The novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence died on this day in 1930. He was not a socialist and did not profess to be one, but there can be no doubt that he possessed some excellent ideas about what was wrong with the money-wages-profit system and what sort of society would be fitter for humans to live in.
Certain rather foolish literary gentlemen and superficial Leftists have described Lawrence as a fascist. There is no evidence to support this claim, and we would argue that it is a label mainly put about by Stalinists who resented Lawrence for having been a non-conservative who was totally opposed to the state-capitalist dictatorship of the Russian Empire. In the 1930s to have taken up such a position, even if you were in favour of social transformation, meant that the so-called Communists would call you a fascist in the hope of discrediting you, In the case of D. H. Lawrence, who wrote explicitly about why he opposed fascism, the label stuck and the smear has no doubt led many people to dismiss the social and political content of his poetry. To do so is to dismiss some ofthe most forcefully revolutionary poems ever written in English. Examples include Money-Madness, Kill Money, O! Start A Revolution, Wages, Why?, How Beastly The Bourgeois Is and The Mosquito Knows, all of which appeared in the deceptively titled volume Pansies.
Why did Lawrence take up some of the ideas expressed in these poems? Reading them, one might think that he was acquainted with the Socialist Party of Great Britain, but there is no evidence to show that he was, More likely, Lawrence picked up the socialist content of his thinking as a result of visiting the home of his girlfriend until 1912, Louise Burrows, whose father was a committed socialist who possessed the socialist writings of William Morris and spent his time talking with Lawrence about the case for socialism whenever the young writer visited his house. The connection between William Morris and D. H. Lawrence is rarely made, and shallow critics would have it that the former was a romantic revolutionary while the latter was a fascistic reactionary (both utterly mistaken observations): in fact, it will be seen from such poems that Lawrence too shared a passion to change the insane society of capitalism, and that, if anything, his poetry was more expressive in its simplicity, Moreover, it is known that he had read Morris' News From Nowhere, and was inspired by its depiction of a socialist society.
(Adapted from a World Socialist article, Winter 1985-6)
4 comments:
Some political poetry from Lawrence.
http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2006/11/some-poetry_26.html
Thanks for this I have been a fan of Lawrence since the early 60's.Definitely should let the servants read those.
I'm late to this blog post, but just to appendix some depth to this slightly misleading article: the author states that 'rather foolish literary gentlemen and superficial Leftists have described Lawrence as a fascist. There is no evidence to support this claim', going on to suggest (in a rather cold war paranoid style) that this is a slur spread by Stalinists.
Us 'foolish literary gentlemen' who have been studying Lawrence for years would point out that far from 'no evidence', it is actually a well known fact that Lawrence had right-wing sympathies and proto-facist impulses run strong throughout his work. I suggest you read some of his fiction, essays or diaries before you get excited by a small selection of his poetry. If you are looking for a poster boy for Modernist socialism, you could not have picked a worse example.
i am devotee of Lawrence's novels but to come to the defence of Lawrence it appears his politics is not as clear-cut as you suggest it is.
"he was unthinkingly branded both fascist and sexist...he never believed in right-wing governments and hted the fscism he saw in Itly and Germany, though he always believed in human beings need for authority."
http://www.dh-lawrence.org.uk/conclusion.html
He has his critics,of course, Germaine Greer says "Damn him to Hell".
"What is certain however is that since 1917 in a number of essays Lawrence had been actively considering a new political order to counteract what he believed had been the cause of the War: the European sickness of benevolent idealism, and the spiritual ossification caused by a Victorian ideology of living for others at the expense of one’s own living"
http://www.dhlawrencesocietyaustralia.com.au/j7a1.htm
But to support your position.
"Critic and admirer Terry Eagleton situates Lawrence on the radical right wing, as hostile to democracy, liberalism, socialism, and egalitarianism, though never actually embracing fascism. Some of Lawrence's beliefs can be seen in his letters to Bertrand Russell around the year 1915, where he voices his opposition to enfranchising the working class, his hostility to the burgeoning labour movements, and disparages the French Revolution, referring to "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" as the "three-fanged serpent." Rather than a republic, Lawrence called for an absolute Dictator and equivalent Dictatrix to lord over the lower peoples."
http://www.poemhunter.com/david-herbert-lawrence/biography/
So perhaps it may have been injudious to have praised Lawrence but we ourselves are all flawed characters.
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