In a letter dated December 6, 1918, written to an unidentified recipient, D.H. Lawrence talks of his deep anxiety about pandemic-ridden London. He describes the city under the grasp of the “accursed Flu” as a “veritable death-trap”. The sickness has spread to the countryside too: “The weather is very nasty and damp, and the Midlands stricken with the fear of death: this Flu.”
Though recurrently suffering from bouts of bronchial infections, Lawrence survived the Spanish Flu, which claimed millions of lives in 1918-19 — dwarfing even the casualty count at the Western Front. While he viewed his own vulnerability with exasperation, he was disdainful of the general attitude towards the pandemic. In his letter, he writes, “They are horribly frightened, all of them: but it is not fear of the Lord, merely selfish fear of death, petty and selfish — when will one get the spark of a new spirit out of these people?”
What does Lawrence imply here by the “spark of a new spirit”, which might come out of the death and destruction wreaked by the pandemic? An examination of Lawrence’s canon may yield the answer.
Pure ugliness
In her landmark book, Illness as Metaphor , Susan Sontag argues that a widespread disease tends to become emblematic of its era. Lawrence would have agreed: the depictions of a diseased society in his novels suggest that he was thinking of illnesses not so much as an individual ailment as a sickness afflicting the masses — in other words, an epidemic. This is what Birkin means when he says in Women in Love: “One is ill because one doesn’t live properly — can’t .” Writing at a time when the maladies of modern living — rampant industrialisation, consumerism, pollution, exploitation of natural resources, urban-centric economies and destruction of suburban and rural landscapes — had just began to make themselves felt, Lawrence proved to be prophetic in his vision of the wasteland these afflictions would eventually create. His works resound in these times of profound isolation, when we are cooped up with the monsters we have let loose. Lawrence had foreseen it all, it seems, raising alarm bells more than a century ago.
In his fiction, non-fiction, poems and paintings, Lawrence bitterly criticised industrialisation and its impact on human lives and relationships. In his 1929 essay, ‘Nottingham and the mining countryside,’ he stares horrified at the “nasty red-brick, flat faced dwellings with dark slate roofs” that have come up in the once picturesque landscape — not only are they unaesthetic but they are also against nature.
This stance is further elucidated in his fiction, which repeatedly examines the result of industrialisation in the mining areas of provincial towns. In Sons and Lovers, Paul’s search for employment opportunities in the Co-operative Society reading room suddenly triggers thoughts of claustrophobic entrapment, as he imagines himself as a “prisoner of industrialism”. In The Rainbow , Wiggiston, a “hamlet of eleven houses” is transformed into a vision of “pure ugliness” as mechanical monotony takes over: “Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself endlessly.”
Along similar lines, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover , as Connie drives through the “long squalid straggle of Tevershall”, the bleakness of the desultory surroundings is underlined: “the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal dust, the pavements wet and black.” The author’s disgust is palpable: “It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling.”
Dignity of labour
Later in the story, repugnance gives way to a genuine concern about human destiny: “What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will-power remained?” In Lawrence’s scheme of things, the people with the dead intuitive faculty are the educated urban elite, who have moved farthest away from the life of nature, losing touch with their innermost self in the process.
In the tenth chapter of Sons and Lovers, there’s a long conversation between Paul and his mother on various issues of life, where Paul says: “I don’t want to belong to the well-to-do middle class. I like my common people best. I belong to the common people.” He goes on: “The difference between people isn’t in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people — life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves.”
Lawrence’s advocacy of the working class was not merely fashionable — he was one of them. What would he have made of the present crisis in India, where the lockdown rendered thousands of labourers jobless, leaving them to trundle home to their villages amidst overwhelming uncertainty?
Life itself
In a recent piece, veteran journalist Mark Tully talks of his indebtedness to Lawrence while trying to seek explanations for the faint response to the plight of migrant workers: “Why has the outcry against this suffering inflicted on men and women who are more than 90% of India’s workforce been so muted? It is, I believe, in part at least, because those in a position to raise their voices have not identified themselves with those who are suffering. This idea came to me from re-reading D.H. Lawrence’s once-controversial novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover during the lockdown.”
Lawrence’s observations on social gaps and friction ring true even after a century. In fact, class tension fuels the plot of many of his novels, most notably that of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, centred on the unorthodox relationship between the upper-class Constance (Connie) Chatterley and her gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The air around the lovers sizzles with tension, as Sir Clifford Chatterley, the mine-owner, freely expresses his disdain for the working class and the resentment of the exploited colliers threatens to boil over. Oliver vents his anger before Connie: “But what I want to know, do they feel any sympathy with workin’ men as has nothing but work before them, till they drop. Do they sympathise — ” Clifford’s dismissive attitude towards the miners (they “are not men” but “animals you don’t understand, and never could”) is equally typical.
Yet Lawrence is remembered less for his humanism than for his depiction of sex in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The sexual content of the novel is read and reread by the thrill-seeker without understanding the context, which gives it meaning. For Lawrence, the deracination that modernism brought could be cured only by a return to the primal, the basic, at the level of both the individual and society. His advocacy of working-class life is tied up with his celebration of passionate, sexual human relationships: as Paul says in the aforementioned quote, both amount to “life itself, warmth”.
Lawrence was a later-day Romantic foregrounding the holiness of the heart’s affections when consumerism and greed had blackened the heart almost beyond repair. As he said in his last book, Apocalypse , written in 1929-30, when he was dying: “What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family.”
In The Rainbow , on his return journey from London, Brangwen wonders, “How had helpless savages, running with their spears on the riverside, after fish, how had they come to rear up this great London, the ponderous, massive, ugly superstructure of a world of man upon a world of nature!” Brangwen’s realisation of human folly in creating a civilisation deaf to the intrinsic rhythms of nature frightens and awes him. Yet, at the end of the novel, Lawrence offers hope, through the symbolic rainbow as envisioned by Ursula. Overcome with nausea at the blackness of her life and surroundings, she spots the rainbow in the sky and “saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.”
The writer is Dean of Arts at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata.
