The Effect of Mrs. Rudolf Dircks' Translation of Schopenhauer's The Metaphysics of Love on D. H. Lawrence's Early Fiction

The Effect of Mrs. RudolfDircks' Translation ofSchopenhauer's The Metaphysics of Love on D. H. Lawrence's Early Fiction MITZI M. BRUNSDALE A friend commented on D. H. Lawrence during 1906, his first year at Nottingham University College, "Bert began to change and I asked him if College was doing it, or was it Schopenhauer? 'Life,' he said, 'and it gives me spiritual dyspepsia.'"1 This study is concerned widi Schopenhauer's contribution to Lawrence's "spiritual dyspepsia," since a confirmation of Lawrence's maturing views on religion, sex, and literary subjectivity was made by The Metaphysics of Love, a copy of which Lawrence annotated in 1908 for Jessie Chambers. That copy is not presently available for study and die citations here are taken from Emile Delavenay's 1936 article, "Sur un Exemplaire de Schopenhauer Annoté par D. H. Lawrence" (Revue Anglo-Américaine, February 1936, pp. 234-8), more recently reprinted in Nehls 1, 66-70. Recent opinion sees Schopenhauer's work as a considerable influence on Lawrence in his early years, agreeing widi Jessie Chambers' biographical assessment: "Schopenhauer seemed to fit in widi his [Lawrence 's] mood. He diought he found diere an explanation of his own divided attitude and he remained under die influence of diis line of reasoning for some time."2 However, die crux of diis paper has not heretofore been discussed: diat diis version of The Metaphysics of Love Mitzi Brunsdale teaches at Mayville State College, Mayville, North Dakota. 'May Chambers Holbrook, quoted in Edward Nehls, D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956-7), III, 609. ' "E.T." [Jessie Chambers], D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (London: Cape, 1935), pp. 41-2. 120DIRCKS, SCHOPENHAUER, AND LAWRENCE was a faulty translation by a Mrs. Rudolf Dircks that badly distorted Schopenhauer's message and that these distortions colored the Schopenhauerian influence on Lawrence and his early works. The Dircks translation is here cited from microfilm from die British Museum. The first section of this study discusses the eight annotations Lawrence made in Jessie's copy of The Metaphysics of Love, and the second presents other of its concepts that appear diere and seem to have been taken by Lawrence as confirmation of his own emerging opinions on life and art. Both sections provide examples from Lawrence's early works to illustrate his use of these concepts, bodi accurate and distorted, in work he completed prior to his eloping to Germany in May of 1912 with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley. The tide of the Dircks translation itself is a distortion and expurgation of Schopenhauer's tide, "Metaphysik der Geschlechtsliebe," an omission of the word "sex" that is consistent throughout her translation . This is significant because here the main concept of die work is that sex is the "Brennpunkt" that according to Schopenhauer forms the central essence of everydiing that exists in the phenomenal universe. This vital omission is a symptom of the Victorian prudery against which Lawrence was beginning to rebel; his restrictive upbringing had made it difficult for him even to refer to Biblical passages on pregnancy to Jessie, so he must have found Schopenhauer's frankness regarding sexual passion as the basic human drive both stimulating and comforting. Taken in the order in which they appear in the Dircks translation, Lawrence's annotations reveal his interest in the following aspects of sexual love: the possibility of Platonic love between two young people of opposite sexes; male desire for several women, but a woman's for only one man; disgust at bodily deformity; the precedence of the individual 's internal harmony over the harmony of two souls, this being a cause for discord after marriage; the mismatching of intelligent, sensitive men to "dragons and she-devils"; the relation of sex and art; longing for one particular woman as a pledge of personal immortality widiin the species; and the tendency of lovers to strive secredy to perpetuate their turmoil and misery. The firstpassage Lawrence marked reads: ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW121 Because the kernel of passionate love turns on the anticipation of the child to be born and its nature it is quite possible for friendship, without any admixture of sexual love, to exist...