The Distrust of Ideas

D. H. Lawrence and Sherwood Anderson—and Their Qualities in Common

JOHN PEALE BISHOP

D. H. LAWRENCE remains the most interesting of that group of English novelists which arose around 1910 and has since proved so remarkable for its brilliant limitations, The rest are, by now, neatly appraised, their defects noted, their places assigned with a fair degree of accord and with as much justice as is possible to the contemporary critic. But there is no such agreement in the case of Lawrence, and therein lies a part of his interest. Miss Rebecca West, whose mordant criticism has fallen haplessly on so many fair young heads, grants him genius in the highest sense, but finds him less clever than herself.

Mr. H. L. Mencken dismisses Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (Thomas Seltzer) as an "effective if unwitting reductio ad absurdum of the current doctrine that Lawrence is a profound thinker. His book is not merely bad; it is downright childish". The voices might be multiplied, either of extreme praise, or extreme blame. In the meanwhile, Lawrence sits in Italy, brooding upon another and darker turmoil.

Why should this wide divergence of opinion exist? Well, first there is Lawrence's preoccupation with physical love, which serves to frighten many, and, it should probably be added, disposes others unduly in his favour, Then too his talent, being an original and unrestrained one, is not readily measured by predetermined standards, The Lost Girl (Thomas Seltzer) may, perhaps, be considered as a study of manners, treating of certain very credible middle class English people of the midlands, and a roving band of alien vaudeville performers. But to approach Women in Love (Thomas Seltzer) as a realistic study of manners, is to have the book crumble at one's touch. Moreover, his work is extremely uneven; The Trespasser (Mitchell Kennerly) is one of the shoddiest novels I have ever read; The Rainbow (B. W. Huebsch), dull and turgid in places, has scene after scene of all but overwhelming beauty, But I believe that the real reason Lawrence fares so badly at the hands of certain excellent critics, such as Mr. Mencken, for example, is that these critics are interested only in the ideas of an intellectual aristocracy and, inversely, in the stupidities of the mob. Lawrence's approach both to life and his art is essentially emotional ; his understandmg comes of having remembered all that his imagination and intuition discerned while under the subjection of emotion. That is to say, Lawrence is, at his best, a poet, even in his novels.

The Will to Ignore

LAWRENCE has seen, or thinks that he has seen the disintegration of all those ideas which sustained aqd fired the best minds in the nineteenth century. He has watched the decay of the Victorian ideals of social equality, of human brotherhood and Christian love; the catch-cries of the modem intellectual find him deaf and skeptic. But where another man might have fallen into a sterile despair, Lawrence remains unperturbed. He has probably never been really interested either in ideas or ideals. His concern is with "the amazingly difficult and vital business of human relationships," and particularly with those relationships which are ultimately sensual. He is like those modern sculptors who, feeling that civil ization has reached its last refinement, and that there is no more work left for observation to do, have gone back to the crude beginnings of stone carving to learn again the essentials of their art from Assyrian friezes and the crudely stylized sculptures of West Africa. In Women in Love (Thomas Seltzer) he deliberately introduces this parallel, for in Halliday's flat there are wood carvings from Africa, one of a naked woman, crouched in a strange posture, distorted by pain.

There Gerald "saw vividly with his spirit the gray forward stretching face of the negro woman, African and tense, abstracted in utter physical stress. It was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath.

" 'Why is it art ?' Gerald asked,

shocked, resentful, " 'It conveys a complete truth,' said Birkin. 'It contains the whole truth of that state whatever you feel about it.'

" 'But you can't call it high art,' said Gerald.

" 'High! there are centuries and hundreds of centuries of development in the straight line behind that carving; it is an awful pitch of culture, of a definite sort . . . Pure culture in sensation, culture in a physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. " In his purest form Lawrence's art is not unlike this savage carving. He is evidently a man of tremendous capacities for emotion, variously sensitive to nervous impressions. He has brooded a over his own intimate relationship and carefully observed the processes of his own sex life. He has read Freud and has availed himself of the knowledge is Freud has liberated, using it, not as a substitute for thinking, but to corroborate his own broodings. Love to him is not the laughing golden-haired Anadyomene, but the dark and terrible Cybele, the many-breasted Earth Mother, mutilating her votaries. The struggle in which almost every one of his characters is most deeply involved is to come to fulfillment through love, without losing identity as an individual. And Lawrence invests this struggle with tragic possibilities.

Wisdom, According to Lawrence

I DO not mean to imply that this is all there is to Lawrence, for he has a varied and fecund genius, but I have indicated what seems to me the essential core. The sum of his wisdom is this: that it would be the wisest of actions for a man to put his wisdom, as if it were a shabby, stifling garment, and in nakedness to touch and close with the dark, vindictive life of the earth, and that better even than this it would be if mankind were utterly destroyed and of only the older inhuman world were left, This attitude receives its fullest expression in his poems, in those poems which are not. written in accordance with his absurdly inadequate theory of poetry, and in Women in Love where his philosophy is everywhere explicit,

Women in Love is indeed an attempt to get at first principles through the medium of a novel. The incidents are chosen, not to hurry the course of the story, not to allow the characters to display, of their own accord, those gestures which are typical of them as individuals and as members of a certain class of English society, but as symbols of the obscure emotions, the unconscious desires, to which they are subjected as men and women. Although both Ursula and Gudrun were remembered from the earlier history of the Brangwens, I could not until half way through Women in Love tell them apart, except by Gudrun's notoriously gay stockings,—whose colors are like an inventory of the rainbow, and which deserve a full chapter in the History of Hosiery whenever the book comes to be written. The young men seem to differ only in their varying degrees of pure maleness. I am accustomed to the novelist, who describes only the clothes and masks of his characters; I was unprepared for Lawrence's stripping his figures, not only of their clothes, but even of a little of their skins. They are left too naked for recognition.

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The incidents themselves are imagined to body forth Lawrence's thought or to externalize by a gesture the sensation and desires, the unconscious hatreds and strivings of the characters. When Hermione, an English lady, at one point comes up behind her flagging lover and stands over him in rigid ecstasy, to crash down on his head with a ball of lapis lazuli, stunning him and driving him half-dazed fom the house; when the man, leaving the house, goes directly to a wet hillside and there strips and sits down in blissful nakedness ampng the primroses, it is more or less dear what Lawrence means to say. As an account of the behaviour of people at an English country house, it is at least fantastic. Yet Lawrence is perfectly capable of inventing action for his characters which is credible and at the same time a complete symbol, as, for example, in that passage in The Rainbow when all the wayward approach of first love, the timid longing of the boy, and the sure eluding flight of the girl, all the inner rhythm of their crossplay, are brought beautifully before the eyes by means of that moonlit marching back and forth among the fallen shocks of Women in Love is a strangely interesting book, because Lawrence's philosophy is interesting: it is an unsatisfactory novel because that philosophy is set forth explicitly. The thought of a novelist should be implicit in his novel, in order that his men and women should seem to move of their own accord, or at the command of necessity beyond the control of the man who writes.

"The Lost Girl"

IN The Rainbow and in Sons and Lovers (Mitchell Kennerley) Lawrence did incorporate all his sensibility, his understanding and his vision of beauty without obtruding unduly upon his characters, albeit both novels are largely composed of recollections of his own childhood and young manhood. In The Lost Girl, the treatment is even more objective, and by attaching himself to a less intimate problem he has gained an unwonted humour. James Houghton, the elegant hypocritical draper, fantastically dreaming in lustrous silks and flimsy poplins, letting his shop fall into an empty decay while trying to impose on the miners' wives "creations" designed for princesses: Mr. May the pink, stout gentleman, slightly down at the heels, who has brought from America some prodigious schemes for making money; Madame Rochard and the four young men of her Red Indian troupe,—these and the inhabitants of Woodhouse are set down with an unusually; gay detachment. The theme of the book is that of the odd, unmarried and unmarriageable daughter of a middle class English household, in search of an amiable husband of her own station. Through the first half of the book the lost girl remains an ordinary creature, confronted with a cornmonplace problem, whose uneasiness is set down accurately and a little amusedly. But at the end, married to a low caste Italian, and brought into an ancient savage life, among the filthy peasants of the mountains south of Rome, she too is touched by a cruel pathos.

Lawrence cannot elude the cruelty of things nor the seriousness of the combat, Even in Sea and Sardinia (Thomas Seltzer), an account of his voyage from Sicily to this island beyond the net of European civilization, there is scarcely a moment of calm. It is a remarkable "travel book," this account of the Mediterranean, and the tall coasts of Italy, of the hard and primitive island of Sardinia, of the peasants, still clinging implacably to a medieval individualism, the men proudly dressed in the old magpie motley, black and white, the women in stiff spreading dresses of mauve and vermilion like Velasquez princesses—remarkable because of the unflagging sensitiveness and the sly observations. But it is never serene. There is always a torment stirred by what people are and are not; there is always the old pagan terror of places as if Etna were, as he says, a mistress "low, white, witch-like under heaven—with her strange winds prowling round like Circe's panthers, some black, some white."

It is serenity which one misses most in Lawrence, serenity and intellectual control of his material. He is never, save at moments, entirely satisfactory, One wearies of the emotionalism, the welter of words, the disorder and the turmoil. He is the typical English genius, beautiful and profound, fragmentary, touching the absurd.

Sherwood Anderson

SHERWOOD ANDERSON alone among the Americans seems to bear a resemblance to Lawrence. When I first read Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (B. W. Huebsch), as it appeared serially in The Dial, I thought to have detected the influence of Lawrence on Anderson's phrasing. But this is slight, if indeed it exists. They are alike rather in their mode of apprehending certain things. If Lawrence has influenced Anderson, it is by confirming the American in his own discoveries. Both are interested in searching out what men hide from the world, in probing under worm-riddled floors and ransacking blind attics. In The Triumph of the Egg (B. W. Huebsch) Anderson is more than ever concerned with those private struggles of the soul, in which Lawrence's interest also lies; but where in Lawrence this struggle is almost always between the cruel aloofness of the male and the tender, devastating pervasiveness of the woman, in Anderson it is between some dream of impossible loveliness, which the dreamer wishes to attach to the body of the beloved, and the inane fecundity of life. Always in this new book of his, it is the blind, insistent, instinct of life for endless recreation which triumphs over the dreamer. This is, I take it, the meaning of the title.

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Anderson, like Lawrence, understands the physical ecstasy and contentment that would come of belonging utterly to a the dark rich life of the earth and moving with the ancient rhythms of light and dark, of green and sterile seasons, of day rise and nightfall. "That would have been sweetest of all things—" he says, "to sway like the tops of young trees when a wind blew, to give himself as the grey weeds in a sunburned field gave themselves to the influence of passing shadows, changing color constantly, becoming every moment something new, to live in life and in death too, always to live, to be unafraid of life, to let it flow through his body, to let the blood flow through his body, not to struggle to offer no resistance, to dance."

He has, too, a sympathy with the simple unthinking life of the African negro and is stirred strangely by the remembered songs their timid, degenerate descendants sing, songs of defiance and hate and relentless love. He shares with Lawrence a mythopoeic faculty, which peoples the darkness with forgotten devils and inhuman ghosts. But where the Englishman piles words upon words, approximating his meaning by a rich welter of words, Anderson is so sparing in statement as to be almost inarticulate. There is at times in his books an unbelievable and glamorous beauty, but it is the beauty of things seen with delight or known in an intensity of emotion, haltingly recovered and scarcely set down in words.

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I have emphasized these qualities in Anderson, because in casually grouping him with the newer American realists, the critics have largely ignored them, Even in those two earliest books of his, Marching Men (B. W. Huebsch) and Windy McPherson's Son (which, by the way, is shortly being reissued by Huebsch in a revised edition) there was no question of his powers of observation, his sincerity, his understanding of American types. He was one of the first to describe accurately and without sentimentality, the dreary and monotonous towns of the Middle West and the dwellers in those towns—old, greyheaded men, thwarted and disgruntled, bragging of fine deeds that had never been done; silent, pale, stoop-shouldered women, strutting young louts, awkward boys with unuttered longings. In Winesburg, Ohio (B. W. Huebsch) such a town is always in the background. In this series of short stories, loosely held together by the figure of the boyish reporter, Anderson seemed finally to have found his form. With Poor White (B. W. Huebsch), he returned to the novel to tell the story of another town, one of the tiny agricultural towns of Ohio, which between the boyhood of the protagonist and his middie age grows into a manufacturing city, another Dayton or Youngstown, Excellent in most respects as it is, the book does not achieve form. There is a constant confusion in the element of time, which always seems to give Anderson trouble, and in an attempt to carry a sense of multitude, he continually follows his minor characters into blind alleys from which there is a difficult return.

The Improved Artistry of Anderson

IN The Triumph of the Egg Anderson again reverts to the short story, and he has gained considerably in artistry since last touching the more restricted forms. He is here more nearly the subtle and facile craftsman than he has ever been before. He will always perhaps labour breathlessly with words; there is still a choppiness in movement, a confusion in the time element. His characters are, more than elsewhere, reduced to a few essential gestures. But there is here, and in clearer form, all that passionate imagination which from the first marked him apait from the other American realists. The first and last stories in this volume are as fine as anything which has come out of this movement.

I Want to Know Why (B. W. Huebsch) is a tale told by a Kentucky boy of fifteen, a boy for whom all the glamour of life is concentrated on the race-tracks, the paddocks and the thoroughbreds. "It's lovely," he says, "the horses are sweaty and nervous and shine and the men come out and smoke cigars and look at them and the trainers are there and the owners, and your heart thumps so you can hardly breathe." He aches with inexplicable longing and delight but to look at Sunstreak, a stallion that "is like a girl you think about sometimes, and never see," and, because the trainer shares the boy's understanding of the horse, he reaches out toward the trainer in warm, boyish adoration. Then, through a lighted window, leaning across a rose-bush, he sees the trainer go into a ramshackle evil-smelling farmhouse, and brag among drunken men after the races, and kiss a tall red-headed woman, with a hard, ugly mouth. He sees the man's eyes shine, just as they had shone when the stallion was running. Suddenly he hates the man, and the glamour of the courses is lost and the goodly smell of the air is gone. The egg has triumphed,

In Out of Nowhere into Nothing there is a young woman who had seen in her girlhood, going down a marble stairway, bright youths and maidens and old men, noble and serene. Having fallen in love with her employer, a man with a wife and two children—she is a stenographer in Chicago—she returns to her native village to draw advice from her mother. She turns to her mother with her secret, thinking "what a strange beautiful thing it would be if the mothers could suddenly sing to their daughters, if out of the darkness and silence of old women, a song should come." And her mother's answer is that there is no such -thing as love, "Men only hurt women. They can't help wanting to hurt women. The thing they call love doesn't exist. It's a lie. Life is dirty."'

In both these stories there is this conflict between the desire of the young, for a seen or imagined beauty, and the cruel ugliness of life and the meaningless need for perpetuating it. Anderson hates the village, not so much for its dreariness, its repressions, its hideousness, but because it has the power to stop the longing stuttering cry of the villagers who dream of something that is not, and "run through the night seeking some lost, some hidden and half forgotten loveliness." One suspects that Anderson's own mind is very like one of these grey towns, and in it, as in these towns there is a conflict, and that out of that conflict his books are made.