Promo video: Figs – a very secretive fruit

Ficus carica L., aka the fig, was so popular 9,000 years ago that folk in Palestine lined them up in groves to ensure local supplies were met, thereby predating grain cultivation. D.H. Lawrence would have admired the fig during his Italian sojourn, but it only made its way into Europe during the 15^th century after being plundered from Persia, Asia Minor and Syria. The above video was created to celebrate Lawrence’s seductive ode to this sun-ripened fruit, but the fig has been a source of reverence for centuries. Figs have come to symbolise fertility, peace and prosperity in many world religions, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and Buddhism. In Ancient Greece, athletes scoffed as many as they could get their hands on, believing it would enhance speed and strength. King Nebuchadnezzar II had them planted in the hanging gardens of Babylon whereas Egyptian kings were buried with them to please the mother goddess Hathor who would emerge from a mythic fig tree to welcome them into the afterlife. Figs also appear in the Old and New Testament, offering remedies for illness – both medical and social. Hezekiah, King of Judah, recovered from a plague of boils after his servants applied a paste of crushed figs to his skin. Whereas the fig leaf provided Adam and Eve with a bit of dignity after an apple left them rotten to the core. Or as Lawrence puts it: ‘She got the fact on her mind, and quickly sewed fig-leaves/ And women have been sewing ever since’.

Although Lawrence’s naughty poem has become synonymous with the fig, it appears elsewhere in literature. In The Bell Jar (1963), Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman’s descent into madness, Esther encounters a fig tree and later reflects ‘I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story’. But it is best known in the 5^th century epic poem The Mahavamsa, which covers the early history of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, and sees the Buddha gaining enlightenment under a fig tree.

Lawrence writes that ‘The fig is a very secretive fruit,’ so secretive in fact that it defies definition. Ben Crair, writing in The New Yorker, explains ‘a clever botanist would sell them at the florist, with the fresh-cut roses’. This is because a fig is technically a ball of flowers, with enclosed flowers that bloom inwards or as Lawrence writes ‘There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward;/ Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb’.

This unique fruit, I mean flower – or more accurately a syconium, requires pollination to reproduce and this can only be done by a fig wasp which is just small enough to crawl inside. And not just any fig wasp by the way! Each of the 750 varieties has its own unique species of fig wasp to do the business. So next time you sink your teeth into the ‘glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled’ interior, remember you are most likely chomping into a female fig wasp that got stuck.

Mike Shanahan in Ladders to Heaven explains that this process of codependent evolution has been going on for sixty million years. The fig, unlike seasonal fruit, can be found all year round, making it a vital food source for over 1300 bird and mammal species. High in potassium, iron, fiber, and plant calcium, it has also been essential to survival of certain species in times of want. A 2003 study of Uganda’s Budongo Forest found that figs were ‘the sole source of fruit for chimpanzees at certain times of year’. I doubt these species would care to be instructed on the best way to eat this keystone fruit as Lawrence does in his poem, taking the Italians to task:  ‘But the vulgar way/ Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.’

Mike Shanahan is particularly enamoured with the Strangler breed of fig which grows ‘from seeds dropped high on other trees by passing birds and mammals. By starting out high in the forest canopy instead of on its gloomy floor, the strangler seedlings get the light they need to grow with vigour. As they do, they send down aerial roots that become thick and woody, encasing their host trees in a living mesh. They can even smother and kill giant trees, growing into colossal forms’. Shanahan also points out that the struggles faced by the Strangler fig would inspire the British biologist Alfred Russel Wallace to develop his own theory of evolution by natural selection, independently of Charles Darwin. High-energy figs may also have helped our ancestors to develop bigger brains.

However you eat yours, and for whatever purpose, we hope you enjoy our short video, lovingly put together by Izaak Bosman.

In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer.  How do we capture Lawrence’s playfulness in poems such as Figs? Does the poem draw out important issues regarding nudity and shame or does the idea that ‘ripe figs won’t keep’ chide with modern attitudes towards female sexual identity? Just as Figs have been around for centuries, so to women have faced centuries of insults. In 2019 we will be building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here.

On the Dangerous Ambiguity of the prefix ‘Eco’

Eco Fascism Boot by James Walker in homage to Shepard Farey’s Tyrant Boot (2008)

In this guest blog, Stephen Alexander, author of Torpedo the Ark, questions the use of the prefix ‘eco’ for a wider discussion around language and fascism, blood and soil.

Many scholars – including some who should know better – continue to fetishise the prefix eco- and think that by simply placing it in front of words including criticism, feminism, and politics, they can sex-up their research and immediately make it seem more vital and contemporary.

But ecological thinking – which, ironically, often prides itself on being radical – has a long and essentially conservative history that can be traced back to figures on the völkisch far-right keen to promote a pessimistic vision of the world that is not only anti-urban, anti-capitalist and anti-science, but fundamentally illiberal and anti-humanist in character. Indeed, whilst this post-Romantic German tradition pre-dates National Socialism, it was nevertheless within the Third Reich that such thinking was first put into practice and formed a key component of Nazi aesthetics and ideology.    

Now, of course, I’m not suggesting that a concern for the environment automatically makes one a fascist. But I am pointing out that nature-based ideologies are very often used to legitimate Social Darwinist beliefs and that many reactionaries have called for a neo-feudalism based upon rural values and natural divisions. We can see this in the work of two figures closely associated with ecologism in England during the inter-war period – John Hargrave and Rolf Gardiner.

The former was convinced that modern life had produced a ‘mentally and physically deficient race’ that couldn’t even be relied upon to breed sufficiently. A self-declared pantheist and Anglo-Saxon nationalist, Hargrave hoped to create a new national myth or substitute folk-memory for the English. To this end, he founded a movement in the 1920s – the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift – which was meant to establish a counter-culture founded upon ‘the distinctive German brand of serious nature-worship’.

In practice, this meant that members spent most of their time hiking, camping, or making their own clothes, but they lent all their activities an earnest spiritual significance that rather absurdly combined Native American ritual with Norse mythology. Although they never numbered more than a few hundred members, the KKK could claim several public figures as supporters, including Havelock Ellis, Julian Huxley, and H. G. Wells. D. H. Lawrence was at least partly sympathetic. In a letter to Rolf Gardiner, he wrote:

‘I read the Kibbo Kift book with a good deal of interest. Of course it won’t work: not quite flesh and blood. […] The man alternates between idealism pure and simple, and a sort of mummery, and then a compromise with practicality. What he wants is all right – I agree with him on the whole, and respect him as a straightforward fighter. But he knows there’s no hope […] And therefore, underneath, he’s full of hate.’[1]

By the outbreak of the Second World War, Hargrave had become increasingly isolated and irrelevant on the political scene. And by the end of the War he’d found his true calling as a faith healer and eco-mystic.

As for Rolf Gardiner, Lawrence profoundly influenced the thinking of a man who would become one of the founders of the Soil Association in 1945. But what really interests is how easily Gardiner also came under the sway of National Socialism. Always an active Germanophile and Nordicist, Gardiner became a fervent exponent of Blut und Boden in England in the 1930s and dreamt of an Anglo-German political union.

His major written work, published in 1932 and dedicated to Lawrence, is a semi-religious work entitled World Without End. In it, Gardiner calls for a spiritual rebirth and a new attitude towards ‘nature, the soil, to sex and to politics’.

Whilst, to his credit, he rejected any ‘nonsensical racial theory’ – not least because of his own half-Jewish background – he nevertheless enthusiastically greeted the Nazi assumption of power in 1933 and was soon on warm personal terms with the Nazi Minister for Agriculture Walther Darré. Both men agreed on the importance of living according to ecological law, which, of necessity, means the subjection of the individual to the ‘larger organic authority’ of the Natural Order.[2]

In sum: we all need to exercise caution before we take an ecocritical turn – because you never know where it might lead …

In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer.  How do we capture his views on nature and alternative living while exercising caution about using the prefix ‘eco’? What would the Kibbo Kift have looked like if it’d been devised by Lawrence? In 2019 we will be building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here.

REFERENCES

[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI,  ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991). Letter 4268, dated 16 January 1928, pp. 267-68.

[2] Gardiner was also an associate of Lord Lymington and the rather sinister English Array. A journal edited by Lymington, The New Pioneer, to which Gardiner was a frequent contributor, affirmed a form of eco-nationalism in which an analogy was drawn between farm and nation, effectively transforming citizens into livestock. For further details on this and many of the other points discussed here, see Anna Bramwell’s Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (Yale University Press, 1989) and her earlier work Blood and Soil: Walther Darré and Hitler’s Green Party (Kensal Press, 1985). Readers of Lawrence interested in his relationship to German culture and his green critique of industrialism and technology, should also see Anne Fernihough’s D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, (Oxford University Press, 1993).

How Lawrentian ideals have come to influence future generations of poets

Look! We have come through! D.H. Lawrence; with an introduction by Frieda Lawrence; & with illustrations by Michael Adam. Published by Marazion, Cornwall : Ark Press, 1959. See Abebooks fmi.

This is our second blog exploring the influence of Look! We Have Come Through! This time David Brock explores how Lawrencian ideals, particularly those of renewed inner life, have come to influence future generations of poets and artists. He pays particular attention to Steve Taylor’s collection The Calm Centre, which picked lines from Lawrence’s ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’ to preface his own book of verse on the theme of individual enlightenment.

In an enlivening introduction to a 1990s Wordsworth edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Poetry, Albert Glover writes of the amazing breakthrough Lawrence made as man and poet on finding fulfilment in love and marriage. ‘Everything Lawrence wrote after Look! We Have Come Through! [the cycle of love poems he produced during this important phase] comes from a soul forged in the ecstasy of spiritual awakening’, Glover asserts, before quoting the memorable, mysterious opening of Lawrence’s ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’. . .’Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!/ A fine wind is blowing the new direction of time. . .’ This being ‘the prophetic stance of the risen man’, Glover suggests.

A present day writer, thinker and poet, Steve Taylor (who gave spell-binding, unscripted talks to the Lawrence Society in its glory days, about Lawrence as Pagan, and as Mystic, and now appears annually in Mind, Body and Spirit magazine’s list of ‘the world’s 100 most spiritually influential living people’), has picked lines from this key poem to preface his own book of verse on the theme of individual enlightenment. Entitled The Calm Center, it features an introduction by spiritual teacher and author of The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle.

Of the Lawrence poem in question, composed around the time of Lawrence’s marriage to Frieda, on 13th July 1914, the late great Keith Sagar writes that it is ‘about life and art, about Lawrence the married man and Lawrence the poet’, and that it ‘consists almost entirely of images – wind, chisel, fountain, angels.’

What is the ‘wind’ which Lawrence speaks of? Keith suggests it signifies the release of a new imaginative, poetic energy suddenly at large, and which may provide him with inspiration so powerful it may break through the rock encasing our soul, to open up a new ‘Pagan paradise’ – the Hesperides – where the golden apples offer a life free from the old (Eden apple) fear of sin.

The poem ends with ‘the three strange angels’ knocking on the door, at night. Lawrence is ready and willing to face this disturbing challenge – ‘Admit them, admit them’. Together with his wife, he feels able to save the seeds of creativity – these wind-blown, winged gifts – from a world descending into war and destruction. And, as Keith also puts it, the ‘exorcism’ of Sons and Lovers has brought the re-birth of Lawrence’s ‘demon’ – a force now ‘free to become no longer the writhing repressed half of a split psyche.’

Steve Taylor’s therapeutic poems (which are reflective discourses, rather in the manner of Lawrence’s Pansies) reveal how we too might heal our mental ailments, achieve this ‘new’ Lawrentian ‘wholeness and courage’, and find a ‘self’ free of negativity ‘which can recognise and respond to the sacred’, within what Frieda called ‘the great vast show of life’.

One must be prepared to change. As with Lawrence there are difficult questions and challenges. ‘The Off-Loading’ is reminiscent of one of Lawrence’s most famous final poems, ‘Phoenix’, in asking ‘Are you willing to give yourself up?’ It is only when you can let go that ‘you’ll be empty, peaceful and light/ and ready to float free’ – rather like Lawrence’s ‘immortal bird’ rising from the flames.

There are poems about engagement with trees, something Lawrence understood uncannily well. It is of unfathomable value – balm to the suffering soul – to wake up to nature and reconnect in this profound way.

‘The Project’ is concerned with permitting your inner self to unfold and have expression.

‘The End of Desire’, about the erroneous pursuit of false goals in life, feels pure Lawrence, while Steve’s concluding poem ‘The Essence’ has that grand Lawrentian theme that we can each be a living manifestation of cosmic energy.

Lawrence’s remarkable verse contains next to nothing that is ‘chaff’. In common with his other work, it offers a great and nourishing influence on succeeding generations of writers, whose own uplifting poetry can achieve similar spiritual breakthroughs, leading to the awakening of new ‘integrity’, ‘vital sanity’ and holistic being. Steve Taylor’s latest volume offers this Lawrentian vision of renewed inner life and fulfilling emotional health.

In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer.  How do we capture and track his influences? What are you personally ‘willing to give up’ and how does this compare with Lawrence’s own principles? How do we represent renewed inner life? In 2019 we will be building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here.

Look! We have (nearly) come through! D.H. and Chatto & Windus

Chatto & Windus logo (L) First edition 1917 (M) Dawn of the Unread (R)

In 2019 we will launch our D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre to mark the centenary of Lawrence’s self- imposed exile. But what was it about 1919 that led to him turning his back on his country of birth for good? There are many reasons why Lawrence had had enough of the ‘grey ones’ but censorship was particularly frustrating, on both a financial and artistic level. But while his bad boy reputation put off many publishers, it offered a lifeline to Chatto and Windus who hoped to rejuvenise their flagging reputation. This is the first of two blogs exploring the history of Look! We Have Come Through!

WWI had a profound effect on many people, not least the 17 million soldiers and civilians who were killed. Industrialisation and technology, the bastions of modernity, were more accurately bastards, and bloody ones at that. Progress just meant you got to the grave quicker. The Great War, in addition to suppressing individuality for the greater good, would see Lawrence booted out of Cornwall, after he was accused of being a spy. The locals didn’t take kindly to his marriage to a German woman. All in all, he had plenty of reasons to turn his back on Blighty. But driving this desire to flee as far away as possible was his absolute frustration with the censors, the ‘aunties,’ the ‘grey ones’.

Sons and Lovers (1913) had already been banned from public libraries. But The Rainbow, published in September 1915, would only stay in print for two months before it was seized under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. Unlike Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) a decade later, the novel didn’t include any obscene words. But as prosecutor Herbert Muskett declared ‘it was in fact a mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action’.

The novel included a Lesbian relationship, but at the time there wasn’t a law against this behavior (as there was with male homosexuality). Lesbianism was very much a love that dare not speak its name, mainly because men were the only ones allowed to do the talking. Women were only given the right to vote in 1918 and even then, only some women. But this gave publisher Methuen a get out of jail card as they were able to play dumb about what was going on in the novel.

In a review in the New Statesman, JC Squire, suggested the characters in Sons and Lovers were under ‘the spell of German psychologists’, for daring to question fundamentals of their life (religion, love, relationships), and by implication were anti-British in nature. Judge Sir John Dickinson therefore ruled that the book ‘had no right to exist in the wind of war’, and that Lawrence was in effect mocking the very principles British men were fighting to defend. One of these men happened to be Dickinson’s son, who was killed in battle a few weeks before the trial. Lawrence never stood a chance. But just to wind him up a bit more – not that he needed provocation – copies of The Rainbow were burned by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange.

Lawrence faced a dilemma all writers encounter at some point in their career, but one that was particularly pertinent to modernists at the time: Did he continue to experiment and push boundaries, remaining true to himself, or conform in order to sell books and put food on his plate.

However, a recent paper by Andrew Nash suggests the relationship between authors and publishers was more dynamic and that it was Lawrence’s name that attracted Chatto & Windus to publish Look! We Have Come Through! in 1917. The poetry collection details Lawrence’s relationship with his wife, Frieda, and had previously gone under the title of Man and Woman and later Poems of a Married Man.

Look! We Have Come Through! was rejected by Duckworth who had previously published The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914), Amores (1916), and Twilight in Italy. These provided a broad range of Lawrence’s work in the form of short stories, poems, and essays, so they couldn’t be accused of being unsupportive.

Chatto & Windus accepted the manuscript and Nash believes this was partly because ‘the firm was entering a period of transition and was soon to regain a position of pre-eminence in British publishing’. These changes were largely brought about by Geoffrey Whitworth (1883–1951) and Frank Swinnerton (1884–1982)’. Arnold Bennett was particularly impressed by Swinnerton who he said had ‘turned Chatto & Windus from a corpse into the liveliest thing of its sort in London’.

‘The editorial dynamics of the firm’ writes Nash ‘manifested itself in a style of publishing that often placed literary concerns before those of business. Swinnerton’s role in the firm was especially significant and illustrates an important trend in literary publishing of the period. Authors were becoming more actively involved in publishing and more closely engaged with policy-making decisions. For writers like Lawrence this was crucial. Swinnerton was an important advocate for his work.’

However, Swinnerton was perceptive enough to see how Lawrence could help elevate the flagging status of the company. His report notes recommend publishing the collection ‘on the ground that Lawrence’s name would be valuable to our list. I could not emphasise this point too strongly. Lawrence has a decided following, and his name has a real distinction’.

Nash observes that ‘the publishing policy of Chatto & Windus in this period serves to illustrate that, in spite of the constraints of censorship and wartime production costs, there were forces in mainstream publishing that were keen to embrace modern literary forms and issue the work of authors whose subject-matter was challenging and potentially dangerous and whose popular appeal was small.’

Swinnerton had to convince Percy Spalding, who objected to the ‘sexual imagery and the conflation of love and religion’ within the collection and demanded that ‘Song of a Man who is Loved’ and ‘Meeting Among the Mountains’ were omitted from the volume as a condition of publishing. ‘Song of a Man who is Loved’ would be reinstated into the collection in 1928 when Secker published the Collected Poems.

Given his history, Lawrence had to compromise. His agent Pinker got the brunt of his frustrations: ‘Publishers are fools, one wants to spit at them — But it is not worth while making a real breach’. In a letter to Amy Lowell he wrote ‘This is a one bright beam in my publishing sky. But I shall have to go and look for daylight with a lantern’.

But Lawrence being Lawrence there were additional demands, such as the setting of the six-part poem ‘Ballad of a Wilful Woman’ on separate pages, irrespective of what this might cost the publisher or wartime restrictions on paper.

The avant garde cover was designed by Edward McKnight Kauffer whose influences included futurism, cubism, and vorticism, making this a very modern publication that stood out from other publications on the Chatto and Windus list. It wasn’t to everyone’s liking. A reviewer in Sketch complained that the incomprehensible cover ‘looks like a mixture of two broken combs and the fragments of a knife-cleaner’ and that this ‘ought to warn you to expect something desperately eccentric’. This, of course, is exactly what the publishers wanted; literature and art that broke with the prevailing aesthetic and moral conventions of the period. However, this ambition did not translate into sales and it was time for Lawrence to find a new publisher for his next work.

Source: D.H Lawrence and the publication of Look! We have come Through! by Andrew Nash The Library, Volume 12, Issue 2, 1 June 2011, Pages 142–163,

In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer.  How do we capture Lawrence’s relationship with agents and publishers? How important was he to literary modernism? How do we convey his frustration at being constantly censored? In 2019 we will be building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here.