D. H. Lawrence, Arch-Heretic

Every writer is unique in some way; Lawrence was unique in most ways: in his prose style, with its frequently incandescent images and incantatory rhythms; in his personality (most of his friends testified that he was flame-like, more alive than anyone else they knew); and in his opinions, the usual reactions to which ran from amusement through incomprehension, incredulity, and ridicule to abhorrence. If any twentieth-century writer can be said to have lived with that hard, gemlike flame that Walter Pater recommended, it was Lawrence.

He was a vagabond. The Bad Side of Books is, among other things, a record of his wanderings. His lungs were weak, so he avoided northern winters. But even more than his health, or than the trickle of income that came from travel writing, he was drawn by an ardent curiosity, a curiosity that (sometimes) trumped even his generally formidable preconceptions. He lived in Florence, Rome, Sicily, Germany, southern France, Ceylon, Tahiti, Australia, Mexico, and, most consequentially, New Mexico.

Sometimes he came away chiefly with vivid descriptive writing, like the opening of “Flowery Tuscany”:

Each country has its own flowers, that shine out specially there. In England it is daisies and buttercups, hawthorn and cowslips. In America, it is goldenrod, stargrass, June daisies, Mayapple and asters, that we call Michaelmas daisies. In India, hibiscus and dattura and champa flowers, and in Australia mimosa, that they call wattle, and sharp-tongued strange heath-flowers. In Mexico it is cactus flowers, that they call roses of the desert, lovely and crystalline among many thorns; and also the dangling yard-long clusters of the cream bells of the yucca, like dropping froth.

     But by the Mediterranean, now as in the days of the Argosy, and, we hope, for ever, it is narcissus and anemone, asphodel and myrtle.

But more often, the vivid writing was in the service of a vision. “New Mexico,” he wrote, “was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.”

The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fé, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend.... In the magnificent, fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new.

     There are all kinds of beauty in the world, thank God.... But for a greatness of beauty, I have never experienced anything like New Mexico. All those mornings when I went with a hoe along the ditch to the Cañon, at [my] ranch, and stood, in the fierce, proud silence of the Rockies, on their foothills, to look far over the desert to the blue mountains away in Arizona, blue as chalcedony, with the sage-brush desert sweeping grey-blue in between, dotted with tiny cube-crystals of houses, the vast amphitheater of lofty, indomitable desert, sweeping round to the ponderous Sangre de Cristo, mountains on the east, and coming up flush at the pine-dotted foot-hills of the Rockies! What splendor!

Along with several essays, Lawrence wrote a substantial piece of fiction set partly in New Mexico: the novella St. Mawr, which throws some light on the meanings the region had for him.

America meant all sorts of things to Lawrence, many of them adumbrated in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). In The Bad Side of Books, there’s an essay called “Pan in America” (1924), which starts from the cry that echoed around the Mediterranean as paganism faded: “The Great God Pan is dead!” What that meant, according to Lawrence, was that the possibility of life lived in spontaneous unison with nature dwindled as commerce, technology, and metaphysical religion advanced. Pan seemed still alive to Lawrence in the Indians of the Southwest, and he conjured a graphic account of the animist mind and imagination. But even there, Pan was “dying fast”; every Indian, Lawrence thought, “will kill Pan with his own hands for the sake of a motor car.” Who, given the choice the essay poses—“to live among the living, or to run on wheels”—would choose what Lawrence called “life”? Pretty much no one, he thought, though he returned to this opposition again and again.

 

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