Abstract
As the ‘brief and hectic’ friendship between D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell moved towards its inevitable end, they reproached one another, in conversations and correspondence, for having fundamentally opposed conceptions of historical understanding. Relying as he did on the romantic intuitions of the irrational spirit, Lawrence berated Russell for being a savant, a ‘mechanical instrument’, whose very methods of analysis made him a cautious collaborator with a corrupt society. ‘He attacks me for various things that I don’t feel to blame about’, Russell protested ‘— chiefly, in effect, for having a scientific temper and a respect for fact’. Lawrence’s romantic impulses, unlike those of Conrad, were never ‘disciplined by a sense of personal responsibility and a recognition of the hard facts of existence shared with the rest of mankind’. Russell met in Lawrence the full implications of a doctrine which held that ‘facts’ are of no account in comparison with ‘truths’, and was exasperated beyond bearing by the ‘dream-like’, impractical quality of Lawrence’s responses to contemporary history: ‘He never let himself bump into reality.’1
I don’t believe your lectures are good. They are nearly over, aren’t they? What’s the good of sticking in the damned ship and haranguing the merchant pilgrims in their own language? Why don’t you drop overboard? Why don’t you clear out of the whole show?
Letter from D. H. Lawrence to Bertrand Russell, February 1916
His attitude was a little mad and not quite honest, or at least very muddled. He has not learnt the lesson of individual impotence. And he regards all my attempts to make him acknowledge the facts as mere timidity, lack of courage to think boldly, self-indulgence in pessimism. When one gets a glimmer of the facts into his head, as I did at last, he gets discouraged, and says he will go to the South Sea Islands, and bask in the sun with six native wives.
The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
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Notes
B. Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, II (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968) 20–3 and 53–4.
P. Delany, D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and his Circle in the Years of the Great War (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979) pp. 114–17 and 132–6; and Booth, Modern Dogma, pp. 57–60.
Lawrence to Dollie Radford, 6 Aug 1915, in The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. H. T. Moore, I (London: Heinemann, 1962) 363.
V. de Sola Pinto, ‘D. H. Lawrence’, in G. A. Panichas (ed.), The Politics of Twentieth-Century Novelists (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1971) pp. 48–9; J. Meyers, D. H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982) pp. 129–30; J. Carey, ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Doctrine’, in S. Spender (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973) pp. 122–34; and F. Kermode, Lawrence (London: Fontana, 1973; 1981) pp. 25 and 29–30. See also S. Sanders, D. H. Lawrence: The World of the Major Novels (London: Vision Press, 1973) p. 170, on the numerous critics who have insisted on distinguishing the ‘mythic visions of a writer from the political shapes they take’.
E. Nehls, D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, i (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957–9) p. 162; and D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. E. D. McDonald (London: Heinemann, 1936; 1961) pp. 476–7.
For example, Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 360 (ch. 17), and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922; Hardmonsworth: Penguin, 1986) p. 76.
See B. Hochman, Another Ego: The Changing View of Self and Society in the Work of D. H. Lawrence (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1970) p. 169.
M. B. Howe, The Art of the Self in D. H. Lawrence (Athens, Ohio: University of Ohio Press, 1977) p. 2.
P. L. Thorslev, Romantic Contraries: Freedom versus Destiny (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), ch. 4, discusses in detail these two ways of construing the romantic retreat.
The general pattern is well described in Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pp. 235–7, and Bracher, The Age of Ideologies, p. 100. Some of the tensions within romanticism are suggested by the fact that it can be persuasively argued to be the source both of egoistic individualism and of totalitarian collectivism. See for example C. Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) pp. 39–40.
D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) p. 79; and D. J. Schneider, D. H. Lawrence: The Artist as Psychologist (Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas Press, 1984) pp. 55–6.
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1921; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988) p. 433.
Possible explanations are discussed in R. Darroch, D. H. Lawrence in Australia (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1981) chs. 5–6.
This is, for example, the argument of M. Wilding, Political Fictions (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980) pp. 180–1.
D. H. Lawrence, Pychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) pp. 235–6.
See for example R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, tr. J. W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923; 1950) p. 31: ‘The “mystery” is for [the man fascinated by numinous experiences] not merely something to be wondered at but something that entrances him … bewilders and confounds … captivates and transports …’; and Bok, Secrets, pp. 6–7.
D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (1931; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) pp. 46–51 (chs. 7–8); and Thorslev, Romantic Contraries, p. 100, on Hegel’s insistence that consciousness is ‘ever an end, and never a means’.
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© 1990 Lee Horsley
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Horsley, L. (1990). Jumping Overboard: Lawrence, Kangaroo, and the Retreat from History. In: Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11055-1_5
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