The Common Pursuit (36 page)

Lawrence does not offer intellectual order or definition or an intellectual approach, to speak of him as incapable of thinking is to mislead. In the same way the phrases, 'lack of intellectual and social training' and 'soul destitute of humility', seem to me misleading in suggestion; and I think that, if Mr Eliot goes on reading Lawrence—and especially the Letters and Phoenix—in. a serious attempt to understand, he may come to wonder whether such phrases are quite consistent with humility in the critic.

When we look up Mr Wyndham Lewis's' brilliant exposure' of Lawrence in Paleface, we discover that it is an 'exposure' of Lawrence and Mr Sherwood Anderson together. Now the primitivistic illusion that Mr Wyndham Lewis rightly attacks was indeed something that Lawrence was liable to (and could diagnose). Just how far, in any critical estimate, the stress may be fairly laid there is a matter for critical difference. But that Lawrence's importance is not anything that can be illuminated by assimilating him, or any side of him, to Mr Sherwood Anderson is plain on Mr Eliot's own showing: 'Lawrence lived all his life, I should imagine, on the spiritual level; no man was less a sensualist. Against the living death of material civilization he spoke again and again, and even if these dead could speak, what he said is unanswerable.' If Lawrence was this, how comes Mr Eliot to be using Mr Wyndham Lewis against him?—Mr Wyndham Lewis, who, though he may stand for Intelligence, is as unqualified to discriminate between the profound insight and the superficial romantic illusion, as anyone who could have been hit on. His remarkable satiric gift is frustrated by an unrestrained egotism, and Mr Eliot might have placed him along with Mr Pound among those whose Hells are for the other people: no one could with less injustice be said to be destitute of humility.

Mr Eliot no doubt thought he was merely using Mr Wyndham Lewis to mark off a weaker side of Lawrence from 'the extraordinarily keen sensibility and capacity for profound intuition' which made Lawrence so irreconcilable and potent an enemy of the idea that 'by tolerance, benevolence, inoffensiveness and a redistribution or increase of purchasing power, combined with devotion on the part of an elite to Art, the world will be as good as anyone could require ...' Mr Eliot, unhappily, was mistaken.

ELIOT, WYNDHAM LEWIS & LAWRENCE 245

From the two sentences of supreme praise quoted in the last paragraph he goes on: * As a criticism of the modern world, Fantasia of the Unconscious is a book to keep at hand and re-read. In contrast to Nottingham, London or industrial America, his capering redskins of Mornings in Mexico seem to represent Life*— Mornings in Mexico is Mr Wyndham Lewis's text, and it is one of the very inferior books. If it represented Lawrence and the Fantasia deserved to be bracketed with it, or if the 'capering redskins' (betraying phrase) represented Lawrence's 'capacity for profound intuition', then Lawrence would not deserve the praise Mr Eliot gives him—so equivocally.

This equivocalness, this curious sleight by which Mr Eliot surreptitiously takes away while giving, is what I mean by the revealingly uncritical in his attitude towards Lawrence. It is as if there were something he cannot bring himself to contemplate fairly. And the index obtr ded in that over-insistence on Lawrence's 'sexual morbidity' refuses to be ignored. It is an odd insistence in one whose own attitudes with reference to sex have been, in prose and poetry, almost uniformly negative—attitudes of distaste, disgust and rejection. (Mr Wyndham Lewis's treatment of sex, it is worth noting, is hard-boiled, cynical and external.) The preoccupation with sex in Lawrence's work is, perhaps, excessive by any standard of health, and no doubt psychologists, if they like, can elicit abnormalities. But who can question his own account of the preoccupation? *I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, not shameful.' And who can question that something as different as this from Mr Eliot's bent in the matter is necessary if the struggle 'to re-establish a vital connexion between the individual and the race' is to mean anything ?

Lawrence's concern for health far transcends what is suggested by any talk of sex. His may be 'not the last word, only the first'; but the first is necessary. His justification is given in these remarks from After Strange Gods (p. 18):

We become conscious of these items, or conscious of their importance, usually only after they have begun to fall into desuetude, as we are aware of the leaves of a tree when the autumn wind begins to blow them off—when they have separately ceased to be vital. Energy

may be wasted at that point in a frantic endeavour to collect the leaves as they fall and gum them on to the branches: but the sound tree will

put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put to the axe Our

second danger is... to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time.

The tree will not put forth new leaves unless the sap flows. The metaphor, of course, is susceptible of more than one translation, but the very choice of it is nevertheless an involuntary concession to Lawrence. To 'stimulate the life' in Lawrence's way is not all that is needed, but is nevertheless, as the phrase itself conveys, indispensable.

It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life—for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and refreshing.

Mr Eliot complains of a lack of moral struggle in Lawrence's novels; here we have Lawrence's reply, and his justification of the earlier description of him as an * extremely serious and improving' writer. No one will suggest that in Lawrence we have all we need of moral concern, but, as After Strange Gods reminds us, a preoccupation with discipline—the effort towards orthodoxy—also has its disabilities and dangers. These are manifest in the obvious and significant failures in touch and tone. It may be prejudice that makes one find something distasteful in the habitual manner of Mr Eliot's references during the past half-dozen years to Baudelaire and Original Sin. But such disasters as that * curtain' to the second lecture in the present volume leave no room for doubt.

No one who sees in what way Lawrence is * serious and improving' will attribute the sum of wisdom, or anything like it, to him. And for attributing to him * spiritual sickness' Mr Eliot can make out a strong case. But it is characteristic of the world as

ELIOT, WYNDHAM LEWIS & LAWRENCE 247

it is that health cannot anywhere be found whole; and the sense in which Lawrence stands for health is an important one. He stands at any rate for something without which the preoccupation (necessary as it is) with order, forms and deliberate construction, cannot produce health.

i

THE LOGIC OF CHRISTIAN DISCRIMINATION

HAVE already had reason for concluding that Christian Discrimination is a decidedly bad thing. Bro, George Every's little book, Poetry and Personal Responsibility, has the air of having been designed defiantly to justify that conclusion. It can be recommended for a brief perusal as showing unambiguously what in the concrete Christian Discrimination is, and where its logic leads.

One might, after looking through the book, start by asking why Mr Every has devoted so much time to poetry, and to creative literature in general, since (I hope I may be forgiven for saying) he shows no compelling interest in it, and no aptitude for its study. The answer he would give us is to be found in the first sentence of his Preface:

This book is intended as an introduction to contemporary poetry, considered as the sensitive spot in the modern mind, where a new response to life, a new outlook upon the world, is taking shape.

He follows it up with a sentence that hardly clarifies the idea, and wouldn't, I think, have been left standing if anyone had asked him what he meant by it:

The best poem is die most sensitive not only to the thoughts and feelings of the author, but to those of other people with whom he is in constant communication.

Still, I see what's in his mind. It's the idea that, in the given form, derives its currency from I. A. Richards:

The poet is the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself.

But though this is the idea that seems to Mr Every to explain his dealings with poetry, he doesn't, as to be consistent he should, go on to try and be a critic. He knows beforehand, in a general kind of way, what new responses to life and what *new outlook upon the world' are to be looked for as making a writer significant and important. They go with his conviction that the most impor-

CHRISTIAN DISCRIMINATION 249

tant activity to-day is to promote a Christian revival. He nowhere begins to come near the business of literary criticism, and it is difficult to see what, apart from names, asserted importances, and impressive generalities his pupils (the substance of the book was given as lectures) can have got from him:

. .. the younger poets who came to light in 1937-42, such voices as Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, Alex Comfort, and Sidney Keyes, have never suffered from any illusions about the future of our civilization. For them the urgent problem is the imminence of death, the need of some significance that can be attached to dying in a world where there is no common belief in immortality.

This suggests well enough his principles of selection and association and die nature of his commentary. It is true that he does a good deal of quoting, but the pieces of verse he quotes get no critical examination, and don't as a rule support the implicit assumption that the author matters as a poet, Mr Every's indifference to the essential critical judgment appears at its most naked in his astonishing collocations. He can glide with perfect aplomb, in a paragraph, from Little Gidding to Miss Anne Ridler and Sidney Keyes without a hint of any perception on his part that, for any serious treatment of his theme, something of a change of level has occurred, and that he cannot still be dealing with significance of the same order. Here is a characteristic passage:

Our greatest living novelist, Mr E. M. Forster, deserted the novel twenty-five years ago for other forms of literature. Rex Warner seems to have done the same. Miss Elizabeth Bowen and Mr Desmond Hawkins have not added to their early output, which had great promise for the future. The reputation of Miss Compton-Burnett, so far chiefly among her fellow-writers, rests on a departure from the naturalistic novel into stylized conversation. Her characters are elongated and foreshortened in the manner of sculpture by Mr Henry Moore, a family group or a reclining woman. No other modern novelist cuts so close to the bone of life. As her prose recalls the verse of T. S. Eliot's plays, especially The Family Reunion, so her treatment of die novel as a form of poetry makes a convenient introduction to novels by two poets, Herbert Read and Charles Williams.

Christian Discrimination, then, absolves Mr Every from the literary critic's kind of discrimination. This comment will not disturb him; he has provided for it, and disabled it, he feels. Tell

him that, if poetry matters because it is the * sensitive spot in the modern mind . . . where a new response to life is taking shape', then to detect * poetry* and to discriminate between that which can properly be considered as such and that in which any journalist or extension-lecturer recognizes the Zeitgeist becomes a task of great delicacy and importance, the due execution of which only the fostering of the highest critical standards and the observance of the most scrupulous critical discipline can hope to ensure— tell him this, and Mr Every replies (his immediate audience being of the WJE.A. type):

The error of the Scrutiny writers was to look for the intelligentsia in the same places where aesthetes were recruited in the days of the Yellow Book and the Rhymers' Club, among intelligent and well-informed young men and women at the older universities, who were prepared to adopt literature as a vocation. Such people develop very easily into pedants, and pedantry can be reared on a diet of contemporary literature as well as on perfectly safe classics. The minority who in any age are really responsive to new developments in literature and the arts should always include a proportion of people who are not themselves engaged in the practice of literature, who care for art because it helps them to make sense of their lives.

Mr Every doesn't actually bring out the word 'highbrow', but his tactic amounts to nothing more and nothing less than the launching of that appeal to the natural man and the natural man's dislike of the suggestion that perhaps in more important matters than football, billiards, and golf there are qualifications that can only be gained by discipline and experience, developing natural aptitude. For what can be meant by 'the minority should always include a proportion of people who are not themselves engaged in the practice of literature' ? The minority is what it is; that it should be bigger is always desirable; but it will not be enlarged by pretending that confidence based on lack of cultivated literary experience and lack of trained aptitude in analysis and judgment—for what does 'not engaged in the practice of literature' mean ?—can be counted on to distinguish and respond to die significantly new in literature.

Mr Every's intention and drift are unmistakable. He writes:

The border between literary criticism and the evaluation of a writer's ideas had been obscured by the critics of the 'twenties, and especially by

CHRISTIAN DISCRIMINATION 251

Dr Leavis, in the interests of'significant form*. Now to his great distress criticism seemed to be becoming completely immersed in theological and sociological polemic.

The doctrine of'significant form' maintains that, where visual art is in question, value-judgments, or judgments of significance, that appeal to the values and interests of general living, are irrelevant ; the experience of art is sui generis and unrelated to the rest oflife, being the concern of an aesthetic sense that is insulated from the rest of one's organization. The true aesthetic appreciator can only ejaculate, since the 'significance' of 'significant form' is to be ineffable; signifying nothing that can be discussed or indicated, it just is. Mr Every imputes a literary transposition of that doctrine to me. That is his way (and does he, on reflection, find it honest ?) of dealing with my insistence that theological, sociological, political, or moral commentaries and judgments on works of literature should be relevant, and that the business of ensuring relevance is a delicate one, calling for literary experience, cultivated scruple, trained skill, and the literary critic's concern with the quality of the life that is concretely present in die work in front of him.