Flame Into Being

DH Lawrence

A few weeks ago I reread Anthony Burgess's excellent critical biography of DH Lawrence, Flame into Being. I borrowed the very same copy from our local library as the one I'd read almost twenty years previously. I know this because I recognised my handwriting on the renewal slip I'd filled in after extending the lending period by phone in 1995. As I reread, I found I remembered the book in quite a lot of detail, so much so that I had the strong illusion it must have been only a few years since I first read it. Such are the tricks of memory. Rather frightening, actually.

Regular readers of this blog will know how much I admire DH Lawrence, and how he was a pivotal influence on my youthful education and my emotional, spiritual and literary life. Though he's unfashionable these days, his reputation tainted by misguided, exaggerated slurs concerning his supposed fascism and sexism, I feel he still has much to tell us about the relationship between man and man, woman and woman, and man and woman, and about our interior lives, and about the spiritually important things in life.

I scribbled down a few notes while rereading the book, so here are some random jottings. Some of these are Burgess's words and thoughts, some are my own, and some are a commingling of the two.

Burgess gets to the core of Lawrence, the man and the writer — both indivisible.

Lawrence (along with Woolf, Joyce, Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford) abandoned the conventional novelistic plot and introduced characters of shifting, fragile identities (a more realistic approach, in fact) and brought in aspects of the elemental, the instinctive and the unconscious. The vital thing was visceral conviction, not ratiocination or rational argument; the solar plexus not the cerebral cortex; entity not identity; the dissolution of the self and its fusion with the other, not the iron-clad ego. Fiction became more honest. There was no obligation to like a character; what was important was loving the character, warts and all.

Faults were the spume of identity; reality lay deeper. ANTHONY BURGESS.

In his wild prophecies and subversive proclamations, Lawrence often ran the risk of ridicule; he believed no less than in the complete reform of the individual, of society and of the world — which was the meaning which lay behind his phoenix motif. And you can ignore many of his naive political speculations, which have a shrill and anti-democratic ring. The thing about Lawrence is that you have to consider him and his spontaneous outpourings, the total man and his work, as a whole, in order to discover the sapphires in the mud; and there were a lot of sapphires.

Lawrence believed in the physicality of sex raised to a sacramental level, in the intensity of passion, in the annihilation of the self, in a new covenant with life (as symbolised by the rainbow, connecting heaven and earth, at the end of his eponymous novel) — an idea which he developed in Women in Love, where his characters are close to nature, not merely social beings. Lawrence was always interested in 'naked primitivism', and the 'savage pilgrimage' of his restless wanderings around the world always sought out unindustrialised cultures.

Ezra Pound wrote that the essence of literature and poetry was the charging of language with meaning; that's not meaning in the linguistic and cultural-historical sense, but in the emotional sense. Lawrence agreed with this.

Although, for Lawrence, resonant natural objects such as flowers and fruit were symbols, they were not obvious symbols, and their meanings shifted. He was basically not so much interested in symbols as in essences.

Lawrence witnessed and praised the gorgeousness of the earth, and believed in trying to fulfil the simplest desires in the world: to live, to love and be happy.

Like Ted Hughes after him, Lawrence maintained a strong belief in the necessary and inevitable otherness of animals (ref. his poem Snake.) No sentimentalising or anthropomorphising here. He also recognised the sacredness of animals.

Lawrence is a holistic writer: his (pseudo-) philosophy of life derives from the total output of his numerous poems, novels, essays, short stories, plays, travel writings, letters — not the reverse.

He admired Freud, but thought there was much more to the unconscious than just sex (eg creativity). He admired Jung also, but believed that the unconscious was individual, not collective. He believed in the particular, not the general.

He believed in the multiplicity of separate selfhoods.

Lawrence admitted he was no rigorous scholar, no rigid intellectual — but that he was indebted to scholars and intellectuals. He proceeded by intuition, not logic or methodology.

Aldous Huxley thought that DHL was intensely aware of the mystery of the world, of Wordsworth's  'unknown modes of being', and that this mystery was a numen, a divine awareness of the 'dark presence of otherness beyond the boundaries of man's unconscious mind'. A spiritual world, where there is union with the divine, and which lies outside us, though it's also within us. Otherness is part of us too.

Lawrence stood for Life, as opposed to Art. (Henry James hated Lawrence, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky for their formlessness. Need I say which side I'm on?)

Lawrence taught us, among many other things, that literature is subversive, that sex is important and tender, and that we must have courage in our contradictions. Amen to all of this.

The vast marvel is to be alive . . . DH LAWRENCE.