D.H. Lawrence's Short Stories Thread

[Janine]

Lolol

The letter is dated 28th January, 1915. I found it over here.

As an aside, I loved this painting of the Hesperides

That is beautiful! Truly stunning painting. I will be copying it to my hard-drive file. Do you know who painted it?

Hira, thanks for the link to the letter.

[Hira]

Someone known as Frederic Leighton. Check this link.

[Janine]

Someone known as Frederic Leighton. Check this link.

Hira, I had never heard of him, thanks for pointing him out to me. I really love this type painting and have several book of the Pre-Raphaelites. I read some of the article; will read more later on today. When I saw this, right away, I thought of the 'Pre-Raphaelites'. This article states:

"Leighton initially trained in the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, but left for Frankfurt in 1846 where he enrolled in the State Institute of Art. Here he was influenced by the work of the German Nazarene artists Steinle, Overbeck and Veit whose work came close to the British Pre-Raphaelites, having religious and spiritual overtones."

Interesting, isn't it?

D.H.Lawrence loved the painter, Maurice Griffenhagen, and copied his painting "Idyll", very often. Lawrence was enamoured of this particular work of the artist's and a copy of the painting, done by Lawrence, himself, can be found on the cover of his first published novel, "The White Peacock". See Penquin Classic paperback edition and then online information about the artist to see the original of the work.

[Dark Muse]

I love Pre-Raphaelites, one of my all time faverites is Waterhouse.

[Nossa]

I was going through one of my notebooks, when I found the name of one of Lawrence's poems..called "old". I went online to try to find it, and I came across this poem. It reminded me strongly of something Janine said, how Lawrence hated the world we're living in, how he was disgusted by it. I'm not sure if we can relate it to the story, though I'm sure the idea of leaving the world, the current world with its current disgust, and go back to nature, flowers and birds, can def. be seen in this poem.
It's amazing how someone can write in little words, what we've all been dying to say, about life in our world.

If You are a Man


If you are a man, and believe in the destiny of mankind
then say to yourself: we will cease to care
about property and money and mechanical devices,
and open our consciousness to the deep, mysterious life
that we are now cut off from.

The machine shall be abolished from the earth again;
it is a mistake that mankind has made;
money shall cease to be, and property shall cease to perplex
and we will find the way to immediate contact with life
and with one another.

To know the moon as we have never known
yet she is knowable.
To know a man as we have never known
a man, as never yet a man was knowable, yet still shall be.

[Dark Muse]

The first lines in the poem remind me of some of the lines from his letters that were previously posted here.

In my Island, I wanted people to come without class or money, sacrificing nothing, but each coming with all his desires, yet knowing that his life is but a tiny section of the Whole

I think it is intresting his ideas against money and property, and it seems to be a very Marxist, or Socailist view.

I think this idea it also rather prelevent within his stories, and goes along with ideas of escapaisim, or perhpas trying to return back to nature.

[Nossa]

I agree. It seems like he's always looking for the perfect world. Which confirms what Janine said earlier about him being the speaking in the story. But I still think that he wanted nothing more than balance. I mean, who doesn't hate the materialistic turn that our lives took in this world? Who wouldn't want emotions and goodness to be back as before? But still, hoping for an escapist, and even looking for it, shouldn't prevent you from interacting with people, I think this is what Lawrence is trying to convey. As I said before, eventually the islander didn't succeed. If Lawrence aimed at making us believe that living on an island is the only way out, then the islander wouldn't have gone mad.

[Janine]

Glad to see everyone posting again. Everyone is mulling things over and thinking and coming up with good stuff. I have a very good comment on this idea of 'isolation' with Lawrence, that I found online, but must type this out (sometime tonight) and post for all of you. I just got so busy and went out last night, trying to catch up now. It can't be copied, unfortunately, or I will have to type from the text/biography. That poem is great and quite significant to what Lawrence meant by is utopian ideas; thanks for posting it, Nossa. He had to deal with money; we all do, and he had to make some money to live on and support his wife and to travel as he did, but he was otherwise, quite a 'frugal' man, even though I read he made a fair amount in his lifetime, which most people think to be untrue. As I said, how else could he afford to live in various countries and travel there.
This poem does embody his feelings on money and commerce and how the world has lost perspective in what truly matters. I think this poem is more of a futuristic view of what will eventually come to the earth. Lawrence was very prophetic in his views. This reminds me of the song by John Lennon "Imagine".
Soon I will be back with that quote from Lawrence's
own lips.

Dark Muse, I love Waterhouse! I bought a calender one year featuring his paintings - oh my goodness - it is just gorgeous! I had to have it and of course I still own it. I keep all my old calenders for the pictures. I also love Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his sister and both their poems. Such moody stuff, this is why I love them all so.

[Janine]

I can't believe it, I just spend an hour on a post that did not go through. So here I am starting all over again.


The following is from the book "D.H. Lawrence, Dying Game, 1922-1930: The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence" By David Ellis

‘Mercury’ was probably the only writing Lawrence did in Germany given that he had posted ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ to Nancy Pearn just before leaving Italy (v.498). When in 1927 this story was to be included in the Women Who Rode Away collection, Compton Mackenzie put so much pressure on Martin Secker, his publisher as well as Lawrence’s, that Secker felt obliged to omit it.37 Mackenzie is the obvious model for the chief character since not many other men in Britain could have moved fromone island to another (from Herm to Jethou in the Channel Islands), and then acquired a third (the Shiants); and at the start of the story the treatment is mildly satirical. But as in “Mercury’ the tone also changes half-way, and by the end of the story it is so absolutely justifies Lawrence’s own angry claim ‘the man is no more he than I am’ (vi.205) that one has to believe that in protesting as he did Mackenzie was objecting to ‘Two Blue Birds’ by proxy. Lawrence’s further claim in his comments on Mackenzie’s threats was that ‘The Man who loved islands has a philospophy behind him, and a real significance (vi.218), and insofar as the story deals rigorously and in a relatively abstract way with a quite specific issue, it is probably the most philosophical fiction he ever wrote.

The man who loves islands is called Cathcart. On the first of them he has a whole retinue and lives in semi-feudal state. But partly because his retainers cheat him, he moves to a second, smaller island accompanied only by one old couple, a widow and her daughter to keep his house, and an orphan boy. Still he loses money. On the second island Cathcart slides automatically and not very willingly into an affair wih the widow’s daughter. 38 When the daughter becomes pregnant, he marries her but, after the birth of the child, makes a generous financial provision and escapes any further involvement by moving alone to a third island which, like the Shiants, is little more than a rock in the sea. There he becomes irritated by the company of some sheep and has them removed; and when his cat leaves him he is relieved. Cathcart has been writing a reference book to all the flowers mentioned in Greek and Latin literature (this is more or less what Lawrence had believed Douglas was doing but when his book appeared in Florence in 1927 it was in fact entitled Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology)
On this third island he abandons the book and loses interest in this own powers of visual and linquistic discrimation:

Many gulls were on the island now: many sea-birds of all sorts. It was another world of life. Many of the birds he had never seen before. His old impulse came over him, to send for a book, to know their names. In a flicker of the old passion, to know the name of everything he saw, he even decided to row out to the steamer. The names of these birds! he must know their names, otherwise he had not got them, they were not quite alive to him.
But the desire left him, and he merely watched the birds as they wheeled or walked around him, watched them vaguely, without discrimination.39

It is impossible to read this without recalling Lawrence’s own extraordinary expertise, in botany especially, and how shocked he was by others who did not seem to know the names of things. One critic has worked out that in his first novel, The White Peacock., 145 different trees, shrubs or plants are identified and 40 different kinds of birds;40 and certainly the success of Lawrene’s famous ‘nature descriptions’ is inseparable from a high degree of technical and linquistic knowledge. For the man on the island works no longer mean anything; he finds it repulsive to read his name on an envelop and, in a master stroke of narrative, he is described as tearing ‘the brass label from his paraffin stove’. 41 What Lawrence is showing here is a profound understanding of the relationship between language and society. Without words Cathcart has completely cut himself off from the human world and his human existence has then no meaning/ At the end of the story the snow which falls has entirely obliterated the island’s distinctive features; all discrimination is lost. With some initial help from Mackenzie, and then with a good deal more from Lawrence’s critical understanding of tendencied in himself, ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ is a remarkable, general reflection on the impossibility of separating ourselves off from others entirely. In the second of his postcards to Brett after she had left Ravello, Lawrence had written:

Frieda wrote much more quietly and humanly – she says, we must live more with other people: which I think is true. It’s no use trying to be exclusive. There’s a good bit in quite a lot of people. If we are to live, we must make the most of that, and not cut ourselves off.

I think this exerpt from the book is quite revealing and brings up some very good points; and I think the final quote of the words of Lawrence himself, is quite revealing as to his philosophy and ideas and how he felt at this later stage of his life. As you can see, by then he may have become more accepting of being with other people and not 'exclusive', as he stated it. I think in writing the story, Lawrence could have been working this part of himself and his ideas out, so that he could come to a final conclusion or peace with his modified ideals.

[Dark Muse]

Dark Muse, I love Waterhouse! I bought a calender one year featuring his paintings - oh my goodness - it is just gorgeous! I had to have it and of course I still own it. I keep all my old calenders for the pictures. I also love Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his sister and both their poems. Such moody stuff, this is why I love them all so.

I hate to go off topic, but have you heard the sort of legendary story about Rossetti's Mistress?

[Janine]

Yes, I once heard that when she died he had his poems buried with her I think or was it when he died he had them buried with him? Now I am not sure which was it was but eventually the grave was opened and the poetry retrieved. DM is that the legend you are referring to?

Thomas Hardy had his heart buried with his exwife - his first wife. Pretty strange, don't you think?

[Dark Muse]

Yes, but as the story goes, it was the woman who was burried, but he later decided he wanted the poems back, so a friend of his, along with a judge, and an officer of the law, and a doctor I think came to see to the digging up of the body, and all them swore, that when the grave was dug up, she looked just as she had the day she died, as if she had only been sleeping, there was no sign of rot or decay upon her, the only thing that changed was her hair continued to grow and filled the whole coffin, while the poems themslves had showed signs of age, thier pages had yellowed and began to tatter on the edges.

[Janine]

Yes, but as the story goes, it was the woman who was burried, but he later decided he wanted the poems back, so a friend of his, along with a judge, and an officer of the law, and a doctor I think came to see to the digging up of the body, and all them swore, that when the grave was dug up, she looked just as she had the day she died, as if she had only been sleeping, there was no sign of rot or decay upon her, the only thing that changed was her hair continued to grow and filled the whole coffin, while the poems themslves had showed signs of age, thier pages had yellowed and began to tatter on the edges.

Dark Muse Sounds like a likely tale. I know I am a cynic, but you know these myths do grow and become exaggerated in time, to impart a very romantic notion. I can actually believe the woman still looking good after many years, because a friend of mine is an undertaker; he told me of an exhuming of a body, at which he was present, and he made the comment that the man looked so good, they could easily have had another viewing, as he was. Odd, isn't it? But it can be true. Back in Rossetti's time I don't know if they had inbalming, but they may have prepared the body in such a way to prevent decay and also it depends on conditions - perhaps the body was sealed in the casket so no air got to it or in a dry vault. I have heard the hair tale before, about hair continuing to grow, but I am not sure that can truly happen. I would have to look it up. The papers sheets would most probably yellow and tatter naturally, but then who knows? It does make for a fine romantic myth and story, doesn't it?

I wonder, if Thomas Hardy's first wife's grave were exhumed, if they would find poor Hardy's heart beating away.... Now that would be truly bizzare!

[Dark Muse]

[b] I have heard the hair tale before, about hair continuing to grow, but I am not sure that can truly happen. I would have to look it up. The papers sheets would most probably yellow and tatter naturally, but then who knows? It does make for a fine romantic myth and story, doesn't it?

I know that it is true that hair and nails can continue to grow after a person dies it was in part because of this phenomen that the led to the beleif and myth of vamprisim, becasue a body would be dug up, and discovered to have longer hair and nails, so it was belived they were indeed the living dead.

[Janine]

I know that it is true that hair and nails can continue to grow after a person dies it was in part because of this phenomen that the led to the beleif and myth of vamprisim, becasue a body would be dug up, and discovered to have longer hair and nails, so it was belived they were indeed the living dead.

That is really strange, isn't it? how can that be when the cells are die? There is no life left in them so how can they still grow. I wonder how I would research that phenomen online? Do you know?