Tag: D.H. Lawrence

“Baby Tortoise” – D.H. Lawrence

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

You know what it is to be born alone,
Baby tortoise!

The first day to heave your feet little by little from
the shell,
Not yet awake,
And remain lapsed on earth,
Not quite alive.

A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.

To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if it would
never open
Like some iron door;
To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower base
And reach your skinny neck
And take your first bite at some dim bit of herbage,
Alone, small insect,
Tiny bright-eye,
Slow one.

To take your first solitary bite
And move on your slow, solitary hunt.
Your bright, dark little eye,
Your eye of a dark disturbed night,
Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise,
So indomitable.

No one ever heard you complain.

You draw your head forward, slowly, from your little
wimple
And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-pinned toes,
Rowing slowly forward.
Wither away, small bird?
Rather like a baby working its limbs,
Except that you make slow, ageless progress
And a baby makes none.

The touch of sun excites you,
And the long ages, and the lingering chill
Make you pause to yawn,
Opening your impervious mouth,
Suddenly beak-shaped, and very wide, like some suddenly
gaping pincers;
Soft red tongue, and hard thin gums,
Then close the wedge of your little mountain front,
Your face, baby tortoise.

Do you wonder at the world, as slowly you turn your head
in its wimple
And look with laconic, black eyes?
Or is sleep coming over you again,
The non-life?

You are so hard to wake.

Are you able to wonder?
Or is it just your indomitable will and pride of the
first life
Looking round
And slowly pitching itself against the inertia
Which had seemed invincible?

The vast inanimate,
And the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye,
Challenger.

Nay, tiny shell-bird.
What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you must row
against,
What an incalculable inertia.

Challenger,
Little Ulysses, fore-runner,
No bigger than my thumb-nail,
Buon viaggio.

All animate creation on your shoulder,
Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield.
The ponderous, preponderate,
Inanimate universe;
And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone.

How vivid your travelling seems now, in the troubled
sunshine,
Stoic, Ulyssean atom;
Suddenly hasty, reckless, on high toes.

Voiceless little bird,
Resting your head half out of your wimple
In the slow dignity of your eternal pause.
Alone, with no sense of being alone,
And hence six times more solitary;
Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through
immemorial ages
Your little round house in the midst of chaos.

Over the garden earth,
Small bird,
Over the edge of all things.

Traveller,
With your tail tucked a little on one side
Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.

All life carried on your shoulder,
Invincible fore-runner.

from The White Peacock (I)

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

The White Peacock (1911), D.H. Lawrence’s first novel, was inspired by a painting, “An Idyll” painted by Maurice Greiffenhagen in 1891. Lawrence proclaimed that the painting had “a profound effect” on him. He later wrote, “As for Greiffenhagen’s ‘Idyll’, it moves me almost as if I were in love myself. Under its intoxication, I have flirted madly this Christmas.” I explore this effect in the second half of this essay.

Here, there is another painting under scrutiny by Lawrence, in the same chapter (III) as the “Idyll” reference, titled “A Vendor of Visions”, young Leticia (or “Lettie”) Tempest denounces her beau’s brother, George Beardsall, as a provincial. George is part of a love triangle with Lettie and Leslie Beardsall. Lettie, subsequently (and unhappily) marries Leslie, but will remain sexually drawn to George. In the third chapter, they sit in a drawing room where she retrieves her collection of art books.

Prior to this, she has been a tease. She tells George “you are only a boy.” She yields her own sense of feminine mystery in a coy and effectual manner. She is protected by a ring of chaperones and the creature comforts of opulence and tradition. She lacks for naught but experience, to which she flirts with a sensate desire to succumb, yet holds herself back.

Lettie toys with recklessness. She frivolously plays on doomed George’s desire for wanting more out of life. He can never escape her fixed grasp on his heart and his life will never be fulfilled as long as she coyly taunts him with what he will never have.

After she carries in a great pile of art books, he tells her that she is “strong.”

“I know how a man will compliment me by the way he looks at me”–she kneeled before the fire. “Some look at my hair, some watch the rise and fall of my breathing, some look at my neck, and a few–not you among them–look me in the eyes for my thoughts. To you, I’m a fine specimen, strong! Pretty strong! You primitive man!”

But George must reach through the fire to seize the gem. Lettie must reach through the gem stone of George to seize the fire she desires so cravenly.

For Lettie, she feels that her superiority, her cultured upbringing, is a tool that she can yield over George’s haplessness. She is condescending, despite likely knowing that she could just as easily be over her head. The other women present, Lettie’s mother, Alice and Sybil all hint that he is “slow.” There is a distinct feeling of “otherness” here. Alice quips to George, “your people,” as if he rose from some other inferior race that they find charming, like a trained ape juggling balls in a Victorian drawing room.

Lettie sits with George and flips through the pages of an art book. When she arrives to George Clausen’s watercolor of peasants hoeing for turnips, she uses the opportunity to square George off for his seeming lack of culture:

“You’d be just that colour in the sunset,” she said, thus bringing him back to the subject, “and if you looked at the ground you’d find there was a sense of warm gold fire in it, and once you’d perceived the colour, it would strengthen till you’d see nothing else. You are blind; you are only half-born; you are gross with good living and heavy sleeping. You are a piano which will only play a dozen common notes. Sunset is nothing to you–it merely happens anywhere. Oh, but you make me feel as if I’d like to make you suffer. If you’d ever been sick; if you’d ever been born into a home where there was something oppressed you, and you couldn’t understand; if ever you’d believed, or even doubted, you might have been a man by now. You never grow up, like bulbs which spend all summer getting fat and fleshy, but never wakening the germ of a flower. As for me, the flower is born in me, but it wants bringing forth. Things don’t flower if they’re overfed. You have to suffer before you blossom in this life. When death is just touching a plant, it forces it into a passion of flowering. You wonder how I have touched death. You don’t know. There’s always a sense of death in this home. I believe my mother hated my father before I was born. That was death in her veins for me before I was born. It makes a difference–“

George doesn’t know how to respond. He is, Lawrence writes, “like a child who feels the tale but does not understand the words.”

She asks George if he is “bewildered,” and he seems very much so, until she flips the page and he is confronted with “An Idyll.”

“There…” he states, and here the table turns on Lettie, for she has indeed tread too deep into uncharted waters.

Read more from the White Peacock (II).

from The White Peacock (II)

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ 1 Comment

In D.H. Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock, we have the two, George and Lettie, looking at pictures in an art book. She first shows him Clausen’s painting of peasants hoeing turnips (see previous blog post). He then sees and reacts to the painting (much like Lawrence after seeing it and consequently wrote the first of three drafts of his first novel, The White Peacock).

It is Maurice Greiffinhagen’s “An Idyll” (1891).

The obsession with the painting by Lawrence is very much in accordance with Dostoevsky’s obsession with Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ lying in his tomb (which influenced the writing of The Idiot).

The following exchange takes place between George and Lettie:

They turned on, chatting casually, till George suddenly exclaimed, “There!”

It was Maurice Greiffinhagen’s “Idyll”.

“What of it?” she asked, gradually flushing. She remembered her own enthusiasm over the picture.

“Wouldn’t it be fine?” he exclaimed, looking at her with glowing eyes, his teeth showing white in a smile that was not amusement.

“What?” she asked, dropping her head in confusion. “That–a girl like that–half afraid–and passion!” He lit up curiously.

“She may well be half afraid, when the barbarian comes out in his glory, skins and all.”

“But don’t you like it?” he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders, saying, “Make love to the next girl you meet, and by the time the poppies redden the field, she’ll hang in your arms. She’ll have need to be more than half afraid, won’t she?”

It is a scene fraught with sexual tension. Lettie possibly feels that George is brutish (unlike his brother and her beau, Leslie) and therefore unresponsive to things like art and sunsets, as she claims he is when she shows him the Clausen painting.

Response to art is irregardless of social class. It is reactive. It incites in George the very feeling stirring between them. Lettie feels that should she fall under a similar opium-daze, that he would take brutally take advantage of her: “by the time the poppies redden the field, she’ll hang in your arms. She’ll have need to be more than half afraid.”

The painting itself which hangs in the National Liverpool Museum, a lusty shepherd firmly embraces a yielding maid on a slope of pasturage. Despite the abundant display of female nudity in many of the paintings surrounding it in the High Victorian gallery at the Walker Art Gallery, such explicit embracing scenes are rare.

The shepherd is seen taking the young maiden with a sudden powerful movement. Her body slumps powerless in his arms. The fairness of her skin contrasts with his swarthy skin tones. He, like George, seems to be a man accustomed to working outdoors. She is a parlor princess, perhaps out on a walk unchaperoned.

Her expression may be seen as ecstatic, but it seems more likely that she is surrendering to the young man’s passion than actively participating in the act of embracing. Should she had taken on a more active role, it would have been unacceptable to a Victorian audience.

The woman’s complacency and her serene rapturous gaze captures the passionate spontaneity of the moment.

Greiffenhagen’s reliance on color as the painting’s expressive medium is striking. The vibrant warm red of the poppies splayed at the lovers’ feet contrasts with the wash of blues and greens in the background. The execution of the work is evident in loose and quick brushstrokes. The artist develops form through color much like a French Impressionist.

Lawrence’s obsession with the painting is well-documented. In 1929 he declared
“all my life I have gone back to painting, because it gave me a form of delight that words can never give.” ‘An Idyll’ embodied passion for him.

He was utterly fascinated by the painting, confessing in a 1908 letter that “the painting moved me almost as much as if I had fallen in love myself.” He made three copies of ‘An Idyll’, one of which he began drawing the night his mother died in 1910.

‘An Idyll’s” appearance in The White Peacock is as sudden and rapturous as George toward Lettie. The painting stirs passionate feelings in George which Lettie is at odds to compensate. Only moments before she had denounced him as a man unable to properly appreciate a sunset. When he suddenly reacts to “An Idyll,” she is taken aback by his response.

His critique of the maiden in the painting mirrors Lettie’s emotional being at that moment: “a girl like that–half afraid–and passion!”

It is almost a case of aesthetic arrest, like Joyce’s Dedaulus glimpsing a young woman bathing in a stream. The frenzied wayward journey of passion leads straight to the heart, with tributaries branching off to the loins and eyes:

“He was breathlessly quivering under the new sensation of heavy, unappeased fire in his breast, and in the muscles of his arms. He glanced at her bosom and shivered.”

It is as though the two had come across a dirty picture in the midst of an album of family photos. Awkwardly they must quantify their barely-disguised passion for each other, but also, suppress it with Victorian-era modesty. Lettie is quick to denounce him as a provincial. She is unable to appreciate his genuine interaction with the painting, which is the very goal of art itself, to stir a response.

“Didn’t you know the picture before?” she said, in a low, toneless voice.

He shut his eyes and shrank with shame.

“No, I’ve never seen it before,” he said.

“I’m surprised,” she said. “It is a very common one.”

“Is it?” he answered, and this make-belief conversation fell. She looked up, and found his eyes. They gazed at each other for a moment before they hid their faces again. It was a torture to each of them to look thus nakedly at the other, a dazzled, shrinking pain that they forced themselves to undergo for a moment, that they might the moment after tremble with a fierce sensation that filled their veins with fluid, fiery electricity. She sought, almost in panic, for something to say.

“I believe it’s in Liverpool, the picture,” she contrived to say.

He dared not kill this conversation, he was too self-conscious. He forced himself to reply, “I didn’t know there was a gallery in Liverpool.”

“Oh yes, a very good one,” she said.

They are loaded guns, both unable to shoot straight, or at all. Lawrence’s mastery of the novel form is in full display here, like the peacock of the title. The hallmarks of his emerging strength as a writer is evident. He is able to evoke both the masculine and feminine aspects convincingly. Lawrence inhabits both the male and female sensibility, kindling a fire that must either be extinguished or built to full flame. Lettie opts for the former, taking the art books and leaving the room, but still aware of her power over George. Her Exit Stage Left sees her holding the books just below her breasts, as if by accentuating them she can still bring George’s fervor to an even higher pitch.

“Their eyes met in the briefest flash of a glance, then both turned their faces aside. Thus averted, one from the other, they made talk. At last she rose, gathered the books together, and carried them off. At the door she turned. She must steal another keen moment: “Are you admiring my strength?” she asked. Her pose was fine. With her head thrown back, the roundness of her throat ran finely down to the bosom, which swelled above the pile of books held by her straight arms. He looked at her. Their lips smiled curiously. She put back her throat as if she were drinking. They felt the blood beating madly in their necks. Then, suddenly breaking into a slight trembling, she turned round and left the room.”

Reading this last night, it only built my appreciation for Lawrence even more, that every work of his, either as a budding novelist, or later, when his heart threatened to become more jaded and his sensibilities bruised by a life of penury and hardship, never extinguishes his ever-burning flame of kindled desire and satiation.

When Lettie sees George out the door, he takes her hand: “They smiled again at each other, and, with a blind movement, he broke the spell and was gone.”

For his troubles, George marries the wrong woman and eventually slides into alcoholism and suicide. Lettie too marries the wrong brother.

A spell. That’s what it is. Lawrence was under a spell with “An Idyll.” George, the same. Lettie under a spell of passionate yearning from George’s response, and myself from reading all of it.

The rind and the fruit.

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

In D.H. Lawrence’s writings, he describes the rind and the fruit as metaphor.

When one peels the rind, therein the fruit is tender, retaining its juices and seeds. Within is life, the bursting seed awaiting implantation into the soil and the redolent waves of the sun nurturing it into budding. The rind merely peels away. It is discarded. It becomes mold in the earth.

Lawrence writes of the rind in Women In Love after Anna and Will marry. They enjoy honeymoon bliss in a little cottage, absorbed in each other. All is soothing and complacent to compassion. They are, for lack of a better word, complete. Will is born anew:

“He surveyed the rind of the world: houses factories, trams, the discarded rind; people scurrying about, work going on, all on the discarded surface. An earthquake (the marriage) had burst it all from the inside. It was as if the surface of the world had been broken away entirely: Ilkeston, streets, church, people, work, rule-of-the-day, all intact; and yet peeled away into unreality, leaving here exposed the inside, the reality; one’s own being, strange feelings and passions and yearnings and beliefs and aspirations, suddenly become present, revealed to the permanent bedrock, knitted one rock with the woman one loved.”

As Will slips into blissful dreamland, Anna plans a tea-party which throws Will into a tizzy.

“The wonder was going to pass away again. All the love, the magnificent new order was going to be lost, she would forfeit it all for the outside things. She would admit the outside world again, she would throw away the living fruit for the ostensible rind. He began to hate this in her.”

This reveals the differences between the two. She longs for outside things, the rind; he, for the living fruit that is them. It is not the tea-party per se that becomes the issue, but that the trifling matter becomes portentous of their future.

Lawrence’s metaphor of the rind is a tool for his philosophy.

“This goes on within the rind. But the rind remains permanent, falsely absolute, my false absolute knowledge of good and evil. Till the work of corruption is finished; then the rind also, the public form, the civilization, the established consciousness of mankind disappears as well in the mouth of the worm, taken unutterably asunder by the hands of the angels of separation. It ceases to be, all the civilization and all the consciousness, it passes utterly away, a temporary cohesion in the flux. It was this, this rind, this persistent temporary cohesion, that was evil, that alone was evil. And it destroys us all before itself is destroyed.”

Lawrence’s “rind” is the origin of evil. It is the hope one settles for after glimpsing the rainbow, but instead takes refuge in the “rind of the world.”

Whatever form the rind appears, it must be dismantled or diminished in order to reach the fruit of the matter.

“It became at last,” writes Lawrence, “a collective activity, a war, when, within the great rind of virtue we thresh destruction further and further, till our whole civilization is like a great rind full of corruption, o breaking down, a mere shell threatened with collapse upon itself.”

Then …

“And the road of corruption leads back to one’s eternity.”

Lawrence indulges in the fruit, where the wet pulp and soft seeds are rapacious with the sweet and bitter pulp of destiny and promulgation.

It is in his poem, “Pomegranate” that he declares:

You tell me I am wrong.
Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?
I am not wrong.

The fleshly seeds of the pomegranate are matters of truth that remain obstinate in the light of falsity.

Or when Lawrence writes in “Figs”:

Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,
And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,
Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t taste it ;
Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman,
Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen,
One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light ;
Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,
Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,
Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilization, and fruiting
In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see
Till it’s finished, and you’re over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost.

The cloying sweetness, its feminine essence overpowers the senses. It is all that it should be. The fruit is declarative and profound. We are righted by its righteousness and journey. The fig’s rind is peeled away and the pulp opens up sweetly with its ferment. It rewards the tongue with its truth. It rewards the soil with its seed.

The crux of the matter lies in the fruit, not the rind. The rind is the world, that binding shell that colludes the real fruit of the matter. It is rioting in Charlottesville, it is nukes in North Korea, it is the pettiness of everyday squabbles, and earthly battles we pursue instead of the living fruit of who we are and what we contain. It is this Lawrence warns of … where “the tiger rises supreme, the last brindled flame upon the darkness; the deer melts away, a bloodstained shadow received into the utter pallor of light; each having leapt forward into eternity, at opposite extremes.”

What is your rind? What is your fruit?

Even the flowers are fucked into being…

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

I have started reading D.H. Lawrence, starting with Lady Chatterly’s Lover before turning back to the beginning with The Trespasser, The White Peacock and now, Sons and Lovers.

I anticipated how to meet the challenge of this formidable author. How do I read something that leads toward the truth? What miracle can I tap from this body of work that could benefit me? How can life flow so effortlessly from between two covers? Reading, for me, is the greatest voyage on earth.

How do I break from the torpor of normative thinking that plagues current-day America?

Reading D.H. Lawrence unshackled me from my own conservative bent, an enterprise striving to break free from the constraints of nonfiction writing, and address the embers of creative writing stirring within. To use the words of Lawrence, how do I “fuck the flames into being”? Before, in the throes of my naive shrugging-off of English lit, I held little regard for D.H. Lawrence, until at last I read Lady Chatterly’s Lover and came across the following:

“His body was urgent against her, and she didn’t have the heart anymore to fight…She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up…she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes…He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and quivering. Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last. But it was over too soon, too soon, and she could no longer force her own conclusion with her own activity. This was different, different. She could do nothing. She could no longer harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit and she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone. Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea anenome under the tide, clamoring for him to come in again and make fulfillment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling til it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, til she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries.”

Beyond the sexually-charged prose, it is Lawrence’s magical brick-laying of the human condition, that the animal act of fornication is brought to a higher level via poetry. It is elevated by the energy of language. The stirrings of the cloth bed to a higher purpose. This is church-energy hallelujah choruses stirring the masses into quickening resolve to do good against the encroaching evils of the world. Somewhere within is a Jungian dream-language resonating in the bell-towers of consciousness. Who knew the pathos of human desperation had its own language?

In The Trespasser (1912), Helena observes her illicit love Siegmund like the anemones she watches in a Isle of Wight tide pool. Siegmund is a violinist, she is his student. He is married with children. Still, he pursues his passion as determined as he attacks the violin churning out strained exasperated notes at the furthest edge of its extremities of sound. Many readers walk away from the narrative depressed by the sobering bite of the book. But it is no less depressing than our own lives when we break it down into chapters. It is the implications and consequences of adultery. It is the fragility of ego and limitations of compassion. Siegmund returns home from his weekend to find himself no less scorned than before.

Have we in the modern age even made adultery boring? One slide of the finger in Tinder and magically one has a hook-up at will. Lawrence would have bored with such effortless resolve. There’s no poetry in smartphones.

In The Trespasser, a progenitor of sorts to the Lady herself, Lawrence riffs from his source material (a friend’s journal) to explore the capabilities of language:

“The sea was smoking with darkness under half luminous heavens. The stars, one after another, were catching alight. Siegmund perceived first one, and the another one flicker out in the darkness over the sea. He stood perfectly still, watching them. Gradually he remembered how, in the cathedral, the tapers of the choir-stalls would tremble and set steadily to burn, opening the darkness point-after-point with yellow drops of flame, as the acolyte touched them, one by one, delicately with his rod. The night was religious, then, with its proper order of service. Day and night had their ritual, and passed in uncouth worship.”

Such delicate improprieties are forgiven under the auspices of such charged hypnotic prose.

It is time, then, to light the candle anew, and fuck the flame into being.