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

John Pateman

 

Lawrence and Bolshevism

 

October 25th 2024

By Zoom

18.30-20.00 UK time

ATTENDERS

Twenty-three people attended, including, outside of England, Shirley Bricout in Brittany, John Worthen in Germany, Marina Ragachevskaya in Minsk, Kathleen Vella in Malta, and Shanee Stepakoff in Connecticut

INTRODUCTION

Lawrence had a complicated relationship with politics which has enabled commentators to place him on a wide spectrum of political thought, from Communism to Fascism. This paper considers his association  with Bolshevism and Socialism, based on what he said about these subjects in his works and letters. As with many people, Lawrence’s political views changed over time. It is possible, by taking  a chronological approach, to track these changes and reach some tentative conclusions about his political orientations. This paper deliberately does not include any opinions he might have expressed about other political trends such as Liberalism and Fascism. This is partly because he wrote much less frequently about these issues and so, on a quantitative basis alone, it is possible to argue that he was more interested in left wing than centre or right wing politics. This paper does not seek to attach a political label onto Lawrence – such a move would be fraught with problems, not the least of which is that Lawrence himself hated to be labelled and thought and wrote in a way that makes labelling him very difficult if not impossible. In any case, labels do not further, but rather hinder, our understanding of Lawrence’s politics which were as layered as the proverbial onion.

READING

Letters volume 3, Movements in Modern European History (epilogue), ‘Democracy’ (Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine), Kangaroo, Quetzalcoatl, The First Lady Chatterley    

BIOGRAPHY

John Pateman worked in public libraries for over 40 years and was the Chief Librarian in Hackney, Merton, Lincolnshire and Thunder Bay, Ontario. He is a member of the Council of the D.H. Lawrence Society and looks after the society’s library at Breach House, Eastwood. He is interested in the politics and ideology of Lawrence as a working class author. His most recent book is Willie Hopkin: D.H Lawrence’s Socialist Friend (5 Leaves, 2024).

PRESENTATION

John started by noting that the date of his presentation (Friday 25th October) was the 107th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia, which took place when Lawrence was thirty-two. His main contention was that, for all his complexities, Lawrence was more, and more consistently, left-wing than a principally bourgeois body of scholars has been capable of recognising. He was radicalised in his youth by exposure to radical socialists such as Willie Hopkin, and to the War. In February 1915 he wrote: ‘We shall smash the frame. The land, the industries, the means of communication and the public amusements shall all be nationalized. Every man shall have his wage till the day of his death, whether he works or not, so long as he works when he is fit. Then, and only then, shall we be able to begin living’. In ‘Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers’ he wrote:

I long to be a bolshevist

And set the stinking rubbish-heap of this foul world

Afire at a myriad scarlet points

A bolshevist, a salvia-face

To lick the world with flame that licks it clean

Around the time of the Russian Revolutions he was expressing the desire to learn Russian and to travel there, and he remained optimistic about the country for some time thereafter. Notwithstanding strong criticisms of Bolshevism, for example in Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent (he found the Mexico of 1924 to embody a self-seeking form of Bolshevism), as late as 1927 he was still thinking of going to Russia. His experience of the 1926 General Strike in England inspired him to make the hero of his next novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a Bolshevist trade unionist. In the novel’s second draft, written in the winter of 1926, sex replaced class, and in the final draft of 1927-28 Mellors became class-ambiguous (he has read about the Bolshevik revolution, but is more interested in phallic consciousness). Yet Connie feels that she is a Bolshevist, and in his final letter Mellors castigates the apathy of the English working class – even though the red trousers that he thinks men ought to wear are not Communist red.

DISCUSSION

Shanee wondered whether Conrad’s The Secret Agent might have influenced Lawrence. John noted that Lawrence did not always comment on his sources. The language of Marxism, for example, pervades his work, but it is not certain whether he read the original texts. Iris applauded the presentation’s concentration on class; John commented that ‘bourgeois’ Lawrencian academics show relatively little interest in his politics per se (though Jane noted that a book may be forthcoming on this topic). Jane asked whether it was not the case that Lawrence’s politics took a rightwards turn towards the end of his life. John thought the opposite (bearing in mind that Mellors’ vision at the end of the final draft of Lady Chatterley’s Lover resembles a true state of communism, when the state has withered away). Andrew countered that there were many contradictions in Lawrence’s political thought, as in his thought about so much else. John agreed that the picture was complicated, but that he was quantitatively more interested in the left than the liberalism, conservatism or fascism, by about 80% to 20% – and his anti-left comments always belonged to particularly difficult periods in his life. He also noted that, just as contradiction is innate to Lawrence, so it is to the Marxist view of history, in which conflict is the driving engine. Anne observed that Lawrence seemed to primarily emphasise revolution at the level of the individual psyche; John agreed and noted that Marx and Engels thought similarly, but that certain material conditions had to be present in order for that internal revolution to take place. Stalin, for his part, saw communists as engineers of the human soul (though Lawrence never mentioned him). Dudley, like Jane, thought that Lawrence moved from left to right over time, and had been at his most Communist during World War I. He was, after all, a savvy capitalist, and liked to befriend aristocrats. John agreed that he had ‘wobbles’, but that he was also ferociously critical of the upper classes, and did not yield his most successful novel (Lady Chatterley’s Lover) to a capitalist publisher. Marina, speaking from Minsk, wondered whether Lawrence had any understanding of the colonial aspect of Soviet Communism, whilst Catherine wondered whether Lawrence had much understanding of the various phases that Soviet Communism went through during his lifetime, and whether he did not rather tend towards Anarchism (Shirley noted the existence of the book Naked Liberty and the World of Desire: Elements of Anarchism in the Work of D.H. Lawrence by Simon Casey from Routledge, 2003). Vic West thought that Lawrence was fundamentally anti-political, and actively resisted political and social classification (fitting with his gradual removal of the more political elements of Lady Chatterley’s Lover over its three drafts). John concluded the formal discussion (it continued informally much later) by saying that we live in a one-party capitalist state in which the bourgeois think that only those on the left have blind spots; and, finally, that the tourist ‘Blue Line Lawrence Trail’ in Eastwood should become the ‘Red Line Trail’.