Report of the Forty-Ninth Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group
Howard Booth
‘Politics at the War’s End: D.H. Lawrence, Douglas Goldring and Thomas Seltzer’
February 27th 2026, by Zoom, 18.30-20.00 UK time
ATTENDERS
36 people attended, including, outside of England, Michael Bell in Agadir, Lucas Campoli and Philip Chester in Canada, Robert Bullock in Paris, Jim Phelps in Cape Town, and Paul Eggert in Canberra
INTRODUCTION
Howard writes: ‘In this paper I will explore how Lawrence was seen – and at times misrecognised – as a politically radical and indeed revolutionary writer around the time the First World War finished. My focus is on Lawrence and Douglas Goldring, and in particular Goldring’s novel The Black Curtain of 1920. Barbara Kearns has discussed this novel in relation to Lawrence, Australia and Kangaroo in the JDHLS of 2022, but I look here at Lawrence, literature and politics more broadly. Goldring was an avowedly political writer at this time, moving towards revolutionary communism, though his politics centred on an opposition to militarism and war. Goldring’s experience as an editor meant that he was well-connected in the literary marketplace, and it was Goldring who put Lawrence in touch with Thomas Seltzer – Seltzer was to publish Goldring as well as Lawrence in the United States. I will consider Seltzer as a writer, translator and publisher with a political agenda, something shown not only in the books he chose to translate and publish, but also in his own writing.’
READING
‘Craving for Spring’, the last poem in Look! We Have Come Through! (1Poems, 223-26).
BIOGRAPHY
Howard J. Booth teaches at the University of Manchester. He is the editor of New D.H. Lawrence (MUP) and the author of over twenty chapters and articles on Lawrence. Publications over the last year include British Writing from Empire to Brexit (Routledge, with Robert Spencer and Anastasia Valassopoulos) and ‘Nature, Transformation and the Frankfurt School in Lawrence’s Late Fiction’ in Terry Gifford, ed., Reading D.H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene (EUP). Forthcoming in 2026 is a chapter on Sol T. Plaatje, Joseph Conrad, Fernando Pessoa and Rudyard Kipling in South African Modernisms: A Critical History, ed. Jade Munslow Ong and Andrew van der Vlies (CUP).
PRESENTATION
Howard opened with an introduction to Douglas Goldring (1887-1960), a British author and journalist whom he characterised, and who characterised himself, as ahead of his times. In Goldring’s 1935 autobiography Odd Man Out Goldring hoped that he would one day be rediscovered; this evening’s event was a modest form of rediscovery.
He had a prosperous upbringing and a mother who raised him to become a missionary; he retained a Christian-informed perspective throughout his life. He quickly moved on from writing poetry to non-fiction and the novel, especially political novels. He became assistant editor of The English Review during Ford Madox Hueffer’s founding editorship, and edited his own short-lived magazine The Tramp (which published both Wyndham Lewis and the first English translation of the Futurist Manifesto). He volunteered for the War, but became ill. Recovering in Ireland, he learned to see England as an outsider, and turned pacifist and anti-imperialist – as reflected in his 1917 novel The Fortune (which was not publishable in England until 1931). He was sympathetic to Russian revolutionary politics, and joined the 1917 Club in London. It was a pacifist vegetarian anarchist Tolstoyan, Charles Daniel, who published his 1920 play The Fight for Freedom.
He and Lawrence were united in their opposition to the War, although in Odd Man Out Goldring characterised Lawrence’s attitude to the War as resembling that of Philip Heseltine – not pacifist, just wishing to be left alone. After the War Goldring played a major role in helping to relaunch Lawrence’s stalled career by introducing him to the radical American publisher (and translator of Polish, Russian and German into English; like Lawrence, someone who worked on Gorky) Thomas Seltzer. The latter became the first publisher of Women in Love, and subsequently played a major role in Lawrence’s post-War career and fortunes. Another common acquaintance of Goldring and Lawrence was Norman Douglas; both he and Lawrence asked Goldring to help publish Memoirs of a Foreign Legion by their friend Maurice Magnus, who had also been published by Daniel. Goldring further assisted Lawrence by including an essay on him in his 1920 collection Reputations: Essays in Criticism. Much later, quotations from his 1948 Life Interestsappeared in the three-volume Edward Nehls composite biography of Lawrence. There was briefly a dispute between the two men concerning the publication of Lawrence’s play Touch and Go – which he had written in 1918 – as the second in a series in which Goldring’s own play appeared first; but these difficulties were soon overcome.
Goldring dedicated his revolutionary 1920 novel The Black Curtain to Lawrence, and included an epigraph from Lawrence’s poem ‘Craving for Spring’ – it seems overlooking the poem’s ending, which warns against false hope concerning new world orders:
‘Ah, do not let me die on the brink of such anticipation!
Worse, let me not deceive myself.’
The narrator comes to question the War and support revolution, whilst the character Anne, who becomes a radical suffragist and anti-War campaigner, somewhat resembles Ursula Brangwen. She dies in childbirth, her health having been weakened by imprisonment, but her martyrdom seems to make possible new political life. Lawrence found the novel ‘interesting’, but the use that it made of Christian imagery (the title alludes to the Temple veil) may have grated on him.
In Odd Man Out Goldring opined that Catherine Carswell, in her memoir of Lawrence, had characterised Lawrence too strongly in terms of his suffering; from Goldring’s perspective, Lawrence had a highly successful career. For all his many literary contacts, and in contrast to Lawrence whom he had helped, Goldring found it hard to re-establish himself after the War, and was poor for the rest of his life.
DISCUSSION
Paul Eggert expanded on the controversy surrounding Lawrence’s play Touch and Go and Goldring’s play The Fight for Freedom. Bringing out his copy of Seltzer’s edition of Touch and Go, he noted that the back flap of the dust jacket described The Fight for Freedom (the first in the series for The People’s Theatre of which Touch and Go was second) as setting revolution in its proper place, at the heart of man. This might have irritated Lawrence when he received his own copy in July 1920; he considered Goldring’s a base ‘pamphlet play’, and in September 1920 wrote his answer to Goldring in the poem ‘The Revolutionary’. Paul also suggested that the politics of Touch and Go could helpfully he interpreted in the light of what Lawrence was writing around the time when he the play in 1918: the essays ‘Democracy’ and ‘Education and the People’, in which his target is less the class structure than idealism (though his individualism is itself a form of ideal).
John Pateman argued that Lawrence recognised the inevitability of Communism, and that Touch and Go and its preface use vocabulary from the Communist Party Manifesto: the character Oliver says that money should flow to men ‘according to his needs’. Howard responded that the reason why Daniel demoted the play from first place in his ‘The People’s Theatre’ series seems to have been that he did not consider it to be Communist enough; the play’s ending suggests that the different classes needed to talk to each other and collaborate.
Terry Gifford wondered whether such dialectics – and the rejection of idealism – themselves constituted or suggested an art form. Howard noted that The Black Curtain includes scenes of the narrator talking with artist figures, suggesting Goldring’s self-reflexive thinking about what kind of art could be effective as a political act.
