Viola Meynell and a Presentation copy of The Rainbow

New Statesman Article of November 20 1915 and inscription by J A Gatehouse. Photo by Derek Aram

In this guest blog Derek Aram attempts to uncover the origins of his presentation copy of The Rainbow, a literary adventure that leads him to Greatham and Viola Meynell’s Rackham Cottage…  

Photo of his presentation copy by Derek Aram.

I read with interest Jonathan Long’s piece on the known presentation copies of The Rainbow and the possibility of there being others unaccounted for; (‘The Rainbow: A Miscellany’: Jonathan Long: Journal of D.H.Lawrence Studies: Vol 4, No 4). His article caused me to take a closer look at my first edition copy, which I added to my D.H.L. collection a few years ago, since my copy purports to have once belonged to Viola Meynell and indeed is stamped ‘Presentation Copy’ over the Methuen Publisher Address at the bottom of the Title Page.

Regrettably there is no inscription by Lawrence or indeed by Meynell herself – unless they were obliterated by the pasted insertion of a contemporary (1915) newspaper article about the book’s banning, which covers the whole of both sides of the first front endpaper. See illustration 2 and Appendix 2

Of additional relevance to the history of this copy are an inscription in pencil on the inside of the front pastedown by a J A Gatehouse (see illustration 2 and Appendix 1) stating the volume to be a ‘Review Copy’, given to him by Viola Meynell possibly in 1945; and two loose inserts (see illustration 3), one being a contemporary (c 1910) photograph of ‘Miss Viola Meynell’ cut out from a magazine or newspaper and the other a photograph without inscription of a family group in what looks like 1950s dress around a central figure potentially resembling Viola Meynell herself..

Illustration 3: Loose inserts in volume: Contemporary photograph of Viola Meynell and later unascribed family photograph with strong resemblance to Viola Meynell 2 from R back row. Photo Derek Aram.

Like many an enthusiast I love my Lawrence acquisitions to have a ‘story’, be it quirky or historic or whatever; just something that gives that special cachet, that links me in to the man and his time. I have Lawrence works or works about him, which once belonged to E M Forster, Stephen Spender, Moira Shearer, Louie Burrows and even Exhibit No 4 at a certain Central Crown Court trial Regina v Penguin Books; and a couple of summers ago I made a short journey which was to bring some of that cachet, plus a degree of corroboration to the volume under current consideration.

Returning from a visit with grandchildren to the Amberley Chalk Pits Museum near Arundel and realising we were quite near to Greatham I took a short detour to try to locate the cottage loaned to Lawrence and Frieda by Viola Meynell during the first half of 1915, where ‘The Rainbow’ was completed. With the help of the West Sussex A to Z and the photograph of ‘Shed Hall’ in Volume 1 of Edward Nehls’ ‘D H Lawrence- A Composite Biography’ (I knew it would come in handy one day!), my grandson Byron soon spotted the house in question by the configuration of its chimneys. I pulled in to the verge and approached the gate of ‘Rackham Cottage’.

A family group was sitting at a garden bench table enjoying the fine weather; I came to them with some trepidation and apologising for the intrusion asked if they knew anything about the writer D H Lawrence having stayed there in 1915. A lady introduced herself as ‘Hannah’ and confirmed that Lawrence and Frieda had indeed stayed there in the long low building end on to the road, which they called ‘the Shed’.

Delighted to have this confirmation and feeling I owed them some explanation for my invasion I told them of my acquisition of the book and the details including its ownership by Viola Meynell, who had also lived there. ‘Yes’ said Hannah, ‘we knew Viola Meynell’ – she corrected my pronunciation, saying it was ‘Mennell’ not ‘Maynell’ – she was our grandmother!’ I heard these words with not a little frisson of delight accompanied by a favourite saying of my mam passing silently through my head: ‘Well, I’ll gu ta Trent!’

Hannah called her brother Oliver over and recounted my interest, especially in J A Gatehouse’s assertion that Viola Meynell had given him the book in 1945. Oliver thereupon went into his study and brought out his grandmother’s Visits Book from which he was able to demonstrate that Mr Gatehouse had indeed visited in 1945.

Illustration 4 ‘The Shed’ Rackham Cottage, Greatham. Photo by Derek Aram.

So; Meynells (or Dallyns) still occupied Rackham Cottage; the link with that critical time in Lawrence’s career was forged and the mysterious Mr Gatehouse was real and had visited Viola. But my sense of delighted discovery was now being assailed by pressures from two sides; I was acutely aware that my family were still in the car, chafing to go and it was likely I had long overstayed my welcome, so I left with profuse thanks, a couple of photographs, Hannah’s e-mail address and a promise to send her the images of the book, included in this piece.

This I duly did and offered to send the hard copy of the family photograph if they indeed confirmed it to include Viola. Sadly I received no reply, although the message was delivered and a retry a month later similarly elicited no response, so I have had to conclude that the family’s privacy has to be respected (and I didn’t even mention ‘England My England’!). So many further questions will have to wait…

The jury must be out on whether Lawrence physically gave this book to Viola; it is presumably still a possibility it was a Review Copy, although I have never read of a review by Viola; certainly according to Methuen it is a presentation copy and I guess it is possible it escaped the judicial flames by being sent to Viola directly on Lawrence’s instruction.

Whether my volume fills one of the two unaccounted holes referred to in Jonathan’s piece or not I leave up to you but this account may at least provide an interesting slant and a tiny addition to the Lawrence record. Whatever it be, it holds a place of delight in my long appreciation of D H L’s work and life.

                               

#30WildBooks Lawrence, otherness and Moby Dick

Original whale drawing by Artem Podrez on Pexels. Design James Walker.

Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust are hoping to increase our understanding of the value of nature and issues facing wildlife by suggesting 30 books to read throughout June (#30WildBooks). One writer not on their list is DH Lawrence. If he were to be included in a future campaign I would recommend Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) which, based on his experiences of the Mediterranean and the American Southwest, explores the poetry of nature and the otherness of the non-human world. But pick up any work by Lawrence and you’ll find a writer completely connected to his immediate environment. His Midlands novels explore the destruction of “the country of my heart” and the dehumanising effects of industrialisation, whereas his debut novel, The White Peacock (1911) includes references to over 140 different plants, flowers and trees.

“Under the froth of flowers were the purple vetch-clumps, yellow milk vetches, and the scattered pink of the wood-betony, and the floating stars of marguerites. There was a weight of honeysuckle on the hedges, where pink roses were waking up for their broad-spread flight through the day. Morning silvered the swaths of the far meadow, and swept in smooth, brilliant curves round the stones of the brook; morning ran in my veins; morning chased the silver, darting fish out of the depth, and I, who saw them, snapped my fingers at them, driving them back.” The White Peacock.

Lawrence’s short stories Adolf (rabbit) and Rex (dog) explore his childhood relationship with animals. In Adolf his father brings home a nearly-dead rabbit he’d found on his walk home. Through pure tenderness the rabbit is saved but goes on to cause havoc in the house, leaving droppings on saucers while helping itself to the sugar pot, much to the displeasure of his house-proud mother. Rex explores the naming of a dog donated to the family by an uncle. Like Adolf, the dog disrupts the order of the house and the mother wants him out. But he returns, “wagging his tail as if to say ‘Yes, I’ve come back. But I didn’t need to. I can carry on remarkably well by myself.'” It’s classic Lawrence, forcing us to see things from a different perspective.

Moby Dick drawing by Augustus Burnham Shute – C. H. Simonds Co at wikimedia.

One book on the Wildlife Trust’s recommended reading list is Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Lawrence helped establish Melville’s reputation after an essay published in Studies in Classical American Literature in 1923. It’s an incredible piece of literary criticism about the “tiresome New Englander of the ethical mystical- transcendentalist sort” and the #30WildBooks project gave me the opportunity to revisit it once more.

You can feel Lawrence’s excitement reading this seminal book. It’s like it’s written in real time, becoming more frenetic as he jumps on the ship with Ahab on “the last great hunt”. He’s intrigued as to the symbolism of this “warm-blooded” and “lovable” Leviathan and suggests that the reason the whale was never worshipped by the South Sea Islanders, Polynesians, and Malays, was because “the whale is not wicked. He doesn’t bite. And their gods had to bite”.

Lawrence is fascinated by the other and how people change when placed in isolation. Here is it the wilderness of the sea that has a profound effect on Captain Ahab’s character.

“For with sheer physical vibrational sensitiveness, like a marvellous wireless-station, he registers the effects of the outer world. And he records also, almost beyond pain or pleasure, the extreme transitions of the isolated, far-driven soul, the soul which is now alone, without any real human contact.”

Lawrence analyses the “incredible crew” on the Pequod, exploring their relationships to each other and the outer world. They make The Argonauts seem like “mild lambs in comparison” as they’re “a collection of maniacs fanatically hunting down a lonely, harmless white whale.” Never one to overplay things, he is equally irked by “the sonorous mysticism” that “gets on one’s nerves”. As much as he recognises the novel as being unequalled in terms of “esoteric symbolism” it is also one of “considerable tiresomeness”, accusations that could equally be levelled at Lawrence’s later work, particularly The Plumed Serpent (1926). Kettle black, etc.

Lawrence’s is always able to see things from the non- human perspective: “Moby Dick, the great white whale, tore off Ahab’s leg at the knee, when Ahab was attacking him. Quite right, too. Should have torn off both his legs, and a bit more besides.” Touché .

Lawrence being Lawrence, he uses Melville as a prism through which to explore his own favourite topics, most notably; blood consciousness, the spinal cord, primordial cultures, spirituality and the obligatory bromance. This was picked up by critic John Middleton Murry: “He is not concerned with Melville in and for himself, in his own quiddity. Melville exists only as a paradigm for Lawrence. But the projection of himself that Lawrence makes by means of Melville is amazing (…) It does not matter in the least whether this is a true interpretation of Moby Dick: its importance lies in the self-revelation of Lawrence.”

It’s all about me…

Damn right.

Biographer Andrew Harrison (2016) takes this further, suggesting “the attempt to understand the Americans and, through them, his own work, implied an incipient desire to imagine an audience for (Women in Love).”

One other area of controversy is Lawrence’s assumption that Ishmael does not survive the wreck of the Pequod. Research by JoEllyn Clarey (1986) suggests this was because he was using the original English edition of Moby Dick that omitted the epilogue. Things are never simple with Lawrence, are they?

RELATED READING

• 30 Wild Books to Read in June (dawnoftheunread.wordpress.com)
• Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust website (nottinghamshirewildlife.org)
• DH Lawrence – Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (xroads.virginia.edu)
• Charles Olson, Call me Ishmael (San Francisco, 1947)
• Michael J. Colacurcio, “The Symbolic and the Symptomatic: D. H. Lawrence in Recent American Criticism,” American Quarterly 27 (1975): 488. 28/Chase, p. 24.
• Ren Wellek, “The Literary Criticism of D. H. Lawrence,” Sewanee Review 91 (1983): 598-613
• JoEllyn Clarey “D. H. Lawrence’s “Moby-Dick”: A Textual Note,” Modern Philology Vol. 84, No. 2 (Nov., 1986), pp. 191-195

REVIEW – Pie and Peas with DH Lawrence at The Grand Pavilion.

Press photograph provided by Little Bit Scruffy Festival.

After being booted out of Cornwall in 1917, DH Lawrence was reliant on the generosity of friends to put him up while he got back on his feet. By 1918 he was in such dire poverty that Arnold Bennett secretly gave his agent Pinker £25 as a crisis fund, knowing Lawrence hated charity. It was these circumstances that led Lawrence and his wife Frieda to take residence of Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by-Wirksworth from 2 May 1918. This was the first time the Lawrences had settled in the Midlands for six years, affording him the opportunity to reconnect with family and old neighbours. He lasted one year.

Lawrence’s time in the Midlands is the main focus of Pie and Peas with DH Lawrence, an amateur dramatic performance that sketches out key elements of his life. As you would expect from a production by the Wirksworth Community Theatre, space is given to Lawrence’s time in the surrounding area. Therefore the performance includes the reading of three of his letters to Katherine Mansfield during the brutal winter of 1918. Mansfield was married to the writer and critic John Middleton Murry. The two couples had briefly lived near each other in Cornwall during the war in an early attempt at Rananim, but it didn’t work out. By 1919 Murry was editing the Athenaeum which featured many of the Bloomsbury Group. This should have been an opportunity to rebuild their friendship while, more importantly, generating a bit of income for Lawrence through commissions. Unfortunately it didn’t work out and it would lead to a simmering mistrust between the two that would intensify over time. This wasn’t touched on in the play because it would have over complicated the narrative. Instead we are reminded that Lawrence was a prolific letter writer and who his circle of friends were at the time.

Lawrence’s Wintry Peacock was inspired by his time spent in Derbyshire and is partly performed, whereby a suspicious wife asks a man who can speak French to translate the contents of a letter to her husband. This places the man in an awkward situation as he has to decide whether to tell her the truth or spare her feelings. Given the audience were privy to the contents of the letter, this worked very well on stage.

We were also treated to both the reading of War Baby and the song War Baby by Carol Fieldhouse. This poem, which was originally published in the English Review, coincided with the birth of Catherine Carswell’s son, John, on 30 May 1918. Lawrence dedicated the poem to Carswell’s new offspring.

It was during a brief stay in Ripley that Lawrence wrote two short stories about childhood pets, Rex (dog) and Adolf (rabbit). Adolf is the tale of a mischievous pet rabbit that causes chaos in a family home, leaving droppings on saucers while helping himself to the sugar pot. In performing this, the producers celebrated Lawrence’s love of nature and wildlife and led nicely onto a reading of Snake. It also helped touch on another theme that had been explored in the opening half an hour, Lawrence’s parents.

Lawrence had an indifferent relationship with his father, depicting him as an ignorant brute in his third novel Sons and Lovers (1913). He was very much influenced by his overbearing mother who aspired for more and didn’t want her kids going down the pit. Arthur Lawrence may have been down the pit since he was seven but he was also a very charismatic and caring individual. This is perfectly drawn out in Adolf when the father finds one surviving rabbit from a family of dead rabbits. He brings the one surviving (but unmoving) rabbit home in order to nurture it back to life. Whereas Lydia Lawrence is aghast at the havoc the rabbit causes, Arthur prioritises life. Lawrence realised years later that he’d been overly harsh in his portrayals of his father and this is noted in the play when a young Lawrence announces if he’d written Sons and Lovers when he was older the father would have been presented differently. Thankfully he didn’t.

In addition to life in “the country of my heart” the play also explores the Lady C trial, censorship of his paintings, and his relationship with his German wife Frieda. This means that other elements, such as his savage pilgrimage, are omitted. But this works very well, providing a brief sketch of his life and works that are performed through song, poetry, short stories, plays, comedy, letters, court case recitals, and piano ballads. The cast also take on multiple parts, meaning we have different people playing Lawrence and other key figures. This brings out the ethos of ‘community’ theatre as everybody is effectively the star performer.

Frieda Lawrence (Marie Paurin). Press photograph provided by Little Bit Scruffy Festival.

However, there are a few standout performances that deserve mentioning. Getting Frieda Lawrence to read out Lawrence’s damning poem The English Are So Nice was a masterstroke. It’s delivered with the right balance of sarcasm and perfectly weighted in delivery to enable the humour to come through:  The English are so nice/so awfully nice/they are the nicest people in the world./And what’s more, they’re very nice about being nice/ about your being nice as well!

A Colllier’s Wife is an incredibly difficult poem to read because of the dialect but Sue Watts was brilliant. She’s like a cross between Ms. Ball-breaker and Nora Batty and delivers this, and other lines, with absolute ferocity. And finally, the gem of the show goes to Andy Miller – a member of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio – for his adapted version of a Monty Python Sketch in which Lawrence and his father switch roles. It was completely unexpected and perfect for getting across the cultural tensions faced by Eastwood’s favourite mard arse.

And now for something completely different: Andy Miller (right) as Lawrence switches roles with his father. Press photograph provided by Little Bit Scruffy Festival.

The play was performed as part of the Little Bit Scruffy Festival at the Grand Pavilion Theatre in Matlock. The Theatre is the largest in the Derbyshire Dales but badly in need of repair and renovation. Lynn Allison, a Trustee, Director and Co Chairman of the charity that owns the building said the purpose of hosting the festival here was “to bring new people into the building to hear our rescue and renovation story;  to bring new drama to the area; and to break even”. The Grand Pavilion was built in 1910 but has sustained damage from water over the years. “Because of the condition of the building, we say it is ‘Open – ambitious – and Still a Little Bit Scruffy’ hence the name of the festival.”

Lawrence lived a largely nomadic existence and wasn’t one for materialism. He was renowned for his DIY skills and ‘make do and mend’ attitude, so I’m sure he would approve of his work being celebrated in such shabby, yet homely, surroundings. Just like the rabbit in his short story Adolph, a little love and tenderness is required to help resurrect this old building back to its former glory. But whereas Adolph needed a few sugar cubes, the charity needs a few million. It will be hard slog, but one you can support while being entertained at the same time.

The Little Bit Scruffy Festival runs from 28 May – 2 July and includes other performances and workshops.

RELATED READING 

• Little Bit Scruffy Festival (thegrandpavilion.co.uk)
• The Grand Pavilion history (database.theatrestrust.org.uk)
• New Heads Have High Hopes For Pavilion (matlockmercury.co.uk)
• Heritage Lottery bid win (derbyshiretimes.co.uk)
• Adolph by DH Lawrence (fullreads.com)
• Wirksworth Community Theatre (facebook.com)
• Nottinghamshire Dialect in A Collier’s Wife (bl.uk)
• Wirksworth’s Fascinating History (derbytelegraph.co.uk)
• Female mate-guarding in Lawrence’s “Wintry Peacock”: an evolutionary perspective (freepatentsonline.com)

The International D. H. Lawrence Conference: The Relative and the Absolute in D. H. Lawrence’s Work

Pink Lawrence by James Walker.

In this guest blog Fiona Fleming reports back on the International D. H. Lawrence Conference: The Relative and the Absolute in D. H. Lawrence’s Work which was held at Paris Nanterre University, 30 March-1 April 2017

Now in its thirty-first year of existence, the Paris conference has become a beloved annual rendez-vous for Lawrence scholars around the world, not only, as Ginette Roy reminded us, for what Lawrence called the “splendours” of the “monumental and handsome” city, but also for the friendly, “informal” atmosphere which characterises the three-day event. This year’s edition was somewhat marked by novelty however, the university having once more changed its name, to Paris Nanterre, and the conference taking place in the brand-new research building, named after German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber, which was rather fitting for this year’s distinctly philosophical topic of “The Relative and the Absolute”. Despite many participants’ slight apprehension of the subject, the twenty-one scholars from Belarus, the UK, Australia, Sweden, the USA, Norway, Lebanon, Italy and France, skilfully rose to the challenge and, to quote Ginette again: “it wasn’t so difficult”.

The papers presented and the enlightening discussions which invariably followed repeatedly highlighted Lawrence’s struggle with the notions of individualism and connectedness, and the ways in which his novels, short stories, poems and essays establish the dual necessity for an isolated absolute self and vital relationships with others.

Marina Ragachewskaya’s opening study of “The Ladybird” linked the relativity of absolute love to Hegelian philosophy and Christian dogmas, to foreground Lawrence’s idea that the absolute is to be felt through human contact. Fiona Fleming focused on the theme of regenerative interconnectedness between the human and the non-human in “The Princess”, Sun and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Joe Shafer’s comparative approach of Lawrence’s devastating attack on Whitman’s universalising discourse emphasised Lawrence’s struggle with the American poet’s views on sexual difference and the absolute self. Howard Booth’s paper on the 1941 radio adaptation of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” showed how W. H. Auden accentuated the child’s disturbing relationships with the world through the use of voice and subject-object relationships with the furniture.

Women in Love was thoroughly examined in four papers which considered the chiasmus of the relationship and conflict between Birkin and Gerald in the light of the relative and the absolute. Jacqueline Gouirand discussed Lawrence’s exploration of the possibilities of relationships between men and women through the character of Birkin, the prophet-like proclaimer of absolute truths who fails to establish his new ethic of human relationships. Following this analysis, Brigitte Macadré’s close reading of Birkin’s countless aphorisms and the ironical distance created by the other characters’ response to them, suggested that Birkin may be a false prophet, despite his efforts to smash clichés and established truths. Tony Voss argued that while Gerald embodies the absolute as the god of the machine, absolutely committed to his system, and Birkin achieves a kind of relativity by defending the relativism of living, the relativism of the latter is not opposite to the absolutism of the former, but completely other. Taking a more linguistic approach to the matter, Maria Trejling pinpointed Women in Love’s exposition of the limitations of human concepts and the slipperiness of language, revealed by the unstable meaning of the word “inhuman” and Derrida’s neologism “l’animot”.

Élise Brault-Dreux and Theresa Mae Thompson once again delighted us with their meticulous study of Lawrence’s poems: Élise engaged with several poems from Look! We Have Come Through to outline the poetic incarnation of human relativity and the virtues of communion in separateness which they extol. Theresa then demonstrated how the poem “Fish” constructs the (possibly sexual) connection between the fish and the water, while celebrating the elusive oneness of the fish.

Lawrence’s views on fiction and the novel also received significant attention, from both Jonathan Long, who presented a beautiful photocopy of the Kangaroo dust jacket from Seltzer’s 1923 edition, as well as a useful survey of all the essays which, when put together, give a theory of the novel according to Lawrence; and from Michael Bell, who argued that the novel provides an arena in which the relative and the absolute can find a modus vivendi, and demonstrated how Cervantes and Lawrence parodied or thematised the relativity of life and the absolutism of the human mind.

Many scholars alluded to Lawrence’s stance towards the religious absolute and highlighted the gradual change in his opinions towards religion. Mélanie Lebreton spoke of the “nauseating fixity” of religion which impelled Lawrence to track down the absolute all over the world in a quest to shape his own religious views and rewrite biblical symbolism. Peter Fjågesund explained that Lawrence sought alternatives to religion in art, where man and woman are reconciled in a dialectical relationship. Paul Poplawski retraced Lawrence’s move from the absolute crucified Christ in the Tyrol essays of Twilight in Italy, through the philosophised Christ opposed to God the Father in “The Crown”, to the resurrected Christ in The Man Who Died, who reawakens to the world and becomes relative, dependent on relationships. This late work by Lawrence also underwent close scrutiny by Jane Costin, who illustrated the importance of touch as a way for the soul to live on after death by referring to Sketches of Etruscan Places and the beautiful engravings by John Farleigh in the 1935 edition of The Man Who Died.

Shifting the focus to the question of “absolute music”, Sue Reid considered the contrasting views of Wagner, Haweis, Hanslick, Beethoven and Lawrence on how music relates to life, nature and man. Papers and discussions recurrently revolved around Lawrence’s theory of polarity in duality, which Nick Ceramella described in his comparative study of Lawrence and Blake. Benjamin Bouche explored the meanings of “absolute”, “existence” and “being” to demonstrate that Lawrence understood the absolute to mean completion, the realisation of each individual’s own nature, through vital relationships, not separateness. Soha El Samad linked Einstein’s principle of light with Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome to show that Lawrentian characters, like the rhizome, grow amidst relationships and follow the light to blossom and reach completion. Stefania Michelucci concluded the three-day programme with a reflection on the relationships between the human and non-human characters in The Fox and the complexity which surrounds Banford’s death.

Besides the large variety of topics and the stimulating complexity of the philosophical considerations they entailed, which once again treated us to Cornelius Crowley’s extraordinary gift for association (including a much appreciated connection between Aeolian harps and G-strings), this year’s conference will remain memorable for the exceptionally warm weather which Ginette must have divined as she arranged for our delicious meal in the appropriately named, Provençal-themed restaurant Le Sud. Interdependence and vital relationships are indeed the sure paths to the absolute of fulfilment for thankful Lawrentian friends who were delighted with Ginette’s announcement of next year’s topic: “Resisting tragedy” – for further details please contact Ginette Roy (ginette.katz.roy@gmail.com) and Cornelius Crowley (crowley@u-paris10.fr).

RELATED READING

• International DH Lawrence Conference 2016 (thedigitalpilgrimage.wordpress.com)
• Conference papers call (fabula.org)
• 14th international DH Lawrence Conference London (dhlawrencesociety.com)
• Paris University website (u-paris10.fr)