and a bit of calm 'cause it certainly can’t, he sees England and so many others as a wasteland. It’s the, inverted commas, “First World civilization shattered”, as many others did. And hence this drive towards the inner life of character like James Joyce, like himself, and in a completely allegorical way, Kafka, for me, but that’s another whole discussion. Okay, then he ends up in America, Mexico, and finally New Mexico. And watch this bit of Ian McKellen reading, again, it’s all Lawrence’s writing. 1928, where he finds a bit of what he feels where he can belong, but does he? Okay, if we can show that, please.
[Anthony] World that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever. Curious as it may sound, it was New Mexico that liberated me from the present era of civilization, the great era of material and mechanical development. The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shining high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend. I’ll never forget watching the dancers file out at San Geronimo, the long streaming glistening black hair of the men. Never shall I forget the utter absorption of the dance so quiet, so steadily, timelessly rhythmic, and silent with a ceaseless down tread always to the earth’s centre, the very reverse of the upflow of Dionysiac or Christian…
The very reverse of the Dionysiac or Christian world. It’s a pre-Christian world he’s trying to access in a way. Again, we ask with hindsight now 100 years later, is this just nostalgic fantasy? Is this post-colonial reverence for a world that was, but actually is not, has no link to a reality? Is it just a fantasy of his that he is seeing in New Mexico? Is it something as he says, a curious world, which speaks to something deeper inside him? And these debates are going on and on, of course, and then powerfully over 100 years later. For me it’s the ability of his writing. And what’s interesting to me is that there’s nature in the writing, in the use of adjective, verbs, all the, in the actual structure of the words that in a way makes it less nostalgic, naivety, or over-romantic idealisation of some vague forgotten past, which never really was like that anyway. It was as messy as any other past is in human, in human culture and human history, and as messy and complicated and untidy and unpatterned. It’s easy to fall into that polemic that this is finding something. Ah, okay, he has the magic that I’ve been searching for my sort of thing. But I would say, for me it goes a little bit deeper because it’s a reaction to that wall, it’s a reaction to all those divisions that I mentioned earlier, the abstractions that I mentioned. So he is consciously, ironically, it’s not just driven by passion, desire, impulse, it’s that it’s a seriously conscious search. Is it a naive 60s romantic dream or fantasy, beautiful, but ridiculously idealistic? I don’t think so. But for me, there’s something deeper, and I’ll tell you what it is for me. And I think Bob Dylan captures it in his poetry. It’s the ability in his writing to combine mythology and symbolism with realistic experience.
And that’s the key, in the writing. When you combine symbolism and mythology together with some serious realism, you have what Homer achieved. You have almost, so many of the other great writers, poets and novelists, the mythological and the realistic personal, put it together, and just as a writer, you crack it. And I think you’re able to transcend that naive over-romantic idealisation of just being, in a sense a delayed adolescent rebelling against one’s own times. Okay, but up for debate as everything is. All right, I want to go onto Women in Love and the film, which is obviously the two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, we all know. And what’s interesting in the beginning, they’re talking about the beginning of the novel, of their working and talking, and the work, in inverted commas, that they’re doing is “embroidery and drawing”. Well, that’s like many leisured women in 19th century Victorian novels, and they talk about marriage, da-da-da. But they’re not actually leisured women, they’re schoolteachers, Ursula and Gudrun. It’s the beginning of the age of female emancipation, and away from a marriage. They say, one of them says, isn’t it amazing how strong the temptation is not to marry? The colliery owner, the coal mining owner, Gerald, the Oliver Reed character, this is Lawrence and I’m quoting. “He was of a fair suntan type rather above middle height, well-made, and almost exaggeratedly well dressed.” Sort of about the character’s external appearance, we’d expect that from a Victorian novel, but that’s a cold reality of how he looks. But then we go into the inner life and mythology. How does Lawrence achieve it? By looking at how other characters, see the Oliver Reed character. In Gudrun’s eyes, he is an arctic thing whose totem is the wolf, and Gudrun experiences a paroxysm, and I’m quoting from a couple of these words, from the novel.
The description of Gerald becomes symbolic, and of course, it culminates in their death in the snowy wastes of the Alps. So we see how Lawrence undermines this old stable ego. He puts in the mythology, and it’s the perception of the other characters that makes it happen. And it’s the techniques used by these other, some of these songwriters that I mentioned, Dylan and others where they talk about you, how we see different… It’s putting this in. Even the horse, he talks about the horse, and I’m quoting here, Lawrence, “The mare opened her mouth and rose slowly, as if lifted up on a wind of terror.” Look at that writing, this is 100 years ago. “The mare opened her mouth and rose slowly, as if lifted up on a wind of terror.” He’s bringing the wind and the nature in, it’s not just the horse got angry, freaked out, and jumped up, or whatever. It’s back, carry on, from the novel. “Back she went, and the two girls clung to each other, feeling she must fall backwards. But he brought her down, sank her down. It made Gudrun faint with a dizziness, which seemed to penetrate her heart.” It’s again, the link of the psychological and the mythological, like for me, Bob Dylan and others do. And it’s written so soon after the First World War, Women in Love. And I’m quoting here from Howard Jacobson, talks about how he brilliantly captures the longing for a new world, a new life. And how Jacobson goes on to talk about it, no English novel so closely resembles Greek tragedy. So the link that Howard Jacobson makes, and I feel it as well, I believe it, I agree with him completely. It’s brilliant, it’s that link to Homer, Euripides, all these ancient writers who try to make that similar link.
And I think Shakespeare is the ultimate, of course, who does it most brilliantly of everyone, and Homer, and to a degree but it’s that link again, and I think Howard Jacobson understands it, gets it completely. And again, it’s that link that Howard Jacobson makes with the First World War and the reaction to that catastrophe. And in the final page of the novel is a reference to the German Kaiser washing his hands of the catastrophe, and the German Kaiser saying, “I didn’t want this to… I didn’t intend this to happen.” That’s all you can do, like Pontius Pilate. I didn’t intend this to happen in washing his hands. Obviously the religious connection there, but he’s showing that he’s not naive at all of his own historical times, Lawrence. And there’s a longing for change for something to be born after the horror, the First World War, a struggle to be born. And what is it going to be? Is it just going to be, history is just a transfer of power from bunch to bunch? Is there a hope for something better? Women in Love, it starts in a small room in the English mining town. Two sisters are doing embroidery, they’re talking about the chance of finding a husband, about marriage, and it ends up, as I said, in the icy alpine mountains, the wastes of Europe almost. And there’s no warm humanity at the end, there’s nothing but irony. What survives? Who survives?
Gerald stumbles in the snow, but the book goes deeper, and it’s like Greek tragedy, it is. It’s the individuals of those four that I showed, but he’s trying to push for something deeper in human nature in a society. It starts and it’s that link of the almost matter of fact and realistic together with this mythological, the psychological, something much deeper. And Lawrence writes in the book, Ursula and Gudrun sat one morning in the window bay of their father’s house working and talking. It just begins and slowly pulls us in to this other whole darker, deeper world that I’m talking about. And there’s a sense of obsolescence that is menacing and yet vital, but it looms over their lives at the beginning. The characters are at the end of their tether, the two sisters, and the two guys, they want love, but they’re wary of it; they want passion, sexuality, but they’re frightened by how far it can really go, and if it can go into violence or not. Ursula is the one who has a sense of change.
She has what Lawrence calls that strange brightness of an essential flame that is caught, meshed. And so he goes on, her active living was suspended, but underneath in the darkness something was coming to pass. When Ursula and Birkin kissed, Alan Bates character, he writes, it was like strange moths, very soft and silent, sitting on her from the darkness of her soul. This is not to me just a bit of erotica or propaganda or naivety or even of a romantic, there’s something beautiful inside that moment of kissing, the two of them, Birkin and Ursula. Of course, its ambivalence, his opposition, his contradiction, everything has its opposite, like the energy of contraries and contradictions, he speaks to our desire, the complexity of our lives, which are driven by mood, emotion, unconscious, irrational desires rather than plot, patterned, structured, rationality. And that’s the huge shift from Victorian to modernism in literature, and the link between him and James Joyce, and so many others. Okay, if we can show the first film from Women in Love, please, is the trailer from the Ken Russell movie.
The proper way to eat a fig in society is to split it in four, holding it by the stump and open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honeyed, heavy petaled, four petaled flower.
You know I always believe in love, but where do you find it nowadays?
Then you throw away the skin after you have taken off the blossom with your lips.
She was a nuisance. Not very many of which she keeps still, not until I’d slapped her hard and made her cry.
[Narrator] Women in Love is a film about all-absorbing human passion, the best film this year. Love, for men, just a part of life; for women, a whole existence.
My God, when I think of you and your world, it makes my heart sick. You are so limited, you’re a dead-end, you cannot love.
And you?
I could never love you.
You can’t bear anything to be spontaneous, can you? Because then it’s no longer in your power. And why? Because you haven’t got any real body, any dark, sensual body of life, all you’ve got is your will and your lust for power.
[Narrator] A dazzling feat of film-making. If you think you have seen everything, just wait, you will gasp.
[Gerald] Do you know what it is to suffer when you’re with a woman, each bit and stroke burns hot.
[Narrator] One of the most exciting films of our times, exceptionally provocative. Stunning, one of the best. The performances are superb.
[Ursula] You can’t have two kinds of love.
[Rupert] I’ve loved you as well as Gudrun.
[Speaker] You don’t think you loved, do you?
[Speaker] Why do you dodge me?
[Narrator] The relationship between four sensual people is limited. They must find a new way.
If we can hold it there.
The D.H. Lawrence’s-
Thanks, Hannah.
[Narrator] Classic novel.
So, I know this is obviously the trailer in 1969, going way back, but there’s something that I think Ken Russell does capture physically. He captures the physical, he captures nature, all these ideas that I’ve tried to feed in, I think he captures it. It’s never just a backdrop, even in this final image here, which is annihilation, no human, no warmth, obviously the metaphor is all inside it. But the nature is inside it, never a backdrop. The humans are caught up in a completely messy, unconscious, semi-conscious, dimly aware sort of drama of their own lives. And it’s so contemporary and so modernist in that way, the film. And of course, he’s trying to find this in the novel, which I think he does find as well. And that’s just so completely contemporary for me as opposed to the influence of the rational, the structure, the ordered. I just want to mention a couple of other things before I show the last clip from the film. And we can jump to slide 15, if we can, please, Hannah. Thanks. I’m going to hold this, the Mark Kermode Uncut. These are some scenes, which are from an uncut version of the film. If we can go on to the last one, please. And skip this one.
[Speaker] At least here, you will have an opportunity to observe nature.
Yeah.
Sorry, the last film clip. Not that one, the next one. Okay, yeah. Could you just hold that for a moment? Thank you. So we all know the fig speech at the beginning, the sexuality of the fig speech, which Alan Bates character does when they’re all sitting and eating there. But here, I want to just read something from the novel, which is quite different where for me, the guys, the Alan Bates and Oliver Reed character are not so clear and… The one is so intellectual, and the Alan Bates character, the Oliver Reed character is passionate, sort of bullish, wild, animal, animalistic. I think what, and what Ken Russell does show in the film and the novel, they’re lost, they don’t know themselves what they’re really trying to find or do. They use words too much, they talk, and they go on and on. And I think D.H. Lawrence is aware somewhere deep inside, even find where you think you belong, New Mexico, wherever, is not going to hold. There’s a restlessness, which is part of the contemporary, the modernist, zeitgeist in a way. There’s something deeper in it all, they’re lost, they haven’t found each other. And that end captures it for me, the Oliver Reed character. And there’s a sense of, he was like, he was as lost in the beginning, but thought he was not. And this was captured for me in the fascinating speech that the mother, the Oliver Reed character’s mother, Mrs. Crich gives when she’s standing over the dead body of her husband.
And he is the one who is the rich one, he is the owner of the mill, etc. And this is her speech, I’m going to read it quickly. “Ay,” she said bitterly, speaking as if to the unseen witnesses of the air, “you’re dead.” “Beautiful, beautiful as if life had never touched you, never touched you. None of you look like this…” And she’s talking to her children. “None of you look like this, when you are dead! Don’t let it happen. If I thought that the children I bore would lie looking like that in death, I’d strangle them when they were infants.” Where the hell does this come from? “What?” She’s looking at her own husband, she’s talking in front of her children, her husband’s dead, equivalent of the funeral. This is going back to Medea, this is going back to ancient Greece, and Howard Jacobson I think is right on the nail. Medea who, when Jason betrays her in the marriage, doesn’t the way to get back at him is to kill the children. Well, in our times today, it’s metaphorical, turn the children against the betrayer. Clytemnestra, it’s a pre-Christian, almost pagan feeling in the literature. Character is not defined by morality alone, there’s a deeper sense of the mystery of humanity, which is Howard Jacobson says, is beyond solution. And he goes on to say, “Women in Love is the nearest…” This is Howard Jacobson, “Women in Love is the nearest any English novel has so far approximated to the fearful grandeur of Medea or the Oresteia.” That’s a beautiful phrase of Howard Jacobson’s. It’s the nearest an English novel has got to approximating the fearful grandeur of Medea and the ancient Greece. So putting it altogether, and I want to show the final clip, which is the famous bull scene from the film. If you can show it, please.
♪ Mm-Hmm ♪ ♪ Pretty bubbles in the air ♪ ♪ They fly so high ♪ ♪ Nearly reach the sky ♪ ♪ Then like my dreams ♪ ♪ They fade and die ♪ ♪ Fortune’s always hiding ♪ ♪ I’ve looked everywhere ♪ ♪ For I’m forever blowing bubbles ♪ ♪ Pretty bubbles in the air ♪ ♪ Hmm, mm-hmm, hmm, hmm, mm-hmm, hmm ♪ ♪ Pretty bubbles in the air ♪ ♪ They fly so high ♪ ♪ Nearly reach the sky ♪ ♪ Then like my dreams ♪ ♪ They fade and die ♪ ♪ Fortune’s always hiding ♪ ♪ I’ve looked everywhere ♪ ♪ But I’m forever blow… ♪
Aren’t they charming, Ursula?
Charming? Wouldn’t they do anything to us?
Oh, I’m sure they won’t.
I’m frightened.
Keep singing.
If you can hold it there please, Hannah. If you could just freeze it there for a moment. Thank you. So I think what’s interesting to me, has always been fascinating is that these animals are looking at the Glenda Jackson character with a kind of, almost there’s like an indifference, it’s bewilderment. What, what’s this? We get both perspectives. It’s not just a romantic… At the beginning, of course, there’s fear and apprehension and real worry between the two sisters, and the sudden shock of seeing. But then because you don’t see them pawing or doing anything, they’re just standing and looking, as nature does. So she is the one who is trying to connect in some way to it. It’s fascinating the perspective that shifts, and in a way they become less threatening and less scary, the more she tries to get closer. And that’s similar to D.H. Lawrence’s poem in the Snake where he’d go down and he sees a snake and he throws a log at it and regrets his education, which says, he is got to kill the snake because the snake’s there, it is water-trough. But the snake is kind of indifferent, doesn’t really care. So it’s this complexity that I think D.H. Lawrence always finds, it’s not a naivety or polemic about passion, desire, sexuality, any of it. Is always the perspective, and that’s the inner life of different characters, here are the characters of the animals, whose perspective, what, when, and it’s shifting all the time in a very relativistic way. And I think that’s what makes him so modern and still speaks to us today. Okay, so I’m going to hold that there and go into questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Okay, Gita, true dedication. I know it’s a glorious day in the north. Thank you, Gita. Sweating and hot. Exactly.
Joan, Jerusalem is 30 degrees. God, okay, that’s where my sister lives. Oh, okay.
And Myrna, Scottsdale 33. God, it’s hotter than South Africa. Nikki, north London, my living room, it’s 28.9. I love the English obsession about the weather and temperature, everything all the time. I’m part of it now.
Sylvia, the settings of this literature are amazing. First, he sets his writing in Nottinghamshire, but then in his nomadic life, his novels were written in Mexico, Australia, etc. Yep. And that word you use “nomadic” is spot on. It’s restless searching, travelling. I just think it’s a search of the outsider ultimately.
Sylvia, the Odour of Chrysanthemums. Yeah. Thank you.
Q: Brandy, the name of the documentary?
A: If you email me through Lockdown, I can get it for you. Again, I just can’t remember the moment, but it’s Anthony Burgess on Lawrence with Ian McKellen doing the readings. To me it’s one of the best that it made about Lawrence’s life.
Gita, but people laughed at the judge’s remarks. Yes, absolutely right, Gita. 1960, that was the prosecutor’s remarks. “Is this the kind of book you want you or your servants to read?” So the prosecutor was trying to use an argument going back to the early 1900s and was laughed. And of course, the case was thrown out, and the book, Lady Chatterley, unbanned.
Thanks, Gita. Solveit, Lawrence enters the women’s mind creating an amazing feminine sensuality. Yeah, I agree with you. And I think into the women’s mind and also the men’s minds of the four of them in that novel in particular. I think that’s where he really achieves it.
Judy, I think Women in Love is one of the few movies that does justice to the novel. I agree entirely. I mean, this is 1969 it was made. Okay, and besides Glenda Jackson, she gets an Oscar for it, but this is over 50 years ago. I mean, it’s a hell of a long time, and yet it’s still riveting for me in trying to tease out these reasons why.
Margaret, I still have the first complete Penguin edition, which appeared in 1960. Huge power was for sale at Waterloo Station in London where I bought it for three shillings and six pence. It was considered so daring and dangerous to us in those days. Brilliant, thanks for that, that’s fantastic. Three shillings and six pence in Waterloo Station. This is what I love about Lockdown. Thank you, Margaret. All these stories are shared.
Carol, my sound is very soft. Yeah, I think it was okay overall the sound. Carol, turned to maximum, problem must be my system. Oh! Yeah, we can check that.
Patricia, as the chair in the library of one of Sydney, two leading private men’s clubs, which is special, as he sat in it when he was in Australia. He must have been accepted at the top level. Yeah, and I mean, he was friendly with some of them in London, of the Bloomsbury and the other set, and he knew them. He was quite friendly with Aldous Huxley and others, but he certainly knew the writers and poets in London of the times, and I imagine Australia as well. I don’t know if you knew the ones, Joyce, Beckett, and others who’d gone to Paris, but he certainly knew them in London. But he didn’t really hang around with them, he wasn’t the… I think he saw it, but he knew he was an outsider, he couldn’t really fit in there.
Patricia, the club has had women members only this century. Ah! That’s really interesting. Thank you. Very important to know.
Rita, D.H. Lawrence’s documentary. Oh, thanks so much. I appreciate that. That’s the YouTube Burgess documentary. William, New Mexico, taken EMBA Oppenheimer at a similar time. That’s a fascinating connection, William. Thank you. I never thought of that.
Yep, Los Alamos, a little bit later, and D.H. Lawrence there. That’s really interesting. That’s the modernist way of thinking. Thank you.
Q: Jack, what do you think of the point I’ve heard that Lawrence makes one understand the attraction of dark forces of blood by the irrational, a strong component of the appeal to fascism?
A: Yeah, I think he did understand, that’s why I don’t think he romanticises it or idealises in a simplistic way, what he called reaction to the abstraction to the physical. In other words, diving into the passionate, the sexual, the erotic, all of that. I don’t think the irrational, I think he saw its limits. I do. And I think that he saw, but he saw the beauty of it, not only the horror. There is the fatal fascination with fascism. No question, I agree Jack completely. And it’s just there all the time, but I think he saw the other side of it. And I think coming out of the First World War, which is his defining era, is trying to find a non-mechanistic way of living, which is less compartmentalised than, this is emotion, this is intellect, this is his intuition, this is instinct, body, all split. 'Cause that ironically makes it easier for fascism to kick in.
Rita, when studying Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I kept it hidden in my knapsack. That’s brilliant. That’s fantastic to know and share these stories today. Rita, thank you.
Olivia, imagine you’ve read The Forked Flame. Yes. Analysis of ideas of D.H. Lawrence. My teacher, ah, Professor Daleski at Hebrew University, competitive understood everything Daleski wrote, but always found Lawrence fascinating out of his time. Thank you.
Oh, that’s a fascinating connection. Yeah, that would be interesting to go into another whole, at another whole time. Olivia, thank you.
Ron, I hope you’re well. The clips of Lawrence’s time in Mexico called to mind ones of Georgia O'Keeffe many decades later. Her modernist art resonates with his writing, strive to capture nature and the human sexuality in the art. Yep, absolutely. I saw the film Lady Chatterley in Miami. Ah! I have to get more into that, George and Olga. Thank you.
Gita. I was going to show the iconic wrestling scene, but then I thought everybody has seen it, so. I thought everybody has seen it, remembers it, it’s so brilliantly done that I’m going to show some others instead. But more time or another lecture, which certainly… Thanks, Gita.
Rita, Glenda Jackson passed away. Yes, just a couple of weeks ago in June. Exactly. 87 years young. Yeah, a remarkable actress. Brilliant! And so in theatre and film, of course. Iconic, Gita. Absolutely.
Gita, Glenda Jackson said, she was genuinely scared to death by the bulls. Yep. Sylvia, thank you. Ah, hope you’re well in Buenos Aires in Argentina. Well, originally heard Glenda Jackson speaking about the scene. The cultural life, she said, she was terrified doing it. Yes. You’re absolutely right. And anybody would be, I think. It’s just how he’s, obviously they did, however many takes, but there’s something about the way it’s shot and filmed because I think the hair covers the eyes of the bulls, and they’re not pawing. You’re expecting to be pawing or, and so head side to be, if they were going to charge. But of course, anybody would be terrified.
Q: Erica, did Lawrence have sisters?
A: Oh, great question. Yes, I think he did have a sister, if I’m right. I got caught up in the novel and the film, I’ll go back and check it. Thanks for that.
Nema, thanks from Tel Aviv. Ah, a great hour away from ever. Okay. I haven’t talked to my sister. I understand, Nema.
Marcel, the comment by the prosecutor on the censorship of the book, undoubted be regarded today as sexist, yeah. How would you like your daughters and servant? Mm-hmm. Thanks, Marcel.
Susan, did Frieda ever see at all… I don’t know. It’s a great question. And honest answer, I don’t know, I need to check it.
Q: Linda, what will happen to critical thinking now that the humanities are continually reduced?
A: Yep, in the curriculum. Without the 16 credits I was required to, yeah, exactly. Well, that’s part of the huge debate of our own times. We have to be so aware, I think of censorship and limits to real. I mean, what’s the point of education and scholarship, if you can’t debate in a civilised, graceful way discuss and debate, and argue, and respect, agree, disagree. There’s no wrong… It’s not a mathematical formula. All of this is literature, fiction, it’s art, it’s… There’s no wrong or right, there’s only the treasure of endless interpretations.
Barbara, thank you. Allison, thank you.
Q: Did he have any good reviews?
A: Yes, he did. F.R. Leavis, the big Oxbridge sort of scholar who wrote, as I said, the book, The Great Tradition; E.M. Forster and others who really wrote positively about his work. So he had others as well. It was more of a general, I suppose, or just many other critics. And public response wasn’t ready for him, in England.
Q: Paula, could you please repeat your observation about the essential difference between Victorian and modern?
A: I think that Victorian literature goes less into inner life of character. And what really drives inner life of character? Irrational, instinctive, messy, complex motives, passions, desires compared to the more structured novel from the Victorian era where it’s a little bit more rational and logical in the way that we access character, motivation, and the structure of plot. And secondly, in the Victorian’s, the story is very, the whole story written in the novel is plot-driven structure. But in the modernist era, it’s mood, atmosphere, more emotion driven.
Q: Esther, how did they filmed the bulls?
A: Great question, I need to research that more.
Margaret, I don’t think they were bulls, they were Highland cattle roaming in the public parks where I live. It looks scary, but are quite quiet. That’s a fantastic point, Margaret. I love it.
Q: How we are able to create things in fiction, in movies, theatre, all the rest of it?
A: Probably right. Thanks, I’m going to check that, Margaret.
Josie, in Fanny Klenerman’s Vanguard Bookshop in Johannesburg, William Burroughs, D.H. Lawrence were banned. Yeah, under the counter. Yep.
This, the Lawrence, he knew she could sell into us. Oh, that’s fantastic stories. Thank you. Pamela, thank you. Two brothers, two sisters. Thank you for that. Much appreciated.
Carol, D.H. Lawrence is a great friend of Georgia O'Keeffe. Yep. Ah, okay, and stayed at her home. Yep, Josie. Thank you for that, Carol. Vanguard books in the 60s.
Helen, I think they’re cattle and not bulls, which was a particular breed of cattle with large horns. That’s great that… You shared that same point made before. Thanks, Helen. Far too dangerous, but I completely understand Glenda Jackson’s terror. As we would, yep.
Ralph, thank you. Two sisters, two brothers. Oh, thanks very much for that.
Okay, so thank you everybody. I hope you have a great rest of the weekend. And Hannah, thanks so much for your help, and take care everybody, everywhere.