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The Ideological Ambiguity of Touch and Go

Simonetta De Filippis

Résumé

The interest of D.H. Lawrence’s theatre lies not only in its experimental nature and formal research with reference to different theatrical traditions (naturalism, comedy of manners, epic theatre), but in its themes and characters which, considered in their historical perspective, appear rather innovative if not provocative. Indeed, in most of his plays, Lawrence chooses to put on stage the lively ferments and turmoils of the workers’ world, the common people and their problems in the struggle for better conditions of life, thus presenting a world that had been somehow marginalised from the British stage: a second class world, with its misery, its physical and moral dehumanization, and its struggle against the arrogance and haughtiness of an efficientist master class.
This social conflict, present in the background of the first colliery plays (1912), is brought to the foreground in Touch and Go, written at a later stage (1920), in a much more complex personal and historical period: a more mature and difficult phase for Lawrence – the artist and the man – who in 1919, after World War I was over, chooses to be an exile for the rest of his life; an eventful period for British society, particularly for a decisive awakening of the working class whose struggles call into question and impeach a large part of the capitalist structures within and outside Great Britain (the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the strengthening of the Fascist movement in Italy). Lawrence seems to feel the change in the atmosphere and, in Touch and Go, he shows his responsiveness to the political events shaking contemporary society by making the socio-political themes and class struggle the pivotal points of the play.
As Lawrence writes in the “Preface” to Touch and Go, there is “a new wind getting up. We call it Labour versus Capitalism […] it is a mechanico-material struggle” in which “two dogs [are] fighting for a bone”, a mere “pretext for a fight with each other.” Only a deep awareness of the true reasons for fighting will bring “dignity, beauty, satisfaction” to man and the struggle would turn into “a creative activity”. An analysis of the play in a socio-political and historical perspective reveals a controversial ideological position on Lawrence’s part. References to essays and poems will support and clarify Lawrence’s ideas about people and social classes.

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D.H. Lawrence’s theatre: a historical and cultural perspective

  • 1 “Interest in Lawrence from the 1930s onwards concentrated on the better-known prose works, his lett (...)

1D.H. Lawrence’s plays are a relatively neglected topic,1 though they deserve greater consideration not only in reference to his other writings but within the wider context of early 20th century British theatre, both for their experimental nature and the variety of different theatrical traditions from which Lawrence draws inspiration – from Shakespeare to the “comedy of manners,” from naturalism to epic theatre – and for their subject matter, as most of the themes and characters, observed from a historical perspective, appear quite innovative, even provocative, in their social and ideological impact. Indeed, in most of his plays, Lawrence presents a social milieu that had been somehow marginalised – if not excluded – from the British stage: the miners’ world – a second class world, with its misery, its physical and moral dehumanization as a consequence of the exhausting work in the mines, with its painful contrast to everything which this world comes up against, notably the arrogance and haughtiness of an efficientist master class. In short, the importance of Lawrence as a dramatist lies also in his choice to put on stage the lively ferment and turmoil of the workers, the common people and their problems in the struggle for better conditions of life.

  • 2 Schwarze-Worthen, op. cit., xxxvii.
  • 3 See P1 359-360.

2The conflict between miners and mine owners had first appeared in the colliery plays, all written around 1912, in the first phase of Lawrence’s dramatic production – although the focus here remains on the difficulties within the family relationships. An exception to this is to some extent provided by The Daughter-in-Law, “a naturalistic dialect play combining psychological and class insight […],”2 in which differences within the family and the conflict between miners and mineowners, eventually leading to a bitter strike, continually intertwine. While the socio-political clash is present, it is not presented on stage as it is mainly talked about, remaining outside the fixed stage setting of the household space, into which the violence of the external world will however creep in through the walls and contribute to the building up of the dramatic tension in the characters’ lives. Indeed, the interaction between inside and outside, between the personal relationships and the work environment, between private and public, emerges from the very first scene, when a miner returns home in the evening to his loving wife. After moments of tenderness, the tensions between husband and wife explode in a discussion about the possibility of a strike – a first example of how the growing dramatic tension of the outside world encroaches on the family sphere and how the private action remains in the foreground while the public context can be inferred from dialogues rather than observed on stage. The play proceeds towards its dramatic climax by way of the two sites of action and conflict, which somehow mirror each other: man and wife are totally separated by a conflict of opposed wills, while at the same time, miners and mine-owners, divided by a similar conflict of opposed wills, are unable to negotiate their different positions. The strike soon degenerates into violence. In the end however, when the miner comes back home, his face covered in blood, husband and wife again recover the bonding that had been momentarily lost:3 after the explosion of the dramatic crisis, life moves back to normal, according to the typical pattern of naturalist theatre.

3In Touch and Go, the public dimension seems to prevail somewhat over the private action insofar as most characters turn are shown in relation to the pivotal point of class struggle, a problem that Lawrence tends to address from the personal angle – inevitably revealing a somewhat controversial ideological viewpoint – rather than examining it in its wider social and historical dimension.

  • 4 In 1908, after a number of strikes and appeals to the House of Commons, the Miners’ Federation obta (...)

4If the socio-political background is much more prominent in this play than in the previous ones, that partly depends on the fact that it was written at a later stage in the writer’s development, during a more complex personal period. Lawrence had been forced to remain in England during World War I and, in 1919, right after the end of the war, he chose exile for the rest of his life and moved to Italy, thus entering a more mature phase as an artist and a man. This difficult period in Lawrence’s life coincides with a more complex and more troubled, turbulent time for British society altogether, particularly because of a decisive awakening of the working class movement whose struggles called into question the very foundations of the capitalist system. Indeed, it was the working class which paid the highest price for the post-war crisis, and the workers were made aware that the reasons for their discomfort lay in the dominant system. The proletariat’s class consciousness grew stronger, that of the miners in particular, always the core of the workers’ movement, who managed to organise and extend their class struggle involving many of the industrial workers.4

  • 5 Mussolini and the Fascists took advantage of the social turmoil and attacked workers and peasants i (...)

5Probably Lawrence felt the change in the atmosphere and was not indifferent to the social themes and political events that were also shaking contemporary society outside Britain, notably the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the strengthening of the Fascist movement in Italy, which had first emerged during World War I. Besides, in Italy militant strike activity by industrial workers reached its peak in 1919 and 1920,5 right at the time when Lawrence moved there, and it is possible that these ferments in Italy’s political life contributed to Lawrence’s increasing interest in the social and political events – an interest that had emerged the previous year in the writing of Touch and Go – and that became a source of inspiration for the writings of this period, largely characterised by ideological discussions: it is in these years of his second Italian sojourn (1919-1922) that he wrote Aaron’s Rod, the first of those “leadership novels” which earned him the accusation of siding with Fascist ideology.

  • 6 It is significant that Bertolt Brecht started writing for the theatre around 1918-19, about the sam (...)

6If contemporary politics somehow provides a vivid source of inspiration for Lawrence’s writings in those years, it is also important to take into account the new intellectual and artistic ferments of the time such as the emergence of the German Expressionist movement with its focus on the theme of the regeneration of humanity through the struggle of man’s creative will against dehumanising and materialistic forces. In some ways, Lawrence can be considered in an expressionist perspective, not only for the evident move towards epic theatre that Touch and Go suggests,6 but for his intellectual approach to life and art:

  • 7 Oscar G. Brockett and Robert R. Findlay, Century of Innovation: A History of European and American (...)

They [The expressionists] sought a world free from war, hypocrisy, and hate, where social justice and love would reign, where the artist might express himself without constraint, where the “new man” would be free from materialistic urges and would base his life on humanitarian principles. Such was the expressionist vision.7

7This comment seems to apply perfectly to Lawrence insofar as his criticism of industrial society and its mechanical impact on man’s life spurred his creative activity and his search for the regeneration of the spirit. In this sense, there is a clear affinity with the expressionist vision of art and life. Another aspect connecting Lawrence to the expressionist movement is his belief in his personal role as a prophet:

  • 8 Richard Sheppard, “German Expressionism,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930, (...)

The Expressionist artist inclined to see himself as a prophetic visionary who was called to explode conventional reality, to break through the crust that had formed around men’s psyches in order to give uninhibited expression to the energies there imprisoned.8

8Indeed, Lawrence is deeply aware of his duty towards humanity, as an artist and a prophet, a conviction which encouraged him to express himself on a philosophical level and to preach his own vision of the world, his belief in the realisation of a more vital and authentic way of life. However, his subjective vision of social problems, to be apprehended in a spiritual key, leads him to disregard somewhat their objective historical and socio-political context.

Touch and Go: a political play?

  • 9 After being rejected by various publishers, Women in Love was eventually issued by Seltzer (New Yor (...)

9In Touch and Go – written a full five years after The Daughter-in-Law (October-November 1918) – Lawrence deals with the social tensions connected with the industrial disputes. The play also addresses some of the emotional problematics discussed in Women in Love, the novel he had finished in 1916 but which still remained unpublished.9 After living in London and Cornwall, towards the end of the war, Lawrence and Frieda, to cut costs, moved to Mountain Cottage in Derbyshire (May 1918-April 1919). Back in the East Midlands, Lawrence became more responsive to the industrial conflicts in that area and chose them as the subject of the play he began writing during a visit to Hermitage in Berkshire, probably between 22 and 28 October 1918:

  • 10 D.H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, volume III 1916-1921, Ed. James T. Boulton & Andrew R (...)

I’ve written a play – very nice – which might be acted. […] I have written a play out of my deep and earnest self, fired up my last sparks of hope in the world […] I believe the world yet might get a turn for the better, if it had but a little shove that way. And this is my attempt – I believe the last I am capable of – or the first, perhaps – at a shove.10

  • 11 Schwarze-Worthen, op. cit., xlv-xlvi.
  • 12 Willie Hopkin partly suggested the theme of Touch and Go: “There must have been talk with his fathe (...)
  • 13 The Crichs are presented extensively in the chapter “The Industrial Magnate”; see D.H. Lawrence, Wo (...)
  • 14 Mark Kinkead-Weeks comments on these characters in the play stating that they “are different enough (...)

10These words confirm that “Lawrence became especially aware, during the last months of 1918, of the tensions in the mining industry (exacerbated by soaring food prices). Disputes, strikes and stoppages were becoming common, and would grow still more frequent with the end of the war in November. […] Lawrence was showing a greatly increased interest in politics and politicians, after years of alienation from them […].”11 It is not surprising, therefore, that some of the characters in Touch and Go were based on people he had met in that area: his revived friendship with Willie Hopkin, a prominent Eastwood figure – poet, philosopher, and social reformer involved in the Independent Labour Party – inspired the character of Willie Houghton, the working class leader;12 the trade-unionist Job Arthur Freer is based on Joseph Birkin, a leader in the Nottinghamshire Miners’ Association; the Barbers – the Eastwood mine-owning family – provide the model for the Barlows. The other major characters in the play are clearly recycled from the then unpublished Women in Love, though the emotional problematics and relationships are here developed in different ways: the Barlows echo feelings and personalities similar to those of the Crich family, and in the case of Gerald and Winifred Barlow, the names of the Crich brothers are explicitly recalled,13 Oliver Turton draws inspiration from Rupert Birkin; Anabel Wrath is very much like Gudrun Brangwen.14 One may conjecture that Lawrence, frustrated by the difficulty of finding a publisher for his novel, redrafted part of it as a play.

  • 15 Schwarze and Worthen comment on Touch and Go as an “attempt to make clear the problems of human con (...)
  • 16 See ibid., xlviii.
  • 17 See ibid., xv.
  • 18 Letters III 374.

11Lawrence was proud of Touch and Go and wanted to have it published and produced on stage, particularly for its content, as he felt it could be a valid contribution to the debate about industrial conflicts.15 On 23 November 1918 he sent what he defined as a “rather wonderful play” to his agent J.B. Pinker. Touch and Go is furthermore the only play for which Lawrence provided a list of characters divided into male and female roles, which shows how much he wanted the play to be published and staged.16 It was only in May 1920 that the work eventually got into print in London (on 5 June in New York),17 thanks to Douglas Goldring, a socialist writer and journalist who had just established the People’s Theatre Society (1919) with the intention of publishing and staging political plays. Lawrence wrote to Goldring on 10 July 1919: “I want to do the play [Touch and Go] for the People’s Theatre. I want it to be the first production, and I want it to be a success.”18 Believing that his play would open the series, he wrote a “Preface” on the status of tragedy in industrial disputes, maintaining an impartial position between the parties and presenting the conflict Labour vs Capital in terms of human passion rather than in political terms:

  • 19 D.H. Lawrence, “Preface to Touch and Go,” in The Plays Parts 2, Ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John (...)

In so far as men are merely mechanical, the struggle is one which […] is no more than accident, an accidental collision of forces. […] It is not really the bone we are fighting for. We are fighting to have somebody’s head off. The conflict is in pure, passional antagonism, turning upon the poles of belief.19

  • 20 Boulton-Robertson, “Introduction,” in Letters III 6.
  • 21 Douglas Goldring, Fight for Freedom (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1920).
  • 22 Lawrence expressed his irritation at the publication of Goldring’s play as first in the series in a (...)

12Moreover, though the mineowner in the play “is portrayed as insensitive, assertive and determined to exercise power, the striking miners appear as unintelligent, brutal and exclusively concerned with money.”20 Clearly, Lawrence’s play was not conveying the radical, revolutionary ideas the Theatre Society had expected, and, as a consequence, Goldring’s play Fight for Freedom was published first in C.W. Daniel’s series Plays for a People’s Theatre.21 Touch and Go, published second in the series, was never staged by the Society.22

  • 23 Kinkead-Weekes 475.

13Though Touch and Go is considered “a predominantly political play,”23 in the “Preface” Lawrence specifies that he does not intend to write a political play, perhaps because politics, in his opinion, is an inadequate cause for profound dramatic conflict, which can emerge only from the inner conflict of the human soul, and is thus an individual rather than a social experience: “Tragedy is the working out of some immediate passional problem, within the souls of man” (P2 365). The centrality of the individual in his/her human essence, rather than the importance of people’s social roles, is what Lawrence cares for: “The plays of A People’s Theatre are People’s plays. The plays of A People’s Theatre are plays about people. […] Men who are somebody, not men who are something. […] It’s harder to be a human being than to be a president or a bit of fluff” (P2 364).

14Indeed, in Touch and Go Lawrence does not discuss the conflict between Labour and Capital in political terms and does not fully favour either contender against the other, leaving the conflict unresolved, therefore inviting the spectators (and readers) to consider the opposing parties by way of their own personal interpretation. This open ending, along with the adoption of other dramatic strategies and techniques typical of epic theatre, marks Lawrence’s move towards expressionist drama. In particular, the fragmented structure based on the alternation of different but interweaved stories related to the public and the private spheres produces endless interruptions in the dramatic action, thus creating a critical distance between the audience and the story unfolding on stage, generating that “estrangement” or “alienation effect” that is to induce reflection, a major characteristic of expressionist drama. In Touch and Go, the sense of fragmentation is reinforced by way of the alternationon between the outdoor and indoor spaces where the scenes are played out: the open, public spaces of the market place and the park, and the studio and drawing room in the mineowner’s house. While the intertwining of the two dimensions – private and public – recalls the strategy adopted in The Daughter-in-Law, in Touch and Go they are more balanced than in the previous play and both are presented on stage throughout the dramatic action.

Touch and Go: the dramatic structure

  • 24 William Hopkin “regularly addressed Sunday-morning ILP meetings in Eastwood market place […]” (Schw (...)

15The conflict between workers and masters may seem to somewhat predominate over the Anabel-Gerald relationship, yet their equal importance is immediately underlined as they are both presented in the very first scene set on the market place, where a crowd of colliers is listening to the impassioned speech of a working class leader, Willie Houghton,24 and where Anabel and Gerald suddenly turn up, thus suggesting from the very beginning the intertwining of the two dimensions. Furthermore, this scene presents a studied symmetry with the closing scene of the play, which also takes place in the market square, with the miners assembled to listen to their leaders, and where in the end Anabel and Gerald unexpectedly appear. The other two locations of the dramatic action – Gerald’s house and the park – also provide settings where the private sphere and the public dimension alternate and intertwine, showing on the one hand the conflicts and progress of the man-woman relationship and, on the other, the attempts by Job Arthur Freer (the trade-unionist) and Gerald Barlow (the master) to negotiate, first in the mineowner’s house (Act II), then by way of their verbal and physical clash in the park (III.1) and, lastly, in the market square (III.2).

  • 25Anabel: […] I want to be married to you. / […] / Gerald: I do love you—and you do keep a dagger up (...)

16The plot centring on the private action displays, in dramatic terms, a rather unusual unfolding. In III.1, Anabel and Gerald discuss their relationship, Anabel wishing for a future together, Gerald apparently having no trust in a possible marriage.25 The audience can only wait for the development of the dramatic crisis towards either the separation or the marriage of the two. However this never happens, and, in the moment of greatest tension in the public action, in the play’s following and final scene (III.2), the audience is abruptly informed, to its astonishment, that Anabel and Gerald are now married, as Anabel unexpectedly announces: “I am Mrs Barlow” (P2 425). No time has passed between the two scenes of Act III, certainly not the time, however short, necessary to overcome Gerald’s hesitations and decide to get married and celebrate the wedding. Nothing could be further from the naturalist approach of the early plays. Indeed, the sudden discovery of such an important event finds its justification in the conventions of epic theatre:

  • 26 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, tr. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), 18.

The art of epic theatre consists in arousing astonishment rather than empathy. To put it as formula, instead of identifying itself with the hero, the audience is called upon to learn to be astonished at the circumstances within which he has his being. 26

  • 27 “No, Gerald, no. Don’t forget yourself. It’s enough now.— It’s enough now.—Come away. Do come away. (...)

17The interweaving of the two actions in Touch and Go is also contributed to by introducing Anabel at the most significant moments of the political conflict. Her presence is particularly important in the two scenes of Act III, when the clash between Gerald and Job Arthur explodes in the clash between two opposing wills and ideologies, a clash which leads to forms of physical and verbal violence which Anabel tries to stop. In III.1, in the park, Gerald reacts to Job Arthur’s words in defense of the workers’s rights by a sudden and unjustifiab physical attack on his opponent, until Anabel tries to put an end to that undignified behaviour and drags him away.27 In the following scene, in the market place, violence reaches its climax when the miners force Gerald out of his car, push him down on his knees, and threaten to squash him like vermin. Again it is Anabel, with her desperate pleading scream to the enraged crowd, who interrupts the violence and saves Gerald’s life:

Ah no! Ah no! Ah-h-h-h no-o-o-o! Ah-h-h-h no-o-o-o! Ah-h-h-h no-o-o-o! No-o-o-o! No-o-o! No-o-o! No-o! No-o! No-o-o! —Ah-h-h-h!— it’s enough, it’s enough, it’s enough! It’s enough, he’s a man as you are. He’s a man as you are. He’s a man as you are. He’s a man as you are. (P2 428)

  • 28 In a previous scene, Anabel says: “When a man says courage he means the courage to die. A woman mea (...)
  • 29 For a discussion of the ending, see below, 22-24.

18Anabel’s cry is a call to humanity, addressed both to the characters on stage and to the audience. It is her claim to “the courage to live,”28 which in the end voices Lawrence’s own personal view in favour of life and creative activity, a standpoint that justifies his disregard of struggles for material goals and prevents him from suggesting a proper ending to the play.29

Ideological ambiguity in Touch and Go: the working class leaders

19Ideological and political ambiguity stemming from Lawrence’s refusal to take a clear stand between the conflicting parties pervades the whole play, right from the opening scene in the market place, with Willie Houghton speaking to a group of colliers and criticising them for their passive acceptance of their dehumanised condition of slavery:

What’s the matter with you folks […] you’ve got no idea of freedom whatsoever. […] I don’t know what it is with colliers—whether it’s spending so much time in the bowels of the earth—but they never seem to be able to get their thoughts above their bellies. […] You’re stuck in a sort of mud of contentment, and you feel yourselves sinking, but you make no efforts to get out. […] But you won’t be men. You won’t even be animals. You’ll go from number one to number three thousand, a lot of numbered slaves—a new sort of slaves— […] You don’t want to be men. You’d rather not be free. (P2 371-372).

20The colliers have been robbed of their individuality – “But you’ll have the soul taken out of you—every one of you. And I’d rather lose my skin than my soul, any day” – as they are identified with the pits and considered only part of the machine, whereas they should “contrive that the pits belonged to you, instead of you belonging to the pits […].” Willie bitterly concludes: “If only you’d learn to think, I’d respect you” (P2 372-373).

21The ambiguity of Willie Houghton’s speech is evident as he is a working class leader. And yet instead of attacking the masters for their exploitation of the workers and the hard conditions of work they impose on them, he inveighs against the weakness of the miners, as if they were the main cause of their own wretched situation.

22An equally ambiguous position is held by Job Arthur Freer – a “local secretary for the Miners Federation” and “the modern Judas,” as Oliver Turton defines him (P2 408) – a negotiator between workers and owners, who believes that one has “to think of what’s best for everybody, not only for ourselves” and that a compromise has to be found “between the interests of the men and the interests of the masters [so] that the pits remain healthy, and everybody profits.” (P2 374) However, his position changes drastically as the play proceeds and the dramatic tension grows, so that in the end, rather than indicating a reasonable political direction through which to achieve those results which the miners’ protest aims for, his words and actions seem to be suggested by his own personal resentment.

23In III.1, in the park, Job Arthur has a tense verbal conflict with Gerald who, unable to accept being called into question, eventually gives in to physical violence, “suddenly seizing him by the scruff on the neck, and shaking him.” Gerald then “Suddenly flings him aside,” while Job Arthur reacts on a verbal level and replies by theatening him:

You will, you’ll be sorry. You’ll be sorry for what you have done. You’ll wish you’d never begun this— […] Every parish has its own vermin, it lies with every parish to destroy its own. […] Vermin is what lives on other people’s lives […] the lives of the working men— […] (P2 420-421)

24Gerald reacts by kicking him – “Get out!—Get out!—Vermin!—Vermin!—I’ll vermin you!— […] I’ll kick you out of this park like a rotten bundle if you don’t get up and go.” – and Job Arthur, “still on the ground,” warns his rival: “It’s your turn to go. It’s you as’ll go this time” (P2 421).

25In the following and final scene in the market place, Willie Houghton is again addressing “a large crowd of men,” this time underlining the difficulty of finding a way out of the strike protest: “And now you’re out on strike—now you’ve been out for a week, pretty nearly, what further are you? […] Well, what are you going to do? You don’t know. You’ve not the smallest idea.” He then reminds them that their leader should suggest the right strategies and turns to Job Arthur Feer, asking him: “Which way are we to steer? Come—give the word, and let’s gee-up” (P2 422). It is in this context that Job Arthur’s ambiguity as to his ideology and political role emerges in full. Having just suffered Gerald’s insult and physical violence, the political conflict now becomes for Job Arthur a pretext for personal revenge, so that he stokes up the will of the miners to get rid of their master, using the same grave words that had been uttered during the violent conflict with Gerald:

The obstacle to Labour is Capital. […] So that if you’re going to remove the obstacle, you’ve got to remove the masters, and all that belongs to them. […] Every parish has its own vermin, and it’s the business of every parish to get rid of its own. […] I’m not one for violence, except it’s a force-put. […] There’s only room for one at a time on this path. There’s a precipice below and a rock-face above. And in front of us stands the masters. Now there’s three things we can do. We can either throw ourselves over the precipice: or we can lie down and let the masters walk over us: or we can get on. […] Well—we’ve either got to throw the obstacle down the cliff—or walk over it. (P2 422-423)

26These are not the words one would expect from a negotiator searching for a compromise between the interests of the two parties; the sudden change in Job Arthur’s attitude to the strategy of the workers’ protest is unquestionaby animated by his own personal rancour and bitterness towards Gerald Barlow. In the final scene, the conflict develops more as a war of opposed individual wills between Job Arthur and Gerald rather than as a political contrast between Labour and Capital.

27In the heat of the conflict, Willie Houghton seems to take on the role of negotiator, who tries to persuade Job Arthur and the miners to adopt a more reasonable and fairer behaviour, reminding them that “the English working-man is the soul of obedience and order” (P2 423). At the same time, he expresses his disagreement with any sort of violence:

[…] although I’ve preached socialism in this market-place for thirty years—if you’re going to start killing the masters to set yourselves up for bosses—why, kill me along with the masters. For I’d rather die with somebody who has one tiny little spark of decency left […] than live to triumph with those that have none.” (P2 424)

28When he realises that the miners will not listen to him and that violence is about to explode when Gerald arrives in his car, he gives up his attempts at persuasion and distances himself from the workers whose rage is now uncontrolled. In the end, back on stage, Willie is “flattened on the ground” (P2 427) and, threatend by the miners, he only speaks a few bitter words admitting the inevitable failure following from the taking of any political stand in the conflict: “I’m damned if I’ll take sides with anybody against anything, after this. If I’m to die, I’ll die by myself. As for living, it seems impossible” (P2 429).

29Ambiguity and suspicion thus hangs over both working class leaders who are unable to act coherently in accordance with the ideology they profess and with their own political and social role. We may ask why sLawrence chooses to present the inadequacy and powerlessness of Labour in the struggle against Capital? In this case, he seems to take a stance between Labour and Capital and, though not openly in favour of the latter, he reveals his disagreement with and opposition to the former, despite his well-known hostility to industrialisation. No wonder then that the People’s Theatre Society never produced the play.

Ideological ambiguity in Touch and Go: the masters

  • 30 In Women in Love Thomas Crich (Mr Barlow) is the mine owner guided by deep charitable Christian fee (...)
  • 31 Thomas Crich equally believes that “The men were not against him, but they were against the masters (...)

30A voice against industrialism and mechanisation in Touch and Go comes from the old mine owner, Mr Barlow, who had always tried to be a liberal, humane master, and who is now rather critical of the modern methods followed by his son Gerald, as he identifies in them the main cause of the miners’ gradual alienation from their work, more and more “dehumanised, inhuman” (P2 395).30 However, he is aware that the times have changed and he bitterly considers that the class contrast can never be surmounted: “To my men I was an oppressor, a representative of injustice and greed.” (P2 394)31

  • 32 Mark Kinkead-Weeks describes Mrs Barlow as a “fierce mother – who hates and despises the lower orde (...)

31His liberal attitude is harshly criticised by his wife, who describes him as “stiff and proud enough before men of better rank than himself. […] But he humbled himself before the poor, he made me ashamed” (P2 388). Mrs Barlow has an attitude of resolute opposition to the working classes – “Between me and the shameful humble there is war to the end, though they are millions and I am one. I hate the people” (P2 387) – and she encourages her son to “Avoid humility, beware of stubborn humility: it degrades. Hark, Gerald, fight!” (P2 387).32

  • 33 Winifred Crich’s personality is also described at length in “The Industrial Magnate” chapter (WL 21 (...)

32Winifred Barlow, the young daughter, seems to share her mother’s feelings, as she refers to “those horrid colliers [… who] didn’t care a bit about you [Mr Barlow]” (P2 389). Her role, though marginal in the development of the dramatic action, is important for its significance. She appears in her studio in I.2, so that the dramatic action moves from the clamour of the first scene in the market square to the quiet of her studio, where she is “working at a model in clay,” talking enthusiastically to Anabel about art and their preference for sculpting rather than painting:33

Winifred: […] I don’t care much for painting, do you?
Anabel: No. I want something I can touch […]
Winifred: Yes, isn’t it wonderful, when things are substantial. (P2 380)

  • 34 Lawrence’s “religion of touch” is a dominant theme in his late writings. In Sketches of Etruscan Pl (...)

33Not only is this a clear reference to Lawrence’s defense of the “sense of touch” as a means of physical and pre-mental communication,34 but this also underlines the importance of creative activity, here specifically and concretely presented through the act of sculpting. Winifred’s studio is a sort of sanctum of art and creative expression – “a sanctum the world cannot invade – unlike all other sanctuaries […]” (P2 386), as Mr Barlow says – an expression of positive and active human creativity as opposed to the dehumanised world of industry and money; indeed, in its symbolic opposition to the colliery, it embodies the creative response to the tragic condition of humankind, so that sculpture – and art, in general – become a way of resisting tragedy, in line with expressionist ideology.

34In the play, Lawrence often speaks through the voice of Oliver Turton, the mouthpiece of his ideological position, through whom he conveys his anti-industrialist view and an ideal of a life that is in closer contact with nature as a means to recover the true, authentic meaning of humanity – an ideal that remains unchanged in the face of the socio-political reality of class conflict, and whose simplistic philosophical view of human nature inevitably ends up in support of the dominant system. An example is Oliver’s discussion of the social system:

[…] everybody supports it [the system], the poor as much as the rich. If every rich man withdrew from the system, the working class and socialists would keep it going, every man in the hope of getting rich himself, at last.—It’s the people that are wrong. They want the system much more than the rich do—because they are much more anxious to be rich—never having been rich, poor devils. (P2 393)

35Though at first Oliver/Lawrence seems to express an impartial view that is attentive both to the interests and position of “the poor” and “the rich,” he then underlines that “the people are wrong” and are more dangerous “because they are much more anxious to be rich” – an open expression of class ideology, one that is particularly puzzling as it comes from Lawrence, a man who had been brought up in a working class environment. It seems that Lawrence, in his attempt to establish a distance from his class of origin and from the masses, gradually becomes alien to the proletariat’s problems, eventually coming down on the side of the capitalist and bourgeois perspective, in spite of his contempt for middle class values.

36Throughout the action of the play, Oliver/Lawrence tends to face industrialism and class struggle in an unrealistic (or rather idealistic) way. In the final scene, when the conflict between workers and precipitates into violence, Oliver, along with Gerald, is forced down on his knees by the strikers and appeals to the colliers and to Gerald, in words which are a call to humanity: “We’re all human beings, after all. And why can’t we try really to leave off haggling against one another, and set up a new state of things?” (P2 429) Then he tries to calm down the enraged crowd by underlining the responsibililties of both parties:

Can’t you see that it takes two to make a quarrel?—And as long as each party hangs on to its own end of the stick, and struggles to get full hold of the stick the quarrel will continue? It will continue till you’ve killed one another. (P2 429)

This is the same idea he had previously expressed in dialogue with Mr Barlow:

All our lives would be better, if we hadn’t to hang on in the perpetual tug of war, like two donkeys pulling at one carrot. The ghastly tension of possession, and struggling for possession, spoils life for everybody. (P2 392)

37These ideas are also expressed in the “Preface” to the play, where the harsh contrast of Labour vs Capital is described as a fight between two bulldogs trying to get hold of the same bone (while the image of the bone is replaced by Oliver by the image of carrot and stick, both convey exactly the same meaning). British Capitalism, the old bulldog with the bone in his jaws, is confronted by the Proletariat, “the insatiable mongrel”; neither is ready to step back and the bone becomes a mere pretext for fighting:

That old bull-dog, the British capitalist, has got the bone in his teeth. That unsatisfied mongrel, Plebs, the proletariat, shivers with rage not so much at the sight of the bone, as at sight of the great wrinkled jowl that holds it. There is the old dog, with his knowing look and his massive grip on the bone: and there is the insatiable mongrel, with his great splay paws. The one is all head and arrogance, the other all paws and grudge. The bone is only the pretext. […] It is hands against head, the shambling, servile body in a rage of insurrection at last against the wrinkled, heavy head. (P2 366)

38That the master class is “the head” and therefore has a right to dominate over the mindless proletariat is openly declared by Gerald, when he discusses the miners with Job Arthur Freer:

They just simply couldn’t control modern industry—they haven’t the intelligence. They’ve no life intelligence. The owners may have little enough, but Labour has none. They’re just mechanical little things that can make one or two motions, and they’re one. They’ve no more idea of life than a lawn-mower has. (P2 407)

39For Lawrence, the contrast Capital vs Labour is in the end simply a conflict between brain and body, “hands against head,” as he says in the “Preface”; his comment in the final part of the “Preface” is again a call to creative activity for the realisation of our true beings:

If we really could know what we were fighting for, if we could deeply believe in what we were fighting for, then the struggle might have dignity, beauty, satisfaction for us. If it were a profound struggle for something that was coming to life in us, a struggle that we were convinced would bring us to a new freedom, a new life, then it would be a creative activity, a creative activity in which death is a climax in the progression towards new being. (P2 367)

40This idealistic and aesthetical view of a problem as complex as that of class struggle appears rather superficial, generating in Lawrence an attitude which at first remains on a neutral ground, as he appears to simply observe the fight between bull dogs and mongrels. Unable to assume a more objective and realistic perspective, he eventually ends up by expressing an individualistic and conservative position. For Lawrence the struggle is important as a “creative activity,” as a means to attain a new life. Therefore, in the conflict between miners and mine owners, it is not money that matters but the wish to achieve something vital, as Oliver/Lawrence says in the final part of the play:

As for power, somebody must have it, you know. It only rests with you to put it into the hands of the best men, the men you really believe in.—And as for money, it’s life, it’s living that matters, not simply having money. (P2 430)

41Both masters and workers should therefore struggle for “vital beliefs” – a rather unrealistic and unfair statement insofar as it implies a sort of contempt for the working classes as they struggle for money, higher wages and better conditions of life rather than for ideal vital beliefs, while the rich, dominant classes elicit greater acceptance and empathy, as they can easily place themselves above material questions and go on to pursue the higher goal of their spiritual growth.

42Gerald’s final words to the enraged crowd of miners, underlining the need for a change in the system through human means rather than through violence, are not convincing, as he speaks from a privileged position and excludes the possibility of it being called into question:

Gerald: […] About a new way of life, a better way all round, I tell you I want it and need it as much as ever you do. I don’t care about money really. But I’m never going to be bullied.
Voice: Who doesn’t care about money—?
Gerald: I don’t. I think we ought to be able to alter the whole system—but not by bullying, not because one lot wants what the other has got.
Voice: No, because you’ve got everything.
Gerald: Where’s my coat? Now then, step out of the way—
(They move towards the car.)
(Curtain) (P2 431)

43Of course this cannot be a real conclusion, insofar as the workers’ rage suddenly fades away for no other reason than the master’s vague and unreliable plea for the necessity of more humane ways through which to resolve the conflict between Labour and Capital. In fact, the ending is left totally open, and the spectators (and readers) can only wonder about a possible solution of the problem and imagine a more clearly defined ending for the play. Perhaps by declining to take sides in the class struggle, Lawrence is somehow denying any constraining sense of class identity and belonging, thus declaring his own liberty – as an intellectual and an artist – to be above the class conflict and refuse to be involved in a deadly social system.

Lawrence and ideological ambiguity

  • 35 The poem “Red Herring” gives a vivid description of the family situation regarding the problem of c (...)

44The question thus is why the play lacks any real conclusion. Probably because Lawrence is simply unable to choose between the two parties, remaining deeply divided between the pull of his class of origin, the working class – which, emotionally, is closer to his attitude to life and his view of human relationships – and the middle class, which, socially, represents the world he is actually part of. It is, yet again, the difficult problem of class belonging, stemming from the original family class conflict represented by his parents: his father, a miner, whose behaviour, however coarse, is more spontaneous and free from conventional social structures; the mother, a well educated lower middle class woman with her social climbing ambition.35 Lawrence’s individualistic attitude is, after all, the logical conclusion of his ideological progression towards the definition of his own identity, free from the conditioning of his family roots: on the one hand, Lawrence has extracted himself from his class of origin, that he now rejects; on the other hand, he feels himself ideologically distant from the middle class, with its mean utilitarism and its Puritan, hypocritical morality. His escape, in the end, is by way of the intellectual and the imaginary plane available to an artist unwilling to take sides and to confront the social conflicts in political terms, as he hints in the “Preface,” where he expresses his firm belief in the importance of the individual, whichever class he/she belongs to: “Although most miners may be pick-cum shovel cum ballot implements, and no more, still, among miners there must be two or three living individuals. The same among the masters” (P2 365).

  • 36 D.H. Lawrence, Education of the People, in Reflection on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. (...)

45Similar ideas are expressed in Education of the People, written in the same period as the play (1918-1920), where Lawrence discusses the uniqueness of the individual, who should not therefore be compared to anybody, as “the moment you come to compare them, men are unequal, and their inequalities are infinite. […] If there be no comparison, he is the incomparable. He is the incomparable. He is single. He is himself.”36 This strong belief in the value of each individual “in himself” makes it difficult for Lawrence to think in social and political terms and, due to this, his ideological position remains profoundly ambiguous and difficult to define. After all, he expresses himself on a philosophical and poetical level and interprets life, humanity and society through his own personal, ideal view, thus inevitably coming into conflict with the realistic dimension and the everyday difficulties of life and of the people.

  • 37 “The colliers were deeply alive, instinctively. But they had no daytime ambition, and no daytime in (...)
  • 38 “The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victori (...)

46Indeed, controversial ideas about people and class conflict are scattered throughout Lawrence’s entire production. Particularly significant, in this respect, are some of his later prose writings such as Nottingham and the Mining Country (1929), where the miners are considered simply as instinctive beings, totally extraneous to any intellectual activity and devoid of any interest in the problems of everyday life, their own wages included37 – a viewpont that shows how a-historical Lawrence’s perspective was, considering that in those years the miners represented the vanguard of the workers’ movement, with their strikes for better living conditions. Even more disputable and unrealistic is Lawrence’s interpretation of the miners within the context of industrialised England and his condemnation of industrialisation mainly on the basis of an aesthetic approach.38

  • 39 LCL 152.

47Similar feelings can be found in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where industrialisation is severely attacked through the description of the town of Tevershall with its “blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black. […] The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling.”39

48Some of Lawrence’s poems from the Pansies collection are particularly revealing of his ideological standpoint and of his feelings towards the people. Indeed, Lawrence’s individualism and his criticism of society as a whole are conducive to a sense of contempt for and detachment from the people, a sense of superiority in a way, as an intellectual and artist who must keep his distance from the masses – a somewhat reactionary attitude, which finds its reason and justification in his strong beliefs and his personal view of the world.

49The feeling of superiority, of being above the mass of people, is significantly disclosed in the poem “To Be Superior”:

How nice to be superior!
Because really, it’s no use pretending, one is superior, isn’t one?
I mean people like you and me.

Quite! I quite agree.
The trouble is, everybody thinks they’re just as superior
as we are; just as superior.

That’s what’s so boring! people are so boring.
But they can’t really think it, do you think?
At the bottom, they must know we are really superior
don’t you think?
Don’t you think, really, they know we’re their superiors?

  • 40 D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts (New York: The Vi (...)

I couldn’t say.
I’ve never got to the bottom of superiority.
I should like to.40

50In “Democracy” Lawrence makes no effort to hide his contempt for the working class:

I am a democrat in so far as I love the free sun in men
and an aristocrat in so far as I detest narrow-gutted, possessive persons.

I love the sun in any man
when I see it between his brows
clear, and fearless, even if tiny.

But when I see these grey successul men
so hideous and corpse-like, utterly sunless,
like gross successful slaves mechanically waddling,
then I am more than radical, I want to work a guillotine.

And when I see working men
pale and mean and insect-like, scuttling along
and living like lice, on poor money
and never looking up,
then I wish, like Tiberius, the multitude had only one head
so that I could lop it off.

  • 41 Ibid., 526.

I feel that when people have gone utterly sunless
They shouldn’t exist.41

51The poem “People,” from the collection More Pansies, has an epigraphic value for the theme of the present volume:

I like people quite well
at a little distance.
I like to see them passing and passing
and going their own way,
especially if I see their aloneness alive in them.

  • 42 Ibid., 602.

Yet I don’t want them to come near.
If they will only leave me alone
I can still have the illusion that there is room enough in the world.42

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Notes

1 “Interest in Lawrence from the 1930s onwards concentrated on the better-known prose works, his letters and his life as reflected in biographies and memoirs, while literary historians and critics generally disregarded his plays.” (“Introduction,” in D.H. Lawrence, The Plays Part 1. Ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, xxvi; hereafter P1). None of the plays were produced during Lawrence’s lifetime and it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that especially the early plays raised the interest of stage and television. After all, Lawrence himself had claimed the major importance of the art of the novel as the highest form of human creativity: “Being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet.” (D.H. Lawrence, “Why the Novel Matters,” in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Ed. Bruce Steele, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 195). The essays on the novel were written in the years 1923-1925.

2 Schwarze-Worthen, op. cit., xxxvii.

3 See P1 359-360.

4 In 1908, after a number of strikes and appeals to the House of Commons, the Miners’ Federation obtained the Eight Hour Act; in 1909 the Miners’ Federation joined the Labour Party; in 1912 the miners’ national strike paved the way for dockers’ and seamen’s strikes; in 1914 a Triple Alliance was established among miners, railway workers and transport workers. Of course, in the war years these protests had to stop but they were resumed, stronger than ever, right after the war. The miners succeeded in having the Coal Mines Act (1919) and the Mining Industry Act (1920) passed, which did not however produce substantial improvements. The social tensions in British society remained and they gradually led to the harsh class conflict which exploded a few years later in the General Strike (1926), triggered off by the miners’s protests and soon joined in solidarity by huge numbers from other vital industries such as bus, rail and dock workers, as well as people in printing, gas, electricity, building, iron, steel and chemical jobs.

5 Mussolini and the Fascists took advantage of the social turmoil and attacked workers and peasants in the name of the preservation of order and internal peace, till they seized power after the so-called “March on Rome” in 1922. 

6 It is significant that Bertolt Brecht started writing for the theatre around 1918-19, about the same time when Lawrence wrote Touch and Go.

7 Oscar G. Brockett and Robert R. Findlay, Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama Since 1870 (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1973), 272.

8 Richard Sheppard, “German Expressionism,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930, Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth, New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 277.

9 After being rejected by various publishers, Women in Love was eventually issued by Seltzer (New York, 9 November 1920) and Secker (London, 10 June 1921).

10 D.H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, volume III 1916-1921, Ed. James T. Boulton & Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 293 (hereafter Letters III). This letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, from Hermitage, is dated 28 October 1918. Lawrence had spent a few months of early 1918 in the small, rural village of Hermitage near Newbury, Berkshire; subsequently, he lived for just under a year (mid-1918 to early 1919) at Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derbyshire.

11 Schwarze-Worthen, op. cit., xlv-xlvi.

12 Willie Hopkin partly suggested the theme of Touch and Go: “There must have been talk with his father [Lawrence’s] and Willie Hopkin (especially), and in the newspapers, about the unrest in the coalfields as the war seemed about to end. What were the prospects of peace between capital and labour – or (to question more dramatically) between owners, miners and union leaders at local level?” (Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D.H. Lawrence. Triumph to Exile 1912-1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 475). Hopkin’s copy of Touch and Go had the title-page inscribed “Here you are Willie! D.H.L.” (see Schwarze-Worthen, op. cit., xlvii, fn. 61).

13 The Crichs are presented extensively in the chapter “The Industrial Magnate”; see D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey & John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1987, 211-233.

14 Mark Kinkead-Weeks comments on these characters in the play stating that they “are different enough from those in the novel to make contrast more useful than comparison. […] Above all, the play differs from Women in Love in that it is not concerned with individual character. Instead (pre-Brecht) the protagonists perform representative attitudes, to bring out their full implications.” (Kinkead-Weeks 475-476).

15 Schwarze and Worthen comment on Touch and Go as an “attempt to make clear the problems of human conflict in the industrial age […] using his own knowledge of the Eastwood colliery district and its social and political divisions to focus upon larger problems of the industrial age.” (op. cit., xlvi-xlvii).

16 See ibid., xlviii.

17 See ibid., xv.

18 Letters III 374.

19 D.H. Lawrence, “Preface to Touch and Go,” in The Plays Parts 2, Ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 366 (hereafter P2; this indication, followed by the page number, will be given at the end of the quotations in the text). In the “Preface,” written in Hermitage (July 1919; see “Chronology,” P1 xv), Lawrence defines the phrase “A People’s Theatre” simply with a reference to the cost of the tickets – “the seats are cheap” – and specifying that the People represent the general content and target for “A People’s Theatre” (P2 363). M. Ayça Vurmay, in her study “D.H. Lawrence’s Expressionist Approach to Tragedy: An Analysis of Touch and Go,” comments: “Lawrence’s Preface to the play is as important as the play, since it reflects Lawrence’s expressionist outlook with a view to tragedy as well as his manifesto for the theatre.” (DTCF Dergisi [Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi] 59.2 (2019): 778 (772-792).

20 Boulton-Robertson, “Introduction,” in Letters III 6.

21 Douglas Goldring, Fight for Freedom (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1920).

22 Lawrence expressed his irritation at the publication of Goldring’s play as first in the series in a letter to Catherine Carswell (5 February 1920): “[…] Douglas Goldring play […] is a pamphlet play with a detestable and inartistic motive. […] I don’t want to be associated with the Fight for Freedom and its knavish preface.” (Letters III 469) In a letter to Kotelianki (8 February 1920), Lawrence was even more explicit: “Douglas Goldring sent me his Fight for Freedom. A nice thing for my play to be following on the heels of such a shit: especially as, since I was purported to open the series, I have got a little preface on a ‘A Peoples Theatre’” (Letters III 471). Touch and Go was also rejected as unstagebale by James Fagan for the Royal Court Theatre and eventually had its first world amateur premiere only in 1979 in Oxford. On its publication the reviews of Touch and Go were not exactly enthusiastic though its balance was appreciated.

23 Kinkead-Weekes 475.

24 William Hopkin “regularly addressed Sunday-morning ILP meetings in Eastwood market place […]” (Schwarze-Worthen, op. cit., xlvii).

25Anabel: […] I want to be married to you. / […] / Gerald: I do love you—and you do keep a dagger up your sleeve […] as if I were an enemy.” (P2 414)

26 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, tr. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), 18.

27 “No, Gerald, no. Don’t forget yourself. It’s enough now.— It’s enough now.—Come away. Do come away. Come away, leave him.” (P2 421) This and the following clash are discussed in greater detail below, 14-15.

28 In a previous scene, Anabel says: “When a man says courage he means the courage to die. A woman means the courage to live.” (P2 402)

29 For a discussion of the ending, see below, 22-24.

30 In Women in Love Thomas Crich (Mr Barlow) is the mine owner guided by deep charitable Christian feelings and he is therefore unable to share his son’s enthusiasm for the new, more efficient methods of production; indeed, Gerald Crich’s personality is described at length as the representative of the new efficientist industrial system: “He abandoned the whole democratic-equality problem as a problem of silliness. What mattered was the great social productive machine” (WL 227). A few pages further on, explaining how Gerald proceeds in the modernisation of the mines, Lawrence comments on the industrial system of modern society as the cause of social and human chaos: “It was the first great step in undoing, the first great phase of chaos, the substitution of the mechanical principle for the organic, the destruction of the organic purpose, the organic unity […]. This was the first and finest state of chaos” (WL 231).

31 Thomas Crich equally believes that “The men were not against him, but they were against the masters” (WL 225).

32 Mark Kinkead-Weeks describes Mrs Barlow as a “fierce mother – who hates and despises the lower orders, is contemptous of all civilised conventions, and wants to beat the last ‘softness’ out of her son to give him the power to act alone” (Kinkead-Weekes 476). Christiana Crich, the corresponding character in Women in Love, is depicted in the novel in this manner: “Of wild and overweening temper, she could not bear the humiliation of her husband’s soft, half-appealing kindness to everybody” (WL 215).

33 Winifred Crich’s personality is also described at length in “The Industrial Magnate” chapter (WL 219-220). In the novel Mr Crich asks Gudrun Brangwen (Anabel) to “help Winifred with her drawing and modelling […] He believed Winifred had talent […]” (WL 220); it is possible to conjecture that in the play Mr Barlow had made the same request to Anabel, as in I.2 she is in the studio with Winifred, working with clay.

34 Lawrence’s “religion of touch” is a dominant theme in his late writings. In Sketches of Etruscan Places, describing the dancers painted on the wall of the Tarquinia tombs, Lawrence stresses the idea of physicality conveyed by bodily contact; in his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Mellors voices Lawrence’s “religion of touch”: “Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of.” (Ed. Michael Squires, Penguin 1994, 277); in “À Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover” Lawrence shows England the path towards re-birth: “If England is to be regenerated […] then it will be by the arising of a new blood-contact, a new touch, and a new marriage” (in LCL 328).

35 The poem “Red Herring” gives a vivid description of the family situation regarding the problem of class belonging, as I discuss in the essay “D.H. Lawrence and Cultural Mediation,” in D.H. Lawrence. New Critical Perspectives and Cultural Translation. Ed. Simonetta de Filippis (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 274-275.

36 D.H. Lawrence, Education of the People, in Reflection on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 102.

37 “The colliers were deeply alive, instinctively. But they had no daytime ambition, and no daytime intellect. […] They didn’t even care very profoundly about wages.” (D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix. The Posthumous Papers. Ed. Edward D. McDonald, New York: The Viking Press, 1964, 136).

38 “The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread. […] If only they had encouraged some form of beauty […] there would never have been an industrial problem. The industrial problem arises from the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition.” (Ibid., 138)

39 LCL 152.

40 D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts (New York: The Viking Press, 1971), 435.

41 Ibid., 526.

42 Ibid., 602.

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Simonetta De Filippis, « The Ideological Ambiguity of Touch and Go »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 54 | 2022, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2022, consulté le 10 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/3298 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lawrence.3298

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Auteur

Simonetta De Filippis

Simonetta De Filippis is Professor of English Literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. She has published on twentieth-century novelists and playwrights (V. Woolf, J. Joyce, G.B. Shaw) but her main research interests focus on D.H. Lawrence and William Shakespeare. She is the editor of the Cambridge and the Penguin editions of Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays (1992, 1999) and of the volumes D. H. Lawrence and Literary Genres (2004) and D.H. Lawrence. New Critical Perspectives and Cultural Translation (2016). In the field of Shakespearean studies, she has published essays on The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Pericles and The Tempest, and a book on Shakespeare’s “Last Plays” (Teatro come sperimentazione. Shakespeare e la scrittura romanzesca, 2003); she is the editor of the volume Shakespeare e il senso del tragico (2013).

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