Forgetting Our Bodies – D.H. Lawrence vs The Mind

D.H. Lawrence was full of contradictions, none more blatant perhaps than his disregard for the mind. Does he in fact have a point? Do we put too much importance on our intellect? Kai Northcott investigates…

“[…] if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.”[1]

This is a quote from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel most known for its controversy, its explicitness, headlines that distract from the book’s most interesting ideas.

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence isn’t just calling for a more open relationship with sex, he is calling for a more sensory approach to the world. This view has left him labelled by some as a ‘primitivist’, yet there is a more complex image at play.[2]

Lawrence was a peculiar contradiction as fellow author and good friend of Lawrence Aldous Huxley noted in an interview “I never understood his anti-intellectualism, more so because he was an intellectual.” [3]

This divide could well have begun with his parents, of which he wrote:

“My father hated books, hated the sight of anyone reading or writing. My mother hated the thought that any of her sons should be condemned to manual labour.”[4]

Despite his mother’s impression, it’s obvious he fought against intellectual idealism. In a letter to Bertrand Russell, who he had plans to lecture with, Lawrence professed, “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.”[5] Whilst it sounds like a simple rejection of knowledge, and intellectualism, Lawrence’s works seems to point to something more.

He was afraid we were becoming disconnected from the world, ultimately disembodying ourselves. Again, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence puts it, “[…]  the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.”[6] As with the first quote, he is concerned that we are to forget our bodies and consider them merely as vessels for a mind. Lawrence puts nature at the fore, likening us to trees, just parts of the landscape. Compelling as back to our roots. He perhaps see’s that our technological striving, and intellectual pursuits leave us stranded, abandoning our very origins, echoing his fears during world war one of mechanization.

Though, his problem with intellect stems from its disconnection from the everyday. In a somewhat tangential tirade in a review of Scarlett Letter, Lawrence criticised the American ideology, saying. “The cultured, highly-conscious person of today loathes any form of physical, ‘menial’ work: such as washing dishes or sweeping a floor or chopping wood.”[7][8]

It is the simple things, which Lawrence takes pleasure from. Even things which are ‘hard work’. Society is an immediate threat to these things, to itself, as Lawrence saw it. He later reconciled his views, saying “[…] man can’t live by instinct because he’s got a mind. Emotions by themselves become just a nuisance. The mind by itself becomes just a sterile thing. So, what’s to be done? You’ve got to marry the pair of them.”[9]

Lawrence’s concerns don’t seem so unfounded now, though perhaps not in the way he meant. We are stimulated at every moment intellectually; our lives are lived in phones and our thoughts are amplified around the world. Our identity is tied up with digital avatars. We often speak as if we have bodies, rather than being bodies. We reside inside them not as them. Lawrence’s work encourages us to reconnect with the physical. Whilst we might know that we are bodies, that we must move and feel, if anything civilization has done exactly as Lawrence wrote, it has sought to forget the body, to overcome it. As we look forward, it may be worth asking, what are we forgetting?

References

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[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London: Penguin, 2006) p.74

[2] Tindall, William York, ‘DH Lawrence and the Primitive’, The Sewanee Review, 45.2 (1937), pp. 198 – 211

[3] Dunes, Aldous Huxley – On D. H. Lawrence, online video recording, YouTube, 4^th September 2017, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okCQ7rdujEo> [ Accessed 3^rd March 2023]

[4] D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking Press, 1923) p.86

[5] Letter to Bertrand Russell (1L503) Found here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1948/12/d-h-lawrences-letters-to-bertrand-russell/644079/

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London: Penguin, 2006) p. 330

[7] D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking Press, 1923) p.85

[8] Tindall, William York, ‘DH Lawrence and the Primitive’, The Sewanee Review, 45.2 (1937) pp. 198 – 211

[9] D. H. Lawrence, Assorted Articles (London: Seeker, 1932) p. 206

Locating Lawrence: July 1923

In these monthly videos we are locating D.H. Lawrence 100 years ago via his letters. He is just about to leave Chapala and head to New Jersey to begin correcting the proofs of three books.

Great Britain doesn’t feel so great in 2023. Everyone worth their salt is on strike: Teachers, nurses, rail staff – the lot. No matter what our profession, we’re all united by our collective lack of money. If it’s any consolation, things weren’t so easy in 1923.

On 9 July, D.H. Lawrence was attempting to leave Chapala via the Gulf Coast of central eastern Mexico, but it was ‘doubtful’ if he’d be able to get out of Veracruz as it was ‘very Bolshevist there’ with a ‘strike imminent if not already on’ meaning they ‘won’t let ships leave[i]’. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

As always, he has money saving travel tips. Willard Johnson is advised that he can save three pesos by heading to the frontier town of Laredo, Texas where ‘they will vaccinate you…free of charge.’

Once jabbed, Lawrence heads onto New Orleans which he dismisses as a ‘steaming, heavy, rather dead town[ii]’ and as ‘a bit Martin Chuzzlewit[iii]’ the eponymous hero of the Dickens novel who bought land only to discover it was a swamp. As for the Mississippi, it’s ‘a vast and weary river that looks as if it had never wanted to start flowing[iv]’.   

There is the usual attempt to lure Knud Merrild back to communal living, ‘if we were a few people we could make a life in Mexico[v]’. Lawrence had spent the winter of 1922 with Merrild in the Rio Grande Valley and was desperate to recreate Rananim. It was here that he was gifted a dog called Bibbles from Mabel Dodge Luhan, but the small French bulldog made the cardinal mistake of rejecting Lawrence and opting to stay in Merrild’s cabin. Lawrence never forgave her. Indeed, he dreamed about the dog on the 14 July and surmised ‘she was a false dog[vi]’.

He eventually settles in Union Hill on the Morris Plains of New Jersey in a ‘farm cottage’ rented for them by the Seltzers. It is ‘quiet’ and ‘pretty’ and ‘peaceful’ enough to allow him to focus on correcting proofs for Kangaroo, Birds Beasts and Flowers and his translation of Giovanni Verga’s Mastro-don Gestualdo.

To see other video essays from 1923 see our playlist here. To read from the original source, see The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol IV 1921 – 24 edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.

References

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[i] Letter to Thomas Seltzer, 9 July (L2857)

[ii] Letter to Margaret King, 15 July (L2863)

[iii] Letter to Catherine Carswell, 15 July (L2866)

[iv] ibid

[v] Letter to Knud Merrild, 15 July (L2864)

[vi] ibid