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Where was Lawrence chez-lui?

Michael Bell

Résumé

If “transcendental homelessness” is the modern condition, Lawrence is an especially instructive example of how to live within it. His emigré life, partly imposed and partly chosen, was experienced with a vivid appreciation of the “spirit of place,” and of places. Perhaps for Lawrence to be at home was a cosmic state experienced most intensely through a life on the move. Martin Heidegger similarly speaks of dwelling as a state of Being and invokes Hölderlin’s words “poetically, man dwells on this earth.” But home is a temporal as well as a spatial location and whereas Heidegger privileges the rootedness of ancestral continuity, Lawrence, who also dwelt poetically, seems to seek a world always new, or renewed. The present paper seeks to illustrate this contrast by examining several moments in the oeuvre.

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Texte intégral

Wir sollen heiter Raum und Raum durchstreiten,
An keinem wie an einer Heimat hängen.
Der Weltgeist will nicht fesseln uns und engen,
Er will uns Stuf’ um Stufe heben, weiten,
Kaum sind wir heimisch einem Lebenskreise
Und traulich eingewohnt, so droht Erschlaffen,
Nur wer bereit zu Aufbruch ist und Reise,
Mag lähmender Gewöhnung sich entraffen.
Hermann Hesse, Stufen

  • 1 Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I, (1996); Globes: Spheres II: Macrosphereology (1999); Foam: Gl (...)
  • 2 György Lukačs, Theory of the Novel (MIT Press, 1974).

1The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in his three-volume study Spheres examines how human beings have always created, or adopted, structures, physical and metaphysical, in which to live: structures ranging from a womb, or a hut, to a cosmos.1 In that respect, the boundaries of a home are indeterminate: is it a house, a family, a community, a nation, a planet? Moreover, although the desire for a home remains a human universal, the conditions of modernity have made these boundaries increasingly shifting, porous and problematic. Apart from the dramatic instances of folk migration caused by economic, political and climate conditions, life even in more settled countries has long been characterised by regional and class mobility. Meanwhile, from a more philosophical point of view, Gyorgy Lukačs’s phrase “transcendental homelessness” defines a state which has come to seem intrinsic to modernity.2 Lukačs opens with a dictum from Novalis: “Philosophy is really homesickness ― the desire to be everywhere at home.” The Copernican revolution began a long process of human displacement from assumed cosmic centrality, a displacement in which progress in understanding has been dogged by loss of belonging. But if this loss is not uniformly suffered as such, it may be partly because human populations in every generation seem to divide between those who wish to explore and those who wish to stay at home, such as all those Americans who reputedly never own a passport. This contrast seems to apply philosophically as well as in its everyday sense. The early Brangwens in The Rainbow are notionally divided on gendered lines with the women looking beyond the farm while the men are focused on the soil and the seasonal round but later generations show this radical difference to be irrespective of gender. Lawrence was clearly one of those who looks beyond and, although many things have changed since his time, his itinerant life, partly imposed and partly chosen, may have some exemplary value for the conditions of a new century.

2Being at home, of course, is not merely a matter of location: it implies a quality of dwelling. The English word “dwell” has a peculiar force as in the concluding lines of Ben Jonson’s poem “To Penshurs”:

  • 3 Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Berington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, (...)

Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee
With other edifices, when they see
Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,
May say, these lords have built, but thy lord dwells.3

3While we intuitively understand that dwelling is more than simply existing in a place, it is nonetheless hard to define and may indeed answer to a variety of definitions, some of them perhaps mutually contradictory. We can deduce a sense of dwelling in Lawrence not so much from direct statements on the topic as from his more general philosophical outlook and mode of life. For this purpose he can usefully be compared with the major modern philosopher of dwelling, Martin Heidegger. When meditating on this term, and wishing to emphasise both its fundamental significance and its abstract elusiveness, Heidegger himself drew on poetry by invoking the auratic, enigmatic verse of Friedrich Hölderlin. The passages he quotes bear a remarkable similarity to classic moments in Lawrence but, while Heidegger’s philosophical commentary may be thought to compound the obscurity of Hölderlin, Lawrence is lucidly concrete.

  • 4 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), pp. 27-34.

4Hölderlin’s line “Poetically, man dwells on this earth” provides the focus for one of the philosopher’s most notable meditations on Being and provides, in the first instance, an instructive, modern contrast with Ben Jonson. Jonson’s poem of courtly compliment combines practical observation with studied hyperbole. As in his theatrical comedies, a classical sense of measure and proportion is expressed through ironic delight in poetically licensed extravagance: the real Penshurst is given explicitly hyperbolic transposition as in the line: “Fat, aged carp that run into thy net” (Penshurst 212). Raymond Williams has famously critiqued the elision of socio-economic reality in the poem and in the long pastoral tradition to which it belongs.4 At the same time he recognises that this dwelling is affirmed within an essentially poetic occasion. The poem itself dwells within a social order for which it provides an ideal image. For Heidegger, by contrast, the conventional terms of a later modernity, both socially and philosophically, are precisely what obscure the true meaning of dwelling. Through Hölderlin’s line he invokes a more elusive understanding both of dwelling and of the poetic.

  • 5 Martin Heidegger, “Poetically Man Dwells…,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, (...)

5For Heidegger, Hölderlin’s line affirms that dwelling is in significant measure a question of language, and quality of language. Poetry is commonly thought of as a special use or condition of language, a heightening or intensifying of its “ordinary” state. But for Heidegger this was an illusion: for him, poetry is the original condition of language on which its daily functional usages ultimately, if unwittingly, depend: “Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling.”5 If poetry was the earliest condition of language, as Gianbattista Vico had argued in The New Science (1725), this was not merely an evolutionary fact about the past but an unconscious condition of the present. For humans, language is what Heidegger, in his 1947 Letter on Humanism, called the “house of Being”: language creates and sustains the human world. Quality of being is, therefore, inextricable from quality of language. Hence the constant emphasis in Heidegger on etymology, real or imaginary, as he seeks to unveil the hidden, or lost, meanings of common words such as “thing.” Likewise with physical entities: the Black Forest farmhouse is iconic of a quality of dwelling: shaped by generations it is now the only manifestation of a lost form of life. It is notorious that Heidegger’s sense of modernity as loss of Being orients him strongly towards the past and helped to make him vulnerable to the Nazi ideology of Blut und Boden. Every great philosophy has its down-market parodic shadow, and an unintended, sobering lesson of Heidegger may be that a great philosopher can be a small man. Lawrence had his own equivalent of Heidegger’s Being: most notably, in “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,” he spoke of the “fourth dimension” and in this radical consonance Heidegger is the closest philosophical parallel to Lawrence. But in respect of orientation towards the past they fundamentally diverge and this sharp difference within a larger similarity helps to focus more precisely what dwelling might mean for Lawrence.

6If as Heidegger says “Poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building” (PLT 215), then building may not necessarily require a physical construction or even a fixed location and it is worth reminding ourselves at this point that Lawrence was always highly domestic. As the couple went from place to place around the world Frieda’s aristocratic insouciance was typically compensated by his working-class skills as cook and cleaner. In that respect he was indeed a home maker but of a distinctly nomadic kind for which these skills were perhaps even more necessary. Some sense of this can be seen in his description of the everyday activity of washing up:

  • 6 Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge: Cambridg (...)

If I wash the dishes I learn a quick, light touch of china and earthenware, the feel of it, the weight and roll and poise of it, the peculiar hotness, the quickness or slowness of the surface. I am at the middle of an infinite complexity of motions and adjustments and quick, apprehensive contacts. Nimble faculties hover and play along my nerves, the primal consciousness is alert in me. Apart from all the moral or practical satisfaction of a job well done, I have the mindless motor activity and reaction in primary consciousness, which is a pure satisfaction.6

  • 7 “Introduction to These Paintings,” in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge: C (...)

7The image of domesticity here is not of possession or settled residence, it is of activity and quality of being. The activity connects him to an “infinite complexity of motions.” If infinite is perhaps not meant quite literally here, it nonetheless suggests his awareness of being not just in a building but in a world, in a network of interrelations that presents no outer limit. Even in this intimately domestic activity he feels himself in a vivid relation to the cosmos. This is the dynamic that surely governs his sense of a home and, in this way, what he describes is a mode of poetic dwelling. Indeed, one could even say he takes here an aesthetic satisfaction in the original sense of this word as a disposition of sensuous experience. Whereas he elsewhere denies the possibility of purely aesthetic experience in relation to works of art, here, in a non-artistic context, he is happy to insist on its purity.7 His home, we might say, is the activity itself, his form of poetic dwelling, with a mobile relation to place.

8The Rainbow, as the first major expression of his mature metaphysic, is also Lawrence’s most direct and comprehensive treatment of humanity’s eternally divided response to home as settled location, a division that seems as fundamental as sexual difference. The earlier generations of the Brangwen men are envisaged standing in their ancestral soil:

  • 8 The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 9.

Whenever one of the Brangwens in the fields lifted his head from his work, he saw the church tower at Ilkeston in the empty sky. So that as he turned again to the horizontal land, he was aware of something standing above him and beyond him in the distance.8

9The passage implies a daily activity enriched by a sense of something beyond which at the same time, it is important to note, is left at a distance. It is merely glimpsed in the pause before turning the eyes back down to the work. At this point it is the women who look with sustained curiosity at the world beyond the farm, albeit with a more social and cultural, rather than religious, focus. And this opens the central dynamic of the narrative: can that outwardly directed aspiration be fulfilled without psychic hollowing or collapse, what Heidegger might see as loss of Being? Both principles need to be honoured even as the individual elects for one or the other direction. And so we see the positive struggle in the generational line of Tom, Anna and Ursula shadowed by the darker possibility embodied in Will, Uncle Tom and Skrebensky.

10But what is actually lost by those who leave? Heidegger’s explication draws on lines from Hölderlin’s poem which remarkably echo Lawrence’s trope of soil and sky:

May, if life is sheer toil, a man
Lift his eyes and say: so
I too wish to be? As long as Kindness,
The Pure, still stays with his heart, man
Not unhappily measures himself
Against the godhead. Is God unknown?
Is he manifest like the sky? I’d sooner
Believe the latter. It’s the measure of man.
Full of merit, yet, poetically, man
Dwells on this earth.

  • 9 W. B. Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben,” in Collected Poems, (London: MacMillan, 1950), p. 399.

11A man lifts his eyes from toil to the heavens. If his heart is right he does not feel diminished even by the divine. Nor is the divine in some hidden beyond: it is manifest in the world but only in so far as man can take, or make, the measure of it. As Heidegger goes on to unpack at length the notion of measure, he particularly critiques the notion of calculation, of precise measurement. In a quite different sense, of course, measure, or metre, is the defining feature of poetic language which is why even the most ignominious doggerel is shelved with poetry. But by the same token, poetry is also the language in which we most significantly encounter, take the measure of, the immeasurable; what lies beyond calculation. As noted earlier, Jonson’s hyperbole is precisely measured in taking the measure of Penshurst. All due respect, of course, to the precise sciences. As Yeats said: “Measurement began our might.”9 But we do not take the measure of a person or an event with a slide rule. The measure involved in poetic dwelling is such a sense of proportion, or scale. As Heidegger puts it: “Hölderlin sees the nature of the ‘poetic’ in the taking of the measure by which the measure-taking of human being is accomplished.” (PLT 222)

12The notion of the divine provides the proportion, or measure, for the human: or, as I like to say, the invention of God is an important step in the invention of man. As Heidegger also puts it:

The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and yet it remains below on the earth. The upward glance spans the between of sky and earth. This between is measured out for the dwelling of man. (PLT 220)

13Lawrence’s early Brangwen, more a generic than an individual figure, and a philosophical exemplar of poetic dwelling on this earth, answers closely to Heidegger’s account.

14Lawrence himself, of course, unlike the Brangwen farmer, was to leave home in multiple senses but the cosmic relation suggested in this inaugural scene remained with him. If his relationship with Frieda effectively required him to leave home, it also perhaps helped him to make a necessary break. Though he never lost his fondness for his early years at the Haggs Farm, he came increasingly to fear nostalgia, and the affectionate treatment of Nethermere in The White Peacock feels incipiently sentimental by his later standards. Where sentimentality muffles and cocoons emotional response with clichéd models, Lawrence sought constantly to refresh the world. The German verb “to dwell,” wohnen, is etymologically linked to Gewohnheit, or habit. Travel may not be necessary to overcome the comfort of habit but it can be a very powerful means.

  • 10 Cf Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cam (...)

15It is said that there are two motives for a life of travel: either to find a place to stay or to be forever on the move for its own sake. The traveller, to be sure, may not be fully conscious of motives and Lawrence’s case may well be mixed. He eventually settled on the Kiowa ranch but travelled with an intense responsiveness at all times to what he called “the spirit of place.”10 It is hard to say in how far this responsiveness to locality was intensified by his being a rolling stone with little padding of moss or how far it was his vivid response to the spirit of place which motivated his need to travel. For the very phrase “spirit of place” suggests a multiple and relative awareness: if all places are different, partial, unique, how can one settle for just one of them? But, of course, encouraged by Mabel Luhan, he did settle on his ranch in the American South West and his memorable account of his first encounter with the region provides an instructive parallel with the passage from The Rainbow.

  • 11 Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge: Cambridge University (...)

I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me for ever. Curious as it may sound, it was New Mexico that liberated me from the present era of civilization, the great era of material and mechanical development.
[…]
But the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Sante Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend.
[…]
In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new.11 (Ph 142)

16Once again, a man looks up to the empty sky and has a renewed sense of being alive, or of what it is to be alive. Whereas for the generic Brangwen this is a largely unconscious background condition, for the later Lawrence it is a moment of intensely conscious revelation. Maybe this is partly because the suddenly intense awareness is not of connection or oneness with the world, which might be another form of the sentimentality that arises for Lawrence with self-consciousness. Rather the opposite: it is the fierce, inhuman strangeness of the land that impresses.

  • 12 Stefania Michelucci, L’orrizonte mobile: Spazio e luoghi nella narrtiva di D.H. Lawrence, (Turin: E (...)
  • 13 “Introduction to Bottom Dogs,” in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N.H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Camb (...)

17This points to another aspect of the Lawrencian home. In so far as the relationship with Frieda enforced a break with his home region one might think of the nomadic couple as constituting a tight unit standing over against the transience of their shifting locations. And there is some truth in this. Indeed, in her fine-grained treatment of this theme Stefania Michelucci quotes Birkin’s remark to Ursula: “It isn’t really a locality, though” he said, It’s a perfected relation between you and me… (WL 316).12 But as we know the relation Birkin ultimately sought with Ursula was one of star-equilibrium, a permanent and radical sense of difference. So the relation to the cosmos and the relation to the life companion are isomorphic, they are micro and macro versions of the same dynamic of difference. And the isomorphism applies in the other direction too. Just as the unknowability of the human other privileges the element of trust in relationship, so Lawrence speaks elsewhere of the necessary trust in the ultimately benign nature of the universe: “that instinctive belief which lies at the core of the human heart, that people and the universe itself is ultimately kind.”13

18Indeed, it is the dynamic of inhuman difference vis-à-vis the cosmos that arouses a religious response: “Ah, yes, in New Mexico the heart is sacrificed to the sun and the human being is left stark, heartless, but undauntedly religious.”

19Lawrence goes on to develop the religious theme at length. The principal promise of the Christian religion is a life hereafter and the corollary recognition that we have no permanent home on this earth. By contrast, Lawrence’s religious sense, as awakened by the desert earth and sky, as well as by Native American practice, invokes no such afterlife but it nonetheless reinforces a sense of individual human transience. Once again, the human takes its measure from the inhuman and in a way that resists a sense of possession. Of course, aesthetic appreciation can be combined with, if not corrupted by, possession but in itself it is disinterested. If Lawrence’s sensory engagement in washing up can be seen as an aesthetic mode of apprehension, then the same applies to his ultimate home on the ranch. Even his mode of acquiring the ranch from Mabel Dodge in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers evades the conventional measures of monetary value. While it would be difficult to imagine a more vivid account of why he chose to live in the South West, his words do not seem the description of a home. What attracts him is the unmediated presence of mountains, sun and sky. To this day, the only physical dwelling-place on the ranch, the only protection from the elements in a region of notorious extremes, is a simple wooden structure of modest size. What Lawrence seems to have sought was the most intense and direct relation to the cosmos. For him, when human beings construct homes, whether physical, social or philosophical, as protection, they thereby insulate themselves in some measure against the only experience that truly matters. And this radical Lawrencian perception has surely taken on a new significance in recent decades.

20As the growth of ecological awareness has made Lawrence, long seen as the eternal outsider, finally come to be mainstream, his mode of living and being provides a measure of the difficulty we all now have in truly rethinking our relation to the planet. Even as we agitate for measures against global warming we cannot but heat our individual homes and protect the immediate well-being of our families. Our contemporary situation demands an extraordinary shift in the collective sense of what it means to live in a world. The ranch provided him with daily openness to life as a vividly cosmic experience; the experience he had always sought in travel. In this respect his notion of dwelling is rather paradoxical if thought of as being at home but by the same token it provides a striking answer to the notion of transcendental homelessness and is an exemplary response to our ecological condition. His relative homelessness was not a loss of Being but a courageous endeavour truly to dwell upon this earth, to treat the planet itself as a home.

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Notes

1 Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I, (1996); Globes: Spheres II: Macrosphereology (1999); Foam: Globes vol III: Plural Sphereology, (2004), trans. Wieland Hoban.

2 György Lukačs, Theory of the Novel (MIT Press, 1974).

3 Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Berington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, vol. 5, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 219.

4 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), pp. 27-34.

5 Martin Heidegger, “Poetically Man Dwells…,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 218. Hereafter PLT.

6 Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 151.

7 “Introduction to These Paintings,” in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 201.

8 The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 9.

9 W. B. Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben,” in Collected Poems, (London: MacMillan, 1950), p. 399.

10 Cf Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 13-19.

11 Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 196.

12 Stefania Michelucci, L’orrizonte mobile: Spazio e luoghi nella narrtiva di D.H. Lawrence, (Turin: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1998), p. 147.

13 “Introduction to Bottom Dogs,” in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N.H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 120.

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Référence électronique

Michael Bell, « Where was Lawrence chez-lui? »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 56 | 2024, mis en ligne le 30 octobre 2024, consulté le 09 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/3697 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12olr

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Auteur

Michael Bell

Michael Bell is a Fellow of the British Academy, Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, and Associate Fellow of the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts. He has written mainly on literary and philosophical themes from the European Enlightenment to modernity. His book-length publications include Primitivism (1973), The Sentiment of Reality: Truth of Feeling in The European Novel (1983), F. R. Leavis (1988), D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being (1992), Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity (1994), Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (1997), Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (2001), Open Secrets: Literature, Education and Authority from J.-J. Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee (OUP, 2007), The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists ed. (2012).

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