D. H. Lawrence: Mythographer

Commenting on D.H. Lawrence's clear preference for Edward B. Tylor's Primitive Culture over James Frazer's The Golden Bough (Letters, II, pp. 593, 690) ¹, John B. Vickery says, "The length of Frazer's work, its almost endless multiplication of examples, its reticence about providing a theoretic framework of analytic categories, and its looser organization probably all contributed to Lawrence's attitude, which more often than we are accustomed to recognizing aligned itself with one form or another of orthodoxy." ² Herbert Asquith, however, who knew Lawrence, argues to the contrary that Lawrence felt "that his free flame could not be artificially confined in an ancient form, but must weave its own patterns, moving without restraint at its own will" and that "his acutely individual genius was not the child of any 'movement.'" ³

I think that Asquith's evaluation is the more valid: Lawrence's pattern was not to accept any one else's models, paradigms, or orthodoxies, traditional or revolutionary, but rather to take from anywhere and everywhere factual details from the real world, bits and pieces of theories, superstitions, aspects of the personalities of people whom he knew, to support his own theories, some of which he held constant over a lifetime, others of which he developed to meet his personal needs as those needs changed, sometimes from month to month. And he used those jerry-built theories in his novels and in his personal life.

As Lawrence himself wrote in "The Novel":

"But what am I to do!" cries the despairing novelist. "From Amon and Ra to Mrs. Eddy, from Ashtaroth and Jupiter to Annie Besant, I don't know where I am."

"Oh yes you do my dear!" replies the novel. "You are where you are, so you needn't hitch yourself on to the skirts either of Ashtaroth or Eddy. If you meet them, say how-do-you-do! to them quite courteously. But don't hook on, or I shall turn you down." ⁴

And, indeed, Lawrence did not "hook on."

Nowhere is Lawrence's pattern of adaptation clearer than in his use of what he read, and particularly in what he read in mythology and anthropology (or ethnography, as it was frequently called at the time). Take, for example, Lawrence's concept of "blood knowledge," which he explained to Ernest Collings on 17 January 1913:

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what not. (Letters I, p. 503)

Three years later, in a furious disagreement with Bertrand Russell that, according to Russell's testimony, led Russell to contemplate committing suicide, ⁵ Lawrence lectures in the same vein:

I have been reading Frazer's Golden Bough and Totemism and Exogamy. Now I am convinced of what I believed when I was about twenty—that there is another seat of consciousness than the brain and the nerve system: there is a blood—consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary mental consciousness, which depends on the eye as its source or connector.

And then he berates Russell:

And the tragedy of this our life, and of your life, is that the mental and nerve consciousness exerts a tyranny over the blood-consciousness, and that your will has gone completely over to the mental consciousness, and is engaged in the destruction of your blood-being or blood-consciousness, the final liberating of the one, which is only death in the result. (Letters, II, p. 470)

In Women in Love, Birkin levels the same charge against Hermione Roddice:

You are merely making words . . .; knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism...