The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Tremulation on the Ether: Versions of Instinctual Primacy in the Essays of D.H. Lawrence: Difference between revisions

{{cquote|Yet, he was a man more beautiful, perhaps, than we can guess, and it is worth the attempt to try to perceive the logic of his life.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''The Prisoner of Sex''}}

{{start|The talented writer, Geoff Dyer,}} has edited and introduced a well designed anthology of selected essays by D.H. Lawrence. He remains an excellent choice to assemble the volume, for among his previous books is ''Out of Sheer Rage'', a hilarious and incisive travel-saga that follows his obsessional trek through several countries to ponder the life and art of D. H. Lawrence. It reads as both a scenic excursion and a neurotic record of sustained searching and sleuthing about his complex subject. Dyer’s selection of thirty-six essays of varying length and subject matter spans Lawrence’s career from 1912 to 1930, ranging from “Christs in the Tirol” to the “Introduction to the Grand Inquisitor,” published in the year of his death.

The catchy title for the book duplicates the title of a short essay from 1942 that is included in the volume, in which Lawrence composes a variously poignant and dyspeptic introduction to a meticulous bibliography of his own works compiled by Edward D. McDonald. The piece reveals evidence of Lawrence’s impatience about the bureaucracies of publication and the inane emphasis by some collectors on first edition markings. More importantly, it provides anecdotal reiterations of his own fraught relation to his parents. Thus The Bad Side of Books functions as a resonant signature for the entire collection and for the essay, for both provide an accessible window into Lawrence the writer and the often misunderstood and besieged son.

   

The essay is especially memorable for its understated depiction of the depressing reactions of Lawrence’s parents to the publication in 1911 of his first

book, The White Peacock: “I put it into my mother’s hands when she was

shrewd eyes, as if I were a swindler. ‘Fifty pounds! An ‘tha’s never done a

dog’s hard work in thy life’”(208). {{sfn|Lawrence|1911|p=208}}

As Lawrence dramatizes so movingly in Sons and Lovers, his family life

and Lovers, has long dissipated, and in “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside” he contemplates him with knowledgeable empathy and a powerful

metaphor:

::</blockquote>''If I think of my childhood, it’s always as if there was a lustrous sort of inner darkness, like the gloss of coal, which we moved and had our own real being. My father loved the pit. He was hurt badly more than once, but he never would stay away. He loved the contact, the intimacy, as men in war loved the intense male comradeness of the dark days. (455) {{sfn|Lawrence|1929|p=455}}''</blockquote>

Thus amid this livid darkness—acutely real and symbolic at the same time—

Lawrence finally recognizes that he shares with his father comparable patterns of love and hurt: it is their unspoken form of secret sharer.

A major reason for the success of this eclectic volume resides in Dyer’s decision to forgo the customary organization of an anthology by thematic categories. The essays are arranged in a straight-line chronological order, so

with his snide comments is the last person to provide persuasive evaluation

of Lawrence’s work, and especially of Women in Love.

Many of the essays recapitulate, in different ways and with varying urgency, Lawrence’s visionary perception of life. Dyer pertinently quotes a

family, friends, acquaintances and countries, his edgy evaluations of works by Tolstoy, Hemingway,Verga, Hardy, Flaubert and Joyce, as well as his lyrical ruminations on flowers, trees, animals, landscapes, and even inanimate

objects.

Lawrence’s essential cosmology insists that the world is “open” to be engaged by one’s unfettered instincts and unrepressed emotions, and that such

her inertia by my change, that I can continue to love her. If she stayed put, I

might as well love a pepper-pot” (357). {{sfn|Lawrence|1925|p=357}}

To avoid “change” for Lawrence is to risk sentimentality, a pernicious

is really honest. And it explains a great deal of sentimentality. When a thing

has gone to hell inside of you, your sentimentalism tries to pretend it hasn’t. But Mr. Hemingway is through with sentimentalism. ‘It isn’t fun anymore. I guess I’ll beat it.’ And he beats it, to somewhere else” (“Review of In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway,”1927,303). {{sfn|Hemingway|1927|p=303}}  

Within this context of sentimentalism and its inherent opposition to

he traded. One sees the trick working all the way through the Legion book”

(“Memoir of Maurice Magnus,”1921–22,355). {{sfn|Lawrence|1921-22|p=355}}

The essays demonstrate Lawrence’s insistence on the value of instinctual

primacy and its ultimate connection to what he variously calls “the fourthdimension,” involving a transcendent perception of “tremulations on the ether” (“Why the Novel Matters,”254). In a critical section of that essay, he privileges the genre of the novel for its intrinsic ability to embody such relevant synthesis of immanence and transcendence, and thus the novel for him is “the one bright book of life,” for only “the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble” (255). {{sfn|Lawrence|p=25{{sfn|Lennon|2018|p=25}}5}} Lawrence’s commitment to his visionary emphasis on the “gleam” in life extends even to inanimate objects. The following passage remains too easy to caricature, but it represents Lawrence’s unqualified adherence to the perceptions of instinct and the messages of tremulation:

::</blockquote>''We have to choose between the quick and the dead. The quick is God-flame, in everything. And the dead is dead. In this room where I write, there is a little table that is dead; it doesn’t even weakly exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove which for some unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books, whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, alas, is dead. (“The Novel,”1925,141)'' </blockquote>

It is a short distance from the God-flame of immanence radiating from inanimate objects to Lawrence’s instinctual imperative. The following words are from “The Novel and the Feelings” (1925), and again they conspicuously prefigure Mailer’s own existential perspectives: “We’ve managed to keep clear of the darkest Africa inside us, for a long time. . . . But there it is, a strange dark

continent that we do not explore, because we do not even allow that it exists. . . .Yet unless we proceed to connect ourselves up with our own primeval

sources, we shall degenerate” (262,263,264 respectively).

Lawrence’s notoriously pungent reviews of other writers—included

people throbbing inside the glow and the glamour like motes in a sunbeam”

(“Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo by Giovanni Verga,”1927,339).

Lawrence excoriates several much-admired writers for what he regards as intrinsic failures of characterization, texture, and power, inadequacies that he discusses, of course, in the context of his own stipulations about fiction. While recognized as a brilliant and unorthodox literary critic, Lawrence at times overstates his personal biases in ways that too cavalierly diminish the works under consideration. Although he praises the complex artistry of Thomas Mann, he criticizes Death In Venice because the work has “none of the rhythm of a living thing” (“Review of Death In Venice by Thomas Mann 1913,14), and he faults Madame Bovary because he discerns a major problem with its “realistic method,” arguing in an Aristotelian manner that “individuals like Emma and Charles Bovary are too insignificant to carry the full weight of Gustave Flaubert’s profound sense of tragedy” (Gesualdo,332). {{sfn|Lawrence|1913|p=332}} In “The Future of the Novel” (1922-23) he gleefully attacks two modernist exponents of radical fictional techniques because he believes the works are boring and overrated. Here he uses an elongated trope of fabric and mummification to turn consensus notions of their talent and importance virtually inside-out. In effect, he “dresses” them to take them apart: “Through

Novel” (1925) he maintains that War and Peace is marred by Tolstoy’s unpersuasive valorizing of “the fat fuzzy Pierre” (246), a character whom Lawrence regards as a “domestic sort of house-dog” (246). Such a caustic assessment is related to Lawrence’s belief that the portrait of Pierre denies the

fundamental necessity of any character in fiction: Tolstoy “wasn’t true to his own character” (246).What is such “truth” to Lawrence? He returns to a version of the tremulation metaphor and the doctrine of change: “Character is a curious thing. It is the flame of a man, which burns brighter or dimmer, bluer or redder, rising or sinking or flaring according to the draughts of circumstance and changing air of life, changing itself continually, yet remaining one single, separate flame, flickering in a strange world” (246). {{sfn|Lawrence|1925|p=246}}

Throughout the essays there are moments of luminous insight by Lawrence that indicate his instinctual grasp of the present and his prescient sense of the future. In “A Letter from Germany” (1942) he virtually predicts the cataclysm that soon will engulf the world. Tremulations are in the air: “But at night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness, strange feelings stirring in the darkness, strange feelings stirring out of this still unconquered Black Forest. . . . Out of this very air comes a sense of danger, a queer bristling feeling of uncanny danger. Something has happened. Something has happened which has not yet eventuated. . . . It is the father of the next phase of events.”{{sfn|Lawrence|2019|pp=191-192}} In “Paris Letter” (1924) he acerbically anticipates a nation’s passivity and appeasement that will manifest itself in the coming war: “Men, particularly Frenchman, have collapsed into little, rather insignificant, rather wistful, rather nice and helplessly commonplace little fellows who should be tucked away and left to sleep, like Rip Van Winkle, till the rest of the storm rolled by.”{{sfn|Lawrence|2019|pp=185}} In “Art and Morality” (1925) he warns of the developing alliance between technological advancements and the blandishments of the ego; he criticizes “civilized man” for his lack of a visual creative imagination, as he increasingly displays “the slowly formed habit of seeing just as the photographic camera sees.”{{sfn|Lawrence|2019|p=223}} Indeed, Lawrence perhaps becomes the first and mournful predictor of the epidemic of the iPhone: “Man has learned to see himself. So now, he is what he sees. He makes himself in his own image.... The identifying of ourselves with the visual image of ourselves has become an instinct, the habit is already old. The picture of me, the me that is seen, is me.”{{sfn|Lawrence|2019|p=225}}