The above video essay was the first draft for the journal ELLA which is themed ‘Literature and the Video Essay. Researching and Teaching Literature Through Moving Images.’ It explores the significance of Lawrence as a letter writer.
D.H. Lawrence was a prolific writer. During his short life he published novels, poetry, short stories, travel books, plays, translations, and a wide variety of non-fiction that ranged from literary criticism to psychoanalysis. Not bad considering his first publication was in 1911 and that he would be dead nineteen years later. It is partly due to this phenomenal output, and the broad range of subjects he addressed, that makes him so hard to define.
A series of memoirs was published in the decade after his death by close friends, which further added to his mythology. As Geoffrey Trease observed, “All those books, though they preserved a wealth of facts, were to some extent distorted by love, hatred, jealousy, resentment or revenge. It was sometimes hard to believe that they were describing the same person.” Lawrence was an enigma, leading Raymond Williams to observe “if there was one person everybody wanted to be after the war, to the point of caricature, it was Lawrence.”
But who was this Lawrence they so admired? If we pan across the decades after his death, we once more get multiple versions of the same person. The literary critic F.R. Leavis was explicit, answering this in his titular book: D.H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955). Lawrence deserved his place in the Canon, Leavis argued, because his novels The Rainbow and Women in Love provided incomparable social and cultural histories of Britain.
Kate Millett was less impressed, arguing in Sexual Politics (1969) that Lawrence’s male leads were domineering, bullying, and phallocentric and that his female characters were only happy once they had submitted to the male will.
Henry T. Moore countered this when he declared Lawrence a Priest of Love (1974) whereas Kevin Jackson, in the graphic novel series Dawn of the Unread, argued Priest of Loathe was more accurate, given Lawrence railed against the system, challenging our conceptions of family, love, work, religion, and how to live. This would lead to much of his work being banned, meaning he lived large chunks of his life in abject poverty.
Furious at the literati for daring to censor him, Lawrence left England in 1919 and embarked on a savage pilgrimage that would see him travel the globe in search of ‘rananim’ – a community of like-minded people – who would help create an alternative way of being, one free of the disruptive forces of modernity, industrialism and war. His intention was, as he described it, to ‘put a new peg in the world, a new navel, a new centre.’ But how could someone who lived his entire life on the margins, ever hope to find a centre.
This is evident in his letters, which I believe is where his true artistic value lies. He repeatedly uses biblical images, such as this description of the Cornish landscape as belonging “still to the days before Christianity, the days of Druids, or of desolate Celtic magic and conjuring.” As for the sea it is ‘incomprehensible under the black rock’ and ’not of this life’. There is ‘a strange, savage, unknown God in the foam.’
Lawrence was essentially searching for somewhere that didn’t exist, meaning he was destined to keep moving. This partly explains why he never lived in the same place for more than two years and refused to own property. He was, to quote Geoff Dyer, “nomadic to the point of frenzy.” Catherine Carswell, a close friend, suggested Lawrence “disliked an air of everlastingness about a home. For him it must have something of the tent about it”. Dyer would later observe that this created an amusing contradiction in that “while he may not have owned a house, the Lawrences’ constant moving obliged them to keep making home. It is typical of Lawrence that, on the one hand, he became more and more anxious about finding a place to settle and, on the other, achieved the ideal condition of being at home anywhere”.
I love Lawrence’s restlessness. His great skill was he never got too comfortable. To be happy, he had to be continually discontented, convincing himself he hated a place to propel himself forwards to the next destination. For example, on 2 January 1922 he wrote, ‘I am weary of Taormina, and have no desire to stay in Sicily or in Europe at all.’ In April 1922 he arrived in Ceylon and immediately ‘loathed the tropical fruits’ while acknowledging ‘I need this bitterness, apparently, to cure me of the illusion of other places.’ When he arrived in Perth, Australia, a month later, he declared, ‘I’ll see this damned world, if only to know I don’t want to see any more of it.’ And then at the end of May came full circle, feeling ‘a bitter burning nostalgia for Europe, for Sicily, for old civilisation and for real human understanding.’ This indecision and uncertainty is captured wonderfully in a letter to the poet Amy Lowell when Lawrence informs of his latest location, ‘I hesitate here.’
At one point, he was so unsettled he craved the sea: ‘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.’
Being in limbo, neither here nor there, was the ultimate Lawrencian state. It presented hope of what was to come, as well as relief at what had passed. This is summed up beautifully in a letter on the RSS Osterley in 1922.
‘Being at sea is so queer – it sort of dissolves for the time being all the connections with the land, and one feels a bit like a seabird must feel. It is my opinion that once beyond the Red Sea one does not feel any more that tension and pressure one suffers from in England.’
Recently, I have been paying homage to Lawrence through a digital pilgrimage. I do this through a monthly video essay called Locating Lawrence which is based on his letters, published one hundred years ago to the month. It takes time delving into the archives to find relevant images, as does researching the people and places he refers to. Doing this forces me to zoom in closer and pay careful attention, to ensure my representations are accurate, which in turn develops my knowledge and understanding of Lawrence.
It is like a weird form of symmetrical time travel. But I like the pace and rhythm this has introduced into my life, knowing he will accompany me until March 2030, the centenary of his death.
Reading his letters in ‘real time’ acts as an antidote to the immediate gratification of modern life. It provides the much-needed pauses that allow an idea to settle, and sink in. But I am aware of the contradictions of travelling digitally. We move rapidly across time and space while not moving from our seat. We are constantly connected to a device that provides answers to everything, meaning, there is no longer the need to go out and experience the world for ourselves.
This would infuriate Lawrence. He argued that technology creates a barrier between people and is a move into abstraction:
‘We don’t want to look at flesh and blood people – we want to watch their shadows on a screen. We don’t want to hear their actual voices: only transmitted through a machine.’
This feels particularly prescient today given the way our entire lives are mediated through screens, as we are doing so now.
In our data-driven world, which promises a precise and immediate answer to everything, I find it comforting that Lawrence continues to defy classification. That he means new things to each new generation. He is complex, contradictory, and human, oh so human. His defining mantra, for me, appeared in a poem towards the very end of his life when he wrote:
‘As we live, we are transmitters of life. And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.’
To see Locating Lawrence videos from 1922, click here.
To see Locating Lawrence videos from 1923, click here.
To see Locating Lawrence videos from 1924, click here.
D.H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage 