In an enigmatic episode in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) Connie tells her father that before the Great War her lover Mellors:
“was Clifford’s game-keeper: but he was [also] an officer in the army in India. Only he is like Colonel C. E. Florence, who preferred to become a private soldier again.” Sir Malcolm, however, had no sympathy with the unsatisfactory mysticism of the famous C.E. Florence. He saw too much advertisement behind all the humility. It looked just like the sort of conceit the knight most loathed, the conceit of self- abasement.
D. H. Lawrence referred to the event in 1922 when T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia fame) had renounced his glorious prospects, sought obscurity (not advertisement) and enlisted as an aircraftsman, the lowest rank in the RAF, under the name of John Hume Ross. In a letter of August 1926 T. E., after calling D. H. very violent and a great genius, modestly deferred to him and explained that to avoid confusion ‘nobody with any sporting sense of D. H. Lawrence’s fine struggle to say something would make it more difficult for him by using the same name while his fate yet hung unbalanced’. In 1923 T. E. was forced to leave the air force after his real identity was exposed. He enlisted in the less desirable Tank Corps that year, and then used his political influence to be readmitted to the RAF in 1925. After the widespread publicity following the appearance of Revolt in the Desert (1926), T. E.’s popular account of his role in the war against the Turks, he was sent to a remote Himalayan post near the Afghan frontier in northern India.
T. E., the fictional Mellors and Clifford Chatterley, had all served in and been traumatized by the war. D. H.’s own mysticism in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) and The Plumed Serpent (1926) was much more intense and extreme than the alleged mysticism of the rational T. E.. And D. H. had no way of knowing T. E.’s guilt-ridden and complex motives for breaking off a brilliant career and plunging into the squalor of an air force depot, as well as his horror at being exposed and ejected from the RAF. The Middle East had been closed to him, for he could not do archeological research without political surveillance. After his horrific wartime experiences, he desperately wanted to test his will again, to escape respectability, to hide and to suffer. He thought the humiliating service would be a great assoiler, a form of lay monasticism, a place of order and self-effacement.
Connie’s father (speaking here for D. H.) saw it only as a rather pointless but widely publicized exhibition of monkish asceticism and self-degradation, which strongly contrasted to Mellors’ joyous celebration of the senses. But in the novel D. H. also illuminates T. E.’s motives when General Tommy Dukes explains why he has remained in the service after the war: ‘The army leaves me time to think, and saves me from having to face the battle of life’. T. E., with plenty of time to think, wrote The Mint and translated Homer’s Odyssey while serving in the ranks. Dukes, like T. E., feels the struggle to adjust to postwar civilian life is even more difficult than fighting the actual battles in war.
T. E. (1888-1935), who died in a motorcycle accident aged forty-seven, and D. H. (1885-1930), who died of tuberculosis aged forty-four, were close contemporaries. T. E.’s father was a baronet, D. H.’s father a coal miner, but both men had weak fathers and domineering mothers. In scandalous domestic episodes, T. E.’s father ran off with his children’s governess, D. H. ran off with his professor’s wife. The illegitimate T. E. and notorious D. H. were both social outcasts. But T. E. was a war hero; D. H., a pacifist with a German wife, was falsely suspected of signaling enemy ships in wartime and expelled from the Cornish coast. D. H. went berserk when intimately examined and disqualified from military service. When T. E. was examined to enter the RAF, he had to lie about the scars he’d acquired from his wartime beating, torture and rape by a Turkish officer in Deraa, Syria.
Both T. E. and D. H. were influenced by Nietzsche’s ideas of self-overcoming, the Will to Power and even the radical elimination of ordinary, unclean human beings. T. E. exclaimed, ‘had the world been mine I’d have left out the animal life upon it’. Mellors declared, ‘Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else’. Both men were expertly edited by Edward Garnett and became friends with his son David. After the war T. E. became world famous through the publicity of Lowell Thomas, whose theatrical performances and best-selling books created the legend of Lawrence of Arabia. D. H.’s The Rainbow had been suppressed in 1915, and after the war Lady Chatterley’s Lover and his erotic paintings were also condemned. T. E. exercised great political authority and power at the postwar Versailles and Cairo conferences, where he helped to ‘settle the Middle East.’ D. H. was the unfortunate victim of British authority and power. Both men had a puritanical attitude toward sex and both were repressed homosexuals but had rare sexual relations with men: T. E. with the young Arab Dahoum, D. H. with the Cornish farmer William Henry Hocking.
On August 6, 1927, while serving in India, T. E. reviewed reprints of Women in Love, The Lost Girl and The Plumed Serpent for the Spectator. Since he used the pseudonym of ‘Colin Dale’ (born ‘Chapman,’ the chameleon T. E. also called himself ‘T. E. Shaw’), D. H. did not know the real author. T. E.’s extremely favorable review, written when D. H. was out of favor and reprinted in Men in Print (1940) and The Essential T. E. Lawrence (1951), observed that ‘D. H. Lawrence is a prodigious novelist, whose works need to be studied in series (to learn their significance of growth) as well as to be re-read frequently, each for itself, because of the rich depth and strangeness and fine artistry of the author’. He felt The Plumed Serpent, which had been harshly criticized, was ‘a perfect achieve- ment, the balance of mind and strength and spirit, a vivified independent creation of art’. Though D. H. wasted ‘pages and pages . . . in the effort to make the solar plexus talk English prose . . . at his best he is an impeccable prose writer’. T. E. concluded that D. H. ‘is a poet, and thinker, a man exquisitely a-tingle to every throb of blood, flexure of sinew, plane- modulation of the envelope of flesh’.
Between 1925 and 1933 T. E. wrote at least nine mostly enthusiastic letters about D. H., who did not mention T. E. in his own letters but in Phoenix quoted his introduction to Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta. He praised D. H.’s translation of Verga’s ‘bright and very exciting’ Mastro-Don Gesualdo and thought The Plumed Serpent ‘an immense and significant book’. He called ‘the form of The Plumed Serpent very shapely and satisfying: and the architecture of most of his novels excellent. Of course his prose stammers often. Somebody [T. E. himself] said he was trying to make the solar plexus talk plain English’. He liked ‘spots’ of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and emphasized his own gratifying lack of heterosexual encounters: ‘the whole hadn’t very much meaning for me. Of course it is outside my particular experience – thank the Lord’. He then gave a brilliant summary of D. H.’s essential beliefs:
What D. H. Lawrence means by Lady Chatterley’s Lover is that the idea of sex, & the whole strong vital instinct, being considered indecent causes men to lose what might be their vital strength and pride of life – their integrity. Conversely, the idea of “genitals being beauty” in the Blakian sense would free humanity from its lowering and degrading immorality of deed and thought.
‘Integrity’ was a crucial concept for T. E. who wrote, after describing his wartime torture and rape, ‘the passing days confirmed how in Deraa that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost’. T. E. also per- ceived that D. H. had been influenced by the prophetic vitalism of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793): ‘The cistern contains: the fountain overflows’ and ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’.
In 1934, developing the idea of the talking solar plexus, T. E. defended rational thought and criticized D. H.’s emphasis on physical sensations:
T. E., who idealized writers such as Thomas Hardy, Charles Doughty and Bernard Shaw, also criticized the quarrelsome D. H. for his adversarial attitude toward contemporaries. After reading D. H.’s Letters, edited by Aldous Huxley in 1932, he wrote:
his ungenerousness astonishes me. I can hardly believe that any 800 pages of my writing would fail to include at least a half-word of satisfaction at something someone had written or done.
But T. E. exaggerated to make his point. In his Letters D.H. praised (among others) Edward and David Garnett, Aldous and Maria Huxley, Cynthia Asquith, Earl and Achsah Brewster and Frieda’s sister Else Jaffe. T. E. was even more generous than D. H. His final judgment of 1933, after D.H. had been damned in many obituaries, echoed Milton’s reference to Christ in the opening lines of Paradise Lost (‘till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful seat’): ‘[D.H. Lawrence] is an infinitely greater man than all of us rolled together’.
By Jeffrey Meyers