Report of the Thirty-Eighth Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group

Shirley Bricout

Lawrence and Volcanoes

 

Friday 29th November 2024

By Zoom

18.30-20.00 UK time

 

ATTENDERS

14 people people attended, including, from outside of England, Shirley Bricout in Britanny, Nils Hedstrand in Munich, and Anthony Pacitto near Vesuvius.

INTRODUCTION

Shirley proposed ‘to examine how volcanoes fired Lawrence’s imagination across his works and letters. As he travelled the globe, the majesty and power of volcanoes inspired him to write beautiful and picturesque descriptions of landscapes; however, these always blend with allusions to a more primitive world. Shirley’s readings show how references to Greco-Roman mythology, as in Sea and Sardinia, express in gendered terms the author’s ambivalent relationship to volcanoes and the cultures and places associated with them. Moreover, Shirley argues that Lawrence turns literal volcanic features into metaphors for conflicts, as in Kangaroo, and for relationships between men and woman, as in the set of poems “Female coercion,” “Volcanic Venus” and “What does she want? –” . Similarly the poem “Peace,” written in Sicily in 1920, explores in volcanic terms the passions stirring within society. This talk is drawn from an article “‘Volcanic Evidence’ in D. H. Lawrence’s Letters and Works” published in the Journal of the English Department (volume 14, 2021) of Vidyasagar University in West Bengal.’

READING

Sea and Sardinia, ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Text available here (with illustrations by Jan Juta)

“Female coercion,” “Volcanic Venus” and “What does she want? –” (from Pansies)

Poems.  Volume 1. Ed. Christopher Pollnitz. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Pages 467-8.

“Peace”

Poems.  Volume 1. Page 244-5 (from Birds, Beasts and Flowers)

Also available here

Chapter VIII “Volcanic Evidence” in Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pages 149-168.

Also available here

BIOGRAPHY

Shirley Bricout is affiliated to the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. Her interests lie in D.H. Lawrence’s appropriations of the Bible. She has contributed over forty articles and book reviews to peer reviewed journals and several chapters to books on Modernism and Lawrence including “Biblical Aesthetics,” in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts edited by Catherine Brown and Sue Reid.

 

PRESENTATION

Shirley prefaced her talk by alerting us to a new (October 2024) French translation, by the academics Marc Porée and Laurent Bury, of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (L’Amant de Lady Chatterley), Women in Love (Femmes amoureuses), The Ladybird (La Coccinelle), The Captain’s Doll (La Poupée du capitaine) and The Fox (Le Renard) for the prestigious and well-produced series La Pleiade. According to the publisher’s website, this focuses on ‘the greatest works of our literary heritage’.

She introduced her subject by a historical overview of cultural tradition pertaining to volcanoes. They were mythologised (for example in relation to the eponymous god Vulcan) long before, in the 18th century, they became the subject of the new academic study of volcanology. Romanticism metaphorised volcanoes in relation to passion, revolution and poetry. Lawrence owed much to this traditions, but his interpretations (for example of Etna as provoking corpulence, affection and exuberance in the Sicilians who lived near it, whilst also breaking souls) were idiosyncratic:

How many men, how many races, has Etna put to flight? It was she who broke the quick of the Greek soul. And after the Greeks, she gave the Romans, the Normans, the Arabs, the Spaniards, the French, the Italians, even the English, she gave them all their inspired hour and broke their souls. (Sea and Sardinia, p. 8)

Lawrence treated Etna not just as feminine, but as a ‘white queen or a white witch’ (Letters vol.3, p. 205) and a ‘mistress’ who ‘makes men mad’ (Sea and Sardinia, p. 8). It also inspired him, unusually, to reach for Greek terms:‘ether’ ‘empyrean’ ‘metempsychosis’; he was of course well aware of the volcano’s Greek history. Elsewhere, for example in the poem ‘Volcanic Venus’, he likens women per se to smouldering volcanoes:

What has happened in the world?

the women are like little volcanoes

all more or less in eruption.

It is very unnerving, moving in a world of smouldering volcanoes

It is rather agitating, sleeping with a little Vesuvius.

And exhausting, penetrating the lava-crater of tiny Ixtaccihualt

and never knowing when you’ll provoke an earthquake.

(“ Pansies,” Poems, vol. 1, page 468)

In the novels volcanoes are associated with the destruction that is necessary for new creation. Kangaroo presents Australia as itself volcanic, waiting to burst out (something which had a geological analogy in its position between New Zealand and Java, as Lawrence was aware).

Finally, Shirley noted that Anthony Burgess, in Flame into Being, represented Lawrence’s thought as itself molton. She found this just; he is indeed a writer of expulsion, fragmentation and flux, not least in the ways in which lava and volcanoes move around in his writings.

 

DISCUSSION

Jane shared that when she visited Taormina, she found that nearby where the Lawrences had lived is a Greek amphitheatre. Her guide pointed out that if you stood in the middle of this amphitheatre you would originally have seen Etna directly behind the stage, but that when the Romans came to Sicily they built a backdrop that shut out the natural world; this fact fits with Lawrence’s favouring of the Greeks over the Romans. Nahla found Lawrence’s volcano poems ambivalent but far from wholly negative about women; Terry agreed that Lawrence was as attracted to as anxious about strong, volatile women, and his antifeminism was in large part a critique of contemporary feminism’s emphasis on material equality. Catherine found volcanoes a piquant contrast to Lawrence’s association, elsewhere, of mountain-tops with snow-abstract annihilation and that which needed to be climbed down from. Shirley noted that he experienced the Alps much more intimately than any volcano. He is not known to have gone to the top of Etna, for example, and his responses are often mediated through mythology and metaphor. Anthony shared that he was speaking from a place close to snow-covered Vesuvius, which was snow-covered; Lawrence does not seem to have been moved by the volcanic contrasts of ice and fire.