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Destruction and Construction: A Collective and Individual Frenzy During World War One in England

Nick Ceramella

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1The First World War is the background of this essay. One of the bloodiest and most violent historical events to have marked the history of mankind; it consequently brought Lawrence to the verge of a nervous breakdown while he was being forced to stay in England against his will. The focus here will thus be on the physical and emotional turmoil which Lawrence experienced at that time. During those tormented years, as the war unfolded in all its cruelty, Lawrence’s everyday language too became violent and full of hatred against mankind. He himself acknowledged that he felt as if he were going mad, a state which his friends explicitly discussed in their correspondence, like Katherine Mansfield, who in a letter to Koteliansky wrote “Lawrence isn’t healthy anymore; he has gone a little bit out of his mind.” (Dickinson 45)

2Among the works Lawrence wrote in that period, “The Prussian Officer,” “The Captain’s Doll,” “The Ladybird,” and “The Fox” all suggest how stressed and worried he was. In the last-mentioned story, the war is partly responsible for the choice made by two women, March and Bandford, who decide to run a farm on their own: “War conditions, again, were very unfavourable to poultry keeping. Food was scarce and bad.” (Fox 8)

3The present article cannot deal with all of these short stories of the period. It will instead focus on the short story “Tickets, Please,” which - in my view – best reflects the effects of the war on people’s everyday lives while it was still raging. Indeed, this intriguing story shows how the war brought about some radical changes in English society, while at the same time introducing an atmosphere of “wild romance,” freedom and equality between men and women to Bestwood, a small community which is fairly transparently based on Eastwood, Lawrence’s hometown. This paper will look into the way the characters find themselves in an explosive situation that they cannot control, which will contribute to the story’s violent climax.

4To arrive at a better sense of the correlation between Lawrence’s perception of the war and the individual and collective frenzy which it unleashed, it is worthwhile considering the indications relative to his personal attitude, as voiced in his non-fictional utterances, concerning the society of his time. These swung between the expression of an absolute abhorrence of the armed conflict and the conviction that the total destruction of an unjust society would lead to a consequent phase of construction. England declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914; Lawrence heard about it the day after, while he was on a walking tour with four unidentified friends in the Lake District, a moment of shock which he chronicled in a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, dated 31 January 1915:

It seems like another life – we were happy – four men. Then we came down the Barrow in Furness, and saw that war was declared. And we all went mad. I can remember soldiers kissing on Barrow station, and a woman shouting defiantly to her sweetheart “When you get at ’em, Clem, let ’em have it,” as the train drew off – and in all the tram-cars “War.” (L ii. 268)

5The woman becomes the spokeswoman for a nation that is craving for the blood of its enemy. In the frenzy of the moment, the word “war” is the only signifier that can be heard in the train. Yet what is intriguing is that Lawrence wrote an article entitled “With the Guns,” which had already appeared in the Manchester Guardian, on 18 August 1914 and in which he - apart from reporting the same scene of Reservists leaving for London unaware of the danger they were going to face - recalled some Bavarian soldiers testing new artillery weapons. The frenzy of the outbreak of war gives way to the realization of the true horror of the conflict:

[…] Last autumn I followed the Bavarian army down the Isar valley and near the foot of the Alps. Then I could see what war would be like - an affair entirely of machines, with men attached to the machines as the subordinate part thereof, as the butt is the part of a rifle. […] What work was there to do? - only mechanically to adjust the guns and fire the shot. What was there to feel? - only the unnatural suspense and suppression of serving a machine which, for ought we knew, was killing our fellow-men, whilst we stood there, blind, without knowledge or participation, subordinate to the cold machine. […] There was neither ferocity nor joy nor exultation nor exhilaration nor even quick fear: only a mechanical, expressionless movement. And this is how the gunner would “let ’em have it.” He would mechanically move a certain apparatus when he heard a certain shout. Of the result he would see and know nothing. He had nothing to do with it. […] This was how the gunner “would let ’em have it.” A shell would fall into this mass of vulnerable bodies, there would be a torn hole in the mass. This would be his “ ‘etting ’em have it.” And I remember a captain of the bersaglieri who talked to me in the train in Italy when he had come back from Tripoli. The Italian soldier, he said, was the finest soldier in the world at a rush. But - and he spoke with a certain horror that cramped his voice - when it came to lying there under the Snyder fire you had to stand behind them with a revolver. And I saw he could not get beyond the agony of this. “Well,” I said, “that is because they cannot feel themselves parts of a machine. They have all the old natural courage, when one rushes at one's enemy. But it is unnatural to them to lie still under machine-fire. It is unnatural to anybody.” (TI 81-84)

6The language itself becomes mechanical, as the anaphoric “let ’em have it” and the substantive “war” lend a martial punctuation and cadence to the scene, underscoring how men become both part of a war artillery and, by anticipation, dead carcases. Lawrence’s prophetic conclusion proved, as was often the case in his life, to be uncannily true. Alienated soldiers would be transformed into parts of the military machines which they were trained to use so “blindly,” while Italian soldiers could not bear the mere idea of being part of a passive element of those deadly machines preferring instead to face the enemy while looking them eye to eye.

British artillery, WWI, 1914.

7About four months after the outbreak of the war and the initial release of tensions, as suggested by the avowal “we all went mad” in the above letter, Lawrence reiterated his abhorrence of the war. He loathed it, while growing in the conviction that neither side was right. His state of mind is best expressed in a letter addressed to Arthur McLeod, dated 5 January 1915:

What do you mean by saying you’d go to war? No, the war is for those who are not needed for a new life. I hate and detest the war, it is all wrong, all foolish, all a wicked mistake. Why can’t it end? We none of us want it, surely. (L ii. 255)

8By the end of January, although Lawrence was still depressed, his mood was improving and he was quite hopeful, as he said to Lady Cynthia Asquith in the letter already cited above:

[…] The War finished me: it was the spear through the side of all sorrows and hopes. […] I don’t feel so hopeless now I am risen. My heart has been as […] cold as a lump of dead earth, all this time because of the war. But now I don’t feel so dead. I feel hopeful. I couldn’t tell you how fragile and tender the hope is – the new shoot of life. But I feel hopeful now about the war. We shall all rise again from this grave – though the killed soldiers will have to wait for the Last Trump. (L ii. 268-269)

9This promising, resurrective and reconstructive perspective echoes the end of The Rainbow (1915), where Ursula sees a symbol of hope and regeneration in the rainbow itself: destruction would be followed by re-creation, the disaster of her relationship with the war officer Anton Skrebenski will lead her to a new path in life and will lead him to marriage with another woman and a new military post in India:

She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven. (R 459)

10What Ursula perceives in the rainbow is a sort of apocalyptic experience, the unveiling of an ultimate and divine truth, that of the cosmic reconstruction of “the earth’s new architecture,” “the world built up in a living fabric of Truth.” In 1923, Lawrence would confirm this new vision of the world in Kangaroo, saying that “It was in 1915 that the old world ended.” (K 216) At the time, he was so unhappy and without hope for the future that he tried to escape and avoid any contact with the reality. So, from a visionary perspective aimed at the reconstruction of the world according to his own design, he urged his friends to join him in his Rananim project to create a new society, while also pleading with them to yield themselves completely, this being the only way to acquire a new consciousness and to create a new reality. Striking the same note, in December 1915 he wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell:

We must all submit to be helpless and obliterated, quite obliterated, destroyed, cast away into nothingness. There is something will rise out of it, something new, that now is not. (L ii. 468)

11Birkin propounds the same belief in the correlation between destruction and construction in Women in Love, when he argues “Dissolution rolls on, just as production does” (WL 173). Destruction and construction are thus two facets of the same coin, they cyclically follow each other, an idea that Lawrence put forward in his essay “The Crown”:

We may give ourselves utterly to destruction. Then our conscious forms are destroyed along with us, and something new must arise. […] Destruction and Creation are the two relative absolutes between the opposing infinites. Life is in both. Life may even, for a while be almost entirely in one, or almost entirely in the other. (RDP 294)

12To Lawrence “reconstruction” meant only one thing, total destruction of an unjust society to create another one from scratch. Thus, the obsessive urge which he felt for a thorough individual purification and a social cleansing, especially prevalent in the war years, made him acknowledge that he too, in his deepest self, wrestled with the desire to kill German soldiers: the destruction of the enemy was thus a cathartic crying out then. He admitted as much in his poem “New Heaven and Earth”:

War came, and every hand raised to murder;
Very good, very good, every hand raised to murder!
Very good, very good, I am a murderer!
It is good, I can murder and murder, and see them fall,
the mutilated, horror-struck youths, a multitude
[ …] burned in heaps
going up in foetid smoke to get rid of them, [ …] (CP 257-258)

13The same idea of the need to clean the existing society from its corruption is expressed in a touching letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, written on 3 August 1915. However it also carries a message of hope that nothing was completely lost:

It is a great thing to realise that the original world is still there–perfectly clean and pure […] It is this mass of unclean world that we have super-imposed on the clean world that we cannot bear […] One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had become hell […] It can be cleaned away. (L ii. 375)

14Almost as an answer to this letter, Lady Asquith commented in her Diaries 1915-18 that the conflict had a destabilising mental effect on Lawrence, who had turned destructive:

15The war is driving him quite mad with rage–he just sits and gibbers with fury. He sees no hope in the country, nothing but war, and the war he sees as the pure suicide of humanity–a war without any constructive ideal in it, just pure senseless destruction. (Diaries 89)

16And as the war dragged on, Lawrence came to the conclusion that the next best thing he could do in his re-constructive effort was to move to the United States. But even this idea proved to be not feasible when he realised he could not leave Britain unless he had a military exemption. We know from another letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell that on 11 December 1915 he went to a recruiting station in Battersea Town Hall (Hampstead) and was allowed to break away for just a couple of hours. This first experience in the military world was all in all positive, for he appreciated the dignified attitude of the people he met there. Yet, as time passed, the war was becoming his obsession, he wrote to J. B. Pinker on 16 December:

I am laid up in bed with a violent cold, and wonder why one should ever trouble to get up, into this filthy world. The war stinks worse and worse. (L ii. 476)

17But unfortunately, since the outbreak of the war the number of men joining up increased day by day. Consequently, by 24 June 1916, general conscription came into effect. This is how Lawrence commented on the systematic enlistment in a letter to Dollie Radford, dated 29 June:

Alas, what a final fall it was when England chose general compulsion to military service. Among the men there is such a valiant sense of doing what is right, in joining up, overlying a deeper sense of catastrophe. The sense of catastrophe in the midst of that militarism, that Bodmin, that barracks experience, those khakis and the men to whom khaki is imminent, is really terrifying. (L ii. 618-619)

18In fact, this letter was written when Lawrence had already been to Bodmin (Derbyshire) to be re-examined by a medical commission. He informed Pinker about it the following day, saying quite triumphantly, “They have given me complete exemption from military service” (L ii. 619). The doctors, as he says to Barbara Low, simply took his word that he had had consumption. Unfortunately, that was not the end of Lawrence’s tangle with the military. Due to the desperate need for new conscripts, since the number of casualties continued to rise dramatically, a Military Service Bill was passed in Parliament imposing further official harassment. This news infuriated Lawrence, who said he was determined to go to prison rather than serve against his will. He struggled and tried to avoid the service, producing his doctor’s certificate on 11 June 1917, but it was rejected by the medical authorities who again summoned him for examination twelve days later. This time they realised they had no choice and put him in the lowest category, C3, just one little step above rejection. In a sense, we can say this experience triggered Lawrence’s personal never-ending war and his loss of faith in the democratic process. Similarly, most European intellectuals refused to support the war, even if there were also those who yearned to wear a uniform or do administrative work. Lawrence was excluded from wearing a uniform, so he fought his anti-war battle through his writing, though not as openly as, for example, Siegfried Sassoon who wrote pacifist poems even from the trenches. In a letter to Waldo Frank on 27 July 1917, Lawrence underscored how his novel The Rainbow and the war had the capacity to alter the individual consciousness through destruction but, according to the author, unlike the war the novel does assert the possibility of a redeeming creative destruction. The war is the mark of a European doom:

I knew I was writing a destructive work [...] And I knew, as I revised the book, that it was a kind of working up to the dark sensual or Dionysic or Aphrodisic ecstasy, which actually does burst the world, burst the world-consciousness in every individual. What I did through individuals, the world has done through the war. But alas, in the world of Europe I see no Rainbow. I believe the deluge of iron will destroy the world here, utterly. (L iii. 143)

19Indeed, a spirit of hopelessness pervaded the whole continent that was everywhere facing the same kind of problems. It is also intriguing to note how the expression “the dark sensual or Dionysic or Aphrodisic ecstasy” sounds almost like an anticipation of the main themes of “Tickets Please,” suggesting two different levels of analysis: the social, concerning the immediate impact of the war back in England, and the personal, involving the relationships between men and women.

20The story is an account of provincial life and was written in 1918. It takes place in the middle of the war years in Nottinghamshire, at a time when many British women were employed in what traditionally were men’s occupations. Lawrence exploits the novelty of this situation by creating a story in which a group of particularly independent “modern” women assert themselves over a “rapacious” male, John Thomas (a slang term for the penis). The name was the eponym original title under which the story first appeared in 1919, but for reasons of appropriateness it was changed to John Joseph, and the title was altered to “Tickets, Please.” The main characters in the story work on the Nottingham-Ripley tramway inaugurated in August 1913, and which we know Lawrence used between 1917 and 1918. Annie, the female protagonist, is one of the conductors working on the tram, of which Lawrence offers a vivid depiction:

To ride on these cars is always an adventure. Since we are in war-time, the drivers are men unfit for active service: cripples and hunchbacks. So they have the spirit of the devil in them. The ride becomes a steeplechase. Hurray! – we have leapt in a clear jump over the canal bridges – now for the four-lane corner. With a shriek and a trail of sparks we are clear again. To be sure, a tram often leaps the rails – but what matter! It sits in a ditch till other trams come to haul it out. It is quite common for a car packed with one solid mass of living people to come to a dead halt in the midst of unbroken blackness, the heart of nowhere on a dark night, and for the driver and the girl conductor to call, – All get off – car’s on fire! Instead, however, of rushing out in a panic, the passengers stolidly reply: ‘Get on – get on! We’re not coming out. We’re stopping where we are. Push on, George.’ So till flames actually appear. […]

This, the most dangerous tram-service in England, as the authorities themselves declare with pride, is entirely conducted by girls and driven by rash young men, a little crippled, or by delicate young men, who creep forward in terror. The girls are fearless young hussies. In their ugly blue uniforms, skirts up to their knees, shapeless old peaked caps on their heads, they have all the sang froid of an old non-commissioned officer. With a tram packed with howling colliers, roaring hymns downstairs and a sort of antiphony of obscenities upstairs, the lasses are perfectly at their ease. They pounce on the youths who try to evade their ticket-machine. They push off the men at the end of their distance. They are not going to be done in the eye – not they. They fear nobody – and everybody fears them.

‘Halloa Annie!’
‘Halloa Ted!’[…]
‘Tickets, please.’
She is peremptory, suspicious, and ready to hit first. She can hold her own against ten thousand. The step of that tram-car is her Thermopylae. (TP 218-219)

21This passage sounds like a parody of a battlefield during the First World War, a counterpart to the war and to the frenzy then spreading through every layer of society. The last sentence of the passage, “The step of that tram-car is her Thermopylae,” ironically evokes a famous ancient battle, one that pitted an alliance of Greek city-states led by king Leonidas of Sparta against the Persian Empire of Xerxes I. Irony prevails here, since the step of a tram is hardly the place for a heroic defence. This is all the more so, if we remember that in actual fact Thermopylae symbolises one of the most emblematic sites of ancient history (it was the pass held by Leonidas, King of Sparta, in 480 B.C., against the outnumbering forces of the Persians). So, if we see the passengers as warriors, who seem not to care about the burning tram and who show their disdain for the danger while screaming all together, “Get on – get on! We’re not coming out. We’re stopping where we are (TP 218), the situation takes then on a tragicomic tone which contrasts with the bloody battles occurring in the trenches and wreaking havoc all over Europe.

22As if to ensure that we do perceive here the evocation of war, in all its tragicomic brutality, Lawrence describes the women conductors as “fearless young hussies,” having “all the sang froid of an old non-commissioned officer” (TP 218). By contrast, their workmates, the perhaps uneasy men who drove the trams in the awareness that they had been declared unfit for the military service, are seen as worthless military recruits, here generically defined as unidentified invalids, “cripples and hunchbacks” (TP 218). This may explain why Lawrence ends his description by adding, “So they have the spirit of the devil in them,” (TP 218), the implication being that they would do anything to show they were not inferior to their compatriots, to the “real” men fighting for their country away from home. Yet whatever their unfitness for that sort of fight, they were making their contribution at home, showing they too were brave and full of energy. Given Lawrence’s own rejection by the army on account of his physical weakness, one could argue that he may have conveyed here his own frustration and humiliation at having been considered inadequate to fight the real war. If that were the case, then we might conclude that “Tickets, Please” is also a reflection of Lawrence’s life-long fight with women and, in particular, of his tumultuous relationship with Frieda precisely during these wartime years. Taking into account Lawrence’s highly violent language when describing his “long and bloody fight” with Frieda, one could even argue that since he was deemed unfit for military service, fighting with his wife may have appeared to offer some sort of compensation. A letter addressed to Middleton Murry in October 1916 supports this argument:

Frieda and I have finished the long and bloody fight at last, and are at one. It is a fight one has to fight – the old Adam to be killed in me, the old Eve in her – Till the fight is finished, it is only honourable to fight. (L ii. 662)

23Lawrence’s language here suggests an echo of the war and a connection between Lawrence’s personal love battle with his wife and the miserable state of war the country was in. In a similar way, the battle on the tram, fought on a daily basis, is only the initial skirmish in an engagement leading to the final “battle” of the sexes. The girls/conductors are all victims of John Thomas, the tram inspector, known as the “lady killer” because he double dates all of them. But one day Annie, herself a victim, tells her colleagues about John Thomas’s ravenous appetite for women, with the result that the victims start plotting a bloody revenge against their common “enemy.” In line with the military imagery used throughout the story, Annie is herself described as a warrior, “something of a Tartar,” i.e. a formidable person, belonging to the Asiatic tribe, led by Jenghis Kahn, that menaced Europe in the thirteenth century. Eventually, after being stirred by Annie, the girls take their revenge and agree to act collectively in order to attack and humiliate such a “cock-of-the-walk” as John Thomas. Lawrence sustains his account, using the language of war as an extended metaphor. Annie leads the attack against John Thomas, who is taken by surprise: “Annie went forward and fetched him a box on the side of the head that sent his cap flying and himself staggering” (TP 42). This is only an initial blow, one which has a high symbolic value: the cap (comparable to a crown) represents his superior rank in the tram service hierarchy. To take it away from him is consequently to dethrone him. By rebelling, the conductresses clearly intend to stress they are no longer his obedient “soldiers”/“subjects.” Immediately after the attack, as if it were a war action, “at Annie’s signal” the other five girls “all fl[y] at him, pinching him, pulling his hair,” which seems to me a dramatic parody of the hand to hand fighting, typical of World War One. The beating goes on and Annie even takes off her belt and “fetche[s] him a sharp blow over the head with the buckle end.” Lawrence adds: “Their blood [is] now thoroughly up,” (TP 43), while “He remain[s] lying on the floor with his torn clothes and bleeding, averted face.” (TP 45) All of them are infused with a fighting spirit, they behave as if they were on a battlefield. This is especially true of Annie, who has developed that defensive/attacking attitude when the tram is overcrowded and is now ready to apply it to the “war” of her life, thus displaying a great ability to lead the assault.

24However it is difficult to say if she actually won her war. Indeed we can assume that she may have even felt ashamed of bashing up John Thomas so brutally. This inevitably creates two opposite factions: those who consider that it served him right to be humiliated so badly and those who think that the girls went too far. Annie, in particular, may also have realised that she killed whatever genuine feelings he could have had for her. And the reader could almost hear Lawrence’s ironic voice in the use of the French proverb “à la guerre comme à la guerre.” After all, Lawrence, in writing this story, most likely had in mind a powerful literary model such as Euripides’s The Bacchae (480-406 BC). In fact it could be argued that Annie and the other girls take on a role similar to that of the avenging Furies in Greek tragedy. In The Bacchae, the King of Thebes, Pentheus, is torn to pieces by his mother and her followers, possessed by the god Dionysius (or Bacchus), whose worship he has tried to oppose. It is for this reason that such a terrible punishment is inflicted upon him. The point of comparison is that the conductresses who assault John Thomas are possessed by an overwhelming force that is beyond their control and that makes them attack him with extraordinary violence, further enhanced by “the sight of his white, bare arm” that “maddened the girls.” This force drives them into an absolutely wild frenzy:

Strange, wild creatures, they hung on him and rushed at him to bear him down. His tunic was torn right up the back. Nora had hold at the back of his collar, and was actually strangling him. Luckily the button burst. He struggled in a wild frenzy of fury and terror, almost mad terror. His tunic was simply torn off his back, his shirt-sleeves were torn away, his arms were naked. The girls rushed at him, clenched their hands on him and pulled at him: or they rushed at him and pushed him, butted him with all their might: or they struck him wild blows. He ducked and cringed and struck sideways. They became more intense. (TP 43)

25Eventually, he is defeated and lies on the floor like a captured animal at the mercy of its hunter, bleeding and bruised:

He lay in a kind of trance of fear and antagonism. [While the girls]
felt themselves filled with supernatural strength. […] “You ought to be killed, that’s what you ought,” said Annie, tensely. “You ought to be killed.” And there was a terrifying lust in her voice. (TP 43-44)

26What emerges here is that the girls, while infringing on a traditional male occupational domain, also take the opportunity to adopt a range of equally chauvinistic attitudes. Ironically enough, we know that Lawrence sometimes uses women to portray himself, as when he tries to mitigate some of his chauvinistic excesses. It is almost as if he wanted to compensate for the feminine disposition in his most intimate self, thus reflecting his unresolved ambivalence towards his mother and towards women. Cecil Gray wrote Lawrence a letter, which provoked a very resentful reply, in which he describes the Lawrence of that period of winter 1917 as allowing himself to become the object of a kind of esoteric female cult, an Adonis-Atthis-Dionysos religion of which he was the central figure, a Jesus Christ to a regiment of Mary Magdalenes (Nehls, vol. 1 432).

27Lawrence did however also cultivate his isolation. This withdrawal from the strife had the inevitable effect of reducing any possible influence on his part on the course of events. According to Daniel J. Schneider, “This constant tendency to avoid complications in order to continue his work explains his relationships with various women during the war years.” (Consciousness 106) Lawrence’s war with women continued for virtually the rest of his life, perhaps reaching its apex when he was staying at Villa Bernarda in 1926, at a time when it was occupied by a “colony” of women, fiercely fighting each other. He kept writing to his friends that the real war, which he never stopped considering to be stupid and self-destructive, monstrous and contemptible, would soon end. There is no doubt he was hopeful about the future, as when he said to Nancy Henry “One feels a curious nascent quality in the world – perhaps something is going to appear” (L iii. 276). Naturally then, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, on 28 June 1919, he displayed, just like a child, all his happiness and faith in a reconstruction of the world, as he wrote to Koteliansky: “the PEACE is signed – sweet peace – Peace Perfect Peace – Pea – Pea Pea – Pea – Peace: ‘the very world is like a bell’ – Pah!” (L iii. 366).

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Bibliographie

Asquith, Lady Cynthia. Diaries 1915-18. Foreword L. P. Hartley. London: Hutchinson, 1968.

Dickinson, John. “Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky: Some Letters,” in Revue de Littérature Comparée, 1971, 79-99.

Lawrence, D. H. The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird. Ed. Dieter Mehl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

…… The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, volume II. Eds. George J. Zytaruk & James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

…… The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, volume III. Eds. James T. Boulton & Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

…… “The Crown” in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Ed. Michael Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

…… “With the Guns” in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays. Ed. Paul Eggert. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.

…… The Rainbow. Ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

…… Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

…… The Fox. Eds. Nick Ceramella & Peter Preston. Rapallo (Italy): Cideb Editrice, 1993.

…… “New Heaven and Hearth” in The Complete Poems. Eds. Vivian De Sola Pinto & Warrren F. Roberts. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964.

Nehls, Edward. Ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 vols. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957-59.

Schneider, Daniel J. The Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence. Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1986.

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Légende British artillery, WWI, 1914.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/docannexe/image/922/img-1.png
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Nick Ceramella, « Destruction and Construction: A Collective and Individual Frenzy During World War One in England »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 50 | 2019, mis en ligne le 02 octobre 2019, consulté le 16 avril 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/922 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lawrence.922

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Auteur

Nick Ceramella

 

Nick CERAMELLA is currently an independent scholar. He has taught in various Italian universities in Departments of Languages and Literatures: Naples, Rome, l’Aquila, and Perugia.His latest position, as contract professor of English literature  and ESP, was at the University of Trento till 2014. He has been a visiting professor of English literature and Translation studies at the University for the Humanities of Moscow (Russia), and Universidade de Alagoas, Maceiò, (Brazil). His eclectic teaching/research is reflected also in his latest publications such as Encounter Between Literature and Science: Galileo’s Impact on Milton in “Forum Italicum” (London: SAGE, 2015); “‘Silence Symphony’ Conducted by Pinter and Eduardo, Two World Theatre Maestri” in Harold Pinter on International Stages (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014); Lake Garda: Gateway to D. H. Lawrence’s Voyage to the Sun (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2013).

 

 

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