Report of the Forty-Third Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group

 

Bernard Richards

 

Henry James and D. H. Lawrence: Perspectives on the English Country House

 

April 25th 2025

By Zoom

18.30-20.00 UK time

 

ATTENDERS

31 people attended, including, outside of England, Lucas Campoli in Quebec, Philip Cester in Ontario, Justin Lapoint in North Carolina, Philip Bufithis in West Virginia, Shirley Bricout in Britanny, Henry Carmines in Paris, and Ye Wang in Shenzhen, China

 

INTRODUCTION

‘In this illustrated talk Bernard Richards will compare James and Lawrence’s treatment of  the English country house. On the face of  it they are very different, since James was invited to numerous grand houses and moved very readily in aristocratic society. Lawrence, on the other hand, was more restricted. His main contact with this life was Ottoline’s Garsington Manor. And here, as Richards will explain, there was a connection with James, who was friendly with Ottoline. Other similarities will be explored, especially the fact that both James and Lawrence were critical of the shortcomings of  aristocratic society. Richards will also briefly consider the different attitudes of  James and Lawrence to the workings of  the novel as a form.’

 

BIOGRAPHY

Bernard Richards was Fellow in English at Brasenose College from 1972 to 1996. He is now an Emeritus Fellow of the College. His main work is English Poetry of the Victorian Period 1830-1890 in the Longman Literature in English Series (1^st ed 1988, 2^nd ed 2001). The cover of the second edition is of Turner’s Dudley, since this is Bernard’s home town. Also because one sees in Dudley the collision between industrial landscapes and rural ones – also a feature of  Lawrence’s landscapes some miles north. He has just finished writing Appointed Felicity: Henry James’s English Country Houses, and it is awaiting publication. His other recent project is to finish John Ruskin’s unfinished autobiography Praeterita in 15 chapters. Seven have been privately published so far. One of them, Via Gellia, is set near Lawrence country in Derbyshire. Bernard is the author of some four hundred critical articles and reviews, some of them on Lawrence. Early in his career he gave a lecture on Lawrence as a comic writer.  He has also lectured on Ruskin, George Eliot and even Pater as comic writers. And even Proust. Another project is identifying some two hundred or so Turner sketches, mainly in France. This is work towards a book to be called Turner: Historian of Modern Life. He has produced critical editions of The Spoils of Poynton and The Princess Casamassima. A number of Bernard’s articles have been published in The Daily Telegraph, including one on Henry James and the American Capitol building, and other on Keats’s sea-voyage to Italy. One of his very first publications was ‘Memorability as a Critical Criterion’ in Essays in Criticism. He was one of the founding editors of the magazine for Sixth Formers: English Review  (now under the aegis of Hachette Learning) , not to be confused with Ford Madox Ford’s magazine The English Review.

 

READING 

Women in Love; Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton; Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

 

PRESENTATION

Richards started with the proposition that Lawrence and James not only originate from very different classes, but stand at opposite ends of the Flaubertian spectrum of the novel (with Lawrence representing what James would consider ‘impure’ fiction). Lawrence wrote in 1915 that he would like to know what ‘Henry James and Bennett say of The Rainbow; I know Henry James would hate it. But I should like to know’ (2Letters, 446-7); in the same year he wrote that ‘James is always on a different line – subtle conventional design was his aim.’ (2Letters, 450-1). They also differed strongly in their treatments of sexuality; Lawrence treated it far more and more explicitly than James, though Richards noted an erotically-charged scene of remembered sex in The Wings of the Dove which he considered to be ‘as powerful as anything in Lawrence’.

Richards then took us on a verbal and photographic tour of country houses which, according to his researches in literature and on the ground, had inspired works by one or both authors. He illustrated his talk with his own, and period, photographs, observing how many country houses had been destroyed between the Wars and in the 1950s, and how their landscapes had changed in the intervening period.

He also noted which houses had been used in the filming of adaptations of the authors’ works (for example Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire, used as the Crich home, Shortlands, in the 1969 Ken Russell adaptation of Women in Love). In general he found films to be as often visually misleading as helpful.

He noted the authors’ common acquaintances. The Garsington Manor circle around Ottoline Morrell included James as well as Lawrence, though they never overlapped (Lawrence first visited in 1915, James died in 1916). Dorothy Warren, who owned the gallery where Lawrence’s paintings were exhibited in 1928, was not only Ottoline’s sister in law but James’s god-daughter.

Of course, James, who was relatively privileged, visited many country houses (Richards has identified around 80), whereas with the exception of Garsington Lawrence visited very few as a guest. He was more familiar with them from the outside – for example Willersely Castle in Derbyshire, or Teversal Manor in Nottinghamshire, which was one possible model for Wragby in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

 

 

Another possible model is the Sitwell seat, Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, which Lawrence visited in 1926.

Renishaw Hall

 

Lamb Close, Eastwood home of the Barber family, was the model for Shortlands in Women in Love.

Lamb Close House

 

The country house that he knew best was Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor.

Garsington Manor

 

In his letter to Cynthia Asquith of 9 November 1915 Lawrence is elegiac about the country house:

When I drive across this country, with autumn falling and rustling to pieces, I am so sad, for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, 2,000 years, which is now collapsing, that it is hard to live. So much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming; this house – it is England – my God, it breaks my soul – their England, these shafted windows, the elm-trees, the blue distance – the past, the great past, crumbling down, breaking down, not under the force of the coming birds, but under the weight of many exhausted lovely yellow leaves, that drift over the lawn, and over the pond, like the soldiers, passing away, into winter and the darkness of winter – no, I can’t bear it. For the winter stretches ahead, where all vision is lost and all memory dies out. (Letters2, 431-2)

(Richards noted that Garsington’s elms were lost to elm disease in the 1970s).

Lawrence also wrote to Ottoline after a visit to her in November 1915:

London does strike a blow to the heart, I must say; tonight in a black rain out of doors, and a tube full of spectral, decayed people. How much better and more beautiful the country is: you are very wise to be at Garsington. … I am very glad I came down: it will always be a sort of last vision of England to me, the beauty of England, the wonder of this terrible autumn: when we set the irises above the pond, in the stillness and the wetness. How cruel it is that the world should so have come to an end, this world, our world, whilst we still live in it, that we must either die or go away dispossessed, exiled in body and spirit. (Letters2,43)

The conversation in country houses, however, sometimes disappointed both men. Lawrence characterises the conversation at Breadalby as ‘half-intellectual deliberate talk’, whilst James objected to country house philistinism, writing in 1870:

The English have such a mortal mistrust of anything like criticism or ‘keen analysis’ (which they seem to regard as a kind of maudlin flummery) [still do] that I rarely remember to have heard on English lips any other intellectual verdict (no matter under what provocation) than this broad synthesis – ‘So immensely clever.’ What exasperate you is not that they can’t say more, but that they wouldn’t if they could.’ (Letters, 1.208-9)

 

DISCUSSION

Phil Bufithis responded to Bernard’s comment about the poor cultural level of James’s ‘gilded cages’ by recalling that Queenie Leavis’s comment that James could , culturally-speaking, have chosen better than the particular houses that he spent his time in. Bernard pointed out that that there were a few exceptions – Clouds belonged to the relatively-cultured Wyndhams, and the very first country house he visited was Charles Darwin’s.

James visited the artist colony in Broadway, Worcestershire, and you could not get more cultivated than that. Many artists were associated with the village, including John Singer Sargent. It is written up in Picture and Text. The first country house he visited was Downe House – where he met Charles Darwin. You can’t get more culturally privileged than that. Another aesthetic house was Hill Hall, Essex, where he was the guest of Mrs. Hunter, sculpted by Rodin, for instance. As a general point, however, Bernard thought that English country houses produced negligible cultural value in relation to the amounts of money poured into them. They ‘should have rivalled the universities’. Instead, they provoked Matthew Arnold to develop his conception of the ‘philistine’.

Isobel Dixon was interested in Bernard’s mention of the painters Anna Hope Hudson and Ethel Sands. Bernard noted that they were up-and-coming on the English art scene during World War I. Sands lived in Newington House near Oxford, and they were friends with Ottoline and Henry James as well as Lawrence (the latter mentioning them in a letter of 1915, Letters2 360). They were relatively unknown, however, and Lawrence didn’t comment on their work. Richards thought that his use of colour could have come from many sources, including the pre-Raphaelites.

Justin LaPoint asked Bernard to say more about the respects in which Lawrence and James stood at opposite ends of the novel form’s spectrum. Bernard clarified that James was strongly influenced by Flaubert’s dicta of impersonality, pure form, and the avoidance of preaching. By Flaubert’s and James’s standards, Lawrence wrote an impure novel, in the Victorian tradition of Elliot and Trollope, and extending beyond the consciousnesses of the characters – hence Ford Maddox Hueffer’s criticism of Lawrence’s form. Nonetheless, Lawrence and James were alike gifted at presenting consciousness.

Dudley Nichols picked up on Bernard’s mention of Brede Place, where Stephen Crane lived. He said that before then he was living at Ravensbrook Villa, near Oxted, because of his connections to Edward Garnett and to Ford Maddox Hueffer, who lived nearby. This area was visited by the meeting of this group of 2.7.22, led by Dudley and Jane Nichols, recorded here https://catherinebrown.org/cearne/) Having got into debt, Crane moved to Brede Place (paradoxically a larger place) in order to escape his creditors.

John Pateman posited that Lawrence was not attempting to write erotic fiction, but rather to evoke ‘phallic consciousness’. He also defended Lawrence’s art, particularly paintings such as Dandelions. Bernard clarified that his objection was particularly to Lawrence’s nudes, which he attributed in part to the fact that Lawrence had never painted live models; he therefore painted ‘a nude in his head’. John then invited Bernard to comment on country houses as an embodiment of the English class structure; he thought that James was less concerned with class than was Lawrence; he simply accepted the environment that he found himself in.

Catherine pointed out the leitmotif of money that had run through Bernard’s talk – from the necessity of aristocrats selling many of their houses after WWII, to the prices for which they had exchanged hands recently (for example, Garsington Manor recently sold for £6 million). To be overstretched in such houses means to live uncomfortably, including in terms of temperature, and quality of food; Lawrence registered what was involved in living beyond one’s means in a large house in ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’. Justin recalled his own experience of being a minister in two underheated ‘Gothic mammoths’ in Massachusetts and Ohio; Bernard noted that James hated big American houses. He then recalled his own experience of buying a fortified chateau in France and having to sell it again because of the time and expense involved in its upkeep: ‘one becomes a slave to these houses’. Catherine observed that neither James nor Lawrence seem to have leant into the comic potentialities of life in such houses, as was richly exploited by Huxley, Wodehouse and Saki. Rather, Lawrence’s characterisation of the intellectual conversation at Breadalby in Women in Love is linked to the First World War, and, as Bernard pointed out, James was always too close to tragedy to write a comic novel of the country house.