#john carey

—Anne Fernihough, “Introduction,” The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (Penguin, 1995)

I didn’t have room to quote the above in my essay, just published yesterday, on Lawrence’s The Rainbow, but you can take it as my epigraph. In my treatment of the subject, I first suggest that a paradigmatic female modernist like Woolf, insofar as she was a modernist, was no less a partner in this “suppression…of political movements” (and the same goes for Stein, Barnes, Moore, Loy, and more, to varying degrees all non-leftists or even in some cases rightists). Then I go so far as to defend the instinct that won out here: the higher politics of the aesthetic over the low politics of mass movements with their designs on state power. Needless to say, this is a very timely prior instance of the same decoupling of bohemian from activist, of aesthetics from militancy, that we see today.

Speaking of all that, while mainstream elite culture is having a D. H. Lawrence moment, I’m surprised he’s not more present in the online extremist countercultures. He has that same Mishima quality, anticipating extremely-online male social outcasts, of being somehow perfectly poised between trans and Nazi, now dipping toward one side, now to the other, but somehow always keeping a precarious balance, in the art if not the life, the would-be mail-fisted fascist as tremulous adolescent girl. I think of how John Carey, in his roll-call of modernist fascism The Intellectuals and the Masses, pauses to exonerate Lawrence of his more troubling tendencies on the grounds that he was, in the end, just a sensitive soul who read Neech too early:

It must be stressed that Lawrence, for all his Nietzschean debts, was not like Nietzsche. The range and subtlety of his imagination went far beyond Nietzsche’s. The Nietzschean warrior ideal, and countenancing of cruelty, could only have seemed disgusting to Lawrence, who turns his characters not into warriors but into flowers. […] To cite such passages—and there are hundreds of them in Lawrence—and to contemplate the impossibility of Nietzsche having written them, is not just to emphasize that Lawrence was a poet and that Nietzsche was in some respects a desperately restricted and unfulfilled human being. It is also to contend that, for Lawrence, the stance of natural aristocrat, with its presuppositions of isolation and alienation, was adverse to all the promptings of his sympathetic imagination, which taught him to fuse and integrate.

The Rainbow is too long, but someone please make the NEETs read “Medlars and Sorb Apples” or “The Prussian Officer” at least. (Why does Mishima get all the attention? Strange that even fringe culture is dominated by the annoying presumption that if it’s translated it must be better.) In my essay I quote this passage from The Rainbow:

She never felt sorry for what she had done, she never forgave those who had made her guilty. If he had said to her, “Why, Ursula, did you trample my carefully-made bed?” that would have hurt her to the quick, and she would have done anything for him. But she was always tormented by the unreality of outside things. The earth was to walk on. Why must she avoid a certain patch, just because it was called a seed-bed? It was the earth to walk on. This was her instinctive assumption.

Here is my official comment, perhaps too Bloomian in its excited swoop through the canon:

Here we remember that Lawrence is the Englishman who put the gnostic-individualist literature of American Romanticism on modernism’s map. Ursula might be the daughter of Hester Prynne and Captain Ahab, her adventures chronicled by a prose Whitman.

My unofficial comment is that this is possibly my favorite paragraph from the novel because it expresses (I confess!) exactly how I felt as a child.