Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.
This week
PROFESSOR MARK WILLIAMS of Victoria University of Wellington has genberously agreed to share his views on a collection of poetry he admires.
“LAST
POEMS” by D.H.Lawrence (first published posthumously in 1932) REVIEWED by
PROFESSOR MARK WILLIAMS
Recently I attended a lecture on D.H.
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover delivered
to a second-year English class at Victoria University. The class was clearly
engaged by the book and its controversies, eagerly responding to the lecturer,
Timothy Jones’s carefully balanced judgments on its literary value, the
historical contexts of its reception, and those endearing and infuriating
habits of its author of butting into the narrative with his grand thoughts
about sexuality, love and gender.
I was pleased that the fierce polemics
surrounding such issues in the 1970s when I was an undergraduate encountering Lawrence
at university had abated. At last one could discuss Lawrence as a writer rather
than being consumed by arguments about his canonical status, his politics or
his thought. But I wondered how these seemingly post-political students would
respond to the Lawrence of the 1970s. Their Lawrence is an odd figure from the
early twentieth century who made it possible to talk directly about sexuality
in fiction rather than the revolutionary practitioner of the novel as ‘the one
bright book of life’.
Something had been lost. As a schoolboy in the
1960s I recall the thrill of reading a forbidden author (as well as the
disappointing lack of pornographic frisson afforded by Sons and Lovers or even Women
in Love borrowed from the local library). A few years later he was the
subject of exhilarating ‘close readings’ by, I think, Peter Dane in an
undergraduate English course I took at Auckland University. By this time,
though, Lawrence was already caught up in the ferocious ideological arguments
about ‘sexual politics’ that would inflame the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Lawrence
would become increasingly marginal and contested in English departments.
Perhaps as an antidote to those Lawrentian
qualities, I’ve always preferred him on a small rather than an epic scale. I
would rather reread the stories in The
Prussian Officer collection than the big novels in response to the Great
War, for all their splendid parts. I love the poems on animals, flowers, fruits
and places. And I return every so often to the last poems he wrote, dying while
vividly defending those fundamental values that shape his work—poems in which
the divine is not separate from the world but present in the flesh, as the highest expression of our consciousness of
life. Here I find him still full of live controversy, more so than his great
modernist explorations of love and the condition of civilization.
How do we approach Lawrence after a century in which
his writing has helped to liberate old repressions? The trouble is that the
battle is over and, like all old revolutionaries, he sounds dated, even corny
when he uses ecstatic language to describe sexual relations between men and
women. His daring confrontations with sexual emotion, awkwardness, beauty and
transport have been taken over and debased in the language of popular romance
(and, more recently, mummy porn). Moreover, contemporary readers of Lawrence
are inevitably made uncomfortable by his palpable excitement about sexuality.
We find his unashamed celebration of the phallus embarrassing (there’s even a
whale’s phallus ‘linking the wonder of whales’ in the odd ‘Whales Weep Not’ in Last Poems).
The problem is that, like all religious
writers, Lawrence is continually gesturing beyond the capacity of language to
convey the kinds of intense experience he is interested in. Linda Williams asks
why Lawrence in describing the sexual act and the moment of orgasm employs
prose which seems to strain beyond the limits of language to convey thought:
‘What then is Lawrence striving to “go beyond” in all this overwhelming passing
away, fainting, flooding, darkness and deepness’. Certainly, one feels that
Lawrence is so determined to express the life of the body, not the mind
thinking about the body, that he tries to carry his reader beyond normal
speech, social codes and conventions. It all sounds a bit strained.
Last Poems are full of death rather than
sexuality or nature. And they are full of God being hammered into a human form.
When Hamm in Samuel Backett’s Endgame
exclaims, ‘God, the bastard, he doesn’t exist’ he both denies the existence of
God and affirms it by cursing that absence. His blasphemy paying a kind of
respect to the deity in that it implies a power in the weighty presence of His
lingering in imagination and in desire. Lawrence’s late poems address the question
of God’s absence, turning it into a positive by finding new channels for the
sense of exultation that religion focused on the transcendent.
The
religious instinct, according to Lawrence throughout his writing life, must
inform life, not draw the self away towards the transcendent. He wants to take
all the old fervour and reverence of religion and direct it not at God as an
abstraction but at the human situation encountering the wonder of things as
they are. His own mortality makes these late poems especially powerful, even
when they seem to have some of that familiar Lawrentian habit of preaching at
us. Consider the group of poems, ‘The Body of God’, ‘The Demiurge’, ‘Red
Geraniums and Godly Mignonette’ where Lawrence attacks Plato’s ‘great lie of ideals’
In
‘Demiurge’ Lawrence considers the Platonic notion that ‘reality exists only in
the spirit’, crying out indignantly: ‘as if any mind could have imagined a
lobster/dozing in the under-deeps’. God can only imagine those things which
have come into being, he says. Jesus was only himself when he had become a man ‘with a body and with needs, and a
lovely spirit’. God, then, is not prior to the world, an idea of which things
are symbols or echoes. God is the
world of sentient things, evolving, changing, grasped in moments of intense
recognition, what Lawrence calls ‘acts of attention’.
One
could summarise the list of positions struck in Last Poems: the denial of the Platonic belief that ideas come
before things; the refusal of the metaphysical bias in Western thought and the
longing for permanence; and so on. Yet reading these poems one does not—leaving
aside such tired polemic as that against contemporary civilisation in ‘In the
Cities’—experience the ideas as abstractions or preachiness. Lawrence curbs his
urge to teach. In ‘Red Geraniums and Godly Mignonette’, for example, he uses
humour rather than railing at us: ‘You can’t imagine the Holy Ghost sniffing at
cherry pie heliotrope/Or the Most High, during the coal age, cudgelling his
mighty brains’ to think into being things as precise as flowers or lizards.
The
matter-of-fact colloquial language in which Christianity and spirituality are
addressed here is almost like that of Jacques Prévert’s
version of the Lord’s Prayer—‘Our father who art in heaven. Stay there’—still
accessible and effective as satire. Indeed, in the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ Lawrence
also turns a cheeky irreverence at the Deity. At the same time, the language of
the poems ripples with Biblical echoes. Lawrence was raised with the language
of the Bible, steeped in the Apocalypse and resurrection. As a young man
Lawrence rejected Christianity violently because of its stress on weakness and
the blood-soaked language of salvation. But he retains and puts to his own
purposes the Biblical language of wonder, symbol, and the willingness to
address ultimate questions of meaning.
The
luminous ‘Bavarian Gentians’ with its flowers, colours, myths, darkness and the
sense of moving towards imminent death reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel’
poems, especially ‘Tulips’. But Lawrence, accepting death, is not agonisingly
in love with it. He seeks to heighten and intensify the moments in which
consciousness apprehends being even as his hold on being lapses. In ‘The Ship
of Death’ he advises us both to ‘live in peace on the face and earth’ and to
prepare for death:
When
the day comes, that will come.
Oh think of it in the twilight peacefully!
The last day, and the setting forth
On the longest journey, over the hidden sea
To the last wonder of oblivion.
Lawrence
has come back in critical interest over the last decade or so, including among
feminist critics like Linda Williams, who responds to the contradictions his
works contain that ‘undermine their apparently definitive polemic’. In other
words, the fiction itself is much less dogmatic than the man. This is why
Lawrence, for all his blustering and preaching, remains important. He tackles
fundamental problems of being, meaning and the self, and he does so in such an
uncompromising fashion that he continually generates complexities and
contradictions. It is these that make us return to him, not for the explicit
message about Life or instinct or nerve-brain consciousness but for the sense
of an individual attending closely to matters that will never be resolved but
which must be continually confronted with fierceness, delicacy and utter
openness.
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