Project Update – Locating Lawrence

We are currently working on a new feature for the website which will help map out Lawrence’s travel as well as capture his initial observations on places.

I am often asked, what is creativity? And my answer is simple: creating problems and solving them. Or finding problems and solving them.

Another recurring question is, what is the point of creativity? And, again, my answer is simple: we have to fill our allotted three score years and ten doing something. Time is there to be filled and creativity adds a crackle and spark to the precarious clock hands.

Creativity leads to obsession as the desire to perfect a process becomes inevitable. This is pretty much what has happened with the Locating Lawrence feature in the Memory Theatre. These are a monthly video essay based on the letters of D.H. Lawrence, published one hundred years to the month.

Originally, I was looking for some quotes to use in the D.H. Lawrence bulletin that I edit. This then transformed into a monthly blog. Then it became a video essay on YouTube. The first Locating Lawrence started in April 1922 (published April 2022) and has been running ever since – and will do so until his death in 1930. This means I’ll be making them till 2030 whether you want them or not. It’s quite the commitment but inspired by Frank Delaney’s superb Re:Joyce podcasts which deconstruct Ulysses a sentence or paragraph per podcast!  

I mention this as the official date for the start of the Memory Theatre project was 2019 – to mark the centenary since Lawrence began his self-imposed exile and embarked on his savage pilgrimage. Technically, I need to back-date the video essays till then but for now I have completed the 1922 ones. The January, February, and March videos will be published over the next month. This is important as I’ve created a playlist for each year and so they need to be filled.

The downside to this is I love reading Lawrence’s letters each month and published the video essay and blog exactly one hundred years on. Updating messes with the chronology as well as with my head.

Paul and I are now working on a map for the website that takes inspiration from the Indiana Jones films and will include the videos as well as quotes. This will eventually run in real time. My initial idea is to include polaroid type images to mark out the journey, such as the one at the top of this post, but we’ll have to see how this looks.

If you subscribe to this blog or follow our YouTube channel, please don’t think I’ve suddenly lost the plot if random years start appearing in your timeline. Think of it as a spring clean and an attempt to get things back in order, as well as an excuse to create more problems for myself with less time to solve them in…       

References

• 1922 Video essay playlist

• 1923 Video essay playlist

Natalie Braber: Celebrating Notts Language

Natalie Braber’s latest project explores the nuances and variations of Notts language. There are no recordings of D.H. Lawrence speaking. Perhaps you can imagine what he may have sounded like from one of these numerous recordings...

Dialect is a form of intangible culture and an integral part of identity. It carries the knowledge, values, attitudes, and experiences of people. D.H. Lawrence had an incredible grasp of dialect, using the nuances of speech to signify different class positions and attitudes, best represented in his mining plays and his early novels. For an interesting discussion of this, see Hilary Hillier’s Patterns of Eastwood dialect in the work of D.H. Lawrence (2008).

We celebrated dialect as the second artefact in the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre via an alphabet comprised of words used in Lawrence’s writing. Natalie Braber, a Professor in Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University, provided the contextual essays. I mention this as Natalie has recently finished a project where she interviewed a broad range of people to try and map out the Notts accent. Each participant was asked ‘to share what language means to them: their favourite words and expressions – whether dialect, familect (words used within families), ethnolect (language associated with an ethnic group), work-related vocabulary or words from another language; and poems, stories and songs which invoke place’.

I submitted shin-tin’ as my favourite word (‘she isn’t in’) and read an extract from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). I find the dialect in Lawrence’s work, such as the poem ‘The Collier’s Wife’, too complex to read. Only those who straddle the Derbyshire/Notts border, like mining historian David Amos, have the tongue for it. This is why ‘Celebrating Notts Dialect’ is important, because it captures the richness and variety of spoken dialect.

Although the East Midlands dialect of Middle English was an influence on the development of Standard English, there’s been little research into the spoken English of the area. Dialect tends be thought of in terms of north (bath) and south (baath) when perhaps there needs to be a tripartite distinction. Nottingham, as always, is hard to categorise, borrowing from the north (‘bus’) and south (‘aaas’/house) – exactly as you would expect from a city bang in the middle of the country.   

Although there are many arguments suggesting language is becoming homogenous, mainly due to the globalisation of work and media, would it be too radical to suggest that a bigger threat to dialect is we are talking less to each other? The mining and industry communities that Lawrence and Sillitoe wrote about are gone – as is the pub where ‘everybody knows your name’. More people work remotely or interact with a screen rather than a human. Millennials no longer need to call each other when a status update or WhatsApp message serves the same function. Surely this must impact on language, accent, and dialect?

D.H. Lawrence certainly had a lot to say. He had an opinion on everything. Sadly, there are no recordings of him speaking. Perhaps you can imagine what he may have sounded like from one of the numerous recordings Natalie has collated.  

Natalie’s website: Celebrating Notts Language

Further reading

• James Walker/Made in Manchester Productions. Tongue and Talk: The Dialect Poets of the Pits (2021) BBC Radio 4
• James Walker. Thar’t a Mard Arse. Memory Theatre.
• Natalie Braber. Mardy ducks: Nottingham Dialect Words. Memory Theatre.
• Natalie Braber. What is the Nottingham dialect and where does it come from? Memory Theatre.
• Natalie Braber. Lawrencian Dialect. Memory Theatre.
• Natalie Braber and Jonnie Robinson (2018) East Midlands English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Natalie Braber and Sandra Jansen (Eds.) (2018) Sociolinguistics in England. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Natalie Braber (2018) Pit Talk in the East Midlands. In: N. Braber and S. Jansen (eds.) Sociolinguistics in England. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 243-274.
• Natalie Braber (2018) Performing identity on screen: Language, identity, and humour in Scottish television comedy. In: R. Bassiouney (ed.) Dialect and identity performance. London: Routledge, 265-285.
• Natalie Braber, Suzy Harrison and Claire Ashmore (2017) Pit Talk in the East Midlands. Sheffield: Bradwell Books.
• Natalie Braber and David Amos (2017) Images of the Coalfields. Sheffield: Bradwell Books.
• Natalie Braber and Diane Davies (2016) Using and creating oral history in dialect research. Oral History 44(1), 98-107.

Locating Lawrence: August 1923.

In these monthly videos we are locating D.H. Lawrence 100 years ago via his letters. It’s August 1923 and Frieda is heading back to the UK without him, leaving Lawrence staring at the clenched fist of Liberty...

Morris Plains in New Jersey is ‘pretty,’ and ‘quite free.’ Their rented farm cottage even includes their ‘own fields – horse and buggy.’ But Lawrence, typically, is ‘not smitten with it.[i]’ While here he finds time to do a bit of schmoozing, lunching with John Macy (1877 – 1932), literary editor of The Nation. The left-leaning political weekly had reviewed The Captain’s Doll on 6 June, 1923 and would go on to review Studies in Classic American Literature in the 10 October edition – a topic which would have made for an interesting discussion given Macy had authored The Spirit of American Literature in 1913.

Frieda is set to sail from New York to Southampton on 18 August on the Orbita – Royal Mail Steam Packet Line. But without Lawrence. He explains to his Schwiegermutter ‘with the heart I should very much like to come: with feet too, and eyes. But with the soul I can’t.[ii]’ But to John Middleton Murry he is more honest: ‘F wants to see her children. And you know, wrong or not, I can’t stomach the chasing of those Weekley children[iii]’

Lawrence had been quite rude to Murry about his editorship of The Adelphi and explains that he doesn’t ‘hate’ it just because the ‘first number disappointed me’ and instead congratulates Murry for having ‘the faith to break an old faith[iv]’ by publishing C8 of Fantasia of the Unconscious. He even requests that he ‘look after F. a bit. You know what a vague creature she is.[v]’ Though some biographers have suggested Murry looked after Frieda a bit too intently…

Lawrence reads Witter Bynner’s The Beloved Stranger (1919) and encourages Catherine Carswell to ‘write a volume of criticism[vi]’ about Eleonara Duse (1858-1824) an Italian theatre actress renowned for her intense absorption of character on stage and the first woman to appear on the cover of Time magazine[vii]. He helps S.S. Koteliansky with his translation of Gorky’s Reminisces of Leonid Andreyev by ‘making the English correct – and a little more flexible[viii]’ so that it can be serialised in The Dial. Kot had started the project with Katherine Mansfield before she died on January 9^th, 1923.

Frieda’s impending absence has a peculiar impact on Lawrence in that home suddenly becomes a liminal space: ‘I wish we were rich enough to buy a little ship. I feel (…) like cruising the seas. I am bit tired of the solid world.[ix]’ Knud Merrild is even offered a starring role as ‘sailor’ with Lawrence ‘myself as cook[x]’.

Once Frieda has departed, a new adventure is required. But where to? ‘Now I’ve reached the Atlantic, and see Liberty clenching her fist in the harbour, I only want to go west.[xi]’

As much as he may dither or moan about where he’s at or where he’s going, Lawrence is ‘thankful’ ‘we are no longer poor, so that we can take our way across the world.[xii]’ Reading this 100 years later is particularly prescient, given one of Lawrence’s former family homes in Eastwood is being developed as a bedsit for multiple tenants[xiii]. There is no escaping poverty in 2023.  

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 Robert Mountsier (L2878)

• [ii] Letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen (L2881)

• [iii] Letter to John Middleton Murry (L2883)

• [iv] Letter to John Middleton Murry (L2887)

• [v] Ibid.

• [vi] Letter to Catherine Carswell (L2891)

• [vii] She appeared in the 30th July, 1923 issue of Time magazine.

• [viii] Letter to S.S. Koteliansky (L2894)

• [ix] Letter to Knud Merrild (L2884)

• [x] Ibid.

• [xi] Letter to John Middleton Murry (L2883)

• [xii] Letter to Amy Lowell (L2895)

• [xiii] Amy Phipps. ‘D.H. Lawrence: Author’s former Eastwood home could become HMO’. BBC, 21 July 2023.