Re: [Marxism] The Method

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>I do though still read Lawrence's poetry, especially the ones about his time
>as a teacher.  The more famous poems  such as *Snake* and *Kangaroo* were
>seemingly influenced by Whitman, but I'm afraid my tastes in poetry run to
>minimalism and I have never really been able to read and enjoy the Whitman
>school and that btw includes Ginsberg.
>
>best regards
>
>Gary

For all of his resentment of the upper classes, D.H. Lawrence was no 
friend of the working class either. (He was described, probably 
unfairly, as a "radical rightist" in a Guardian blog entry by Terry 
Eagleton.) His greatest novel "Sons and Lovers" treats the coal miner 
characters, especially the one based on his own father, as cruel and 
brutal. Lawrence sought desperately to escape from this world and 
enter one more attuned to his artistic needs. Politically, he was as 
appalled by the world of Lord Chatterley as he was by the coal miners 
he exploited. He was hounded by the authorities during WWI and was 
even accused of being a German spy. Unlike many other writers who 
broke the bourgeoisie and identified with the working class in the 
post-1917 era, Lawrence walked a tightrope between both major classes 
in society. He was appalled by the British General Strike of 1926 
that must have seemed little better than a barroom brawl in his 
native village when he was growing up.

D.H. Lawrence, caught between two worlds

In doing some background research on this article, I came across J.M. 
Coetzee's review of Peter Scheckner's "Class, Politics and the 
Individual: A Study of the Major Works of D. H. Lawrence" in the 
January 16, 1986 NY Review of Books, along with other books on 
Lawrence. Scheckner was a classmate of mine at Bard College, a 
Marxist literary scholar and an expert on Lawrence. The review is 
worth quoting in its entirety:

     In his short book, Peter Scheckner traces the course of 
Lawrence's political thinking. Scheckner's contention is that 
Lawrence wrote his best work while he was most deeply engrossed with 
the question of the relation of private to public life, but that he 
was unable to reconcile his desire for the end of industrial 
capitalism with his reluctance to commit himself to mass action to 
destroy it; he therefore ended his life retreating from social 
concerns into an idyll in which the importance of sex became 
artificially magnified.

     Scheckner is surely correct in his claim that the "thematic 
dynamism" of much of Lawrence's fiction emerges from an evenly 
balanced distaste for both capitalism and mass movements, reflected 
in an ambivalence toward working men which he recognized very clearly 
in himself: "I love them like brothers?but, my God, I hate them too." 
Lawrence thought of himself as one of the working class, at least in 
"blood affinity." But he felt that the British working class betrayed 
itself by joining in the patriotic fervor of the First World War. 
When the general strike came in 1926, he recoiled from the violence 
that went hand in hand with it, as well as from what he regarded as 
its disappointingly materialistic objectives.

     As the son of a genteel mother who had married into the working 
class, and later as a member of a declassed intelligentsia, 
Lawrence's emotional involvement in class relations was deep. In his 
writing his great theme is freedom. But about politics and 
particularly about economics, his ideas are often worse than naive. 
Had he lived deeper into the age of fascism, he would undoubtedly 
have made as much of a fool of himself as Ezra Pound was to do: there 
was certainly in him enough of a mix of furies of hatred (which, to 
give him his due, he recognized as "vicious against the deep soul 
that pulses in the blood"), yearning toward the strong man or leader, 
and utopianism.

     Lawrence's creative life provides yet another chastening 
demonstration that simple, even simple-minded ideas, explored to 
their uttermost with passionate persistence, can issue in great art. 
Somewhere in the back of his mind Lawrence knew this, knew that his 
own feelings and desires were mere grist for artistic processes whose 
operations he had best not interfere with or scrutinize too closely. 
"Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance," 
he wrote. "When the novelist puts his thumb on the scale, to pull 
down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality."

     Scheckner's study is most useful when it gives attention to the 
neglected plays and to the so-called leadership novels: Aaron's Rod, 
Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent. It is a rather airless book, 
concentrating myopically on Lawrence's texts with barely a glance at 
fellow members of an intelligentsia squeezed, like Lawrence, between 
a right and a left equally indifferent to their interests. In order 
to prove that Lawrence jettisoned his working-class sympathies too 
precipitately in 1914, retreating into a sterile misanthropy, 
Scheckner presents working-class resistance to the Great War as 
rather more principled and uniform than it really was?as a reading of 
his main source, G. D. H. Cole's Short History of the British Working 
Class Movement, 1789?1947, will confirm. Most surprisingly, Scheckner 
pays no serious attention to the thesis that Lawrence was never a 
socialist in embryo, but rather a radical conservative hankering 
after a preindustrial world of organic agricultural communities and craftsmen.

  full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/07/08/lady-chatterley/ 


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